September 9, 2008 at 10:52 pm · Filed under Roadtrips
Our goal today was to drive 118 miles from Capitol Reef to Bryce Canyon, via Utah’s semi-famous Route 12. This route goes through parts of the Dixie National Forest and the northern edge of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (BLM). We’d been told it was an eye-popping drive, but unfortunately the weather was uncooperative and a lot of the views from 9000 feet and above were obscured by passing rainshowers and fog.
Coming down past Boulder, the view improved. We had considered stopping at the Calf Creek BLM campground, but passed it by with a note to perhaps visit it on another trip. It’s located down in an absolutely beautiful canyon, not far from the spot we were overlooking in the photo at left.
I must be getting used to driving out here on the Colorado Plateau. We rolled up and down grades ranging from 8% to (briefly) 14%, climbed above 9000 feet on curvy roads with no guardrails, in and out of rainshowers, and my reaction to most of it was “ho hum…” Not that it wasn’t beautiful, but the adrenaline rush that usually accompanies towing under such conditions was distinctly muted. Mostly I toodled along, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the transmission stick, thinking about when we should stop for lunch.
Which eventually we did, at the visitor center in Escalante. While we were parked there, we ran into Rick, another Airstream full-timer traveler who has been out on the road for about three months so far. He’s got a sweet 1976 Airstream 30 footer that he refurbished and customized. We hung out for a couple of hours, swapping travel notes, and may meet up again later this winter. Rick’s blog is a bit out of date but he’s planning to get caught up on his latest travels.
With all the puttering, we didn’t get to Bryce until about 5 p.m. The national park’s campgrounds were mostly full, and the few remaining spaces were either too short or very unlevel. The entire North campground seems to have been built on a hill. Also, the site were entirely shaded, which would give us no useful solar power. We decided to go upscale and pay for Ruby’s campground just outside the park entrance.
This is a big luxury for us. We’ve been camping without hookups of any type for a week, which has allowed us to stay close to the parks we’ve been visiting. Upgrading to a commercial campground is like splurging on a five-star hotel. We’re getting full hookups, wifi, a laundry, two swimming pools, two restaurants, and my phone works too. We’ll catch up on laundry, work, email, phone messages — all those annoyances of “real life” –and work in a few hikes in Bryce too.
September 8, 2008 at 3:14 pm · Filed under Places to avoid, Places to go, Travel / lifestyle musings
In my rush to post a quick blog entry yesterday I didn’t have time to describe the setting of Capitol Reef. The park is 100-mile long north-south sliver of Utah, surrounding an ancient fold in the Earth’s crust where tectonic plates collided, forced a ridge to the surface, and then weathered into remarkable canyons.
They call this the “Waterpocket Fold” because the geography traps pockets of water which encourage plants and animals in this part of the Utah desert. Indeed, in the center of the Waterpocket Fold are the remains of the historic town of Fruita, where Mormon settlers lived from the 19th century until 1969 and raised fruit trees. The park is centered in Fruita, and the National Park Service still operates the orchards for visitors to pick fruit seasonally.
Fruita is really a series of strips of lush cultivated land inside the canyons, flattened out and manicured into parklike settings. After driving through a hundred miles of red rock desert, it is startling to arrive in Fruita, where green grass and shade trees are everywhere, and a creek flows rapidly alongside the campground. It is like arriving at a city park, an oasis in the midst of dry sandstone and crystal clear blue skies.
The skies are part of the reason the night stars and daytime views have been so startling. The average summer day visibility here is 145 miles! Very little pollution from southern California, Las Vegas, or southern Arizona arrives here ““ so far ““ and there’s not as much airborne dust, pollen, or humidity as other places. The result is magnificent views day or night. Yesterday we could easily see mountains a hundred miles away, from Panorama Point.
In the campground our view is quite different. We are sitting in a canyon looking up at sheer rock walls on both sides. The sun reaches our solar panels more than two hours after it has lit the high peaks of the canyon walls, and we are in shade about two hours before actual sunset. (Fortunately, we are still getting enough solar power to keep up with our daily usage.) From the bedroom’s front window we get a marvelous view of the glowing red sandstone in the light of the setting sun each evening.
The danger of visiting so many incredible western parks in such a short time is that you can begin to lose appreciation for them. It’s easy to say, “Ah, that’s just another pre-historic petroglyph,” or think, “I already hiked a canyon, so let’s skip that.” On a daily basis we are seeing things and hiking places so wonderful that any one of them would be the highlight of a week’s vacation. Too much of that is like eating too much dessert, and we don’t want to get sick of this only halfway through our planned loop of Utah.
We also are spending a lot of time studying the history of the area (Butch Cassidy, Mormon settlers, the “Fremont people,” early European explorers, geologic history, etc.) I have been reading a book about Utah’s outlaws every day, in addition to guidebooks, maps, and interpretive signs everywhere we go. Emma has been working on Junior Ranger projects continuously for over a week, and she needs a break from that too. Even though we are having fun, we are constantly learning about where we are, and eventually that can be a burden too.
So once again our trip plan is changing. (It will keep doing that.) Rather than rush down to Bryce Canyon today, we are spending another day, and possibly delaying our arrival in Bryce. Everyone is telling us that the Rt 12 route from Torrey to Boulder and Escalante is one of the most stunningly beautiful drives in the country. We were originally planning to cover the 118 miles from here to Bryce Canyon in an afternoon, but now I’m thinking we might take most of the day just to get to Escalante, or spend the night at Calf Creek (BLM) for a night. That will allow plenty of time to stop and take pictures along the way, or visit roadside attractions like historic sites.
For today, our plan is very low-key. I’ve been working on the magazine since 7 a.m., and will probably spend the rest of the morning at that. Eleanor and Emma will go explore some of the historic structures of Fruita, and then around noon we’ll go to Torrey to pick up our mail and send/receive email at Robber’s Roost (a local bookstore/café). We might drive another dirt road down a canyon just to see what’s there, but we won’t do any hikes.
In other words, today is a day “off” from the schedule of hiking and studying. It’s funny how a day of business and errands can be a welcome relief from physical recreation. Emma has announced that on her day off she is planning to spend the entire day in bed reading. I think we’re all looking forward to a day like that.
Late note: We found Robber’s Roost to be a very comfortable cafe (and smallish bookstore), but the free wifi didn’t work. There was a connection error when I tried to join the network with my Mac. We asked permission from the on-duty manager to unplug one of their computers and use the that computer’s Ethernet cable to connect to the network. He said it would be no problem. Later, when I was outside on the phone, the Uber-Manager showed up and bitched Eleanor out for connecting to the Ethernet. “I charge for that, you know!” Turns out she knew the wifi was misconfigured so that only PCs can connect to it (not Macs, for some reason), but rather than fix it she chose to blame the Macs instead. The on-duty manager was embarrassed. I could have fixed their wireless router but didn’t even bother to suggest it. The “high speed Internet” connection turned out to be dial-up, too. Go for the coffee, but don’t bother going for the Internet. Go to the burger shop instead.
Second late note: There are few services near Capitol Reef Nat’l Park. Gas is available in Torrey (11 miles from the visitor center), but not much else. Verizon and Sprint have no service here. (We made a few calls “roaming” on some local network, but I’d be careful about that if you don’t have a roaming plan as Eleanor’s phone does.) There is one ATM that we know of, but it didn’t work. The town shuts down even more in the winter season, which I think means all the art galleries close. Come here with everything you might need.
September 7, 2008 at 5:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
(Still in Utah, Karen!)
I’m a bit rushed in posting this blog entry because I am sitting in Slacker’s Burger Joint (“shakes & ice cream”) in Torrey UT, 11 miles from the campground in Capitol Reef, and my milkshake has already melted. I don’t think they will toss me out on account of that, but still it feels like I should have completed all my online business before the end of the shake.
Because I am in a rush, it is hard to summon the superlatives that can adequately describe what we’ve seen in the past two days. Southern Utah is amazing. It is beautiful. It is filled with endless opportunities for exploration, and best of all it is uncrowded. I feel incredibly lucky to be here right now and although we are going to be in Utah for at least another 10 days, we are already talking about coming back.
When I have more time I will post a Flickr album of some of the sights and let you see what I’m talking about. Just the drive up from Natural Bridges through a narrow section of Canyonlands and up to Capitol Reef, was magnificent.
As everyone predicted, Capitol Reef is a great park. We took it fairly easy yesterday, attending a 3 p.m. ranger talk about petroglyphs, meeting some new friends (Bob and Donna, great people), checking out the Visitor Center, eating pie from the historic farmhouse, and attending the 8:30 ranger talk at the Amphitheater. The latter item involved old time fiddling music and dancing — by us, the audience — while bats flew overhead eating up all the bugs.
The rest was good for Emma’s ankle, but we didn’t want to be burned out on hiking when we get to Bryce Canyon in a few day, so today we did just one easy hike down a dry canyon to a section of “narrows” where the red sandstone towered about 300 feet above us. The roundtrip was about 2.5 miles. The rest of the time we’ve been cruising the 9-mile scenic drive, trying some of the dirt side roads down winding canyons, and now checking out Internet in nearby Torrey.
We’ve decided to stay a third night at least in Capitol Reef, so I’ll have to commute into town daily for an Internet fix, but that’s not much of a price to pay. This place deserves to be savored a bit more.
September 5, 2008 at 5:01 pm · Filed under Places to go
It’s both a privilege and a challenge to be “professional campers.” We travel for fun, sure, but in this blog I have tried not to gloss over the many things that go wrong, and the difficulty of balancing the work and play. Today was a typical example of how we usually get a little bit of both.
We took a look forward in the calendar and decided that it was time to leave Hovenweep after only two nights. We’d seen 80% of the publicly-accessible ancient Puebloan ruins, hiked most of the trails, and Emma had completed her Junior Ranger program. But also we saw time beginning to run short on us. We’d like to complete our loop of Utah national parks before the end of the month.
One reason to wrap up this month is that we are considering going to the Albuquerque Balloon Festival, October 4-12. We had reservations for last year, but abandoned them when we decided to go to Banff and the Pacific Northwest instead. This may be our last chance to go, if we find ourselves bound by school schedules in the years to come.
Another reason is weather. Right now it is ideal weather at the upper elevations, but in October things will get distinctly fall-like. The mid-70 to mid-80 degree days we’ve been having are ideal, and the nights have been warm enough that we have only needed heat on a few occasions.
So we drove out of Hovenweep this morning, zig-zagging along county roads to eventually find ourselves at Natural Bridges National Monument about 75 miles drive to the northwest. The Hovenweep area is a bit of a Bermuda triangle for GPS units. Garminita very much wanted us to take some dirt trails across the desert, which would have been fun had we not been towing the trailer. We had to disregard the GPS for about fifteen miles and use the old reliable paper map instead.
Not long after we settled our differences with Garminita, the trailer brakes stopped working. It was the usual scenario, one I’ve started to become rather comfortable with since it has now happened three times. All was well, and then when coming to a T-intersection I noticed that I suddenly wasn’t getting the brake response I expected. I pulled the manual override on the Prodigy brake controller and sure enough, no trailer brakes.
Once again the problem was a dirty ground wire on the trailer. We had last cleaned the wire in May, in the Florida panhandle, but I suppose two weeks of salt air at the Outer Banks of North Carolina and two months of intense humidity in Vermont had their effect. This time we really scrubbed both the ground wire and all the points it contacts, first with a screwdriver tip to scrape off some accumulated varnish, then copper wool, then Emery cloth (fine sandpaper). Problem solved in about five minutes.
I can only plead distraction for the next mistake. Fuel is exceptionally rare out here, and literally our only shot at it was in the town of Blanding. I mistakenly listened to Garminita and took the turn onto Rt 95 toward Natural Bridges, forgetting that we needed to overshoot the turn and go into Blanding for fuel. By the time I remembered, we had passed through two canyons with 8% grades and were about seven miles away.
At that point we had a half tank, but that means nothing out here. I had a choice of working back to Blanding (easily a 20 minute drive each way, with those darned canyons), or proceeding north toward Natural Bridges and hoping for fuel in that direction. Garminita was no help: her database of fuel stations is woefully incomplete. She claimed there was no fuel for at least 90 miles going north.
I decided to proceed to Natural Bridges (25 miles further) and make inquiries there. If there really was no fuel heading north, I’d unhitch the trailer in the campground and return to Blanding alone for a refuel while E&E did something else. But fortunately the rangers reported an automated fuel station in the settlement of Hite, about 50 miles further up the road. We have plenty of fuel to get to Hite.
I have to remember the “Rule of Fuel” here: Always stop for a refill whenever you can, regardless of price. There are no major towns in this part of Utah. A 28-gallon tank such as the Armada has, is sufficient to tow through this area if it’s kept more than half full. Seventy miles between gas stations is not unusual. Years ago, when we towed our Caravel with a Honda Pilot, I quickly discovered that a 19 gallon fuel tank is a joke when towing, even in the east.
With the fuel worry lessened, we faced another challenge. The campground at Natural Bridges is only 13 sites and they are all quite small. It’s really best for tents and very short motorhomes. Signs say that maximum allowable length is 26 feet combined. When I told the rangers we were towing a 30 foot trailer, they kind of grimaced but didn’t say anything. I told them we were accustomed to squeezing into tight spots. (We are, after all, professionals.)
Well, we are, but I have to admit that this is one of the tightest campgrounds we’ve camped in. Our combined length is about 52 feet ““ double the suggested limit ““ and that meant careful navigation through the loops leading to site #9, where we backed in and then parked the Armada alongside. This is probably the hardest campground for us to fit into since Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California.
I wouldn’t recommend trying this without a lot of prior experience. The alternative campground is seven miles away on a free BLM site, so if you come to Natural Bridges and are oversized, stay there instead. Also, the Natural Bridges campground does not take reservations and it is so small that it fills up quickly.
The big challenge of camping in this region is managing our resources. Other than in the town of Blanding, there are no campgrounds, no dump stations, and very little water. Hovenweep had sulphur-tasting water but nothing else. Natural Bridges’ campground doesn’t even have water (and again, no dump station). Water is obtainable at the Visitor Center, and a sign there says the limit is five gallons per day. We picked up three gallons today. Two and a half gallons went into the water tank and the rest was set aside for cooking.
So we have been watching our water consumption extremely carefully. We won’t get a chance to dump the tanks until we get to Capitol Reef (or the nearby town of Torrey). Hiking in the sun, with lots of sunscreen on, demands a shower at the end of the day, which makes the water-management job much harder.
The only resource which hasn’t been a challenge is electric power. In between hikes I’ve been writing up notes and editing articles for the Winter issue of the magazine on the laptop, and Eleanor has been using her laptop as well. Our solar panels have kept us well supplied. At this writing our batteries are 94% full, and our last plug-in was Tuesday morning. I love the desert sun.
In fact, the sun is so abundant here that Natural Bridges was chosen as a demonstration site for solar power. The Visitor Center is powered by the sun, using two arrays of panels across the street. A short trail leads down to the 50,000 watt solar arrays, encouraging visitors to see.
The big draw, of course, is the three natural bridges formed in the canyon below by water erosion. Each one has an overlook point from the 9-mile loop road, so you can see them all without hiking, and each has a hike down into the canyon to get a closer view.
We did two bridge hikes and one other hike to see another set of cliff dwellings, totaling only about 1.5 miles. Emma has a sore ankle from a minor twist a few days ago, and we’re trying to give her a break. We won’t do any hiking tomorrow unless she’s entirely recovered.
Tonight there is an evening program involving a telescope. This area has some of the darkest night skies to be found in the United States, and the skies have been crystal clear each night since we got to Hovenweep. There, we stood outside the trailer at night and looked up to the most brilliant display of stars I have ever seen. The Milky Way was a unbelievable flood of stars, and Jupiter was glowing like a streetlamp. So if we can manage to stay awake until 9 p.m. tonight, the evening program should be pretty good.
That pretty much covers what this little park has to offer, so tomorrow, after picking up Emma’s Junior Ranger badge, we’ll move on to Capitol Reef.
September 4, 2008 at 6:40 pm · Filed under FAQs, Places to go
I have to remind myself that not everyone knows the location of Hovenweep National Monument. It is one fairly small US National Park site of about 390 in the western hemisphere, and it’s hard to get to. You really have to want to come here, because it’s just not on the way to anything.
Hovenweep National Monument is actually a series of small parcels of land scattered across the southeast corner of Utah and the southwest corner of Colorado. It’s a bit confusing to people, I think, for several reasons. First off, a lot of people think that only places with “National Park” in their name are actually national parks. Actually, the National Park Service system includes National Monuments (NM), Nat’l Historic Sites (NHS), Nat’l Recreation Areas (NRA), Nat’l Memorials (N MEM), National Seashores (NS), Nat’l Historic Parks (NHP), Nat’l Battlefields (NB), Nat’l Scenic Trails (NST), and a few oddballs like the John D Rockefeller Jr Memorial Parkway (near Grand Tetons). All told, there are about 390 sites in the United States, plus a few in US protectorates like Guam, Samoa, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. The number keeps rising as new parks are being authorized all the time.
To make things more confusing, this national monument is surrounded by another national monument: the recently-formed Canyon of The Ancients Nat’l Mon. So as you are driving from one “unit” of Hovenweep NM, you are also in and out of Canyon of the Ancients.
But wait, there’s more. Some national monuments are not in the Park Service system, but instead are administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Easterners are often not familiar with BLM, but out here in the west BLM owns vast tracts of land, which is often open to recreation, mining, and drilling. BLM Nat’l Monuments often are just open space with a few primitive 4WD roads and no developed facilities (such as a Visitor Center or campground). Sonoran Desert Nat’l Mon in Arizona is one example, and so is Canyon of the Ancients.
At Hovenweep, the Visitor Center and campground are in the “Square Tower Unit” of the park, located in Utah. Today we drove northeast to three other units where more ancient Puebloan ruins can be seen. The Horseshoe & Hackberry Unit, Holly Unit, and Cutthroat Castle Unit are all located just 4-9 miles away, but they are in Colorado, and they are within Canyon of the Ancients Nat’l Monument.
This results in an interesting study of how the two government agencies administer their land. The Hovenweep units are fenced, have better signage, pit toilets at every trail head, and are more closely monitored. Camping is prohibited except at the campground we’re in. There’s also a day-use fee to access any part of Hovenweep. The rest of the land is BLM, and the rules are less clear (and possibly less restrictive). There’s no fee or services in the BLM’s Canyon of Ancients Nat’l Monument.
Visiting all five units of Hovenweep will certainly be a very full day, or even two days. We have visited four so far, and hiked most of the trails. To visit the other ruin sites you need only a car (you can hike right from the campground but it adds 8 miles roundtrip to the day), assuming the roads are dry. If wet, the guides say they “may be impassable.”
The only site that can’t be reached by car is Cutthroat Castle. You can get most of the way in with a car and then hike down to the sites, or if you have a high-clearance 4WD vehicle like us, you can have an interesting drive down and hike just 0.1 miles to the site. After doing three other hikes, we chose the interesting drive. 4WD Low Range all the way and it was great fun.
Because of the BLM/NP borders, it happens that the exceptional “Painted Hand” pueblo ruin is also on the same access road as Cutthroat Castle. Because it is on BLM property (and thus part of Canyon of the Ancients NM), the brochure you get at the Hovenweep Visitor Center doesn’t even mention it, and it’s not depicted on any of their maps. But it’s right there, almost impossible to miss as you head to Cutthroat, and you must visit it. Painted Hand has towers, kiva depressions, pictographs, farming terraces, and great views. Best of all the round-trip hike is less than a mile. I’m glad we visited Mesa Verde first, so we knew what we were seeing.
We’re still alone here. We did see one other couple visiting some of the ruins today, but other than that it has seemed as though this is our own private national park. We could really stay another night, but we’re juggling our desire to visit Capitol Reef and other places as well. One limiting factor of this park is that it has no dump station, and because of the remote location they ask that we take all our trash with us as well. With careful conservation, those factors won’t force us out for a few days, so the choice is ours to make.
September 3, 2008 at 7:34 pm · Filed under Places to go
This is already an amazingly great National Park and we’ve only been here a few hours.
If you were looking for the middle of nowhere, Hovenweep is pretty close. The nearest town (fuel, services, food, etc) is Cortez, about 44 miles away via a bumpy County Road. The park is in the midst of vast tracts of open desert. Almost nobody lives in the area. There are few roads.
And yet, when we pulled in, we were blown away to find a completely modern, accessible, and handsome Visitor Center, and just beyond it, one of the most beautiful campgrounds we’ve ever seen. I mean, it’s the nicest place we’ve camped since Frisco campground in the Outer Banks. And best of all, there’s nobody here.
I mean nobody. In the 30 site campground, there is one camper: ours, shining brilliantly in the desert sun in space #4 with a gorgeous view in all direction. In the Visitor Center, there are two rangers and nobody else, so we got extremely personalized service at the desk. On the Ruins Trail that we hiked this afternoon (2.0 miles), we saw two people who quickly disappeared, and other than that we had the place to ourselves.
And the kicker is that for some strange reason, there’s a cellular signal here. There’s not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be offline, disconnected from the Internet. And yet, when the winds blows right and I hold my breath, I can get a cell phone signal.
This changes everything. We no longer have to rocket through this park and Natural Bridges (our next stop) because work is piling up. We can take our time, because every morning and evening I can get online and keep up with business.
When the stars are telling you something, you’ve got to listen. It’s $10 a night to stay here, the weather forecast is for sunny mid-80s all week, we have a gorgeous spot and our water tank is full. It all adds up to: “STAY”. So we’ll stay for at least two nights and then decide if we want to move on.
It seems almost unfair that we should have all this to ourselves, but I’m not complaining. The ancient ruins all around here are fascinating, Emma’s doing another Junior Ranger program, we’re luxuriating in the dry air, and there’s plenty to do in the area. This is the type of situation that we live for. It makes all those Wal-Mart nights and borderline campgrounds and high fuel prices worthwhile. May as well enjoy it.
September 2, 2008 at 4:57 pm · Filed under Places to go
Our plan for the day was to explore a representative sample of Mesa Verde, not everything. A park this size can’t be seen in one day, in fact it probably can’t all be seen in a week if you count in all the hiking trails. For our first visit to a big park we like to sample and browse, and in the process learn what we’ll want to come back to see next time.
I’m a big advocate of the idea of hiking a park as much as possible. I realize that’s not possible for everyone, but right now it works for us and so we always try to check out the lesser-known corners by making the effort to hike. Our first hike was an easy one, the Farming Terrace Trail near Cedar Tree Tower, about 0.5 miles. The Ancestral Puebloans who lived here during the time of cliff dwellings were farmers. They grew squash and other vegetables, including a very small variety of corn. Since rainwater runs off the mesas very quickly, they created small terraces to slow the water enough to irrigate their crops. This trail brings you right through a series of terraces.
Three of the most popular cliff dwellings are only accessible by guided tour ($3 per person). We’d seen Long House yesterday, so today we had tickets for Cliff Palace and Balcony House. As it turned out, this was a great order to see them in. Long House is a spectacular first dwelling to tour (150 rooms), and then Cliff Palace is even more elaborate (151 rooms), so you can easily see the difference.
Visiting these dwellings requires climbing ladders and going up and down irregular stairs. The Park Service warns people about the physical challenges of these places, and in the pre-tour briefing the rangers all mention that, should you have a medical emergency, help is three hours away. In reality they aren’t particularly strenuous to anyone in good health, but you can see why the rangers prefer to scare away anyone who might have a problem: They are the ones who will have to carry the stretcher up and out of the canyon.
Something special was happening at Cliff Palace when the Puebloans lived here. It has many more kivas (round ceremonial rooms built into the ground), plastered walls, excellent masonry work, and elaborate decorations. It’s anyone’s guess as to what made this particular so much more elaborate than all the others.
Balcony House made a fantastic final tour. Fair warning: this tour is not for anyone with a fear of heights or claustrophobia. It is considerably more psychologically challenging than the other two. The tour starts with a pair of 30-foot ladders mounted on the cliff above a very very long drop. “Don’t look down — don’t look up!” warns the ranger. “Just look straight ahead and keep three points of contact on the ladder at all times.” I didn’t look down, but I did look up and regretted it.
Climbing the ladder at Balcony House — click for larger
Once you’re inside the Balcony House, the view is stunning and you can see why it has that name. You also might wonder how the heck you’re going to get out of there. Back down that ladder? No, it’s even more interesting. You crawl through a tunnel that is 18″ high, and twelve feet long. (In the middle it opens up enough to crouch, but that’s all.) Emma made it look easy. The rest of us took off our packs and pushed them ahead of us.
Emma goes in the entrance; a tourist comes out the (larger) exit.
Then, you climb up a sheer rock face with chain-link handrails. Again, looking down is not recommended. It’s a looooong way to the bottom of the canyon.
Last challenge of Balcony House — click for larger view
If climbing ladders isn’t your thing, you can still see a lot of cliff dwelling sites from your car, or on a hike. Many are marked from overlooks, and a few others are just surprises. Just by keeping my eyes open during drives and hikes, I managed to spot and photograph more than a dozen cliff dwellings. The Spruce Tree House is probably the best self-guided tour, and it’s only a few hundred feet via paved walkway from the Chapin Mesa Museum parking lot.
At Spruce Tree House you can actually get in a restored kiva. Kivas had roofs made of wood, but the wood has long since rotted away, so during the guided tours you see right into the kiva, like looking at a foundation with no house on it. But getting into the kiva at Spruce Tree gives you a sense of the mysterious, and you can imagine the rituals going on inside while the ceremonial fire burned.
Kiva without roof; inside a kiva
From Spruce Tree house there is a very nice hike on the Petroglyph Point Trail. The signs claim that the total elevation gain is only 174 feet, but that doesn’t include the many ups and downs in the trail. In reality, I would estimate the total climb at several hundred feet — all at about 7500 feet elevation, in arid and often hot conditions. Bring a lot of water. The reward is not only some superb petroglyphs but an unnamed cliff dwelling along the trail. If you want to just see the petroglyphs with minimal effort, do the trail backwards (it’s a 2.8 mile loop), and turn around when you reach the petroglyphs. The second half of the trail is on flat mesa, very easy.
All this plus a short visit to the Chapin Museum accounted for a full day. Our last stop was for fuel, but as I expected the concessionaire-run gas station at Morefield Campground was outrageous. Unleaded: $4.71 per gallon. Seven miles away in Cortez, gas is $3.83. This is typical. When the concessionaires run things, there are more services in the parks but they always cost an arm and a leg. This also accounts for the campsites costing $24.05 instead of $14. I bought two gallons of gas just so we’d have a reserve to drive to Cortez for a proper refill.
Our stop today is Cortez, CO, to top off our reserves. We needed an oil change, a tank of propane, gas, groceries, a fridge defrost, and a chance to catch up on email & the blog before heading out again. The next four days of travel (at least) will involve places in Utah where the cell phone won’t work, Internet is just a concept, groceries are scarce, and prices for everything are likely to be high. I can’t say when I’ll get a chance to update the blog, but I will keep writing entries as we travel, and upload them as soon as possible.
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