AROUND THE MESA

Attendance figures for 1938 have already broken all records. Last year the total attendance was 28,171. Already this year 29,126 visitors have entered the park and the figure will probably rise to 30,000 before the travel year ends on September 31. The largest single day's attendance was 669 on July 3rd.

The experimental corn field gives promise of producing the heaviest crop in its history. The stalks range from six to nine feet in height and some of the ears are becoming very large. This is the twentieth consecutive year that corn has been grown in the field and there have been only two crop failures during that time. Last year's crop was the heaviest in the history of the field; over 1400 ears were harvested from the plot which is slightly over an acre in extent.

According to the count of finger and nose prints on the glasses the most popular exhibits in the Park Museum are the Spruce Tree House diorama and the case of bones that show the diseases of the Cliff Dwellers. The glass on the diorama is smudged so much that it has to be washed every two hours.

A splendid mummy was received by the Park Museum recently when Mr. S.L. Palmer Jr. of San Francisco returned one that his father had taken from the ruins in 1894. The mummy is that of a two year old boy and is in an excellent state of preservation. At the time of burial the body was clad in a slip-over cotton shirt and three small cotton blankets. Fragments of these are still on the mummy.

Because of the heavy travel season little research has been done by the Ranger-Naturalist staff this year. However, two projects have been started, one, by Ranger-Naturalist Chester A. Thomas on the probable uses of the various plants by the Mesa Verde people. This is to be worked up eventually into a popular nature trail talk. The other project, carried on by Museum Assistant Betty Yelm, is a critical study of the Mesa Verde axes, involving type of material, shape, dimensions, groove type and position, and surface appearance, whether flaked, ground or polished.