July 2, 2016
After breakfast we started our hike through the “Little
River Canyon” at Hovenweep
National Monument. It is a relatively small canyon, but their “claims
to fame” are the remains of puebloan dwellings made out of thick bricks, two
bricks wide. They date back 700
years. One of the most interesting
revelations about these structures is that they have “openings that, during solstice
and equinox, admit shafts with sunlight”.
The puebloan people have used this as a type of calendar to determine
planting and harvesting times.
Pic 1263
Towers may have been used as signaling stations, a way of
communicating with members of the community.
There are living areas, work rooms, ceremonial chambers and storage
buildings. Defense may also have been a consideration
with some of the brick towers. The
construction certainly does show how talented the masons were.
The name Hovenweep was actually chosen by a pioneer
photographer named William Henry Jackson in 1874. It is a Ute/Paiute word that means “deserted
valley”.
Sunday, July 3, 2016
We left Hovenweep at 11:00 am, taking a different route back
to Cortez, Colorado.
Along the way we did some bird watching, but had to take photos, hoping
when we enlarged them on the computer, maybe we can identify them. I have to admit that it felt good to get back
to farmland again. The dry sage brush
landscape frightened me a little.
We found a nice RV park that allows a Passport America
discount. It isn’t fancy, but is very
clean. It has full hookups, so we could
fill up our water tank. We took down our bikes and rode them to the little
church for evening Mass. After dinner we updated the blog with our
pictures, because the RV park has Wifi.
So, if you haven’t checked it in awhile, you might enjoy the pictures we
have added.
Monday, July 4th, 2016
Roger spent quite a bit of time wiping the dust from the
inside of the front of the RV. Then he
cleaned off the outside, as well. I
vacuumed and swept. We both feel so much
better starting out the day with a cleaner “house”. Now we are “good to go”.
Today we are returning to Mesa Verde National Park, because Roger can get
additional credit for transmitting here again, because it has been over 24
hours since he last activated this sight.
We also admit we will enjoy postponing the heat one more day. As we climbed the mountain, we noted that the
landscape is quite different from what we have seen. There are few trees, but the land is covered
with tall green shrubs, so the contrast of the light brown rocks and dark green
is very pleasant. We drove to the second
lookout, Park Point, at 8572 feet, and Roger transmitted, as this is the highest
point in the park.
Though this is not the prettiest park we have seen, the
smooth round surfaces of the rocks near the top gives it a softer, more
peaceful presence. Also, in all fairness
to the park, we learned that there have been four major fires here in the last
decade. They destroyed thousands of
acres within the park; many of the dead trees are still evident, sticking out
from the new shorter vegetation.
After transmitting, Roger drove back down the mountain and
headed back to Yucca House. He had
spoken with a park ranger today and gotten a better idea about the parking
situation. We felt more confident about
returning, though the ranger acknowledged that the property owner does not like
visitors crossing his property. You
would think that he was aware of the situation when he bought the land; but
perhaps not.
Pic 1288
There were no trail markers to direct us to the ruins, but
we did find several areas with rock rubble, one circular area and another place
where one wall is still standing. It was
such a shame that there were no plaques or explanations. We were lucky to get a brochure from the Mesa
Verde visitor’s center.
It explained that a professor with the US Geological Survey
reported his finding in 1878. He mapped
the area, which has an estimated 600 room.
So this was a large community of people who resided at Yucca Hours from
AD 1150 -1300.
Roger had heard so much about the four corners area that he
wanted to go there in person. There is
actually a monument at the site where the four states (Utah,
Colorado, Arizona
and New Mexico)
meet. But the landscape is very
desolate, like what we saw in southern Utah,
dry, no trees, just short scrub brush.
There are no towns and very few people for miles.
It makes me miss home. We were
surprised to see a small river just before we reached four corners.
There was a single building at the location, but it was
Navajo Indian property, not a national park.
They were closing in less that an hour so we decided to continue our
journey.
We picked up Highway 64 and turned back east into New Mexico. Shortly after crossing the state border we
came over a rise and there was a huge almost vertical mountain right in the
middle of the desert-like landscape. We
could see it from 20 miles away. It
reminds me of the Wicked Witche’s castle in the movie, Wizard of Oz. It gave me a kind of forbidden feeling
when I gazed at its sharp pointed peaks.
July 5, 2016
We spent the night in Farmington. Then, this morning we headed just a few miles
north to the Aztec
Ruins National
Monument.
We watched a movie in the visitor’s center then toured the ruins. But let me clear up the misconception created
by the mane. These ruins were not built
by Aztec Indians of Central Mexico. They
were built by Puebloan people, just as Yucca House and many other locations in
the four corners region of southwestern United States. Unfortunately, when the Spanish explorers
moved north from Mexico,
they made the false assumption that the Aztec Indians must have lived here and
the name “stuck”.
One of the most impressive areas of the site is the
reconstructed “Great Kiva”, a circular sanctuary and a place for people to meet
for community events”. It was excavated
by Archeologist, Earl Morris in 1921 and rebuilt in 1934. Something that is different about these
structures is a band of green sandstones, at about waist high, all along the
outside walls of the pueblo. “Their
purpose remains a mystery.” Another
unanswered question is why the puebloan people only lived here for 200 years,
from the late 1000s to the late 1200s.
One of the theories is that a great drought occurred, causing the people
to search for a new home.
The Northwest corner of New Mexico is another area where oil pumping
stations are a frequent site, some pumping, others capped. There is little else of civilization for 40
miles or more just scrub desert conditions.
But the sky –Oh! It is such a beautiful shade of blue, with puffy clouds
scatter through out.
We traveled to Chaco
Culture Naional
Historical Park.
The native ruins date back to 800. This
tribe of puebloans built multilevel dwellings and lived in the area for 300
years. We drove around the canyon,
viewing the ruins from a distance, then continued on our way.
The open range land we passed reminded me of the term, “dry
gulch”, because so many of the stream beds were dry. We saw two different groups of cows eating
next to the road. Other large groups
were in the sagebrush. We saw lots of
rabbits. One variety had a big round
white tail and the others were larger and had a long black tail.
There was an absolutely beautiful sunset with the edge of
some of the clouds looking like they were on fire. Its beauty reflected throughout the entire
sky, as there were no buildings or trees blocking the view. It was a very positive note to a very long
day. Roger assured me we would not have
any more dirt roads on our journey home.
Halleluiah! We spent the night in
the parking lot of the Apache
Nugget Travel
Center and Casino.
Wednesday July 6, 2016
Oh! To see green
trees again is so lovely. We are
actually going through a forest this morning, Santa Fe National Forest. We are climbing in elevation, passing cliffs
of dark red dirt. We reached 8,700 feet
on the mountain before we began to descend the other side. This is a pretty forest with very little
under brush, just short green grasses, allowing you to see through the trees
for a considerable distance. The air is
so nice and cool and the sky is a clear pretty light blue. Most of the trees seem to be a type of pine,
different from our southern variety.
They are tall and narrow in shape.
The bark is rough and has a slight reddish tent in the older trees with
wider trunks.
Remember how we weren’t going to do any more dirt
roads? Well we started off on a nice
paved road and about half way to our destination, it turned into a dirt
road. But, fortunately, it has been
recently graded and was much easier to drive on than yesterdays irregular and
bumpy gravel road. Also, on the places
where the sun shines on the ground, the mica in the dirt creates sparkles all
over the road. After about a half hour
we returned to a paved road again. Yea!!
There are even yellow wild flowers growing along the side of the road. (7900
ft) We also passed a real meadow, which
we haven’t seen in ages. The scent of
the pine is so strong in one section of the forest, a sweet clean fragrance
that we really missed when it was gone.
There are many National sites in New Mexico and Roger is trying to stop at as
many as he can without going too far off the route toward home. The first one today is Vallas Caldera, a National
Preserve. It is the most recently
designated park, less than a year ago, and does not yet have a brochure. It is at 8500 ft. and is comprised of almost
8,900 acres. We learned that the
difference between a national preserve and a national park is that the preserve
allows public hunting, trapping and gas exploration and extraction.
This area was a large volcano millions of years ago. It collapsed, creating a round
“caldron”. Then in later years a few
small eruptions occurred raising several small mountains of lava. Today, the center of the bowl shaped area is
a huge meadow of grasses with no trees.
When we pulled into the parking lot we saw numerous Gunnison
Prairie Dogs. They are about a foot in
length and have short little legs and a short tail that turns down. They dig tunnels in the ground and have a
large pile of dirt surrounding the opening of their burrows. We were also happy to see the hummingbird
feeders on the porch at the visitor’s center.
It allowed us to add another new bird to our list, the broad-tailed
hummingbird.
After making contacts in this park, we drove into Los Almos
and found a lovely city park next to a pretty pond. There were flowers and native grasses
decorating the landscape along the sidewalks.
A small wooden walkway was constructed over the pond, to give a close-up
view of the water lilies floating in the water.
Ducks were swimming around the little lake, adding another level of
serenity to the park. On one end of the
pond there were a set of stairs leading to a higher level of the park, with a
waterfall flowing down between. Families
were having individual picnics on the green lawn. It was such a great sight, seeing families relaxing
together and using their park.
July 7, 2016
This morning Roger met a filming crew here in Los Almos. They were working on a segment on the 100th
anniversary of the national parks. After
talking with them, they asked if he would let them tape him about the National
Parks on the Air program that ham radio operators are participating in. Of course he was excited to agree. The TV series should air in a couple of
weeks. The man Roger spoke to will contact
him with the details, once he finds out which Florida stations will air the program. We hope they will include Roger’s interview
when it is finished the editing process.
We left Los Almos at 10 am and drove
to Bandelier National Monument, another ancestral
Puebloan community. It includes numerous
cliff dwellings, as well as a large circular village. This National Park brochure had a much better
explanation of the Ancestral Puebloan people.
It noted that archeologists believe that these people were “hunters and
gatherers”…who “came into the region over 10,000 years ago.” They moved with the seasons and food sources. But once they discovered agriculture, from
the Spanish explorers and were able to raise corn and squash, they began to
make permanent homes.
The park was named after
archeologist Adolph Bandelier, who began studying the ruins in the New Mexico Territory in 1880. He remained in the region for 12 years and
wrote a novel depicting the Puebloan life in Pre-Spanish times” called The
Delight Makers. Roger and I walked
to the circular village, then to the cliff dwellings. The weather was so hot that we didn’t have
the energy to climb the cliffs and explore.
It would have required using several ladders made of tree branches.
One question we had about the
villages on the ground level was why there were no openings between the walls,
going from room to room. The ranger told
us than the entrances were all from holes in the roofs. Ladders lead down to the inside. There is a great artist’s sketch of what the
city would have looked like, on the brochure for the Park. There were no windows in the structures. This allowed the dwellings to be cooler in
the summer and warmer in the winter.
Pic 1303
The “city” had only one opening,
serving as entrance and exit. It is
believed this was a way of protecting the children from wondering off and
getting lost. The elderly members of the
tribe would have watched over the children while their parents were cultivating
the crops on the cliff tops above their homes.
It was 1:30 we started down the
mountain to Santa Fe. We went straight to the Capitol Building
and did a short tour. The exterior of
the building is very different from those we have seen in other states. It is very conservation, in appearance,
blending in with the architecture of the entire city. It was interesting to learn that New Mexico’s legislature
is not paid a salary. They receive per
diem for the time that the legislature is in session, 60 days in odd numbered
years and only 30 days in even numbered years.
All of the art work inside the
Capitol building is either donated by the artist or paid for by the Capitol Art
Foundation, which has various fund raisers throughout the year. All of the works on display were created by New Mexico artists. They vary greatly in media and style. One of the most impressive works, inouropinion
was a painting by Gary Morton on display on the 4th floor. It is so detailed that you would think it was
a photograph. It depicts a man on
horseback overlooking a canyon with a river down at the bottom.
Pic 1307
Another very interesting discovery
we made regards a New Mexico
state symbol. It is a red circle with
four lines running through the top and sides.
This is the Zia (an Indian tribe) sun symbol and represents “the four
directions of the earth, the four seasons of the year, the four times of the
day (sunrise, noon, evening and night) and life’s four divisions of childhood,
youth, adulthood and old age”.
After leaving the Capitol, Roger
found the Old Santa Fe Trail and transmitted from there for awhile. Then we found a city park right on the El
Camino Real National Trail and decided to stay the night. It was a little uncomfortable for awhile, as
it was quite warm with little breeze.
But after sunset, it cooled down.
Roger was able to transmit from there, another national park site.
Pic 1314
Friday July 8, 2016
Santa Fe has some kind of
city ordinance where construction has to be adobe style and colors are
restricted to different shades of beige and brown or reddish brown. Roger and I don’t particularly care for the
“sameness” of the architecture. Plus, it
is another government restriction which we don’t agree with. Many of the walkways through out the city are
not maintained, but grow wild with weeds.
Even the park we stayed in last night was overgrown with weeds. When we went to the Walmart for groceries we
learned that another ordinance does not permit plastic bags. It cost 10 cents each for paper bags, “to
encourage people to bring their own,” yet another local government restriction
After
our Walmart stop, we left Santa Fe and drove to Pecos National
Historical Park. It
is
another Puebloan ruin. The film in the
visitor’s center gave a much more thorough
explanation
of the total history of the area. I had
not realized there had been a point in
time
when the Puebloan Indians had revolted against the Spanish conquistadors and
won
their freedom for a short time. Neither of us had known that there was a
major Civil War
battle
in this same area. It was also very
interesting to know that the actress Greer
Garson
and her husband lived in Pecos and donated
land to this National Park. They
believed
it was very important to continue to maintain the history of the Pecos area. Ms.
Garson
actually narrated the film in the visitor's center.
Pic
1315
We spent the first part of the afternoon locating a
campsite. Because this is the weekend,
the first couple of parks were full. So we had to drive
several miles from Pecos, up in the
mountains to find a place where there was space
available. But that was good, because it
was cooler there, with a nice steady breeze.
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