9-28-2016 Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

NOTE:  We found some good wi-fi so we're catching up with our blog posts.  SCROLL DOWN to see 9-27.

We stayed overnight in Durango, Colorado, located in the beautiful Mancos valley, which leads to Mesa Verde National Park.

In the early afternoon we arrived in Mesa Verde, best known for the many Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings located here.  There are over 4,000 archaeological sites in the park.  The visitor center is also an archaeological research facility.

Mesa Verde is less well known for its incredible views of the four-corner states and its landscape--the highest overlook is at 8,500 feet.

Gambel oaks recovering after a forest fire.

 

9-27-2016 Durango, Colorado

We left Gallup, New Mexico, with its very cool public art…

…and headed north to visit Shiprock, the solidified magma core of a volcano.  Since the volcano’s eruption 27 million years ago, everything around the core has wasted away.  Shiprock, located on Navajo land, is sacred to them.  Non-native Americans must have the permission of the Navajo Nation to visit it. 

At a height of nearly 1,600 feet, Shiprock is the tallest of several volcanic magma cores found in the Navajo Volcanic Field of northern New Mexico and Arizona.

Extending in a straight line for several miles from the Shiprock's core is a lava dike, an intrusion of molten lava into vertical fractures in the earth’s crust.  The earth which covered the dike continues to waste away.

As we photographed Shiprock, we discovered a beautiful local inhabitant.

We left the desert of northern New Mexico for the vegetation of southern Colorado near Durango.

9-26-2016 El Morro National Monument

Today we drove southeast of Gallup to El Morro National Monument, also known as “inscription rock” for the “graffiti” carved into the sandstone by American pioneers, Spanish conquistadors, and ancestral Puebloan Indians who stopped here.   A spring at the base of this sandstone bluff made it a popular campsite for hundreds of years.  

We visited El Morro in 2013 and took many photos of the inscriptions.  On this trip our friend from Gallup convinced us we should hike the trail up some switchbacks to the top of the 250-foot-tall bluff and across the top to the other end.

We followed trail markers like this.

There is a canyon in the interior of the bluff.

 
At the far end of the bluff top is a small excavated portion of a pueblo that once contained 800 rooms.  It was a town, known today as Atsinna, the home of ancestors of the Zuni people.

A New Mexico sunset.

9-25-2016 Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona

We drove northwest from Gallup to Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona.

Canyon de Chelly was first inhabited by hunter-gatherers in 2500 BC.  It has been continuously occupied by Native Americans up to the present; Navajo families still live and farm in the valley.

Called “White House Ruin,” Ancestral Puebloans built and occupied this place about 1000 years ago.  It housed more than a dozen families, and may have included up to eighty rooms and four circular kivas (sacred ceremonial structures).

The diversity of topography in the canyon is stunning.