Dear readers, I am now posting about 2 weeks after the fact. My apologies! In addition to my delays from lack of internet on most of this trip, the last week has been a flurry of interviewing for work (I got a good seasonal engineering job here in Ithaca), running to Vermont to retrieve necessary work gear, visiting friends and most importantly attending James Hart’s Memorial outside of Philadelphia. I am now back in Ithaca NY hoping the dust will settle and starting work here tomorrow. But without further ado, my long delayed chapter:
Leaving Bryce and the Red canyon I did a loop back through southern Utah through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument which is a rather large area of beautiful layered sandstone cliffs with way more than I had time to see. I pulled off the highway in a couple of places, drove down BLM (Bureau of Land Management) roads and wandered around.
Flowers were just starting to come up, which made me really happy!
I also stopped at an area called “Toadstools,” for obvious reasons. These formations happen when a harder chunk of rock protects a column of sandstone from erosion caused by rains. You can clearly see the odd pieces perched on top:
My next stop was Navajo National Monument, the first of the big Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) cliff dwellings that I visit. I would like to come back to this site again and hike down the canyon to the city itself. In the off-season without a reservation you can only look at it from the cliff top across the canyon, which was still cool.
This village dates to between 1250 and 1300 AD. The Ancestral Puebloan people (from whom the Hopi and Navajo probably descended) farmed the lands on the plateau and lived in villages or in these cliff dwellings. Archaeologists suggest that they only lived there for 50 years or so before they started to migrate away. We don’t know exactly why but “there are many theories: drought, erosion, social pressures, religious dictates, or other influences that we know nothing about.” This story was the same at many other dwellings I would visit.
Northeast of the Navajo National Monument in the heart of Navajo Nation Land, and on my way to Colorado, is Monument Valley. I have of course seen pictures of the towers rising out of the desert but really, wow. Even from far away the place draws you in. I literally could not stop saying to myself “this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” They come out of nowhere and are enormous, majestic and haunting.
I am so glad this was on my way. The entire region of Navajo Nation Land and up through the Four Corners Region had incredible beauty and feeling. I knew I was on my way back East but this was still a very calming and healing time. The desert was alive, and so was I.