A jewel of a canyon

Being a lover of rocks, it's not surprising that I'm also a lover of canyons. One of the most beautiful and striking that I've ever seen is in Arizona.

No, not the grand canyon (to be saved for a retirement trip), but one that seems to me almost as spectacular: Canyon de Chelly. (The last part of the name is pronounced "shay"; a Spanish/French corruption of the Navajo word—tséyi—for canyon. Which makes a translation of the name "canyon of canyon"—sort of like, in Britain, where avon means river...so River Avon="river river.")

At any rate, we thoroughly enjoyed our much-too-brief tour of this Canyon—just over the border from New Mexico, and conveniently on our way to Utah. Parts of two days was definitely not enough time to see as much of this gorgeous National Monument as we would have liked, but we worked to fit in as much as we could.

We arrived in the afternoon, just in time to check in to the Sacred Canyon Lodge, where we'd made a reservation. Very nice accommodations, and actually inside the park, so it was easy to get to the scenic overlooks. After some brief stops at a couple of the south rim overlooks before dark, we had a scrumptious dinner at a nearby restaurant, which features dishes offering variations on delightful Navajo fry bread. I had a turkey sandwich on the stuff and Henry opted for the "Navajo taco" you can see above. (It was alternatively called "Navajo pizza" elsewhere, but the basic recipe—the fabulous pastry plus chili and salad—was the same.) Yum!

The dinner tasted especially good after our introduction to the park, which involved a little hiking to overlooks. Here are a couple of shots from our late afternoon sight-seeing:

"Spider Rock" at dusk

near Spider Rock

Inspired by this initial taste of the gorgeous scenery, we were determined to make the most of the next day's time at CdC. I was even able to be convinced to get up before dawn—and, more seriously, before breakfast—so that we could see sunrise over the canyon.

It was certainly worth the extra effort, as I think you'll agree!

super-photogenic rock at Junction overlook

more photogenic rocks

distance view

Wow! What a great experience! Aptly followed up by a nice breakfast at the lodge's cafeteria, which fortified us for a real hike.

There is one trail which visitors can take without guides down to the canyon floor. (CdC NM is jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Navajo Tribal Trust, as it is on Navajo land. Several Navajo families live in the park, some even on the canyon floor, and so tourists aren't welcome to just go wandering on their own.) Since we didn't have time for one of the guided tours—to be saved for our next visit!—we for sure wanted to take the hike down to the White House Ruin.

view from the top

It was a wonderful hike. The ruins are definitely worth seeing (you can see some pictures of them here) but for me the hike would have been worth the time and effort even without them. What an amazing canyon!

To begin with, it was a very nice trail...

...which was not all that easy to have established. Long sections of it were cut right into the rock face, like in the picture below. So neat to be able to traverse such gorgeous cliffs, experiencing these great rocks up close and personal!

We've hiked a lot of trails in a lot of different environments, but probably never one quite like this!

And, of course, the canyon scenery was all around us and breathtaking at almost every step...

view from the canyon floor

on the way back up

almost back to the top

After having seen all the overlooks on the south rim, we headed to the north side, where there are fewer viewpoints...but those few are pretty spectacular!

Antelope House Ruin is set in perhaps the most spectacular setting in the park. (Sorry, I don't have any good photos of this ruin; Henry's camera got better shots and he should be blogging about CdC soon.) 

The Antelope House overlook covers a wide area, with two endpoints. Here I am at the first one I found; the red line points out the other:

It was lots of fun clambering over the rocky canyon rim to see views from both of these overlooks...

Henry exploring the canyon rim

conveniently-placed photogenic foreground rock

One of my favorite features here was the "Navajo fortress," the large formation below that looks like it's coming out from the canyon wall in the distance. In reality, it's actually an island in the canyon, handy for making a defense against your enemies...

As I hope you'll agree, Canyon de Chelly is a really magical place, and if you find yourself in the Four Corners area, you should definitely make time for a visit. We plan to, for sure, next time we're out that way.

More ancient art & architecture

Last time I gave you a show-and-tell of the fascinating rock art and cliff dwellings we saw on our San Juan paddling trip.

But Henry and I didn't want those four days to be our entire desert southwest vacation. We spent a few days before, and a few after, touring some other wonderful places in that area. If you look at a recreation map of the Four Corners area (referring to the meeting of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico) it's astonishing how many wonderful sites are in relatively close proximity. We didn't have time to see them all, but we crammed as much into our "extra time" as we could...in the process visiting all four states and, technically, another "country"* as well.

Our first stop was at Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, which we'd heard glowing reports of from many quarters. We weren't disappointed in its scenery, which I'll review for you in upcoming posts. But, to finish up with the ancient art theme, I'll tell you first about the cliff dwellings we saw there: gorgeous examples of domestic architecture, circa 1100.

White House ruin

This fabulous site is the only one that you can hike to yourself in CdeC (other points of interest in the Canyon require a Navajo guide, and although we wanted to take one of these longer trips, we just didn't have time).

This shot can give you a better idea of the scale of the structures—it was a large settlement!—as well as illustrating a modern cultural phenomena: jewelry vendors.

More recent building has taken place along the trail, too, making the hike much more doable than it would have been without these improvements. Here's one of two tunnels carved through inconveniently-placed rock outcroppings:

Overall the hike was lots of fun, with photo opps galore all the way down to the Canyon floor and back up, and I'll show you more of these views in a later post. 

The White House ruin is on the south side of the canyon; on the north side is another impressive structure that we saw from a distance: Antelope House. Can you find it in this panoramic shot?

Spotting these cleverly-positioned structures across the canyon is a skill you have to work at a little, but once you get the hang of where to look it comes a little easier. Here's a zoom shot that shows Antelope House in more detail:

Incidentally, at a couple of the overlooks in CdC, they've implemented a very ingenious low-tech device to help people find the ruins (I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who has difficulty with this!). There are metal tubes mounted in such a way that they point right to the ruins. Thanks, CdC! These should be required at overlooks everywhere.

After our paddling adventure, another national monument was on our itinerary. This one is in Utah, Natural Bridges NM. In addition to the emponymous natural rock features, they also have an impressive cliff dwelling, Horse Collar ruin. Test your new dwelling-finding skills on the photo below:

Unfortunately, we had even less time at Natural Bridges than Canyon de Chelly and were only able to do one of their hikes, and it didn't involve a cliff dwelling. More about that scenery, though, later.

(Another bummer from our time crunch was having to missing an astronomy program at NBNM, which was the first designated International Dark Sky Park. Such a cool claim to fame! And what makes it worth another visit sometime.)

The amazing abundance of archaeological sites in this area means that not all of them are in these nationally-protected areas. There were a few just off Highway 95 between Natural Bridges and Blanding, Utah. Unfortunately, we only had time to stop at one (note the low sun in the photo): Mule Canyon ruin. As you see from the link, there is more to it than what we saw by the roadside (where the structures are partially restored) but, again, time was working against us:

As interesting as the cultural sites are, we were probably more overwhelmed by the natural scenery of the Four Corners region. I'll spend the next few posts showing you some of these gorgeous and iconic vistas.

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*A good-sized chunk of this area (especially in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico) is in the Navajo Nation's territory, as any reader of Tony Hillerman's books can tell you. This includes Canyon de Chelly, the left bank of the San Juan during our paddle, and other sites I'll show you later, such as Monument Valley. So, in a strictly administrative law sense, we did visit another country on this trip!

San Juan River: ancient art & architecture

One of the big draws of the section of the San Juan that we paddled is its abundance of archaeology. Although the high water prevented us from stopping to view some of the more famous rock art collections (namely the panels at Butler Wash), we still saw plenty.

It was such fun visiting these sites and walking along a cliff when, bang! all of sudden there was a work of art several hundred, perhaps even a thousand, years old! It does take a little eye-training to be able to spot some of these figures, but it's well worth it.

I couldn't help but be reminded, when looking at these artistic creations, of Kim Stanley Robinson's wonderful, wonderful novel Shaman, that I read last year. The rock art we saw wasn't as ancient as that which inspired KSR, but it's old enough that whoever created it seems, initially, to have to be completely alien to us. 

But, then, you see the art, and respond to it. Which means that these ancient peoples must not have been so different from 21st-century humans after all. We had so much fun discovering, and trying to interpret, these wonderful images and structures.

(Henry's camera got much better photos of these fascinating artifacts, and he's generously let me use some in this post.)

The items we're excited about in the photos above are petroglyphs, which were made by carving into the outer layer of a rock face, often made up of "desert varnish." Since this stuff is very common on exposed rock faces all over the southwest, and since, even given the area's dryness and overall inhospitable-ness, all kinds of indigenous peoples have lived here...well, there are a lot of petroglyphs to see. 

note the Kokopelli figure, left of the big man

All of the photos so far were taken on our hike to see the Moki steps on our first day of paddling. These steps are features that are also common in the desert, usually near cliff dwellings. The residents would use them, we surmise, to get up and down from their well-protected buildings...well-protected since it would take pretty strong and agile climbers to surprise you by climbing up these steps!

we were not able to see the ruins that are probably in the alcove at the top of the steps

Here is a closer look at this ingenious "ladder":

I was also intrigued by another set of holes, much smaller, near the steps. What could these have been for? Sorry I didn't include something for scale in the photo, but as I recall, each hole was about nickel-quarter-sized.

Our first night's campsite was chosen because of its proximity to the River House ruin, where we spent a delightful morning exploring. Here's the main ruin, snuggled up nicely on a wide ledge, under a convenient overhang of rock...

Not only was the ruin itself fun to wander around in (we were careful not to climb on the walls or otherwise disturb things, but the regulations still allow plenty of ways to explore the site)...

Cynthia and Henry enjoying the walk-through-museum

...but there was rock art here, too, in addition to the building. You might be able to see this pictograph high on the wall in the photo above...

By the way, one of the many things I learned on this trip was the difference between petroglyphs and pictographs, terms which had always confused me. The snake (or is it the river?) above is a pictograph because it's painted on the rock surface, rather than incised upon it, like the petroglyphs I showed you before.

Here's some more:

Down the ledge a ways is an "outbuilding," what's called the "granary." What a gorgeous piece of workmanship! Not quite on the same scale as the Inkas, but it did remind me of the stonework we saw in the Andes.

One of the most archaeology-rich areas we planned to visit was up Chinle Creek. However, the creek was responding to a lot of rain upstream and we couldn't cross it to get to the sites on the other side. (We found out later that it was peaking just about the time we were there...at about 200 times its normal flow!)

However, we had a very pleasant hike on the near side of the creek (you can see a lot of the naturally gorgeous and interesting rocks we saw in this post) and Henry, intrepid explorer, did find a way to get close enough to the sites to get some good pictures:

cliff dwelling across the creek

"baseball man" pictograph

And, we saw yet another manifestation of indigenous art...pottery shards. These lovely items were littering the ground at the end of a small arroyo, no doubt washed down from middens higher up...

Our final petroglyph stop was actually right where we started. There's a very impressive panel at Sand Island, near Bluff, where we had launched several days before. Since we were much too busy then to take the time to do an art walk, Henry and I made sure we stopped by on our way home...

the guy on the wall is one of the largest figures we saw anywhere

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We were able to get much more up close and personal to the rock art and ruins along the San Juan than we were at other points on our journey, but we did see some amazing archaeology at Canyon de Chelly and Natural Bridges National Monuments, and I'll show you those sites in my next post.

BTW, I've put almost all of my San Juan pictures up in a Flickr set, if you haven't seen enough of this amazing scenery.

Wordless Wednesday: necessary admonition in Mexican Hat, Utah

San Juan River: living the high life

ingeniously-set-up camera provides shot with everyone in it!

This is the motley crew that braved the flashing-flooding San Juan with us. A very congenial group, that just happened to include a couple of the world's best camp cooks—along with assorted willing and variously talented sous-chefs. So we lived pretty high on the hog (and the chicken and the cow, not to mention the peaches) during our 4 nights on the river.

peach cobbler for not one, but TWO, desserts, plus leftovers at breakfast!

sous-chef extraordinaire Katie, serving tortilla casserole

The campsites we found were nice, too...

our tent at sunset, Camp Fossil Stop, our final night on the river

beached boats at Fossil Stop campsite

camp dining area, River House campsite, our first night out

boats at sunset, River House campsite (before the water rose!)

living room/dining room/boat garage at Chinle campsite, where we stayed two nights

our tent on its soft bed of sand at Chinle campsite

Unfortunately, I didn't get photos of all our fabulous food, but here was Fossil Stop's yummy beef stew...

Also on the menu: heavenly Jambalaya, stupendous tortilla casserole, and sublime meatballs and spaghetti. No, we didn't starve in the wilderness!

Neither did these guys, either, I suspect. They visited our Fossil Stop campsite, and one of them even made off with a package of Cynthia's spam!

Definitely, a great time was had by all!

Katie and Cynthia relaxing at sunset, Fossil Stop...before the spam theft

All too soon (although perhaps not too soon, given the dirty states of hair, bodies, boats, and gear) we were taking out at Mexican Hat, Utah, at the nice boat ramp...

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Next up, glimpses of the high life, circa 1200-1400 (or so)...ancient art and architecture on display along the river.