| Submitted by: Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 14 February 2005 |
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The rooms in the canyon were very well-preserved, some of them complete so that if you entered them through the tiny doorway you could tell how it would have been inside of one of them back when they were in use. The thick walls kept out the heat, but they also kept out the light, and the door let in very little. Even with a cooking fire, it would be very dark, and all work that involved seeing what you were doing must have been done outside. There were built on ledges under cliff overhangs (like the ones we saw at Navajo National Monument) so there was some space in front of them and a ledge to walk on, but I wondered what the ledge (and the path down to it) were like before the National Park Service put in a good path for visitors. The canyon itself is like a small version of Oak Creek Canyon--high steep walls covered with pine and other trees.
The whole circuit, including the walk back up, took about an hour. We got back to I-40 east and drove to Winslow. As we drove the sky ahead darkened, contrasting sharply with the bright blue behind us. Lightning flashed all along the horizon, but very little rain fell, just a few splatters.
Mark claimed Winslow was the ugliest town we had seen on this trip. I can't argue that--most of what we saw consisted of run-down or closed motels, gas stations, and restaurants. The motels that are open are competing for the few customers who do get off the interstate. For many, the chief way they compete is by saying 'American Owned' on their signs. At first glance, one might think this meant they weren't owned by a large multi-national firm (which is obvious just by looking at them), but what it really means is 'not owned by (Asian) Indians.' (This is speculation on my part, I admit, but Mark also came to the same conclusion.) This is no doubt one of the contributing factors that leads people to think of Arizona as a racist state (the flap over Martin Luther Day is another) and I for one will avoid places that advertise this way. (Actually, we seem to have settled on Motel 6 as the best room for the price, but not every town has a Motel 6.) This 'American-owned' phenomenon continued in New Mexico as well, and the worst example I saw was one that said, 'We're American. We're clean.'
Winslow is probably best know from the song 'Take It Easy' by the Eagles ('Standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see...'). As far as I can tell, there's nothing to do in Winslow but take it easy.
We had dinner at La Casa Blanca. I had a mediocre chicken fajita pita- --not that it surprised me. By the way, it seems to be customary here to drink iced tea from the glass rather than through a straw--even if Mark gets a straw with his lemonade, I rarely get one with my iced tea.
Mileage today: 151 miles.
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We had breakfast at the Falcon Restaurant--not that there was enormous choice. After taking a picture of 'The Corner' (2nd and Kingsley), we backtracked west on I-40 19 miles and then took the access road 6 miles to the Barringer Meteor Crater, a.k.a. the Winslow Meteor Crater. Daniel Moreau Barringer was the person who first theorized this was a meteor crater. In fact, this was the first positively identified meteor carter and is the best preserved. In addition to this crater, another crater on the far side of the moon (at 131 degrees west, 29 degrees south) is also named for him.
The crater is 575 feet deep and 4100 feet in diameter, caused by an eighty- to one-hundred-foot diameter meteorite. (The latter is speculation, as most of the meteor vaporized on impact.)
The crater us privately owned and in order to give people more than just a hole in the ground for their admission ($6 each, or $5 with an AAA discount), a museum has been built, half devoted to meteorology and half to space exploration (because the astronauts came here to learn about meteors and craters). There was a very good section on meteors and a fairly average section on space exploration (which did have a spacesuit that had been on the moon--there are only twelve of those). There were a couple of videos, 'The Future Belongs to the Brave' and 'Flights of Imagination,' that weren't working at first and had to be rebooted. The latter video talked about the theory that organic molecules came here from outer space and then noted the irony that a meteor finally killed off the dinosaurs, bringing it all full circle in a way.
We decided not to hike around the rim of the crater, so the whole visit took about an hour and a half.
We got back on I-40 and went 50 miles east to US 180. The Petrified Forest National Park has a drive-through road that goes from I-40 to US 180, and when heading east it makes sense to start at the end on US 180. Actually, it would be nice to get off the interstate more often, but the interstate has replaced the 'local' roads, in this case Route 66. There is still a fascination with Route 66 here, for reasons I don't quite understand, and everyone is selling Route 66 souvenirs.
We got to the Petrified Forest National Park about 11 AM. We started with the Rainbow Forest Museum. There was a lot of emphasis on not taking petrified wood out of the monument. We had seen similar warnings about removal or vandalism in other parks, but they really emphasized it here. They showed samples of letters that people had written and sent with pieces of petrified wood they were returning. They read like the bad luck parts of chain letters--'I took this piece of wood and three days later broke my leg.' But it is a real problem here. They estimate that about 36,000 pounds of petrified wood are removed each week, or about 3.4 pounds per vehicle. And then there is the Fossil Cycad National Monument. Or rather, there was the Fossil Cycad National Monument. Established in South Dakota in 1922, it was closed in 1956 because all the fossil cycads had been removed. Which is why they emphasize the dictum, 'Take nothing but photographs; leave nothing but footprints.' To satisfy the souvenir seeker, the shop sells petrified wood collected outside the park on private land. (It's not clear this is much of an improvement, as this still depletes the landscape, but it beats plowing it under for farmland.)
After the museum we walked along the Giant Logs Trail behind the museum, where we got a chance to see close up the different kinds of petrified wood in all the colors created by the different minerals. This is the best trail, since it does have an explanatory booklet to tell you what you're seeing that the other trails lack.
The gift shop provides a way to buy legal petrified wood but a lot of the rest of their stuff is over-priced. For example, they had a bolo tie like the one Mark bought, but costing 50% more.
We drove along the scenic road, stopping to walk to the Agate House, a seven-hundred-year-old pueblo house built from petrified wood. It's amazing--a house built of what are practically semi-precious gems. William Randolph Hearst would have been so jealous!
We also walked through the Crystal Forest, which was basically more of the same. It used to have a lot of crystals in the hollows of some of the log, but those were taken by souvenir hunters even before this became a national monument. It was difficult to appreciate it even at the level remaining because we were somewhat preoccupied by the storm clouds and lightning rapidly approaching. In fact, we made it back to the car just as the rain really started. It let up enough for us to get out of the car to take a quick look at the petroglyphs on Newspaper Rock, but the beauty of the Painted Desert at the north end of the park was hidden by rain and clouds. Luckily, we had seen some of it earlier on the way to Monument Valley.
(Note: if you recall Casa Grande was the first National Monument. This was the second; it was later made a National Park.)
From here we drove east 22 miles on I-40 and the north 38 miles on US 191 into the Navajo Reservation and to the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. This part of the Reservation is obviously less traveled by tourists, because there were no stands selling jewelry and pottery as there were on US 89 out of Flagstaff. We left the Petrified Forest at 2:15 PM and arrived at the trading post at 4:30 PM, having once again lost an hour by driving on to the Reservation. And we weren't going to gain it back when we left, as we were leaving by way of New Mexico. But we would get it back overnight, as Daylight Savings Time ends tonight. Confused? So were we.
They say walking through the door of the trading post is like stepping back in time. It was--as soon as we got there, lightning hit a transformer somewhere and all the electricity stopped. So we had a chance to see the trading post as it was before the electric light (although we used flashlights instead of candles). It was full of a lot of antique goods (tack and such) as well as high-priced craft items like rugs. (I'm sure they were also high quality, but they weren't anything we were interested in.) We did buy a half pound of pinon nuts.
From there we went east 21 miles on AZ 264 to Window Rock, the tribal capital. Window Rock was named for the 'window rock' or natural stone bridge north of the center of town. The tribal offices are all in the area at the base of this rock, a very nice setting.
We continued east on NM 264, leaving Arizona and the reservation and entering New Mexico. Then seven miles south on US 666 brought us to Gallup, our stop for the night. Dinner was at the Ranch Kitchen--some okay barbecued chicken. After dinner we drove out past the edge of town to watch the terrific lightning in the western sky.
Mileage today: 279 miles.
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Breakfast was at the Ranch Kitchen. If we find a place that's good for dinner and open for breakfast, we tend to stick with it. It saves time.
We drove south 26 miles on NM 602, then west 5 miles on a side road and 6 miles on AZ 53 to Zuni Pueblo. (There seems to be some disagreement on whether there should be a tilde over the 'n' in 'Zuni.' Since it's split about 50-50, I'll do it the easy way and not use it.)
Zuni was the first pueblo we visited and I have to say I found it a bit disappointing. That fact that it was Sunday, and early Sunday morning at that, may have contributed to this; there just wasn't very much activity. The houses looked pretty much like the houses in other towns. Oh, they had hornos (beehive-shaped mud ovens) in their yards, but these were often next to a satellite dish. There was great emphasis placed on the road being named Zuni Veterans Memorial Highway; there was even a historical marker commemorating this and all the Zunis who had served in the armed forces.
The Zuni, by the way, speak a language unrelated to any of the other languages of the Indian groups. Other language groups include Atabascan (Navajo and Apache), Keresan (Acoma and six other pueblos), and Tiwa (Taos, Isleta, Santa Clara, and others). At first glance it would seem that languages groups could help determine relationships between groups, but the relationship turns out to be more geographical than genetic. For example, Jews speaking Yiddish and Ladino are genetically closer to each other than to either German-speaking or Spanish-speaking people.
We stopped in a couple of shops that were open and discovered most items priced well out of our range. I guess we're just not interested in expensive objets d'art. |
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