Day 04

After the grueling climb at Guadalupe Forest, yesterday was just right in terms of the amount of hiking.  Our original plan for today began with a hike up Mt. Taylor, the highest peak in this part of the state and one of four Navajo sacred mountains.  The top is at about 11,500 feet, and getting to the starting point requires about 15 miles of dirt road driving.  After yesterday's cold temps and wet snow, I did not want to attempt either the hike or the drive.  Our car has all-wheel drive, but the ground clearance of a Dachshund.  We elected to hike El Morro National Monument instead.

Last Winter, we passed through Grants in the Ghia and stopped at the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center, which is right off of I-40. The Visitor Center is part of the El Malpais National Monument which covers 547 square miles – or a little less than half the size of Rhode Island.  The Visitor Center has an impressive view of the surrounding countryside and, given that we spent the night in Grants, it was a great way to start the day.

The center opened its doors at 8am, and we were there two minutes later.  Since last year, the facility has changed its name to the El Malpais Visitors Center - but still has a ton of information on other parks and National Forests in the area.  The ranger was from Daytona Beach and informed us that the road to El Morro, as well as the monument itself, was closed yesterday due to the freak snowstorm. While we received only a bit of wet snow in Grants, the road to El Morro is at a much higher elevation (it crosses the Continental Divide) and was hit pretty hard (weird, given that this was May).

The view from our car as we approached the Continental Divide

The drive to El Morro took about an hour, and we definitely saw a lot of snow.  However, the road was easily passable and the National Monument had little evidence of the previous day's snowstorm still remaining. The park opened at 9am and we were there two minutes later.  The El Morro ranger, native to the area, confirmed that ice accumulation had forced them to close the hikes in the park yesterday. We set off on a two-mile loop hike in one direction, with the ranger heading in the other looking for signs of ice.

This is actually just a few miles from the snow covered picture shown above.

El Morro is a mesa with a permanent watering hole that makes it unique in this part of the country. The water is not from a spring, but rather it is a very large pool at the base of a cliff that catches rain water.  There is no other permanent water for dozens of miles in any directions - so natives and settlers often made El Morro a campsite before heading further west.  The sandstone cliffs have carvings, petroglyphs, messages and signatures dating back hundreds of years.

Water also collects at the top of the mesa in small pools.

At the top of the mesa is a pueblo.  For the longest time, I thought "pueblo" was an individual house; but it is actually a settlement of multiple adobe or stone structures.  In this case, the pueblo housed about 1500 people for a relatively short amount of time - only about 75 years. The structures have been buried over time, with only a few excavated.  The Park Service has learned that uncovering an ancient adobe dwelling quickly leads to its deterioration; consequently, the vast majority of the structures have been left buried.

After El Morro, it was a westward trip into the Zuni Reservation, and then north to Gallup for lunch. I have stayed in Gallup NM a couple of times on my bicycle trips, and we found a New Mexico restaurant on the busy road that I have previously biked into town.  Afterwards, it was due north to Shiprock NM on US 491. As a three-digit US highway, we know that it is a spur off of 91, a north-south highway.  However, it was originally a spur off of US 66, an east-west highway.

US 491 serves the Four Corners region of the United States. It is one of the newest designations in the U.S. Highway System, created in 2003 as a renumbering of US 666. With the 666 designation, this road was nicknamed the "Devil's Highway" because of the belief by some that 666 is the Number of the Beast. This Satanic connotation, combined with a high fatality rate along the New Mexico portion, convinced some people the highway was cursed. The problem was compounded by persistent sign theft. These factors led to two efforts to renumber the highway, first by officials in Arizona, later in New Mexico. There have been safety improvement projects in recent years, particularly in NM, and fatality rates have subsequently decreased.

Although sign theft has always been a problem along this highway, thefts reached epidemic proportions when the pending number change was announced. Within days of the announcement, virtually every US 666 sign had been stolen, some for sale on eBay. Officials in Utah reported that five entire sign assemblies had been cut down with a chainsaw and stolen, while New Mexico officials reported that even signs welded to metal posts (as a theft deterrent) had been stolen. Officials speculated from one scene that someone had intentionally crashed a car into the sign post to break the welds.  I’m not making this up – Satanists are apparently fanatical.

Hovenweep National Monument is a smaller park in the southeast corner of Utah near the border with Colorado. I found it on my last trip to these area completely by accident.  Getting to Hovenweep National Monument is not easy.  The park’s website says “Do not use GPS to find your way. There are numerous paved and dirt roads intersecting each other in this remote corner of Utah.”  For this trip, I compiled turn-by-turn directions that read like a rally car's log (bending left turn, fast right, full out straight, bending right,...).  But just like last time, we found it by following the signs. Miss one of the few signs and you might as well set up a homestead because you're never finding your way home.

This is open range territory.  No fences, and wild horses and free range cattle.

Aermotor windmill near Hovenweep; little has changed with them since 1888.

Pueblo at Hovenweep

This is what our trip has looked like to this point:

The motel for tonight is in Bluff UT and looks like dorm rooms for Alaskan pipeline workers.  There are two restaurants in Bluff, and we chose the steak place.  For a Monday night, they were packed and completely in the weeds (i.e., understaffed); as expected, they got our order wrong and avoided eye-contact for the next 20 minutes.  We survived just fine.  Based solely on accents, I guess that over half of the people at the restaurant and our motel are from Europe.