Arches and Houses
On up to Arches National Park was an easy drive, we went directly to Delicate Arch. After a brief stop at the far viewing point we went to the trailhead. They advertise it as a strenuous hike and mean it. Three miles with an elevation change of 480 feet. That is 48 stories of stairs and there are lots of up then down then back up then back down before you reach the top. The major “slickrock” walk up is about a mile long and slow steady climb. In the picture the dots are people walking up it! Once you clear that it is another half-mile plus up and down and the final few hundred yards are on a 3 foot ledge with the wall on one side and the drop on the other, no rails. But the view of this incredible arch is something else. Brother Bill is standing in the arch. Down is definitely easier than up on the lungs, but the hips are another story. We did a lot more hiking and viewing arches the rest of the day and then went to a hotel near Mesa Verde, planning for the next day. The evening was slightly cloudy, so we did not go to Natural Bridges as it would have been an extra 180 miles and I was beat. I am impressed with my 68 year old brother Bill, he is striding out on all of the hikes, better than me at least. The pics are:1)Balanced Rock getting some help. 2)the slickrock trail to Delicate Arch. 3) Delicate Arch. 4) a rock I named EVIL EEL.
These next pictures are: 1)the sign going in, certainly not applicable to me 2) the ladder up to Balcony House, because I am so experienced with ladders 3) the only original way in and out, through the tunnel, not me- I took the picture 4) the Cliff Palace.
Saturday morning we got out early to head to Mesa Verde. A ten minute drive to the park entrance and an hour drive up the winding road to the visitors center to get tickets for the tours. We are still lucky to be ahead of the crowds, so we could get tickets for both the Balcony House Tour and the Cliff Palace tour. Absolutely amazing what the “ancestral Puebloans did to live here for 1400 years. Around 1190 to 1270 they moved off the top of the Mesa and built the cliff houses. Spectacular engineering feats. I was scared using the park service ladders and steps to get in and out, they used small hand and foot holds cut into the sandstone to go up and down the sheer cliffs!! The Park Service tried thirty years ago to “repair” some of the walls, since we are so much smarter and better now than then. NOT! It is so much worse workmanship than what they did 800 years ago with stone tools. The caves/overhangs in the Mesa walls were created by water seeping through the sandstone and freezing/thawing breaking off pieces from the ceiling. The water goes down until it hits a layer of shale which is non-porous and comes out. Realizing this the natives built many small dams on the top of the Mesa to keep the water and snow melt going into the right area of sandstone to come out in springs on the shale at the back of their cliff house. It provided water for a community of 5000! I have a newfound respect for the Ancestral Puebloans (previously called Anasazi). The sites have many “Kivas”. These are round 15 foot across holes in the rock which originally were covered with flat roofs. They are Prayer, Meeting, Hanging out rooms, entered by ladder through the central hole in the roof. At the end of a great day we drove south to Gallup, NM. All the way down we could see the thick smoke drifting up from a huge fire in Arizona. The winds carried it east of us and then north, so we could see it but didn’t get into the smoke. Today we drove on to Carlsbad, New Mexico. This evening we went out to the park for the Bat Viewing Program. It was a nice talk and question/answer session, but the bats were somewhat disappointing. They have been having drought around here and instead of the 100,000 swarms you read about we got maybe 200 bats. Ah well, not every oyster has a pearl in it.
Tags: Travel
James