When I first arrived at the Ahwahnee Hotel in August of 2009 I was excited to be part of a National Historic Building.  To me it was a museum and not really a Hotel.  Most guests that visit and have visited over the last 82 years feel the Ahwahnee is more of a home than a hotel and even less of a museum.  However this is where time looses its importance in Yosemite.  Our park and our hotel have adopted, like the walls surrounding us, a sense of timelessness.  I have not been here very long, certainly "just a puff of wind across the way" and already I feel like I have been here since the begining of time.  The Ahwahnee was built with endurance in mind and so it is a standing monument and living hotel, as well a viable artifact set among the tall trees of the forest.

Artifacts were what I was looking for, such as old bones among the rocky ledges of the walls of the mighty granite cliffs around me.  I was suprised to find my first artifact in the dry creek bed running near the Ahwahnee heated pool.  One was good but two more revealed themselves to me and like someone who did not know any better I thought they should be handed over to the NPS office.  No, no they told me.  If I found any artifact in the future I was to leave it exactly where it lay, even if it was in the creek bed and would soon be swirled over by the chilly eddies of snow melt, or rainfall.

We are not to touch anything.  We are not to pick it up.  We are to let it lay.  Kinda like being buried in place.  Since I learned my lesson about this I started taking photos.  Nothing much has turned up and this is the only piece that I have found.  Now what is it exactly is not necessarily clear.  It still lays in the bar garden of the Ahwahnee unless of course the mule deer stomped it under the sod during one of their foraging excursions, or a hungry squirrel spirited it away mistaking it for one of their pine cone nuts.

Considering all the ground that gets walked on by guests and visitors, we are certain to find or see something interesting.  Like the day I saw a Blue Squirrel.  I might have been sky gazing way too long, however the ranger I told about the Blue Squirrel claimed he had never heard of one.  I have looked for that same squirrel for the last 8 months now without any success.  Perhaps he just disappeared and ran off with this artifact so  he could put more support in his squirrel hole....either way I am hoping to find my Blue Squirrel again one day.