Month: April 2024

The hitchhiker we picked up on the way back

jdewyzeLeave a comment

The idea for this road trip was to see the great sights of the Southwest we’d somehow missed. To make our drive to Austin for the eclipse a kind of mop-up tour. We might undertake other road trips elsewhere sometime, but we could close the atlas on at least this quadrant of America.

Nice try. Spending time in the ruins of Chaco Canyon (above) and among Sedona’s red rocks; jouncing through Canyon de Chelly and ogling fake aliens in Roswell all rewarded us richly (as I recorded in my earlier posts.) We also fared well on the drive back, even if White Sands National Park somewhat underwhelmed me.

Hiking in the blinding white landscape made me want to dig out the eclipse glasses.
Still, it was interesting to see all that snow-white powdered quartzite even if the dunes’ size didn’t match others Steve and i have visited in the Sahara or Colorado or even just west of Yuma.

In contrast, our morning in Carlsbad Canyon far exceeded my expectations.

We hiked in through the cave’s original opening, following a path that went down 75 stories.
It may not be as colorful as some caverns, but the vast size and baroque variety of its decorations dazzled me.

What wrecked our “Adios, Southwest!” Plan was listening to the audio version of House of Rain, a kind of detective story written by a naturalist/adventurer/desert ecologist named Craig Childs. Driving east through the Indian reservations, we’d consumed a more classic mystery – one of the Hillerman stories starring Navajo tribal police officers. But I had also downloaded House of Rain hoping finally to learn about the Anasazi people (aka Ancient Puebloans). I knew vaguely they had lived in cliff dwellings in the area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah come together. The subject of House of Rain was who they were and what became of them – just what I wanted to know.

Visiting the Heard Museum in Phoenix and Flagstaff’s Museum of Northern Arizona and Canyon de Chelly and Chaco gave us droplets of the answer. But listening to Childs on the drive home was like jumping into a roaring flood.

He starts with Chaco. We’d just been there – barely a week before, and yeah, the scale and the height of its elaborate complexes had impressed us. But Childs is as familiar with the place as if he’d grown up there, and he made it come alive, explaining what it must have been like when under construction, more than a thousand years ago. He communicates the wonderment of what these folks accomplished, chopping down trees from forests more than 50 miles away and erecting buildings that remained the tallest in North America until skyscrapers began to sprout in Chicago. Then they built a dazzling network of roads radiating out from the heart of it, and they communicated over long distances with a complex signaling system. All these things happened at a time and place that in my mind had always been just…. blank. Childs filled it.

The Anasazi disappeared from Chaco around 1200 A.D., and what happened to them is the mystery explored by the book. It’s a dense, complex story I’m glad I listened to for all those hours – reading it on paper would have been daunting. I won’t try to summarize, just say that what Steve and I heard made us marvel at our ignorance and stoked a curiosity to see more: Mesa Verde or Aztec Ruins or the pueblos where the Anasazis’ descendants still live today.

Will we get there? Not soon. In less than a month, we’ll fly to Miami, a launching point for a visit to a region Steve has begun referring to as Ground Zero for Where All the Trouble in North America Began: the Caribbean. Our plan is to spend time staying mostly in exchange houses and Airbnbs on Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. Stay tuned for details of how that one works out.

Adios, Austin

jdewyze1 Comment

Day 17. Austin to Carlsbad, New Mexico. 454 miles, 8 hours, 55 minutes (including stops).

Our Austin stay lasted almost a week, and we packed in a lot, enough to get a real feel for the place. Not counting the eclipse, which seemed more celestial than tied to any spot on earth, my favorite Austin experiences were…

1) the barbecue (see above). It was a shock to realized I’d never had Texas barbecue before. And a bigger shock to learn how delicious it is. How did it take me so long to discover this?

2) Catching a performance at Esther’s Follies, an institution on the ultra-lively Sixth Street. Mixing fast-paced extremely topical comedy skits, music, and big-stage magic, it felt like a weird combination of vaudeville and Saturday Night Live. We laughed a lot.

3) On Sunday morning, we visited the wildflower reserve established by Lady Bird Johnson. Its big vistas…

… dazzling close-ups…

… and everything in between filled me with happiness.

But now we’ve left Texas behind and will tackle two national parks in the next two days. Up tomorrow: a visit to the largest underground chamber in North America.

Our lucky star

jdewyze2 Comments

Chasing eclipses is dangerous. The risks aren’t physical but emotional. Traveling anywhere to experience this particular outdoor activity — brief as it is — requires planning and making commitments months or even years ahead of the actual event. If after all that the weather doesn’t cooperate, you can wind up seeing only a fraction of what you’d dreamed about. You could feel devastated.

Steve and I chose to chase Monday’s big American eclipse in Austin mainly because this part of Texas is reputed to have something like 300 days of annual sunshine. (Also, neither of us had ever been to Austin before.) When my iPhone weather app began forecasting Austin’s eclipse-day conditions 10 days ago, my heart sank to see all the clouds. I told myself conditions could change and did my best to put it all out of my mind.

The forecasts got harder to ignore once we arrived here. We’d decided to view the eclipse at a big organized site in Waco (about an hour and a half away, on the centerline, with a consequently long span of total darkness.) But rain had appeared in Waco’s forecasts for Monday and Tuesdays, and by Sunday afternoon, it looked like violent weather — thunder and lightning, huge hail, maybe even a tornado or two — could rip through the area some time Monday afternoon. (Totality would begin at 1:38.) The thought of getting stuck on a freeway in post-eclipse traffic with a Texas tornado spinning toward us was scary enough to make us all consider staying in Austin, even though the moon would cover the sun for only a minute or so (versus more than 4 minutes in Waco). We finally resolved to wait and see what Monday morning brought.

By then, the weather predictors seemed to be suggesting any violent storms would not take shape until late afternoon. So we piled into our van and headed north, under skies that still looked unfriendly.

The outlook began to brighten about a half hour later. Tiny patches of blue sky appeared, illuminated by glimpses of sun.

By the time we reached the parking lot at Baylor University, site of our Eclipse Over Texas tickets, it almost felt like a sunny day.

With four hours to go until totality, we walked a little over a mile to the Dr. Pepper Museum in the center of town, where we learned that too many other eclipse-chasers had had the same idea.

The sun was blazing by then, but the line crawled. After a while, we gave up and returned to Baylor’s eclipse-viewing area. The crowd was growing.

We found our friends Donna and Mike, who had driven in from Colorado.
The sky still held promise.

I didn’t mind the two-hour wait for totality. Steve and our friend Leigh braved horrendous lines to buy some of the overpriced food-truck offerings. (Event organizers had forbidden bringing in any picnic fare.) I chatted with Donna and Mike; the people-watching also was amusing.

Like so many others in the crowd, I kept an anxious eye on the sky.

The moon sliced its first thin piece out of the sun around 12:20. You could see this marvel through your eclipse glasses, but as I’ve learned from previous total eclipses, no immediate impact on the earthscape is detectable. On Monday, it took at least another 30 minutes for the light to strike my eye as colder, somehow deader than normal. This sense intensified as more and more of the sun was lost.

The scene went from looking like this…
…to this.

In those last few minutes, I felt a surge of pure joy. Forecasts be damned! The fragile crescent of remaining sun faced no threat of obliteration from mere clouds. We would see everything as it slipped behind the moon and the world chilled and dimmed, abruptly. Thousands of us simultaneously dropped our cardboard glasses, tilted our heads back, and gaped. People cheered. Some of us screamed.

I noticed different things, this fourth time of viewing a total eclipse. Dark as the sky became, I saw no stars, only Venus and Jupiter. (I have no idea why it would have appeared less dark in Texas than in some of my previous total eclipses.) Even without a telescope or fancy camera and lens, we all could see a glowing orange protuberance at about the 4 o’clock position of the orb: solar flares that someone later said were likely the size of a couple of Earths and more than 10 million degrees.

Something about that perfect alignment — the sun, the moon, my brain, surrounding by the cold gloom of space — electrified me. Then the burst of the first bit of sun re-emerging, more dazzling than anything on earth.

En mass, the crowd scrambled to gather our possessions and begin streaming to the parking lot and shuttle buses. Even though the sun would continue to be uncovered for another hour, mundanity was fully restored.

We tore back to Austin at 70 miles an hour; no traffic ever materialized. It was just one more miracle, one more thing to add to the deep sense of wonder and gratitude.

Trent slept through totality. He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

The end of the road (outbound)

jdewyze2 Comments

Day 7: Chinle to Chaco Canyon to Gallup. 265 miles; 8.5 hours.

The Navajo Nation can be wintry in early April. We worried that more rain Monday morning might close the roads to Chaco Canyon, which we really wanted to visit.
Although it was almost 12:30 by the time we reached the 20-mile dirt track leading in to the park, we decided to chance it, and reached the visitor center a little after 1.
I couldn’t resist visiting “our” campsite — where we would have slept Monday night were it not for the frigid forecast.
Visitors access most of the park’s trails and major sites by driving on a paved loop road. Then you park and walk to sites like Pueblo Bonito, the largest building site in the broad shallow canyon.
People started living here and building complex free-standing brick structures almost 1200 years ago.
The Pueblo Bonito complex covered three acres and contained around 600 rooms four stories tall.
Archaeologists think much of this site was ceremonial. The Chaco residents also built an impressive network of wide roads, and people trekked here from afar to trade all manner of goods.
We saw enough to get a sense of what’s here, then made it out over the dirt road to head for the section of the old Route 66 that passes through Gallup.

Day 8: Gallup to Zuni Pueblo to Albuquerque. 199 miles, 7 hours, 10 minutes.

We were sad to miss the Hopi Pueblo in Arizona, but decided we could pop into the ancestral lands of another tribe: the Zuni, whose primary village is just 45 minutes south of Gallup. We visited a private museum, a trading post, and the visitor center there but were not supposed to take any photos. All very interesting, but with nothing to share in the way of images.

The other highlight of our day was an afternoon stop at the Albuquerque home of the couple who are raising one of Trent’s litter mates, Tex. They have a huge, fenced pasture behind their home, where the brothers romped ecstatically.

Equally thrilling to Trent was his discovery of the muddy drainage ditch coming off the irrigation channel at the back of the property. In it, he transformed himself from a lab/golden mix into something more closely resembling a chocolate lab. (Or a pig?)

We hosed some of the mud off but still needed to take him to a nearby doggy self-wash facility to make him presentable again.

Day 9: Albuquerque to Roswell to Lamesa, Texas. 170 miles, 8 hours, 45 minutes, including stops.

Roswell, New Mexico is the town that many people believe was the site of an alien spaceship crash in 1947. The incident and subsequent theories about the US government’s attempts to cover it up have created a substantial tourist industry in Roswell, a town that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.

We had expected the UFO Museum to be cheesy, but it surprised us by how large and complex it was.
Trent seems to be sneering — but is it because of the alien presence… or the hype

To break up the journey, we spent the night in the small but friendly town of Lamesa, Texas.

Day 10: Lamesa to Austin. 348.8 miles, 6 hours 10 minutes.

Almost immediately after crossing into Texas, the landscape changed. I’d never seen that combination or enormous fields, dotted with oil wells.
Even more impressive was the bloom of bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush and other wildflowers once we hit the hill country west of Austin.
The bluebonnet is the official state flower of Texas.

We arrived at our home-exchange base in Austin a little after 2, having covered 2,034 since leaving our garage. Our son and his family from Reno landed at the airport a few hours later. Now the next phase of this adventure has begun.

Lots of eating,
A bit of sightseeing.
Mounting anxiety over the question hovering over Monday’s big event: will the building clouds obscure it?

Canyon del Muerto

jdewyze1 Comment

A few days before we set off on this road trip, my friend Kris told me a story about how she almost died in Canyon de Chelly. On their first visit to the renowned Navajo landmark, she and her husband had journeyed to the tourist office and hired an official guide, then had a marvelous experience being driven by him through both Canyon de Chelly and its extension, Canyon del Muerto (Canyon of Death), a name dating back to when the Navajos endured great suffering as the US government seized their lands.

On a return trip to the canyon, Kris and Rich found the tourist office closed. So they hired a freelance guide who picked them up in a battered Suburban and drove them into the canyon, where the vehicle promptly stalled in a river crossing. Its reverse gears appeared to be broken, and the driver/guide eventually shouted that everyone had to abandon ship through the few doors that functioned. Kris said it wasn’t difficult to slog through the water to dry land, where they watched the Suburban sink — and disappear — into the quicksand in which it had bogged down.

The moral of her story, Kris told me, was that we should only hire a trustworthy guide. But because Steve and I had arrived in Chinle so late Saturday afternoon, we settled for arranging a four-hour tour through our hotel. I reflected that we might be doing what Kris had warned us against. But we’d had little choice.

Sunday (Easter) morning, I’d felt reassured by the sight of our vehicle, a 10-passenger Pinzgauer army troop carrier built in Austria with 6WD and three locking axles. With only one other passenger besides us in the vehicle, there was plenty of room for Trent (garbed in his cape, of course.) The driver/guide, Fernando, had grown up in his grandparents’ hogan, deep within the canyon, so that also reassured me. Scattered clouds hinted that rain might be coming, but as we entered the canyon, it was still dry and bright.

Canyon de Chelly isn’t as overwhelming as the Grand Canyon (what is?), but it quickly became clear its sandstone walls present an extraordinary mixture of color and form. Near the entrance, they start out low…

…but they soon rise to a thousand feet in height.

Moreover, this is very much a living landscape. Fernando told us only one family lives in it year-round.

This is their home.

But members of another 70-80 households return each spring to their properties. Somehow they coax crops of corn, beans, squash, melons, stone fruit, and more from the riverbed.

Here’s another homestead. But nobody was there on Easter Sunday morning.

Beyond the current inhabitants, the canyon also holds fascinating evidence of the Old Puebloan peoples who lived here until roughly a thousand years ago. Fernando stopped at at least a half-dozen spots to point out the remnants of dwellings and paintings and other rock art left by the Anasazi ancestors.

We penetrated deeper into the rough terrain, and around noon the sprinkles started. The temperature dropped and the wind intensified, so soon the sprinkles turned into sleet. Or was it snow? It was hard to tell. Most of my attention was focused on staying as warm as possible. Fernando handed out blankets, and I tried to get Trent to snuggle up to me under one. He looked pretty miserable.

On a nice day, we all might have hiked more, taking time to savor the fantastic landscape and all the history that had unfolded within it. But as we headed back, all I could focus on was how little feeling I had left in my fingers or toes.

Fernando dropped us off at the hotel a little after 1, and I staggered to our room on what felt like lifeless stumps. Stripping off my boots and socks and gloves, I remember puffing out little breaths and doing a fair amount of moaning as I soaked my feet and warmed my hands in the tub. I shivered hard for an extraordinarily long time.

When the shivering had mostly subsided, Steve and I downed hot pozole and coffee in the lodge’s cafeteria and agreed we wouldn’t have missed seeing the canyon. I wouldn’t say the price was almost dying of hypothermia. But I’d come closer to that than I ever hope to get again.