We came to Lake Arrowhead State Park on Wednesday. You can see it has nice, paved level sites and they have some room around them. Also, we have great internet and we’re only about 15 miles from Wichita Falls, Texas. So we could get groceries and refill our propane, fill up with diesel and do the wash.
But this isn’t a place I’d come for vacation.
There’s a fairly large lake, but the water is brown. Still, folks were fishing…
and swimming.
Everything is pretty flat around here,
including the disc golf course.
The prettiest trail went up and along a levee.
The only hills were going up and coming back down the other side.
The most interesting thing on the trail was probably this culvert taking us under a road.
The park has its own old-time oil well.
I’d like it better if it weren’t working. It’s not far from our site and the low “pud, pud, pud” it makes under the clatter carries quite clearly to our site. It makes an odd backdrop to the bird calls.
Still, there is beauty in every landscape…
if you just look closely enough.
It’s spring here and the wildflowers are out. I learned that these are a hemiparisitic flower that grow from the roots of grasses. They can photosynthesize if conditions are right, otherwise they can get water and sugar from their host plant. Life constantly amazes me.
And though I had to walk a half mile to get this picture, there are Texas bluebonnets here.
We spent four days camped at Palo Duro Canyon State Park in northwest Texas.
The campgrounds are all down on the floor of the canyon, which is the second largest canyon in the U.S.
It made for beautiful surroundings but no Verizon, so no blog posts.
We also had a wild ride weather-wise.
Sunday morning we went out early and hiked some of the Lower Comanche Trail.
I love the gray rocks that seem tossed around on the red soil.
We hiked up along the side of the canyon. The views were fascinating. The thin white layers are a form of gypsum.
We hiked up…
until the trail started to make its first descent. We turned back because we were worried about Matey getting too tired; not us mind you, it was the dog we were worried about.
Anyway, it was a lovely walk and the air was cool and crisp and the sky was mostly blue.
Then it got warmer and the wind began to really blow. They were having a dust storm up out of the canyon. It was so dusty at the campsite that we turned the air conditioner on rather than open any windows.
It rained just a little and there was so much dust in the air that the rain drops left mud marks on the windows!
I drove to the canyon rim in the afternoon when the wind had subsided a bit. The blue sky and vistas were still swallowed in the dust.
The next day the dust was gone and so was the warmth. We bundled up for another hike.
We hiked back the Lighthouse Trail as the sun poked through here and there to light up the canyon walls.
It was a nice wide trail, probably the most popular trail in the park. It goes back 2.8 miles to Lighthouse Rock, which is the symbol of the park.
Matey would be too worn out if we took him the whole way, but I wanted to get far enough back to see the rock.
Finally, at about a mile and a half I saw it and was able to get this picture.
On the walk back it brightened up but it didn’t get any warmer.
We finished this beautiful walk in snow flurries! No need for the air conditioner that day!
The next day, our last full day at the park, the weather was pretty nice, still chilly in the morning but more sun than clouds. We chose the Rock Garden Trail for our last hike.
This trail wound up through an ancient landslide on the side of the canyon.
It was our favorite of the three trails we walked.
That’s our campsite across the canyon.
It was a dramatic landscape in places.
We hiked the first mile of the trail, it went on another mile and a half until it reached the rim of the canyon, but a two mile hike was enough for Matey.
We still got to enjoy the views on the way back down.
And there were plenty of views to enjoy.
In the afternoon Matey and I drove up to the visitor center on the rim of the canyon. This stone structure was built in 1933 by the CCC.
Even the late afternoon walks Matey and I took on the canyon floor were lovely.
This canyon was the place of the last free stand of the plains Indians. Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne people were all living here with their horses and wild buffalo herds. At dawn on September 24 of 1874 the US Cavalry came down the canyon walls and attacked their settlements. The women and children fled on foot with only what they could carry. After driving away the warriors the cavalry came back and burned the villages and the winter stores. They rounded up 1,400 horses, took those they wanted and killed the rest – 1,100 horses. The natives, with no food, tools or horses walked 200 miles to the reservation at Fort Sill, ending their way of life.
As I enjoyed the beauty of this place I mourned their loss.
After a number of days of questionable weather including this hail, yesterday was cool but with just a 20% chance of rain, so we decided to try golfing at the very interesting course right down the road.
This was the Pueblo de Cochiti Golf Course and both the setting and the building were beautiful.
The course was in good shape…
and it was a fun place to play.
I enjoyed their signs.
Well, most of them.
We didn’t see any rattlesnakes but I did manage to see quite a few sand traps more closely than I liked.
Neither of us had a good score, but we did have a good time.
The weather was almost decent yesterday so we decided to get outside. I found Cerrillos State Park on the map, looked it up and it sounded promising. It had a number of trails through the hills where mines remained from the late 1800’s. We stopped at the visitor center and the volunteer there recommended the Escalante and Mirador Trails for a short loop (about two miles) that would take us by three of the old mines.
These were well made and well maintained trails. They were worth our $5 daily fee.
The Cerrillos Hills were formed by magma bubbling up through what had been a sea bottom. As the hot magma came through the calcarious soil above it, it reacted and a number of minerals formed. Erosion has left these minerals close to the surface of the hills.
The first mine we encountered was an iron mine. These mines weren’t what I was expecting. They were all hand dug and the ones that remain are all from a period from 1879 to 1884. This mine would have been profitable only until the railroad came through making it reasonable to transport heavy iron articles. It was only 9 feet deep.
Besides iron the hills had silver, lead, gold, copper, manganese and turquoise. The turquoise was only prized by the native peoples and a few miners who thought it was an indicator of gold.
We hiked by two more mines. This was the Pride of the Camp shaft. I don’t know how deep this one was, it was probably a lead-silver mine.
Some of the shafts in the park are a hundred feet deep, but there was no way to gauge the depth as all of them that are deep enough to present a hazard are now secured, like this. The sign didn’t say how deep it was.
The last mine we saw was the Rosellia Lode. It yielded 30 pounds of manganese per ton of rock and was 19 feet deep. Seems like a hard way to make a living.
The mines were interesting, but the most valuable thing for me was the chance to walk in these hills. This is the view at a knob. At the beginning of the video you see the snow capped Jemez Mountains. Next is the broad Rio Grande Valley and finally the Sandia Mountains. I miss the trees out here, but I love the long vistas.
Things did not go our way in Santa Fe. We planned a trip for Friday because it was going to be windy and cold, not a day for outdoor activities. So we left Matey in the trailer with our Waggle Pet Monitor and drove a bit over 40 minutes to downtown where the plaza, Palace of the Governors and museums are.
Well in an old city like Santa Fe downtown is not conducive to driving, especially in a big pickup. We looked for a parking space and found one about four blocks away. It was metered and the meter took credit cards; I was prepared to pay whatever it took to give us two or three hours. Not going to happen. The meter was limited to an hour. Since we were already parked and I had paid for the hour we took off walking.
Walking briskly, to save time and stay warm, we got back to the plaza. Too cold for a leisurely stroll so we looked for the Palace of the Governors. It faced the plaza but access was on a side street through the New Mexico History Museum. We entered and paid $12 each for admission. By then we had about 45 minutes left.
This is the Palace of the Governors. Sorry I have no outside pictures, it was too cold and we were too hurried for me to remember to take any.
This was my favorite room because it showed under the skin of this remarkable structure. The Palace was first built in 1610. Because it is adobe it has been constantly renovated. Notice the huge support logs. Across the room the thing that looks like a picture frame was a glassed opening into the wall. The two squares on the floor are glass portals to the subfloor.
The walls of this building are thick as you can see from this window.
It was hard to get an image without glare, but you can see the wall layers involved through the portal.
The floor was not always nice wood. There’s flagstone down there…
and more than one layer of that.
I took a shot of the plaza from inside the warm building. We took a quick turn through exhibits covering 400 years of history and practically ran back to the truck. We got back in exactly 60 minutes and the parking enforcement person was across the street from our truck.
We’d planned to go out for lunch, but our pet monitor said the trailer was slowly cooling off, so we decided to do the errands we had to and get back to see what went wrong. Returned to find one of our heaters off. We must have had a very brief power outage and that heater didn’t come back on. It wasn’t bad yet, but it was down to about 65 degrees.
I’d like to go back and explore the city, but not on a cloudy, windy, 45 degree day. We’re not due for any really decent weather before we leave…so another time, I hope.
Yesterday we took a drive up in the Jemez Mountains to see two national preserves. They were only about 25 miles away, as the crow flies, but there are no paved roads directly there. We had to drive over 85 miles in a huge backwards “C” to get there.
First we drove up a steep and twisty road over a 9,000 foot pass and down into Valles Caldera National Preserve.
Most of the preserve is a huge alpine meadow that was created by a series of volcanic eruptions about a million years ago. We’re still at 8,500 feet and snow lingers here.
It is hard to grasp the size of the eruption that could make this 89,000 acre caldera. It’s estimated that the material ejected was 500 times greater than that spewed out in the May 1980 eruptions of Mt. St. Helens.
We tried to take a mile and a half hike around a the smallest of the hills formed from magma that leaked to the surface thousands of years after the eruptions, but the trail was covered with crusty snow.
Matey liked rolling in it, but didn’t do too well walking on it.
We drove down the one open road and Bud spotted this coyote, it stopped a minute and I got its picture.
We couldn’t get far, when we returned…
the coyote was still there. We saw it pounce on the snow and thought it caught something.
We then left the snowy caldera and drove about 11 miles and 2500 feet down…
to Bandolier National Monument. This is looking into the lower canyon of Rito de los Frijoles. (Interestingly I found a source who pointed out that the stream should be Riito de los Frijoles, Bean Stream; Rito means rite or ritual, so the name with one “i” as it’s now spelled means Bean Ritual.) There was no snow here and the temperature in the canyon was 15 degrees warmer than up on the meadow.
Whatever its name, the stream carved a canyon through hardened volcanic ash, called tuff. This is much softer than most rocks and erosion has created fantastic shapes.
The canyon is full of caves and the tuff lends itself to cutting and shaping.
So this beautiful valley with plenty of water…
has been a place of human habitation for thousands of years. This is a very large kiva.
There’s the remains of quite an extensive building.
You can see the outline of many rooms.
From above you can see its shape and size.
People also enlarged and shaped the natural caves. These modified caves are called cavates.
There were also structures built right up against the canyon walls.
This is our site at Cochiti Lake Recreation Area, Pena Blanca, NM. It’s a Corps of Engineers facility. We have a pretty level paved site with water and 50 amp electric.
We have plenty of room, good wifi and TV, so we’re set. We are here for nine days, until the 19th of March.
The lake is pretty,
there are a couple of trails,
and some early wildflowers. (Of course this is an invasive, Common Stork’s-bill; but it’s been here since the 1700’s and is decent food for native animals, so that’s not so bad.)
There are a few disc golf courses around, including this one about a half hour away.
So all in all this is a fine place to stay for a bit. Oh, and it’s $10 a night.
The original pueblo of the Acoma people is perched 375 feet up on the top of a mesa. I had heard about it when we came this way in 2021 and wanted to tour, but it was closed because of the pandemic. So this year we planned to visit.
The morning of the day we planned to visit was a bit cold! I called to see if they’d be giving tours in the afternoon when it was supposed to warm up and be sunny, but could only get a message. The message said they would be closed February 17, and open again on the 18th. Their website said tours were offered every hour on the half hour.
We decided to arrive at about one for the 1:30 tour. The valley is stunningly beautiful, with huge rock formations and their small mesa. You can just pick out the mesa with adobe houses on top to the left side of the photo.
The approach was spectacular. Unfortunately, when we got to the Sky City Cultural Center and Ha’aku Museum we found the next tour wasn’t until 2:30. Oh well, we’d wait. But when we got on the bus to go up to the mesa they told us this was a condensed tour because they had a cultural activity that evening.
The bus took us up and we got out in an open area, though this wasn’t their main plaza. The road up was built by a film company in the 1970’s. Before that everything had to be brought up by hand or by mule.
There still is no water or electricity in the village.
There are, however, beautiful views. We didn’t get to go to any lookouts on the side of the mesa with the rock formations, I guess the condensed tour didn’t have time for those.
The Acoma people first settled this mesa in about 1100 and people have been living here ever since. Now there are only 5 caretakers that stay, those rotate every year. The rest of the tribe comes up for special celebrations. Along with a Hopi town in Arizona, this is the oldest continuously inhabited village in America.
This is a matrilineal tribe. Houses are passed from the mother to the youngest daughter.
The men are tasked with their upkeep.
If there is no daughter, niece or granddaughter to inherit the tribe assigns the house to a family that needs one. This is true for all the houses, fields and livestock off the mesa, also.
The main focus of our tour was the San Esteban del Rey Mission. This was built as a gesture of “peace” under Friar Juan Ramirez starting in 1629.
The men of the people were forced to bring all of the building materials, including huge trees for the roof beams, up to the mesa. These trees were brought from 30 miles away. Our young tour guide told us the four carved trees incorporated into the altar had to be carried without ever touching the ground. If one tree touched the ground all four had to be abandoned and four new ones brought. The mission was finally completed in 1640.
We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but the walls were painted incorporating Acoma images, including representations of the sun, moon, stars, rain and corn. Eventually the Acoma took possession of the mission. Now it is only used in celebrations in September and on Christmas. The tribe invites a priest to come, since this isn’t part of the Dioceses.
Their religion still centers in kivas, the buildings with the white ladders for entry. These kivas are square, not round, because after the Spanish forced the men to destroy their round kivas they built them again disguised as houses.
Our guide introduced this as the Acoma National Forest. It is the lone tree on the mesa, a cottonwood planted in the 1970’s. The rock lined depression behind it is one of three cisterns on the mesa. These used to supply drinking water, but after the Spanish allowed their horses to drink from them they were contaminated with algae and could no longer be used.
There is no love lost for the Spanish. Someone asked the guide about names in the cemetery in front of the mission (also off limits for photographs). She explained that as the Spanish recorded names they would use a Spanish equivalent for the names, as they couldn’t pronounce them. She has a Acoma name she was given at birth, but it is only used for ceremonies “and when my mom is really mad at me”.
After less than an hour we had to return to the bus for the trip back down the very steep road off the mesa. An interesting tour, but far too short!
We had been hearing a lot about Chaco Canyon and the Chaco culture so thought we should check it out. It is just over a hundred miles from where we are now, at Sky City RV Park on the Acoma Pueblo land on I-40. Today was cold and cloudy and a long drive seemed okay.
It wasn’t that the drive was just long, the last 20 miles was a dirt road; “rough dirt…may be impassable in increment weather” according to the brochure we picked up after we got there.
And, oh yes, please share the road.
It was beautiful country…
but 20 miles is a long way on a rough dirt road.
When we finally got there I was surprised to find this nice entrance sign. I figured we’d come in a back way. At the welcome center they told me that the route we took was the best way in from the south. If you’re coming from the north there’s only eleven or twelve miles of unpaved road.
But, oh my, was it ever worth it. In 1987 this was designated a World Heritage Site. There are twelve sites in the park. We only had time to visit three. The ones we saw or drove by were all “great houses” built from 800 to 1250 CE. That is a huge red rock cliff, at the bottom you can see the brown structure.
This was Hungo Pavi, occupied from 1000-1250’s, and up close it was massive.
To build such large, multi-story buildings the Chacoan people used thick walls. The center cores were roughly shaped pieces of sandstone in a mud mortar.
The veneer on either side was made of intricately fitted stones, some large, but many small. As beautiful as these walls are, in use they were plastered, inside and out.
Logs were fitted to hold the floors. It was amazing to see the ends of these thousand-year-old logs.
The building was precise, still squared off 800 years after they left.
Next we visited the largest structure, Pueblo Bonito. It had over 600 rooms. The rubble lying to the right is part of the canyon wall, Threatening Rock, which collapsed in 1941.
These were some mighty boulders! This canyon wall must have been already split when the great house was built. They built a supporting masonry terrace against it and there were prayer sticks in the crevice between Threatening Rock and the canyon wall.
The only way I could capture all of Pueblo Bonita was with a video.
Some of the towering walls were stabilized.
But a lot of it was sturdily intact. You could go through the rooms…if you could fit through the doorways.
That’s a stone for grinding, probably corn.
That’s an unusual corner opening. This one let in the winter solstice sunrise.
The rooms went on and on.
There were large courtyards…
and many kivas. Having a round kiva in a square space was typical Chacoan architecture.
These structures on the kiva floor are also different from other culture’s kivas.
This is awe inspiring as a ruin, imagine what it would have been like a thousand years ago.
To see our last ruin we walked up this trail that Matey was allowed on, though he couldn’t go in the ruin. We had thought we’d go further to see some petroglyphs. The map had them marked at 0.8 miles, but a sign at the start of the trail said it was a 4 mile round trip, and we didn’t have time for that.
While Bud toured the ruin Matey and I checked out Chaco Wash, that runs down the center of the canyon.
It was dry now, with just a path of hoof prints down the center, but after a rainstorm it can run full, right up to the banks.
Tree ring data shows that the climate during the time of occupation was much as it is now. At its peak a thousand people might have lived here, while many more would have come for ceremonies. Those people must have known the land, water and weather to be able to sustain themselves.
Then it was my turn to explore. This site was Kin Kletso. A trail behind it let you get a bird’s eye view.
It may not look it, but this was also a huge space. Here’s Bud descending the trail.
Neither of us took the trail to the rim. It went through this crevice, you can see the trail marker at the base of the dark crevice.
You could only look inside this one,
but it had a bonus of petroglyphs on the boulder next to it.
On our way out we stopped at the Chacoan Stairway. This once must have been the trading or religious center for a huge region. Traces of these roads extend west almost to Arizona and north almost to Colorado.
I found the stairs! That’s taken at 15x; according to the sign those are 30 feet wide.
Then there was nothing left but the road back out. The only things that could have made this visit better were more time and Kenny Bowekaty as a guide!
On the Roam Again 