Carl Henning

Things to do in Idaho: visit one of the two National Monuments, Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. Kind of a disappointment, really. You can’t actually visit the fossil beds. But the visitor center was interesting. And there are wagon ruts from the Oregon Trail.

Small towns and small universities sometimes surprise. Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah run by Utah State University Eastern surprised me. I expected one set of dinosaur bones and got dozens with excellent explanations. Add in some prehistoric Indian history and this was a great find.

Second stop on the nostalgia tour was Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. In 1969 there were no facilities here at the end of the graded dirt road. The facilities now include a visitor center, an entrance station ($20 per car and worth it), and a paved road.

Hite is the northernmost point of Lake Powell. Glen Canyon Dam creates this reservoir on the Colorado River. When I first visited in 1965 the lake was still filling for the first time. It filled. Then drought emptied the lake to the point that the lake is no longer even visible at Hite.

Today was to be a nostalgia tour. First stop: Four Corners Monument. We were here in 1969. This was a vacant dusty desert location with a plaque showing the intersection of four state borders: Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. I remember driving the VW bug (pulling the tent trailer) through all four states before parking.

I am fascinated by the original residents of North America. So stopping at one more Indian ruins national monument was completely normal. The Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico was the stop this trip.

A city so secret that it did nor appear on any maps and the people who lived there got there mail from a town many miles away. At least that was the case in the 1940’s. Los Alamos, New Mexico is on the map now. During World War 2 secret research into atomic energy was performed here, resulting in the only two atomic bombs dropped during warfare.

Not every site to visit is a national park or national monument. La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs are administered by the BLM. (That’s Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter.) The petroglyphs at this site were hard to reach. I needed my…

There’s no rolling stock at the Tucumcari Railroad Museum, but a few artifacts and a lot of history. 

Continuing our trip west, I resolved to drive through Tucumcari on old Route 66. If nothing else, there was a Route 66 sign to take a picture of. Two and half hours later we continued our journey. Who knew there was so much to do here?