The American West

The hitchhiker we picked up on the way back

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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.

Canyon del Muerto

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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.

Change of plans

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Road trips have their drawbacks. You assume all the work of moving yourself through the world, work that you would otherwise delegate to taxi or Lyft or Uber or bus or private drivers. Or tour companies. Or airline pilots. Or train engineers. Doing it all yourself is tiring.

The greatest allure of road trips, however, is that it frees you up to shape your itinerary, literally moment by moment. Need a bathroom break? Stop for the next one down the road. Want to check out that funky museum? Put on the brakes and pull over.

In the last few days, I’ve had several reminders of how valuable this flexibility can be. First, it enabled us to wimp out on our plan to camp in Chaco Canyon. In order to have more time in the canyon, I really had wanted to camp in it because there are no hotels within a couple of hours of the canyon floor. But by this past Wednesday afternoon, our Weather apps were telling us that heavy winds would be howling through Chaco Canyon Monday night, and the temperature would plummet to 30 F. Nightmarish visions troubled both Steve and me. He saw us dying of hypothermia. I didn’t think that was likely, but a miserable evening and night seemed certain. In the morning, we agreed we should make alternative plans, as bad as we felt about hauling all that camping gear with us FOR NOTHING! Our only other fixed investment was the $10 fee for our spot at the Gallo Campground. I could cancel that reservation online, and it was easy to develop an alternative plan: Monday we could drive to Chaco, see as much as possible, then spend the night at a hotel on Route 66 in Gallup, New Mexico.

Saturday morning gave me another reminder. We spent Friday night in the breathtaking Flagstaff second home of friends from San Diego. Sadly, they weren’t there, but staying in their place was a wonderful base for visiting the Museum of Northern Arizona (impressive!) and then taking a quick tour of the 128-year-old Lowell Observatory.

Yesterday morning we didn’t pull out of our friends’ Flagstaff driveway until 9 am. And once on the highway, it quickly became clear my plans for the day were…. naive.

Months ago, sitting at my desktop computer, looking at maps of places I’d never been, I’d imagined it would be reasonable to drive from Flagstaff onto the Navajo reservation (bigger than all of West Virginia), then take a detour onto the 2,532-square-mile Hopi reservation contained within the Navajo lands before continuing on to Monument Valley, then finishing up the day in Chinle, located within the reputedly magical Canyon de Chelly.

But this is staggering country: huge skies; huge stretches of open scrubby land. Once we were rolling, it quickly became clear no one could squeeze all that activity into a day. We made a quick decision to abandon the Hopi side trip and head straight for Monument Valley. We arrived at its visitor center around 1 pm, gobbled down the sandwiches we’d brought with us, then set off on the driving tour through one of the world’s most famous landscapes.

Had we never seen it before? Of course we had! In countless Westerns! But never before in person, we realized, incredulous. In fact, Steve and I struggled to accept we’d never been in this Indian nation before. How had we overlooked it? Even if you’d never seen one of those Westerns, the sight of Monument Valley’s weird monoliths sculpted by time from the red rock, was commanding. The unpaved road on the touristic loop drive made the 15-mph speed limit seem aspirational, still after jouncing over it for an hour and a half, all I felt was gratitude.

But once again we’d miscalculated. We had planned to drive from Monument Valley to the Canyon de Chelly visitor’s center and there book a tour of the canyon for tomorrow. We’d forgotten, however, about the one-hour time-zone diference between Arizona and the Navajo Nation. The wind was also whipping the dust into a frothy curtain that at times forced us to drive as if we were in a heavy fog.

By the time I walked up to the reception desk of our hotel, the Thunderbird Resort, it was already after 5 pm.

To my relief, I was still able to book a 9 am tour through the canyon for today — Easter Sunday! More crazy wind is scheduled, and my phone says there’s a 20% chance we’ll get rain. But a trained Navajo guide will be behind the wheel. That should be a nice change of pace.

On the road again

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Day 1. San Diego to Phoenix. 357.7 miles; 6 hours, 55 min (including all our stops along the way.)

I’ve done a lot of reporting from Abroad in recent years, but it’s always been my intention to include adventures At Home too, and today we set off on a big one. Steve and I hope to see the upcoming total eclipse that will slice across a big part of North America April 8. Because of its perennial sunniness, northern Mexico is probably the best place to chase it, but we figured the logistics of traveling there might be too complex. So we opted instead to head to Austin, Texas, a city neither of us has ever visited, and a reasonably sunny place most of the time.

We could have flown. But we wanted to include Trent, the 16-month-old pup we’re raising for Canine Companions for Independence. We’ll have to send him off to CCI’s professional trainers on May 10, and we’re already dreading saying goodbye to him. Emboldened by our recent driving/camping experience in Zimbabwe, we decided to reach Austin by driving (and even camping one night, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico). That would allow us to visit American wonders we’ve heretofore missed — and take Trent along for the ride.

Preparing for three weeks on the road was more complicated than I initially expected. Steve and I got our clothes into the carry-on suitcases we take everywhere. But we have also crammed a duffel full of canine gear — NOT including Trent’s portable kennel. Or his 20-pound bag of dogfood. Or the dog bed on which Trent is napping at the moment in the back of our Ford Escape, as I write this in the front passenger seat. We have another duffel full of gear for our camping night. That bag is much bigger than the doggy duffel, but it’s not big enough to hold our tent and two sleeping bags. They take up their own space.

Here’s most of the camping gear, laid out on our dining room table.

Being that it’s a road trip, I also filled a separate bag with shoes and knee braces and other miscellany. And another one packed with all our bathroom supplies (nice BIG containers of shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste instead of those measly 3-ounce TSA-approved ones.) We have not one but two picnic cooler bags AND a grocery bag full of essential food (ground coffee! food for Chaco Canyon!) AND a shopping bag full of our oranges. And a case of wine. (It could get pretty cold and windy in that canyon.) There’s more I can’t remember but hopefully won’t forget to reload along the way.

Here’s part of it this morning, ready for loading in the vehicle.
The view looking in one of the rear doors, after loading.

We keep reminding each other this is America. If we’ve forgotten something, there are Walmarts and CVSs and Family Dollar stores where we can get whatever we need. I’m a little more worried I may not acquire as many stories as I have found in more exotic locales. Today’s a good example. We’ve covered this ground many times before, and it wasn’t exciting on our maiden drive many years ago.

Lots of freight trains and pretty clouds.
Mostly road views like this.

My posts in the upcoming three weeks may be terser than normal. I’ve resolved to write more only when we run into something extraordinary. How often will that happen? Finding out is a big part of why we travel, both abroad and at home.