Today we hit one state park and one national park: Utah’s Dead Horse Point and Canyonlands.
Dead Horse Point is named because cowboys drove wild horses onto the narrow point and blocked the narrowest part. They took the horses they wanted and inexplicably left the rest corralled without food or water.
I’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day. Or at least that what Kay was singing to herself all day as we rode the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge to and from Silverton, CO. It was a great trip even though the sunny morning gave way to a rainy afternoon. Having booked tickets just yesterday, the only seats left were in an enclosed coach. Actually, worked out better that way considering the rain. Here are more photos than usual and a must-see video.
On to Mesa Verde National Park, last visited with baby Jeff in 1969.
Traveling from Gallup to Durango allowed visits to The Shiprock and Mesa Verde National Park. On the way to The Shiprock, for which the city of Shiprock, NM is named, we saw a number of other volcanic plugs. None of them looked like a ship, including The Shiprock.
El Malpai National Monument includes five lava flows. El Malpai means The Badlands. The rough lava was abundant and a lot of it was aa (one of my favorite Scabble words and one of the 105 two-letter words in the current Official Scabble Players Dictionary).
No Chaco for me!
Chaco Canyon access roads were inaccessible from the south so we made other plans: a pueblo and two national monuments.
“Nothing” as in a hole… in a rock… or a window in a rock: Window Rock. Located in the national capital of the Navajo Nation of Window Rock on the Arizona side of the Arizona/New Mexico border.
Zane Grey was disappointed in the cabin he commissioned on the Mogollon Rim (pronounced muggy-own). He expected a log cabin, but got a New England style cottage because the builder figured he was an Easterner. (Ok, he was born in Ohio.)
I wonder about some of these road signs.
Fort Lancaster was fairly short-lived, opening before the Civil War, abandoned during, and re-manned as a sub-post of Fort Stockton. After the Civil War, it was manned by Buffalo Soldiers (black troops, white officers).