Notes from the Road - Day 28

2/26/04 10:50pm Albuquerque, NM

I’ve seen so much today it’s going to be a struggle to remember it all. I got started early thanks to rain outside and the cold in the room, since I’d turned off the noisy heater before I went to sleep. I packed up and left the room key on the front desk like the sign said, then headed out of town into another dreary day. I followed the road labeled 89 South but quickly deduced from the map that I wasn’t going south, so I turned around to catch 89A down to Flagstaff.

When asked to picture Arizona, snow is generally not the first thing to come to mind, but as I ascended into the higher elevations, I ran into a very strong snow storm. The rabbit brush and snakeweed had given way to juniper and ponderosa pine forest, and suddenly snow covered the ground and blew as hard as anything I’d seen up north. As soon as I crossed the mountaintop and started heading down the other side, the snow disappeared and I was greeted by the desert surrounding I’d expected, although the temperature stayed below 60 degrees. The sun began to peek out and where it struck the sandstone cliff faces, they glowed pink, although the valley floor had turned a pale yellow. The vegetation was surprisingly thick, but it was still the same tufts I’d been seeing before this morning.

Soon I came to the crossing of the Colorado River, and the Cliff Dweller village shortly before it. These Native Americans had built their homes around precarious rock formations rising out of the valley floor. None more than 20 feet tall, most of them looked like an elongated golf ball set on a tee. The river crossing had places to stop on either side so you could access the pedestrian bridge, right next to the one for cars, to get a better view of the gorge cut by the river through miles of rock over millions of years. Just on the other side of the bridge, empty stalls began appearing along the road, which it became obvious were used by Indians selling their wares in warmer weather.

The next couple of hours were a straight drive across a flat plain with a line of red cliffs or buttes on the left hand side and nothing on the other. I listened to NPR on the radio, which surprisingly came in enough to follow most of the way, discussing the Martha Stewart trial. Eventually, I came to a large, red roadside stand called Chief Yellow Horse, which had both indoor and outdoor areas. The indoor area had an old-fashioned iron stove. I bought a decorated arrow and a leather dream catcher. One of the signs on the outside read “Nice Indians”.

Moving on from there, I came across the entrance to the Wupatki ruins and Sunset Crater National Park. There were several groupings of 800-year-old Indian houses along the road, but the largest one housed about 100 people at its peak. I went ahead and took the self-guided tour around the site, which took me by the ball court (one of hundreds found in Arizona and New Mexico), and a geological feature called a blow hole, that the Pueblo Indians believed was the breath of the wind spirit. When I held my hand above the hole in the ground a strong current of cold air was blowing up out of it.

Sunset Crater is actually a cinder cone volcano, now dormant, similar to the one I saw in New Mexico at the start of my trip. It had some interesting lava flow formations, but the winds blowing down the pass that the road occupied were some of the strongest I’ve ever encountered. They nearly prevented me from opening my car door, and when I got it open, they nearly knocked me down. The wall on the other side of the pass from the volcano looked like smooth asphalt with a few trees growing out of it, some with their roots exposed, but it was actually basalt lava. It looked like these flows had engulfed and maybe petrified some of the trees in at least one area I passed.

Finally, I made it to Flagstaff, where I got a bite to eat, got some more film, and got on I-40 heading east. Not too far out I ran across a place billed as the only proven meteor crater site in the world, but it had closed 15 minutes before I got there. A new, paved road led six miles back to the museum and crater, and ended right there. I wondered if the taxpayers got the bill for that one. I gassed up and made the decision to press on for Albuquerque even though the light was fading so I’d have more time to spend with my family in the area. Around dusk I passed the entrance to the Petrified Forest National Park, which I’d seen once before on a trip to the Grand Canyon with my folks. When night came on, I saw a huge shooting star streak down towards the horizon.

A little after 9:00pm, I rolled into my cousin John’s driveway. His friend Jeff, who I’d met last time I was out and he was visiting from Arizona, was here, and John and Diane’s sons Michael and Jason were still up and remembered the games of Magic: the Gathering we played that Thanksgiving. For some reason, their dog Checkers doesn’t remember me fondly and barks whenever I look him in the eye. John and I sat up for a bit having a couple of beers and talking.