Saturday, October 29th: Monument Valley

Jan on our morning walk. Our trailer is the white spec on the right.

Looking back at our trailer from the canyon rim finger

We got up to a chilly, but clear morning and decided to take a walk down the dirt road that leads out to a narrow finger of the canyon rim. In one place, the finger was only about 100 feet wide with 1000 foot cliffs on both sides. The mesa was perfectly flat with different little desert sage plants scattered everywhere. We could look back at our trailer parked on the canyon rim and it looked like a child’s toy. When we got to the end of the finger, we could see the river winding down below in a steep gorge. Other gorges feed into the serpentine canyon, but they were dry now as the rainy season had ended. One of the feeder streams looked like it had a nice waterfall as a hard layer of what looked like slate kept the water from digging further down into the gorge. As we walked back to the trailer, we stopped by John’s campsite and asked him about his neighbor with the generator. Apparently, it ran all night. I invited him to over to our trailer for some star gazing thru my 14” telescope that night.

The Mexican Hat rock

Some of the rock formations in Monument Valley

We hopped into the truck and headed to the town of Mexican Hat and onto Monument Valley, which was a 30 to 40 minute drive. Mexican Hat is famous for a rock that looks like a Mexican sombrero that precariously teeters on top of a rock column. Before we entered the town, we could see the rock about ½ mile away on our right. We needed some groceries, but the town didn’t seem to have a grocery store per sie so we drove on to Monument Valley. From the top of Monument Pass looking west, there is a famous picture of the highway leading down to the valley floor and out to the majestic rock formations. I always wanted to be in that spot and I finally was. The monuments were large, but they were very far apart and we couldn’t get close to most of them as the surrounding land was privately owned by the Navajo Indian Nation reservation. We noticed that there was a grocery store nearby the road junction, so we stopped to buy some groceries. We were a little disappointed; however, because they didn’t have our favorite sugar free fudgesicles, in fact, I don’t think there are any sugar free fudgesicles in all of southern Utah!

Jan in Monument Valley

When we got back, we started setting up the big telescope for the night’s viewing. Clouds had rolled in, but they passed over as the night got darker. The moon was a thin crescent and the planet Mercury could be seen on the horizon. What is so great about the desert is that the horizon is unobstructed in every direction and at this place the sky is dark in every direction as you are out in the middle of nowhere. As it got darker, I looked at the planet Jupiter and then some of my favorites: the Andromeda Galaxy and its companion galaxies, The Great Globular cluster in Hercules, the globular cluster M22 in Sagittarius, the Ring Nebula, and the Dumbbell Nebula. John dropped by, and we looked again at Jupiter, then again at Andromeda, and finally the seven sisters. With the sky that dark, we could just make out the Andromeda Galaxy with our naked eyes. Imagine seeing something 2.2 light years away with just your eyes! It was getting cold, so John left and we retired for the night.

Friday, October 28th: Cortez to Four Corners to Goosenecks

Here we are, standing in 4 states!

The next morning, I finished up wiring up my battery condition meter and got the propane tank filled at the “Big R”, but it still took us until 12:19PM to hook up the trailer and leave. Checkout time at the Sundance RV Park is noon, so we were a little late. We calculated that the drive to Goosenecks State Park was only about 2 1/2 hours away, so we weren’t in a hurry. The road took us through the 4 corners of the states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. There is a National Monument there that is administered by the Navajo Nation. The monument was a big slab of concrete with a big “+” in the center with the names of the different states in each corner. A bunch of flags on tall polls surrounded that and then a bunch of booths surrounded that where the Navajos sold their jewelry and pottery. As we stepped towards the big “+”, another couple asked if we wanted them to take our picture and we said, “Sure”. Jan thought that she had recognized their rig from Sundance and asked them if they had stayed there the night before and they had. They were also full timers and had been on the road since June as we had, but had been on several long trips before that. We talked to them for a while and compared notes on the places that we’d been, renting our houses, and the Quartzite AZ RV gathering every Jan-Feb. We bid them farewell and looked at some Navajo crafts for sale. Jan picked up a nice turquoise necklace and Christmas ornament. We also bought postcards and a magnet. There was a little shack nearby that served Indian bread. We were curious, so we stopped in to find that Indian bread was deep fried bread with a choice of sugar & cinnamon, powdered sugar, or honey topping. We chose the sugar & cinnamon. I thought it was quite good, but Jan didn’t like it that much as it was too greasy. As we drove through the Navajo Indian Reservation, we could see scattered ranch type dwellings, but the land they were on is very meager and most of the houses were run down trailers or shacks, so it looked like they were barely surviving.

The view from our trailer window

The road to Goosenecks State park is very Thelma & Louise-like. If you don’t stop at the stop sign at the end of the road, you go careening off the 1000 foot cliff. There is one pit toilette there and a dirt road that runs along the canyon rim. Another Montana 5^th wheel had taken the nearest spot, so we pulled into the next spot that was about 200 feet down along the canyon rim. We parked about 15 feet from the cliff edge, so we could see the $1M view, which we paid zip for because camping is free there! The skies there are some of the darkest in the country, so as it started getting dark, I took out my little 4" refractor telescope and started looking at the sky. Jan came out and sat in the chair for a while. She got up and walked to the back end of the trailer where she almost bumped into a man who was walking back to his tent, but stopped by to ask us if we thought if it was O.K. to move his neighbor’s generator to the other side of his truck. The man’s name was John. He was from Minnesota and was camped in a tent several hundred yards down the canyon rim from us. Apparently, a pickup truck with a camper shell had stopped to camp near his spot. A guy got out, hooked a generator, and promptly got back into his truck. John had camped out there to find some peace & quiet and now he had to listen to the guy’s generator! John had told us that he had knocked on the truck door and shouted “Hello” several times, but no response. We said that he better not try moving it as you never know who you are dealing with. We talked for a while and John went on his way back to his noisy tent.

Thursday, October 27th: Mesa Verde National Park

With the weather improving, we decided to go visit Mesa Verde. The entrance to the park was only about 9 miles out of town, but there was a 45 minute drive to get to the museum and cliff dwellings. We stopped at Subway on the way out of town and ate our sandwich as we stopped at an overlook of the valley. The park road meandered up the mesa with a few switch backs and we even went through a tunnel. The tops of the mesas were above 8000’ and valley floor was around 6000’, so it was about a 2000’ climb. The visitor’s center was closed for the season, but the museum, which sat on a canyon rim above one of cliff dwellings, was open. The museum was small, but actually quite nice. Jan bought a magnet, some postcards and had her passport stamped. We looked at the exhibits at the museum for about ½ hour. I wondered why these Native Americans lived up in these mesas and not down in the valley, where it seemed to be much nicer. As it turns out, most of the native population did live in the valley, while these peoples chose to live up in the mesas, just as people choose to live in different parts of the country today. They dry farmed on the mesa tops and lived under the natural protection of the cliff overhangs for hundreds of years up until about 1300 AD.

Spruce Tree House from the trail top

We hiked the trail from the back of the museum about 100’ down into a small canyon to look at the Spruce Tree House dwellings. The walls are made of mud brick and the rooms are really tiny. In some places there are 3 stories with balconies. They had dug a lot of these round holes about 14’ in diameter and about 9' or 10’ deep called Kivas. The roof was made of tree branches with bark and mud and there was a square hole in the top where a ladder is placed for access.



Dave at the Spuce Tree House

Of course, the roofs where gone long ago, but the park service re-built the roof on one of them, so Jan & I climbed down into to one to have a look. It must have been nice and cool in the summer and warm in the winter as there was a place for a fire in the center and a ventilation shaft.

Cliff Palace

Jan climbing out of the canyon

After we walked back out of the canyon, filled out our post cards and mailed them at the tiny 1 woman post office that they had there. We went back into the museum and bought tickets for the 4 o’clock ranger guided tour of the Cliff Palace, which was another ruin a few miles away. When we arrived at the top of the trail head, the ranger told us that we would have to climb several 3 meter ladders. This made Jan very nervous as she did not like climbing ladders. This I didn’t know, but as I remember back to all of our house fixing and painting days, she never did climb any really high ladders, but I just assumed that was because my job was to do it. As it turned out, the ladder climbing wasn’t as bad as we had thought and it was actually quite fun. This cliff house was a lot like the other cliff house only bigger. The ranger did a good job of telling us about the daily life of the cliff dweller. It was interesting that the average height of a man was only about 5’2” to 5’4” and he only lived to be 25 to 35 years old. The woman died even younger. They were married at 13, had 6 kids (3 of which died either at childbirth or an early age) before they were 20. Some people on the tour remarked that they must have had little time to pass on their culture to their children before they died. I thought of how fast the generations must have passed!

Wednesday, October 26th: Taking the day off in Cortez, CO

We left the Walmart parking lot and drove a few blocks down the street to Sundance RV park in Cortez. We got a nice pull thru spot under the trees and near the laundry room. That day, it was raining off & on, so we decide to lounge around and catch up on things. I wanted to hook up a battery monitor I had bought back in Colorado Springs and I needed to buy some more hardware to do it. We drove the truck back to Walmart and did our grocery and other shopping. We bought an electric space heater there to use when we were on full hook ups, so we could get heat on the RV park’s dime.

Tuesday, October 25: Crossing the Rockies just in time

Bad weather was coming and we had to get over the Rockies. Jan looked on the map and found that we had to get over Wolf Creek Pass at 10,800 feet, our highest yet. This seemed awfully high and we dreaded a long climb, but as we approached from a high plain from the East, we found that we were already over 8,000 feet, so the climb, although slow wasn’t so bad. It is fairly dry on the west side of the Rockies because of the rain shadow effect, but as we approached the pass it got more & more cloudy until it started to drizzle. Near the top, there was a ski area and patches of snow. On the other side, the road was steep and there were several hair pin turns. The road construction didn’t help either as the truck threw mud at the trailer again.
I had called ahead to the Walmart in Durango to see if they allowed RV overnight parking. They said that there were “No overnight parking signs”, but that they didn’t enforce it and that we would see other RVs parked on the eastern side of the parking lot. When we got there, we didn’t see any other RVs in the lot and there were lots of very explicit and menacing signs on every light pole forbidding overnight parking, so there would be no mistake if someone tried to kick s out. I said to Jan that I didn’t feel welcome there and if they didn’t want our business, we should move on, so we drove on to the Cortez Walmart, which was only another 1 ½ hours away. The Cortez Walmart had a bigger parking lot, other parked RVs, and just a few “No overnight parking signs”. It started raining as we hitched up and there was a thunderstorm with lots of lightning. We were thankful that we had gotten over Wolf Creek Pass when we did because they were getting snow.

Monday, October 24th – We explore the Great Sand Dunes

The next morning, I called an RV repair place in Alamosa, the nearest town of any size. They said that they could work on it in 2 weeks!  That sent a chill down my spine since I also had to wait 2 weeks in Colorado Springs to have my black tank leak fixed. They gave me some numbers of mobile RV repair services in the area. The first guy I called said that he was not doing RVs any more, but only residential. I had to leave a message for the second guy. At that point, we thought we’d have to trash our plans and drive 100s of miles to Albuquerque to get it fixed. That got me to thinking…. Maybe it was the propane after all. Even though the stove worked, maybe there was not enough gas pressure to get the furnace and the Generator to run. We decided to go into Alamosa that morning and get the tanks filled. We drove into town, parked in a shopping center parking lot and walked over to the nearest gas station to ask the attendant where we could get propane. He didn’t know, but a guy waiting in line said that the “Big R” store right there in the shopping center had propane at a cheap price. The “Big R” store, as we found out, is the Wal-Mart of the rancher and farmer, selling everything from water troughs to saddles. Each tank took 6 ½ gallons. They both were empty! After learning this lesson, we now weigh the tanks on the bathroom scale in the morning to find out how much is left. We headed on back to the Great Sand Dunes using a different route and noted the best place to get gas as we were going to leave going that way again. I had noticed that the rig was very hard to stop; so on the way down a very straight and deserted road, I played with the trailer break adjuster to find that the poor truck was doing most of the stopping. After the adjustment, the trailer was stopping the trailer and the truck was stopping only the truck, so it felt pretty good.

Our rig with the sand dunes in the background

Jan out on the sand dunes

We parked at the visitor’s center where Jan got her passport book stamped and we bought some postcards and our usual magnet. The ranger told us to drive to a parking lot at the base of the sand dunes where we could hike up to the top. That seemed a little ambitious, so we decided to hike up a little way to see what it was like. It was a quite windy and when the blowing sand hit your skin, it really hurt. These are the highest sand dunes in the country, so it was like climbing a small mountain of several hundred feet. Trudging through the sand was very slow going as it was like walking on a sandy beach, only uphill! Once we had climbed part way up, there was only sand everywhere. Some of the sand dunes were very steep, so I decided to climb one and try to slide down. I didn’t slide down very fast at all and kept stopping. If I had had a snow saucer or even a piece of cardboard, I think it would have been a blast. We walked back to the parking lot and crossed a shallow dry riverbed where in the rainy season kids and grownups have fun playing in the sand and water.

We drove back to our “free” spot to watch the sunset over the high desert. It was spectacular because we had a 360 degree view of the desert that was empty for miles in all directions and magnificent snow capped mountains beyond that. The other trailer was gone, so we had the whole place to ourselves.

Sunday, October 23rd - We leave Rachel & Nicks.

Eli with a messy face

Grammy & Grampa with Sawyer

Grammy, Sawyer, Rachel & Nick

We had planned to leave 2 weeks after Sawyer was born, which would have been Saturday, but the trailer was in the shop for 2 weeks and we didn’t get it back until Friday. The black tank had sprung a leak and it was stinking something aweful! The RV shop kept trying to patch the leak, but then found more leaks. Gross! I had also wanted to add a larger battery bank and a 2000 watt inverter before we left, so that took another 2 days. The inverter would enable us to have 110 volt AC house power without an external electrical hookup so we could “boondock” i.e. camp in places with no hookups. The advantages of boondocking are not to have to pay the usual $30-$40 per night fee and not being crammed into little spaces with the next RV only a few feet away. There is also the possibility of having fantastic views. The weather was very warm that last week in Colorado Springs as they were having a “heat wave”, so working on the trailer was pleasant. It would only be a week later that Rachel & Nick would get snow.
We set out for The Great Sand Dunes National Monument, which was a 3 ½ hour drive. We had to go through 1 mountain pass, but it was not too difficult as the mighty diesel pulled the trailer up the hill. The access road to the monument was 16 miles long. About 3 miles down the road, we noticed a dirt road and a sign that read “Public Land”. There was a trailer parked in a large dirt area there and a pickup next to it with its hood up. We took a mental note of this just in case it didn't work out at the camping ground. As it turned out, it didn't. We were headed to the camp ground in the park where I had previously read that there were some spaces that could handle big rigs. Well, they were wrong! As we drove around the loop, we noticed a lot of tent campers and small trailers and short little camp sites. There was one class A big rig on the loop that had gotten stuck on a rock trying to negotiate one of the sharp corners. We had to wait while he figured out a way to get himself free. He then backed into what looked like a slightly longer site than the rest. There were 2 more campgrounds, so we drove further up the road to try those. As we approached, we saw that both gates to these campgrounds were closed and we found ourselves in a dead end, the very place you don’t want to end up if you are pulling a long trailer! I tried to maneuver back & forth to try to get the trailer turned around, but we were too big! I finally said to Jan that we would have to back the trailer back down the road until we could back into the first campground road. She got out & guided me down the road and we got going in the opposite direction again.
Now it was getting late and we did not have a place to park, so we were feeling a little discouraged, maybe even a little panicked. We had noticed a general store & campground right outside the park, so we drove back to there and asked the guy inside about the camping facilities: full hookups $30. We said no thanks and decided to head back to where the sign had said “Public Lands”. The trailer & truck we saw there before were still there, but nobody was around. We parked about 50 feet away and got ready for the night. It was getting cold and we turned on the furnace to get warm. At first, we got heat, but when the furnace turned on a little later, the fan was only blowing cold air! In desperation, I started the generator and plugged in the electric space heater, but then the generator started to fail! I switched to the other propane tank, and the generator ran O.K. again, but then after about 10 minutes, started to fail again, so I had to shut it off. I couldn’t figure out what was happening because the gas top stove worked fine. It was a cold night for us as the temperature in the trailer dropped into the 40s.

Boondocking in the desert