day 13 - cortez, co to holbrook, az

First thing in the morning, we were off to Mesa Verde National Park to see the cliff dwellings built by ancestral Puebloans.

The drive up to Mesa Verde is pretty nice, offering some valley views of the surrounding area.

One we were there, we discovered that many of the tours had already been booked up through noon - it was very crowded. So we decided to go see Spruce Tree House, which is the park's best-preserved dwelling and the only one that you can actually enter on your own (this is only OK in the summer - in the winter, they do guided tours of it). The trail to Spruce Tree House starts at the back of the park's museum, so we went in and learned about the life of ancestral Puebloans. Apparently they farmed the top of the mesas for corn and beans, and were skilled basketmakers and later potters.

The dwelling is nestled in a cool, shaded alcove in the side of the canyon. It's got several rooms as well as some entrances into kivas, or underground spaces that were probably used for prayer.

Kiva entrance

After Spruce Tree House, we went on a drive to check out some of the other structures.

Cliff Palace is the largest of the dwellings and only visitable on a tour, but we got a nice shot of it from a cliff.
Square Tower House has a 4-story tower right in the middle.


Sun Temple was probably built for gatherings, but was apparently never completed before the ancestral Puebloans decided to abandon their cliff dwellings in 1300 AD.



After the drive, we decided we were pretty much done with cliff dwellings (they were cool, but had pretty much all looked the same) and drove back into Cortez to have lunch at Sonic. There, this fat little prairie dog came around begging for food so we fed it some fries.

Then we attempted to begin the drive to Grand Canyon, but we lost our cellular data service somewhere along the road and almost immediately got lost in Navajo Nation.

While wandering around Navajo Nation, we realized that there were animals freely grazing on the side of the road, with no fences to keep them in. Apparently animals are allowed to just roam around there, sometimes posing a danger to cars. We saw goats, sheep, horses, cows, and several dogs just hanging out right off the road.




Our unexpected detour was making us a little late, so we decided to make a stop for the night in Holbrook, AZ, right next to Petrified Forest National Park, which we planned to explore in the morning. The entire park essentially consists of a 23-mile scenic drive, so we figured it was a good, quick way to knock another park off our list while seeing some new things.

We had dinner at Jerry's, a local diner, and then holed up for the night at a local Comfort Inn (a chain that is quickly becoming our favorite).

day 12 - albuquerque, nm to cortez, co

After a nice night's rest, we decided to spend some time exploring Albuquerque, especially the historic Old Town section, which is characterized by old adobe buildings. We found in Albuquerque essentially what we'd wanted in El Paso and Juarez - vibrant, friendly locals and fun shops to browse.





We stopped by some local Chinese buffet for lunch but it was somewhat generic and small, although the lo mein was tasty and the owner very friendly. Then we were off to Mesa Verde.

The drive was long and boring. At one point we wanted to turn off and take a break, in a random town. We had intended to just relax in the parking lot of a McDonald's for a few minutes, but only found the following, somewhat hostile sign...so we left.

Here's some roadside observations:

Albuquerque's buildings are all pretty much the same color.


In a 5-mile stretch or so, we passed about 5 different hitchhikers.

Here's a dust devil, which is kind of a whirlwind of dust that lasts for a while and then subsides.

Finally, the landscape of this area is kind of puzzling. It's completely flat desert, and then all of a sudden these random rock formations appear. Not really sure how that happened.



We got to Cortez, CO, a town right outside of Mesa Verde. We were kind of late because of some bad traffic caused by construction which had created a one-lane highway and they had to alternate between letting each side pass; it took forever. So we decided to just hole up in a somewhat mediocre local hotel for the night, hitting up a local Arby's for dinner.

day 11 - big bend national park, tx to albuquerque, nm

We left Big Bend early this morning to get a head start on the long 6-hour drive to Albuquerque through El Paso. Our morning got off to a creepy start with this nasty surprise, which had apparently been hiding under our tent all night. It was five inches long.



On our way out of the park, we passed Border Patrol, there to make sure that no illegal immigrants had crossed via the Rio Grande.


We passed through the small towns that made up the road from Big Bend to El Paso rather uneventfully, seeing much of the same scenery we'd become accustomed to in the park.

El Paso was probably the biggest disappointment of our trip so far. We were excited by the prospect of a colorful, vibrant border down connected by a bridge to another colorful, vibrant border town with delicious food and fun shops to browse. Instead we got this crappy dead-end place that was hot, devoid of attractions, and completely boring.


We paid $0.35 apiece to cross the Santa Fe Street bridge into Juarez, Mexico.


We thought Mexico might be exciting. What we found across the border was...exactly the same: uninspired and shoddy town, but even worse, everything was in Spanish!




After about 25 minutes wandering the streets of Juarez (and getting a few stares because Asian tourists are probably pretty rare there), we decided to head back across to US soil. We paid $0.30 cents to cross back.

Then we hit the border patrol line. It took an hour - possibly more - of waiting in the heat in line with a bunch of Mexicans to get back into Texas.

Then we tried to look for a highly rated restaurant on Yelp. Google Maps drew a blank and led us into a sketchy alleyway.

With that last disappointment, we decided to hightail it out of El Paso and head off to Albuquerque. Our original destination was Santa Fe, but Albuquerque happened to be about an hour closer, so we figured we'd just check it out and spend the night.

Along the way, we passed a town with an odd name.


Albuquerque turned out to be a delightful city. It's quite lively, clean, and neat, and the sizeable student population has made it so that there are plenty of restaurants, convenience stores, and other places of interest open late at night. We went to Frontier for some late-night Tex-Mex.




Now, we're holed up in what is one of Albuquerque's best hotel deals: Sandia Peak Inn.

We're thinking about skipping Santa Fe altogether tomorrow; rumor has it that it's kind of artsy-fartsy and neither of us are that type. So we may hang out in "ABQ" for the morning, and then head straight to Mesa Verde National Park to camp for the night.

day 10 - big bend national park, tx

After a quick oatmeal breakfast, we set off to do some trails.

We had originally planned to take a trail to an area where old ruins create a hot springs that people like to go swim in. However, presumably due to flooding, the trail was closed. So we went off to the Boquillas Canyon trail that offers views of the Rio Grande.

One thing you learn quickly out in the desert when wearing short sleeves and short pants: desert plants want to kill you. This is a nice, somewhat lanky plant, right?


But look a little closer...

Thorns. Everywhere!

Many plants like this, as well as the omnipresent cacti, make trekking through the desert kind of tough sometimes, especially when the plants grow over the trail.

This trail not only had these killer plants everywhere, but the main trail had been essentially eroded by rain. Essentially, the trail goes over a hill onto a sand dune, from which you can look into a canyon where the Rio Grande flows.


By the time we were there, the sand had all turned into mud because of the rain, creating some sticky situations:


After some muddy, reluctant crossings, we got to see this canyon.



The Rio Grande was very muddy that day because of rains the day before. In general, rainstorms over Southern Texas seem to come and pass quickly, but are incredibly violent when they are raging. After we came back from the trail (and showered to get all the mud off), we had the pleasure of being caught in a rainstorm - luckily we were in our car at the time. It was actually really cool - you almost couldn't see anything around you because the rain was so thick, and the droplets also pounded so violently on one side of our car that it got almost completely clean.
However, the desert soil drank that water up so quickly that five minutes later, it seemed as if the rain never happened.

We had lunch at the park's restaurant, and then stopped by the store and picked up a little plush javelina as a souvenir. Javelina, also known as collared peccaries, are these piglike mammals that inhabit the park along with the usual megafauna: bobcats, bears, mountain lions, deer. Although normally vegetarian and peaceful, they sometimes will attack bigger predators as a herd, and apparently once ate some camper's pet poodle. Pretty ridiculous! Anyway, we were hoping that the little plushie would give us some good luck, and that we would see one sometime during our time at the park.

The next adventure of the day was the Ross Maxwell Scenic drive, a nearly 30-mile meandering road through the Western side of the park, which led to magnificant views of several incredible rock formations as well as views of multicolored rock bands through the mountains.

The following are just tons of pictures of what we saw on the drive:





















We outran a storm that was dumping rain behind us on the mountain roads, eventually ending up near another canyon, Santa Elena, which was also by the Rio Grande. Then we found that part of the road leading to the last mile of the trail had flooded, so we turned around and decided to head back to camp.



All was well til we got here:


A tiny creek that we'd seen as a trickle of water on the way out had flooded due to the rains and turned into a ridiculous raging river that was pushing huge rocks, entire shrubs and various other types of debris onto the road and off a steep cliff. The river was about a foot deep (as far as we could tell), and had also deposited a dangerous mud slick under the flow of water. Here's a video. You can even hear the roar of the water.

Our wheels were entirely caked with mud:

So we were the first people to discover this little mess, but ultimately about 5 cars collected at this point, full of people who needed to pass. After everyone stared at it for a while, people began to wade in to ascertain the depth, and eventually started to clear rocks. Altogether we were stuck there for about an hour and a half to two hours, waiting for the creek to slow down, the water to recede, and the rocks to be cleared out of the way.


At long last we got back to our campground in the Basin, just in time to catch the sun setting over the mountains.

We started to prepare a late dinner when one of us looked over at a thicket just beyond our site. Several low, gray shapes had emerged. JAVELINA!

We had some terrible lighting so of the twenty or so frenzied shots we got of them, this was the only one that came out (there is one other, but it's a javelina butt-shot). Anyway, there were about 5 or 6 or them rooting around by the thicket. One of them came closer and stopped about 10 feet away. (Meanwhile, another car had come around, then backed up and stopped in front of them, and someone's head and arms emerged, busily snapping pictures.)

As we were the only people in that section of the campground, and because we were in the middle of cooking dinner, I was pretty sure that they had been attracted by the prospect of food. Javelina, however, can become aggressive concerning food, and more importantly when they attack, they attack in herds, swiping and biting and causing a lot of damage with their tusks. So I went to get the park ranger, but when he came by, the javelina had already disappeared.

Later that night, however, we got our skunk visitor again. This time he hung around for a little longer, circling around our picnic table, and then sniffing one of our chairs before moseying off.