Roswell, New Mexico

Because of the length of the trip from Santa Fe to our next goal, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, we decided to stop in route at the town of Roswell, New Mexico, home of a UFO Museum. While we were vaguely aware of some purported claim of some UFO sighting at Roswell, we really didn’t know the details. Fortunately, the Roswell UFO Museum and Research Center provided all of the details we could ever want……and then some…… After reading through all of the write ups, affidavits from participants and newspaper articles, we were prepared to accept that something unusual happened in July 1947 on the outskirts of Roswell. Thanks to what appears to have been a clumsy effort by the army air force at the nearby airbase, we will never know whether Roswell was a sight of the crash landing of a UFO or only the site of the crash of a weather balloon. There are enough holes in the story told by the army as to raise doubts about their weather balloon theory. But the amateurish nature of the claims being made by the UFO proponents makes one a bit leery about accepting the UFO theory. But what is undisputed is the amusing way in which the city of Roswell has embraced this alien touch. The inflatable alien dolls outside the nearby gift shops, and the alien faces painted on the lampposts might be no more than one would expect in the vicinity of the one and only UFO museum and research center in the country. However, when you see a McDonald’s Restaurant made to look like an alien spaceship and the sign on the Wal-Mart store bearing the picture of the green alien face with the big eyes, you know that you are no longer in Alexandria, Virginia!!!!!!!!

Taos, New Mexico

We had been looking forward for some time to our trip to Taos. We took the “high road” through the hills up to Taos, which was a longer but more scenic drive than the straight highway between Santa Fe and Taos. When we arrived at Taos, we were surprised to find that it was not thronging with tourists. As with Santa Fe, the historical downtown Taos area centers around small plaza ringed by historical buildings. In many ways, it seemed like a smaller version of Santa Fe’s plaza. We found a nice restaurant nearby for lunch and Jo had a good time wandering around several of the nearby shops while David sat outside watching the small number of tourists wander around. After lunch, we walked around the neighborhood surrounding the plaza, but there were only a small number of older buildings before the neighborhood changed over to new construction. While pleasant, we were surprised that it didn’t capture our interest for a sustained period, and we left the historic downtown area only a few hours after lunch.

We were very pleasantly surprised when we thereafter went out to the nearby Taos Pueblo for a visit. Unlike the Zuni Pueblo we had visited the week before, Taos Pueblo gave us very much of a feeling for what the buildings would have been like when the pueblo was originally constructed more than 100 years ago. While some of the dwellings have been converted to shops, many are still used as dwellings. And while there are now doors and windows at the ground level, and the old doorways through the roofs have been converted into skylights, they still limit the use of modern conveniences in the pueblo and none of the pueblo buildings have electricity. This was our best experience to date in gaining a flavor for Indian life before being heavily influenced by European immigrants. The Pueblo alone was enough to make the trip to Taos worthwhile, and we were glad we had come. The trip to Taos was a fine conclusion to a very enjoyable week in the Santa Fe area.

Bandlelier National Park - New Mexico

The next morning we headed out on a long loop drive through the scenic areas to the west of Santa Fe. The highlight of the drive was our visit to Bandalier National park. Bandalier turned out to be a small, attractive park tucked in the bottom of an out of the way canyon. Thanks to a reliable stream running through this canyon, it had been the home for a number of early Native American Indians who built their pueblos along the canyon walls. As with Mesa Verde, these early pueblo Indians built small dwellings in some of the holes and caves in the canyon walls during the later stages of their occupation of this canyon. The small, intimate scale of these Indian ruins, coupled with the limited number of tourists visiting the site, made this a very pleasant experience, notably different from the Mesa Verde experience where there had been large numbers of tourists at all of the cliff dwellings we visited. Bandalier is definitely a park we would like to come back and visit again someday.

Continuing on our loop drive, we passed a number of facilities carrying on who knows what kind of activities for Las Alamos National laboratory, which is located in the nearby town of Las Alamos. We hope they still aren’t trying to make more nuclear weapons in these small facilities as their isolated location would make them easy targets of terrorists!!!

A very pleasant surprise about half way through our loop drive was coming upon a caldera, which was the remains of an ancient volcano. Apparently, this volcano exploded many centuries ago with a tremendous force much greater than the Mount Saint Helena explosion up in the northwest a few decades ago. This explosion literally blew away the entire top off the volcano, leaving this broad, circular/oval caldera. At first blush, it looked like a vast meadow, and it was startling to realize just how big that volcano must have been in diameter and how powerful the explosion must have been which blew its walls to smithereens.

In addition to these highlights, this scenic loop drive offered a number of other attractive areas, including a scenic overlook of the Rio Grande River, some quaint little towns, and a therapeutic hot spring. We were tired by the end of the long day’s drive but enjoyed ourselves considerably.

Santa Fe, New Mexico

The next morning we decided to take a walk around Red Rock State Park before saying good-bye to it. We found ourselves walking up a wash that ran along one side of the red rock hills and were amazed yet once again at the power of water to carve out such deep washes through the desert landscape. We are developing something of a liking for hiking in washes.

After returning to the Big Sky, we packed up and headed off for Santa Fe. We had been undecided for some period of time whether to include Santa Fe in our itinerary this fall out of concern that its high altitude could lead to very cold weather in October and perhaps even snow. Fortunately, Santa Fe had been experiencing something of a warm spell in the last few weeks, so we decided to include Santa Fe and Taos as our last stops before heading down to warmer climates.

It was a long drive from Gallup to Santa Fe, and we were glad to pull into the campground we had selected south of the city. The campground didn’t have a lot of amenities but it did have a great view of the western sky, and we enjoyed the prettiest sunset we had seen for several weeks.

The next day we decided to take in a flea market north of the city as our first sightseeing adventure. Their idea of a flea market was certainly different from what one would expect to find in a flea market back east. It was really just a collection of tents and stalls for selling the products of local artists, most of whom were Native American. There was virtually no used or old merchandise providing the bargains that we enjoy searching for when visiting eastern flea markets. As David said, this was more like shopping in a retail mall!!!!!

After the flea market, we headed to downtown Santa Fe for more traditional sightseeing. The young fellow at the visitor’s center downtown was very helpful in giving tips on some of the sights to see downtown as well as the best way to and from Taos -- good sights to see on a loop through the areas of the west of Santa Fe. Our first two stops downtown were traditional ones, one visiting the oldest church/chapel in the U.S. and the other visiting a larger, newer church with a unique, interesting spiral staircase going from the floor of the church to the choir loft above. The staircase had no visable nails and, when originally constructed, had no hand rails and no supports attaching it to the wall or any other supporting surface. Rather fine craftsmanship and design particularly for something built so long ago. The story line is that the nuns at the church had been praying for some solution to the fact that their church had been built without a way to get into the choir loft when some unknown young man appeared and volunteered his services to design and build a staircase. The locals treat this as a miracle whereas we were more inclined to view it as a nice bit of engineering design and woodworking craftsmanship.

We thereafter walked over to the old plaza at the center historical Santa Fe. The historical buildings surrounding the four sides of the plaza have of course now been converted almost entirely to retail stores, galleries and other facilities targeted to tourists. Nonetheless, it is still attractive architecture and David had a fine time sitting on a bench in the plaza while Jo strolled around some of the shops.

After lunch at a small café on the plaza we walked over to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum. Unfortunately, the museum is so small that it can only display a limited number of the many works they have in their inventory. Even this number was reduced because of a special showing they were having of the works of other women artists in her circle. But it was a pleasant stop nonetheless.

We concluded our afternoon in downtown Santa Fe by a walk through the commercial and residential blocks surrounding the plaza. We found that we really like the adobe style of construction widely used in downtown Santa Fe, and we also like the soothing earth tone colors used with this adobe construction. A very pleasant stroll. An added bonus when we got back to the campground later that afternoon was yet another pretty sunset in the western sky.

Gallup, New Mexico & Chaco Canyon

After leaving Sedona, we headed east toward Gallup New Mexico. We chose Gallup not for any special features that it had but for the fact that it seemed to be centrally located among a number of National Monuments in the area, including Chaco Culture National Historic Site, where our friend Kelley was volunteering as a tour guide. We were pleasantly surprised by the campground we chose, which was in Red Rock State Park. It is becoming apparent to us that we enjoy the campsites much more when they are situated in state or national parks rather than commercial facilities. As, so far at least, the settings in the parks have been much more scenic than the commercial campgrounds. Our choice of Gallup proved to be a good one as it gave us a home base to stay in during our travels for the next several days and spared us having to set up and break down every day or two.

EL MORO NATIONAL MONUMENT

Our first visit the next morning was to El Moro National Monument, which we frankly had never heard of before. It turned out that El Moro was blessed with a deep pool of water, collected from rainfall from the adjacent Mesa which proved to be a virtual oasis for travelers in this area for hundreds and hundreds of years. El Moro was noted for an area of rock wall next to the oasis where resting travelers had chosen to carve messages over the years. The earliest carvings were a large number of assorted Indian pictographs. The earliest non-Indian inscriptions date back to early Spanish travelers in the early 1600s. Some carvings were merely names and dates, while others were short messages describing the travels being undertaken, (e.g., a Spanish provincial governor describing his trip to and from the Gulf of California). Most startling were signatures and short messages carved into stone in beautiful script writing style that must have taken days to carve with special tools as well as the artistic ability to use them. But the writers achieved a small degree of immortality since here we were reading their inscriptions hundreds of years later.

As an added bonus, El Moro contains pueblo Indian ruins on top of the mesa adjacent to the oasis and the “inscription rock” area. A short but vigorous hike up led us not only to the pueblo ruins but gave us a great view of the surrounding countryside.








EL MALPAIS NATIONAL MONUMENT

Only a short distance down the road from El Moro was a totally different type of national monument. El Malpais NM is a very large park containing lava fields resulting from numerous volcanic eruptions. In addition to walking across lava fields and viewing the collapsed domes at the sites of some of the eruptions, we were introduced to “lava tubes.” Apparently, during many of the eruptions, the lava flowed in channels or rivers rather than as a broad mass moving down the slopes. A typical pattern would be for the outer areas of the channel or river to cool off and harden while molten lava continued to flow through the space inside. After the lava had flowed out of these channels, it left behind hollow “lava tubes.” Many of these tubes have since been covered over with sediment, turning them into virtual caves. In some spots, the roof of the lava tube had collapsed, forming a sink hole which allowed us to look down into the lava tube from the surface. The park service strongly warned against going into any of the lava tubes/caves without proper caving equipment and experience. Against Jo’s very strong objection, David decided to walk through a short stretch of a lava tube which had caved in and formed two sink holes only one hundred yards apart. Climbing over the boulders that had fallen down from the roof of the lava tube amply demonstrated how difficult the journey would be to travel any extended distances in one of the lava tubes/caves. But it was exciting to see what these tubes actually look like inside.

We didn’t start on our hike into the lava fields until late in the afternoon, which had two benefits. First, we had the trail entirely to ourselves and did not see anyone else during the entire hike. Second, when we got back to the trailhead at the end of the hike, we were treated to a beautiful sunset which we could enjoy in solitude. What a wonderful ending to a surprising delightful day.


CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

The next day we were up early for our planned trip up to Chaco Culture National Historic Site. The GPS said it was a 2 ½ hour trip, and we wanted to get up there in enough time to join Kelley’s tour which was scheduled to start at 10:00 a.m. We were coming up from the south and were forced to take a secondary road, the last 20 miles of which was on a rough dirt road. Boy did we bounce up and down on those rough surfaces. But we weathered the road hazard and made it to Chaco in time.


It was a delight to meet up again with our friend Kelley, whom we hadn’t seen since our last high school reunion in 2004. It was wonderful to see her in the setting at Chaco since it took her back to her long time roots in New Mexico and her love of anthropology, which had been the subject of her master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. After introducing us to several of the rangers on staff at the park she took us up to Pueblo Bonito, the premier location in the park and the site of her scheduled 10am tour. The ruins alone are enough to impress any visitor to this remote park. Even more astonishing, however, was the information that Kelley’s excellent presentation provided us and the other visitors on the tour, about the Chaco culture. As far back as 800 AD, pueblo Indians had been active at Chaco Canyon. For reasons that anthropologists still do not understand, this culture exploded in a massive development effort which boggles the mind even today. They built a number of roads, each 30 feet wide, going off in numerous directions from the canyon –- no one even today can explain why they went to the immense extra effort to build roads 30 feet wide when they didn’t even have wagons in that era. In Pueblo Bonito, one of the premier buildings constructed during this boom period, they built a huge number of rooms, many of which were apparently never occupied as dwellings and may never have been used even for storage purposes. No one knows why they built such a large structure or just what they were doing with many of the rooms in the structure. Moreover, particularly during the later stages of construction, the stonework was done with exquisite care even though the artisans knew that it would be covered up with adobe plaster and hidden from view. We have the question, but no answer, as to how and why this culture invested such tremendous effort in building these magnificent structures, and how it was done in an area so arid as to make it difficult to identify how this society could support the extravagance of such a large “public works” project. And why did virtually all of the inhabitants abandon Chaco Canyon less than 100 years after having made such a great sacrifice in building these magnificent structures?

After our tour with Kelley was over, she was required to leave us to go back to the visitor’s center. We went off on our own to explore more of Chaco Canyon. One of the highlights of our afternoon was the hike we took up onto the mesa above Pueblo Bonito. At first, we weren’t sure just how the trail got to the top of the mesa since it seems to disappear into the rock wall. After we were 1/3 of the way up the trail, however, we found that it passed between a 2-3 foot wide fissure between the main rock wall of the mesa and a large rock face which had split away from the main mesa wall. While Jo was initially hesitant to try this ascent, she yielded to David’s urging and made the valiant effort to climb to the top of the mesa, with the benefit of periodic boosts from David pushing up from below. The journey was definitely worth the effort as the views from the top of the mesa were superb. Particularly lovely was to sit on the mesa looking down at Pueblo Bonito from above and gaining an even greater appreciation for the magnificent effort made in constructing this structure.

Although we had initially planned to drive back that evening to Gallup and have Kelley stay with us in our Big Sky, we were having such a good time visiting with her in her park service duplex that we decided to stay the night. In addition to great conversation and catching up on what’s been happening with all of us recently, we were treated to an extra bonus. Because of its location in a remote spot far from any light pollution, Chaco has been the focus of many who seek a great view of the stars. One of these was an amateur astronomer who donated to the park several telescopes with the proviso that he could use them when he came to the park. We were able to benefit from his generosity by being able to look through two of these telescopes to see a variety of astronomical features, including the Homer’s comet, a seldom noticed comet which has gotten substantial attention in the last week because it had suddently increased its visability by a factor of one million (for reasons unknown) in the last few days. While we appreciated being able to view the comet and other stars through these telescopes, David was heard to say that the comet really just looked like a fuzzy snowball.

The next morning, Kelley joined us on our trip back to Gallup. Indeed, Kelley and Jo led the way in Kelley’s car while David strove valiantly to keep up with these fast women. It turns out that, for drivers experienced in handling rough dirt roads, the preferred solutions to pot holes and washboard surfaces is to drive over them at a high rate of speed so that you skim across the top rather than dip in and out of the low spots. The theory seemed to work in practice, although it left David a nervous wreck. When we finally made back to Gallup, the women went shopping while David went back to the Big Sky to settle his nerves with a good supply of wine. Indeed he called Jo to recommend that she stop off in route and buy more wine. The wine came in handy as the three of us spent the afternoon and evening in taking about life past and present.




ZUNI PUEBLO

The next day the three of us went down to Zuni Pueblo to visit a center of current Native American culture. Little did David know that a principle focus of this trip would turn out to be visiting a number of shops and places of business which focused on selling Zuni jewelry, fetishes, pottery and other items. We were unable to take a hoped for guided tour of Zuni Pueblo itself because the tour guide had decided to take the afternoon off and took with her the keys to the church in the heart of the Pueblo which was the primary focus of the guided tour. We nonetheless drove over to the neighborhood of the pueblo with the intent of walking around the perimeter of the pueblo so that we could see at least a portion of it. While on this walk, we happened upon two young Native American girls returning the pueblo from a nearby grocery store. They invited us into the pueblo to view some dolls that their father had made and was offering for sale. We were delighted to accept this invitation to go into the heart of the pueblo as we were otherwise under the impression that this area was off limits to tourists. The products that the father had to offer were of poor quality, and we reluctantly declined to buy anything from him. However, both the walk into this area of the pueblo with the young Native American girls and our walk back out on our own gave us a good opportunity view the pueblo. It was a disappointment. Virtually all of the buildings appeared to be in a very poor state of repair and to exhibit little or no architectural interest. We were not able to go inside the church in the center of the pueblo which was reputed to have wonderful murals. Instead, we were left with a view of the outside of the church, which reflected major deterioration of the structure no doubt due to the lack of economic resources to maintain the structure.

After leaving the pueblo area, we visited the nearby Zuni Museum, which was a delight. Although clearly operating on a limited budget, the museum offered us a valuable glimpse into Zuni history and culture. At the end of our visit to the museum, we enjoyed watching a series of old, silent, black and white films capturing various aspects of historical Zuni life, including the backing of bread the making of soap/shampoo from yucca plants.

On our way out of town, we followed the signs advertising a bakery selling Zuni bread. This turned out to be an operation run out of a nearby home where the bread and pastries were made up in a fairly modern home kitchen but then backed in a traditional adobe oven outside which had been heated with a wood fire. We bought two loaves of bread and turnovers for each of us – the bread we had later that evening, but the turnovers we consumed immediately. For reasons unclear, as we walked around the back yard eating our turnovers and looking at the adobe ovens outside, the neighboring dogs crowded around David in the apparent assumption that he would share with them his turnover. While laughing out loud, Jo snapped a number of pictures of David willfully refusing the pleading expressions on the dogs’ faces as he ate his turnover despite their obvious desire to share it with him. What a hoot!!!

After a delightful dinner that night, and more wine, Kelley headed back to Chaco since she had to open the visitor’s center early the next morning. We said a fond farewell and drowned our sorrows in another glass of wine while planning out trip the next day to Santa Fe.

Sedona, Arizona

After leaving Williams, we headed down to Sedona, Arizona, about 30 miles south of Flagstaff. Our attempt to visit Sedona two years earlier was frustrated by the fact that we couldn’t find anywhere to park our rental RV when we drove to Sedona near the end of our RV trip in the spring of 2005. Our problem this time was that the only campground in Sedona was booked up, so we were forced to settle on a campground 20 miles away outside Camp Verde. After leaving the Big Sky at the campground, we took a short excursion to two nearby national monuments.

MONTEZUMA'S CASTLE NATIONAL MONUMENT


Montezuma’s Castle National Monument turned out to be a delightful little park with a limited number of Indian ruins, including a small number of dwelling situated inside an alcove in the cliff wall -- a minor replica of the Mesa Verde style of construction. The park also had informative exhibits illustrating the tenuous dependence of the Native Americans on a supply of water to get them through the dry seasons.

MONTEZUMA'S WELL NATIONAL MONUMENT


The second nearby national monument, Montezuma’s Well National Monument, turned out to be a large rock depression which was constantly fed by an underground spring. The Indians had creatively adapted this water supply to irrigate their fields using a clever system of irrigation ditches. These ditches were fed by a steady flow of water escaping from Montezuma’s Well through a fissure in the side of the rock wall. It was a very delightful surprise to hike down the little canyon adjacent to the well and to dip our hands in this cool, constantly flowing channel of water coming out of the well. Since all indications were that this well would have survived the drought back in 1400 A.D., it is puzzling that these ancient pueblo dwellers abandoned their homes around the same time that the Native Americans at Meza Verde and other locations also left this area of the country.

On our way back to our campsite in Camp Verde we were able to enjoy a lovely full moon. We love the moon………

The next day we drove up to Sedona for our much anticipated visit. Disappointment. The road leading into Sedona was crowded with traffic (made worse by road construction). The outlet stores and other retail facilities lining the roadway reminded us of many commercial shopping areas back east, thus lessoning whatever magic might have been generated by the red rock formations which we could see here and there to the left and right of the highway. When we got into “downtown” Sedona, we were disappointed to find that the vast majority of the buildings there were small retail shops selling T shirts and souvenirs much like those we had seen in commercial establishments throughout our travels in the last several months. We did, however, have a beautiful few of red rock cliffs from our table in a small café where we had lunch. Even our ride up through Oak Creek Canyon was not as awe inspiring as we had expected, due no doubt in part by the fact that we had seen truly gorgeous canyons and red rock formations repeatedly over the last several weeks. A further downer was that Jo was not feeling well, a possible side effect of the medication she was taking for her rheumatoid arthritis.

SEDONA

The following day, we decided to give Sedona another try. No doubt in part because it was a Sunday, there was much less traffic into Sedona, which got us off to a good start. We took a short walk in the area of a pretty red sandstone formation called Bell Rock, which is supposed to be one of the “energy vortices” in the Sedona area. Alas, we felt no influx of supernatural energy, so we headed down the road for Cathedral Rock for our planned hike up this very attractive red rock formation. The scenery was in fact quite beautiful and the climb challenging but attractive. Jo still wasn’t feeling fully recovered, so she stopped half way up and waited till David returned from his climb to the top of the formation. He found the view up there to be very impressive and the surroundings to be quite tranquil since there were very few other hikers up on the summit when he was there. Again, unfortunately, neither of us felt any influx of supernatural energy even though Cathedral Rock was supposed to be another of the “energy vortices” in the Sedona area.

When we then headed to downtown Sedona, we stayed away from the “T Shirt and Souvenir” shopping area and instead visited a couple of “New Age” shops on the outskirts of town. Ah, we felt a bit more energy influx here then we had out at the energy vortices. LOL LOL!!! They also had some nice collections of crystals and gems (expensive!!!), but it just is not practical to be buying such heavy souvenirs and carrying them around with us for the next two years. There was also a wonderful little shopping complex across the street which had far nicer merchandise than the T shirt and souvenir shops downtown. This included a couple of galleries full of beautiful photographs of the wonderful scenery in this area of the country.

We were extremely glad that we had given Sedona this second chance, since it left us with a much more favorable impression then we had gotten the day before. We plan to come back again next year, if possible. But we will focus on hiking in the beautiful red rock hills surrounding Sedona and forego exposing ourselves again to the souvenir shops downtown. We will also try to make reservations far enough in advance so that we can stay at the campground in Sedona, which is not too far the “new age” retail shops that Jo found to be so nice.

Grand Canyon National Park

We left Laughlin headed to the Grand Canyon for an encore of our visit there in the spring of 2005 in our rented RV. Unfortunately, while we were able to stay in the park two years ago in the rental RV, our Big Sky is just too big to fit into any of the campsites inside the park, so we had to stay at a campground in Williams, about 40 miles south of the park. We reserved a site for two nights at Williams so that we could have a full day up in the park. The Grand Canyon was just as awesome and impressive as we had remembered it from our prior visits. It is in many ways simply overpowering in its magnificence. But a corollary of being such an attractive park is that it attracts crowds, even in the off season. The trip out along the west rim by shuttle bus was influenced in part by the fact that there were hundreds of school kids on a field trip to the park, so solitude was not easy to obtain. Fortunately, the trail along the rim doesn’t attract many visitors, so we ended up finding the solitude we have come to value by taking the shuttle bus to the first stop and hiking from there along the edge of the rim to the next several viewpoints along the edge. Jo took lots of wonderful pictures, but in some ways Grand Canyon is just too big to capture in individual pictures. Next time we come to the south rim, we hope to find a place to stay closer to the park so that we can be out on the trail both early in the morning (to catch the sun rise on the western side of the canyon) as well as sunset (to catch the setting sun light on the eastern side of the canyon).

An unexpected bonus as we were taking the shuttle bus back to the village was the sight of a bobcat in the woods alongside the road. We had heard that bobcats were extremely skittish and were seldom seen by visitors, so we were delighted to have this opportunity to see one in the wild. The pictures we had seen of bobcats in the visitors’ centers at Zion and other parks made them look quite small, but this one looked quite rugged and durable, with heavy legs and big paws. Not your housecat!

We decided to treat ourselves to lunch in main dining room in the El Tovar Lodge. The lodge and its dining room date back to the early 1900s and it was awesome to see the original logs and timbers still supporting the walls and roof almost 100 years after it was built. It gives one a real feeling of the history of this place. And the food was delicious!

We have each now been to the south rim of the Grand Canyon on several occasions in the past, so our hope is next year that we can make it to the north rim before the cold and snow close it down next fall. Jo will particularly like being able to photograph the canyon formations from a different angle and different lighting conditions.