Day #80. September 6, On to Canyonlands National Park

Leaving Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients National Monuments. Much to see in these wonderful places. Seems like everywhere we go a parting comment is, “Wow, we need to come back here!”.

Off we go, westward bound on Hovenweep Road (route #213), to intersect with Cajon Mesa Road (BIA 2416), across bone dry Montezuma Creek to intersect with Hatch Trading Post Road, back into the Navajo Indian Reservation, intersect with route #191 and north through the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation. I should note that today’s Indian reservations are generally not the original home places of given tribes. Most often they are simply the places that white folks didn’t care to settle or exploit at a given time. Places to herd natives together to contain them.

Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients

New Friends

Damn Dry Country

On we go through Blanding, UT, and further north to turn west on route #211 toward the park. Blanding, with about thirty-four hundred souls, is the largest town in San Juan County. Mormons settled here in the late 19th century.

Route 211 takes us through a very scenic area of canyons, high, sandstone cliffs, mesas, broad, dry valleys and mostly dry river courses. 

On the Way to Newspaper Rock

We stop at Newspaper Rock, a Utah state monument featuring a two-hundred-foot-tall natural sandstone rock cliff carved with hundreds of petroglyphic figures, a mixture of human, animal, material and abstract forms, pictures of deer, buffalo, and pronghorn antelope. Petroglyphs, not to be confused with petrographs, are carvings, scratching or etchings in rock. Petrographs are drawings, paintings or inscriptions on rock. 

Newspaper Rock Petroglyph Samples

Anasazi, Fremont, Navajo, Anglo, and Pueblo people started making the carvings two thousand years ago. In Navajo, the rock is called "Tse' Hone'" which translates to a rock that tells a story, thus Newspaper Rock.

On to Canyonlands National Park, thirty miles distant. And what a park it is! We come in on the eastern side and take up residence at the Squaw Flat Campground, with a few other travelers, not too far distant from the confluence two mighty western rivers, the Green and the Colorado. Canyonlands is just one administrative unit in this southeastern Utah high desert country. Others are Arches National Park, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Capital Reef National Park, Bears Ears National Monument and the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Rugged, arid canyon country.

On the Road to Canyonlands

The Colorado River flows out of Canyonlands into Glen Canyon, originally a deep sandstone gorge, now filled with water and known as Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the U.S.  Lake Powell exists because of the Glen Canyon Dam, a 710 foot high monstrosity near the town of Page, Arizona, built over a ten year period from 1956 to 1966 by the US Bureau of Reclamation.

Lake Powell is named for John Wesley Powell, a one-armed civil war veteran who led the first expedition to traverse the Colorado's Grand Canyon by boat. Ironic that the Lake bears his name because Powell, knew that water would be a limiting factor in western settlement. He knew first hand just how arid the west truly was.   He opposed development of large federal water projects, the creation of massive catchment basins miles and miles away from end users. That opposition cost him his career.

The US Bureau of Reclamation juggernaut, led by William Mulholland (think Mulholland Drive) and people like him, was determined to build immense, federally funded damn projects throughout the west. In fact, three months before Powell died in 1902, Congress launched a century of massive dam and canal construction costing billions of dollars.  The plan was to build the damns, catch the water, transport it by aqueduct and other means to agricultural and urban end users and charge for it. Turns out, the cost of building and maintaining the projects far outweighs revenues from water sales, which, you guessed it, the public subsidizes. Still happening today.   

Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862 that encouraged settlement. Pro-development interests launched marketing strategies to get people moving westward. Newspaper editors, railroads, speculators and even water scientists, in a concerted effort encouraged by Bureau of Reclamation officials and government representatives, went so far as to tell poor eastern dirt farmers that if they simply got their butts out to the utopian west and plowed the land ample rains would follow. Farmers came by horse drawn wagon and train, plopped down their stuff, plowed the hard, dry land, took a long pull on the moonshine jug and waited for the rains to come, which they did not. Think Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Predictably settlement did not follow any logical pattern as Powell would have wanted. He believed people should organize settlements around existing water sources, which would force them to conserve for certain lean times. He envisioned settlement in areas near reliable mountain snowmelt and stream, lake and river sources with short irrigation ditches leading to crops. Transporting water hundreds of miles did not make any sense to him.

Sorry to go on. I refer you to a brilliantly researched book on the subject. Cadillac Desert, the American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner. 

We settle in at the Squaw Flat Campground and go exploring in the 'Needles' section of the park.

Scenes from Cave Spring Trail - Leading to an Actual Spring. One of Just a Few in the Area. Cliff 'Hidey-Holes' Provided Shelter to Cowboys and Indians Alike. 

An Actual Springs

Canyonlands is a stunningly beautiful and majestic red rock landscape that the powerful Colorado and Green Rivers started to erode into countless canyons, mesas, and buttes over seventy million years ago. It is a most spectacular place.

Back to Squaw Flats for dinner and a restful night. 

More adventure tomorrow.

Day #79. September 5.

Up and away after a pleasant and restful night at the campground. We say goodbye to Ryan, who gave us his pancake mix because he was flying back the next day. It came in handy.

We stopped at the monument visitor center and walked along a loop trail to visit some of the more accessible ruins. Hot and dry usual. The trail ascended and descended rock ledges and followed along the edge of a canyon.

Ancient Structures in Hovenweep

President Warren G. Harding proclaimed Hovenweep a unit of the National Park System in 1923. The much larger Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, one hundred and seventy-six thousand acres of high desert country administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is in southwestern Colorado. Ecologically, historically and culturally Hovenweep and Canyons are the same. Barack Obama designated Canyons as a national monument early in his presidency. Good for him.

Smart, visionary American republican and democratic leaders have always worked to protect places of special natural and cultural value. What the hell is going in this administration?

The entire Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona is home land to early native Americans. Relics and artifacts of the Anasazi people speak volumes about their ten-thousand-year occupancy. When one spends some time in this country and sees the on the ground evidence of their long term occupancy, it’s easy to conclude that this country belongs to them. We should not ignore a ten thousand year history.

Canyons contains the highest known archaeological site density in the United States. More than 6,355 recorded sites show rich, well preserved villages, field houses, check dams, reservoirs, great kivas, cliff dwellings, shrines, sacred springs, agricultural fields, petroglyphs and sweat lodges. Archaeologists estimate the total number of sites to be up to thirty thousand. Talk about walking through history!

We drive to Lowry Pueblo and visited more spectacular ruins. Anasazi people constructed this pueblo (village) around 1060 AD. Forty to one hundred people lived there for about one hundred and sixty-five years. The structure has forty rooms and many surrounding kivas (ceremonial structures). The inhabitants farmed and hunted small game, made elaborately decorated pottery and probably ate lots of peyote and smoked a lot of dope. What else are you gonna do without cable news?

Lowry Pueblo Structures

This Rock Work has Stood the Test of Time

A Grand Kiva

Step Work into the Kiva

Archeologists Added The Roof Structure to Protect the Pueblo from Degradation

Back to the Anasazi Heritage Center to give it another go. At Sand Canyon Pueblo we saw six male mule deer. Went south on Route 491 back to Cortez. Picked up 160 south and drove past the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation to the north, then turned back to the northwest on 41/162, crossed over the Utah border into the Navajo Indian Reservation just to the southwest. Following the Jan Juan River, which is not much of a river in this country, we come to Aneth, which in the Navajo language means ‘just like the devil!' The Navajo used that phrase to describe the business practices of the community's first white trader. The name stuck. Capitalistic exploitation at its finest!

Aneth is a Navajo chapter headquarters, a unit of government on the reservation. There are oil fields nearby and the Aneth Field is still one of the major producing fields in the western U.S. Traditional Navajo hogans (ho'gone) or shade houses dot the spectacular, treeless landscape. About a thousand souls live around Aneth, mostly Navajo Indians. There is a community school, one gas station. No four-star restaurants or hotels. As of 2000, eighty-five percent of Aneth residents still speak the native Navajo language.

A Lone Cowboy

When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It.

Wild Mustangs on the Move

Local Dump Site

Roads in and out of Aneth are sparse, mostly gravel and dirt. They wash out in spring deluges and are hot and dusty most of the year. We turn northeast on Ismay Trading Post Road (2414) to begin our return to Colorado and the Hovenweep Campground. Driving along bone dry McElmo Creek we spot a lone cowboy on horseback with his dog enthusiastically following along. Further on we spot a herd of wild Mustangs racing across a field and the road ahead of us. Crossing back over into Colorado, we got ourselves good and lost. GPS works to locate a spot on the ground but sometimes it’s not so helpful when roads are not where ‘they are supposed to be’. After a 10-mile run on a gravel, dirt road we reach the end of the line and a local dumpsite. Had to backtrack for some distance to get back on the right road. Finally, after a long day we got back to our grand Hovenweep campsite.

Back at Hovenweep Campsite

In for the night.

Tomorrow, Canyonlands National Park.

Day #78, September 4, 2017

Away we go this morning after visiting with the camp hosts, a nice Latino couple from Albuquerque. Onward and upward to Wolf Creek Pass. We straddle the Great Divide at 10,800 feet, within several hundred miles of the headwaters of the Rio Grande, Pecos, Arkansas, Canadian and Red rivers draining to the east and the San Juan, Green and Colorado rivers to the west.

Wolf Creek Pass, part of the San Juan mountain range, averages annual snowfall of four hundred inches, over thirty-eight feet of snow. Sounds like a lot of water, but in the spring, after torrents and torrents of runoff, this region dries off rapidly and by mid-summer and into fall the arid nature of the climate becomes apparent. Water becomes scarce.

Onward and westward to Pagosa Springs, Durango and finally Cortez where I had one of the best burritos ever at Gustavo’s Mexican Restaurant. From Cortez we visited the Anasazi Heritage Center in Delores, CO before we head into the Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. The Anasazi or Puebloan people inhabited this region for centuries and left ample evidence of their astonishing culture.

Don't You Just Hate People Who Do Foodie Pictures?

In the center, we met eighty-one-year young volunteer Nancy Lacell Becker.  Nancy came to this country from Asheville, North Carolina as a young woman and took up teaching theater in various venues including the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation. She got herself a husband and, after a few years, decided she liked Colorado better than the husband so sent him packing. After a couple of more husbands and many adventures she is still here and still teaching.

After a visit to this remarkable museum we head west to the remotely located Hovenweep National Monument located on the Cajon Mesa in the Great Sage Plain along the border between southeast Utah and southwest Colorado, just north and west of Cortez, an area of arid, high desert. Annual precipitation averages between five and fifteen inches depending primarily on elevation. Most of that comes in spring deluges. Spring, summer and fall elevated temperatures and low humidity promote rapid evaporation, so very little water is available to plants and animals. The canyons have some springs and seeps, which is where signs of human habitation mostly occur.

Puebloan Culture Items in the Anasazi Heritage Center

The name Hovenweep, in the Ute language means "deserted valley", apt as a description of the area's dry, desolate canyons and barren mesas as well as the ruins of ancient communities.

Ten thousand years ago nomadic native people visited this region to gather food and hunt. These people used the area for centuries, following the seasonal weather patterns. They built complex square and circular towers, cliff dwellings, kivas (ceremonial structures) and left petroglyphs like those in Mesa Verde National Park not far away. The masonry work is beautiful and skillfully done. Most of the ruins are off the beaten path and require a hike across dry, tortuous and hot terrain punctuated by sage brush scrubland and low growing pinyon-juniper forests.

Hovenweep Scenes

By the end of the thirteenth century, for unknown reasons ancestral Puebloans throughout this area migrated south to the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and the Little Colorado River Basin in Arizona. Probably looking for new sources of peyote and a Grateful Dead concert. Pueblo, Zuni and Hopi people are descendants of this culture.

Hovenweep is just one of several national monuments we visited. National monuments are real gems on the American landscape. Far less visited than national parks, in more remote and less roaded areas, but no less spectacular. The National Park Service manages some monuments, the Bureau of Land Management others. They all generally have excellent camping facilities, albeit in remote locations, which is fine by me. Not to get too political, the current administration of idiots under President Bone Spurs is doing what it can to reduce protection of some of these spectacular places.

We drove along a gravel road for ten miles to get to the only campsite in the monument. There were three other vehicles there. The campground was complete with shelter, fire pits, running water, showers and was situated on the edge of a canyon typical to the region. We took up residence there for the next two days.

After we settled in a young man camped nearby walked over to visit. “Hi there, I’m Ryan”, he said enthusiastically. “I couldn’t help but notice your Virginia tags. Where are you from?” I proceeded to explain, assured he would have no idea where Staunton Virginia was. Not necessary. “I’m from Nellysford over in Nelson County”, he said cheerfully. Nellysford is twenty miles from Staunton. Ryan went to Mary Washington College where our son Henry went. He knew Joe Moore who also attended Mary Washington. Joe is the son of Steve Moore my best buddy growing up. Ryan, known as Boomer to the athletic crowd at Mary Washington, is on vacation by himself. He had flown to Albuquerque, rented a truck, bought a modicum of camping gear and was doing what we were doing; having a ride-about. Small world all over again. What are the chances of running into a fellow Virginian, especially one hailing from so close to our hometown, in such a remote place?

Coyotes yipping in the distance. Evening libations, dinner, sunset, starry night.

Tomorrow we go exploring.

Day #77, September 3

This morning we left Buffalo Creek on #285 southbound back to Trout Creek Pass and then to Salida on #291. We hailed a woman to ask where to get a good breakfast. Grace was her name and she was walking her dog Gracie. Turns out she is from Chesapeake, VA. Small world. A traumatic divorce and bad memories back east and here she is in Colorado for a fresh start.

On to Dawn’s Café for breakfast. Then south on #285 with the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness just to the east and the Rio Grande National Forest to the west. Through Villa Grove and Saguache where we went due south on #15 to Monte Vista then west on route # 160 to Del Norte and then South Fork where we crossed the Rio Grande River. Camped for the night in the Park Creek Camp Ground right on the South Fork of the Rio Grande in the Rio Grande National Forest. Lucky for us. The campground is closing for the season at noon tomorrow.

A Portion of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range to the West. Hot and Dry this Time of the Year.

Day #74 – 76, August 31 to September 2.

Margo, Bob and Captain Emily

Up and gone today to Windsor, CO to visit with Emily’s friends Bob and Margot Iwanchuk, professional meteorologists who came to this part of the country from Bedford, MA. Margot’s brother Duncan was Emily’s beau in bygone days. Duncan and Emily new each other in Boston in the late seventies. The both had the unfortunate experience of having severe strokes in their early thirties.

Bob was a student at Kent State University during the late sixties and early seventies when the horrific shootings on May 4, 1970 of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard occurred during a mass protest of the Vietnam War. Twenty-eight guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine others. After this tragedy four million students staged strikes across America and hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed. People rose up in opposition to war.

I was a first classman (senior) at the Virginia Military Institute in 1970. What a time to be a student at a military college. While I was learning to fire a 50-caliber machine gun, drive tanks and throw a hand grenade my cohorts at the University of Virginia were protesting the war. These were tumultuous times in America, a contentious, unsettling and sad. Where were you on May 4, 1970?

The sixties were war years, like so many before and after.  During the Vietnam War era, every evening American news anchors reported the number of American soldiers killed that day, the body count. In the end, over fifty-eight thousand American soldiers died. Rarely mentioned were the 1.1 million Viet Cong and North Vietnam soldiers or the 250,000 South Vietnam soldiers or the two million civilians who died in the conflict, or the 4,900 dead from Thailand, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.  

Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight was a particularly eventful year.

In February, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a National Police Chief, executed Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém.  War journalist Eddie Adams photographed the execution. The picture made its way around the world and help sway US public opinion against the war. Adams received a Pulitzer prize for his reporting. People around the world condemned Loan for his brutality. The underlying story, one that did not get much attention, was that Lem was responsible for killing the wife and six children of a South Vietnamese military officer. A few months after the execution picture, a Viet Cong soldier seriously wounded Loan in a fire fight and a field surgeon had to amputate Loan’s leg. In 1975, during the fall of Saigon Loan fled South Vietnam. He moved to the United States and opened a pizza restaurant in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Burke, VA where he died in 1998. You cannot make this stuff up.

In March the My Lia massacre happened. United States Army soldiers killed somewhere between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in South Vietnam. The victims included men, women, children and infants. Some of the women were gang raped and their bodies mutilated. Three US serviceman tried to halt the massacre and rescue hiding civilians. Some US Congressman denounced these heroes as traitors. It was only after thirty years that our government recognized and decorated them for shielding noncombatants from harm in a war zone.

In April James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.in a hotel in Memphis Tennessee.

In June, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy at a hotel in Los Angeles.

In August Private First Class James Anderson Jr. became the first African-American marine to receive the Medal of Honor for heroism while serving in Vietnam. In a fire fight in December 1966, Private Anderson covered a grenade with his body to save his teammates. The grenade exploded and killed him. He was twenty years old. If that doesn’t make you cry nothing will.

In December the Apollo 8 spacecraft entered orbit around the moon and astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders become the first human beings to ever see the far side of the moon.

Margo and Bob were fabulous hosts. They fed us well. The next morning, after a scrumptious breakfast, we drove to Denver to visit another old friend and have the van serviced. The brilliant and talented graphic artist Wendy Ray picked us up at the car dealership and whisked us away to her condominium, where we spent the afternoon visiting, eating Colorado peaches and admiring her art.

The Insuppressible Wendy Ray Holding a Picture of the Equally Insuppressible Lester Bowers 

Samples of Wendy's Art

Wendy drove us back to the dealership and after goodbyes we drove to Colorado Springs and checked in at the Garden of the Gods Motel and Cottage. Some place. A perfect Tom Waites hang out. All manner of colorful people coming and going. Had dinner that night at Rudy’s Country Store and Barbecue Hang Out. Perfect.

The next morning, we drove to the Air Force Academy’s Falcon Stadium to see a football game between the Keydets of the Virginia military Institute (VMI), my alma mater, and a far superior Academy team.

 VMI, a state supported military college, the oldest such institution in the United States, has a student population of about seventeen hundred. The Air Force Academy, a federal service academy, about forty-five hundred. The other service academies are the United States Military Academy (West Point), the Naval Academy, the Coast Guard Academy and the Merchant Marine Academy. Both VMI and the service academies offer rigorous military programs. Some say that living conditions at VMI are more austere that those at the service academies.  That’s code for, ‘we are tougher that those guys’. Cadets at both VMI and the service academies must participate in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) of the of the US Armed Forces, but VMI gives cadets the flexibility of pursuing civilian endeavors or accepting an officers commission in any of the active or reserve components of any of the U.S. military branches. Cadets from the service academies attend their respective schools free and, barring extenuating circumstances, must enter a chosen military service branch for a given length of time.

The Virginia Military Institute is the only school in the nation to have had its students, while actively attending the school, sent into battle. On 15 May 1864, two hundred and forty-seven members of the VMI Corps of Cadets fought as an independent unit at the battle of New Market during the Civil War. General John C Breckinridge, the commanding Southern general, held the cadets in reserve until Union troops broke through Confederate lines. Breckinridge sent the VMI unit into battle and, as history tells the story, asked for God’s forgiveness for doing so. In a matter of minutes, the unit suffered fifty-five casualties with ten cadets killed. But the cadets pushed forward, capturing a Union artillery emplacement. The Union troops withdrew, and Confederate troops held the line.  A heavy price indeed to pay for holding a line in a field in the Shenandoah Valley. These remarkable VMI cadets were about the same age as Private First Class James Anderson Jr. who covered that grenade with his body to save his teammates in Vietnam. Six of the ten fallen cadets are buried on VMI grounds behind the statue "Virginia Mourning Her Dead" by sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a VMI graduate who was also wounded in the Battle of New Market.

VMI has a simple and straightforward honor system. It says, “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate those who do.” The system does not recognize degrees of honor. The sanction for any breach of honor is dismissal. Leaving aside the impracticality of implementing such an austere code in day to day living outside an institution like VMI, wouldn’t it be nice if we did not tolerate politicians who lie to us? That would be an effective way to get rid of most of them. Just dismiss the charlatans!

I was a cadet at VMI in 1968 when the Institute admitted the first African-American cadets. In 1997 VMI finally admitted women, shamefully the last military college in America to do so. VMI resisted the whole way. It took a 7 to 1 decision in the US Supreme Court that found that it was unconstitutional for a school supported by public funds to exclude women to finally compel VMI to admit women. Following the ruling, VMI contemplated going private to avoid the ruling. State and federal dollars drive much of VMI’s military programs so when cooler heads ran the numbers and concluded that road would be a dead-end, VMI finally relented and admitted women, who of course have gone on to excel at VMI, in the armed forces and in civilian life. When money talks nobody walks.

VMI is a southern school through and through. Many of its heroes are Confederate generals. To this very day when fourth classmen, ‘rats’, exit barracks through Jackson arch they must salute a statute of Stonewall Jackson just outside of the arch. This is a time in America when many people are contemplating the allegiance we have to these southern Civil War heroes or at least to monuments to them throughout the South. Just across the Blue Ridge Mountains in Charlottesville the city council voted recently to remove a statue of Robert E Lee from a  public park, formerly called Lee Park, now renamed Emancipation Park. Is VMI next?

Schools need big money to fund their athletic endeavors. This game between fine young men on both sides illustrates the influence of money on scheduling in college sports. On this day the VMI football team were severely overmatched. They gave it their all but predictably came up on the losing end. However, the school got a substantial chunk of money just for showing up. Final score of today’s match? Air Force Academy – 62, VMI – 0. It might have been a money maker for VMI but I’m not so sure about a morale builder for the brave VMI players. The VMI team did not win a single game this season. One must wonder whether opening against a fare superior team and getting shellacked in this way contributed to that losing season. Big programs like the Air Force Academy get big, fast, talented athletes. VMI athletes have big hearts but not comparable talent, size and speed.

Football games at Falcon Stadium are festive events, complete with jet flyovers, marching bands, precision parachutists, and an appearance by the team’s mascot, yes, a falcon. Late in the first half medical personnel took the starting VMI quarterback off the field in a gurney after an opposing defender administered a violent hit.

VMI Team Praying that Nobody Gets Killed

Precision Parachutists

That's a Big Flag

The Air Force Falcon

Valiant VMI Quarterback Leaving After Violent Hit

We couldn’t take any more of the slaughter so we left the game at halftime and drove west on route 24, skirting Pike’s Peak, passing through Woodland Park, Divide, Florissant, Glentivar, Hartsel and finally to Antero Junction, where we crossed Trout Creek Pass at 9,487 feet and went north on route 285 to National Forest road 433 where we entered the Pike National Forest for a little sweet dispersed camping, with eight spectacular fourteen-thousand foot and many lesser, but not much lesser, mountain peaks in the Sawatch Range of Colorado’s Central San Wan Mountains just to the west. 

Tomorrow Salida, CO