On to Aztec…

After Flagstaff, I traveled north then east to visit some of the country in that area that I’ve missed over the years. I’ve been to Shiprock and such, but lately I’ve traveled North/South in this area and this time I was going West/East. Since I was on a ‘this is the year of the train’ kick, my ultimate destination was Silverton, Colorado where they have a interesting train trip from/to Durango that I wanted to take. The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge RR has been running passengers up to Silverton for 131 years in cars behind a steam engine and I wanted to take that trip…but also, I wanted to visit Silverton. Seemed, from the internet, like an interesting town. And it appeared it had a nice RV park.

But first, I planned on visiting Aztec, New Mexico, because of the ruins of the ancient pueblo peoples village there that had a large restored kiva. And since it was almost exactly on the route to Durango, which led to Silverton, it wasn’t a hard decision to decide to stay there a few days while the weather improved in Silverton. It was fairly cold there at the time as it is up in the mountains and all.

On the way to Aztec (just 5 hours from Flagstaff), I passed a couple of places along the road that I vaguely recognized. The area seemed familiar so when I got to Ruins Road RV Park and set up, checked my stored photo albums, I found some pictures Nephew Paul had sent me just a couple weeks before that were taken at some of the tourist stops on this very road. Hah. It had been so long ago, I’d kind of forgotten about taking this route. It was kind of funny that, unsolicited, just a week before I made the trip, Paul would have sent me all those photos of a trip the family had all taken decades before in the same area where I was now enjoying a second visit. Maybe I mentioned the trip on Facebook or something.

We, (my son and me, brother Dan and his son Paul, sister Terri and her son Bruce, and our much loved family friend Maria) had made this tour in 1984 or so, stopping at the White House ruins, and the dinosaur track place. Here are a couple pictures:

Interesting thing about the dino tracks was that you really did need a guide. Just 50 yards off the highway, in sun baked, unappealing, stark, seemingly waterless country. As you can see above, there are only a couple plants here and there. The hills were likewise devoid of greenery. The Navajo people that own this land have a little shed set up for shade and trinket sales. When we were there in ’84 we were the only tourists. The guide took us over to this large flat rock, asked if we could see any tracks. We couldn’t quite. Then he poured water into a depression in the rock, then another further on, and another, suddenly you could see an entire trail of them. Thousands of tracks from small to large dino’s scattered all over the surface of this large rock, criss crossing, starting over here, ending over there, which obviously had been the muddy shoreline of some lake some 70 million years ago. Once you adjusted your brain, you could spot them almost immediately. But the water poured into tracks really brought them to life. Didn’t take much for the imagination to kick in and ‘see’ the lake shore with hundreds of animals coming down to drink, running away from predators or after insects. Most of the tracks were from small animals, many bird like tracks, but then occasionally there would be the large tracks like in the picture above. Nothing resembling paw prints though. Very interesting.

But that was then, this is now. I drove past that dino track place and didn’t stop this time. Since my memory was fairly clear about it, didn’t seem necessary. Things haven’t changed much either and the tracks have been there 70 million years and don’t seem to be heading anywhere fast. Wasn’t anyone there other then the natives. I felt bad about not stopping there after getting a few miles down the road though. Nostalgia and all.

So a ways after that little mental trip down memory lane, I came up on the turn off to White House Ruins, Canyon de Chelly National Monument. That’s where the first picture (above) was taken. Oh, yeah, I thought, the White House. Pretty cool place. I should have planned better and added a visit there to my itinerary. As it was, I’d have to backtrack from US-64, heading south to get there. Then try to find overnight accommodations. Oh, well, next time I’m in the area I’ll go visit again. I continued on to Farmington, which I thought was a funny name for a town in the desert. I was surprised to find that it’s a big damn city in a very wide valley with a big assed river. Farmland all over the place. Huh. But, the main road through town wasn’t to crowded and soon enough I was in Aztec. Watched the signs closely and arrived at Ruins Road RV Park without a hitch.  Nice park on flat ground. Walking distance to the ruins. Pulled into my assigned spot and soon found that I didn’t have WiFi where I was. I’d asked about that when I’d signed in too. They gave me another spot closer to the antenna, but I had to wait 3 days for those folks to move on. I paid for a week, and ended up enjoying the park quite a bit, but unfortunately, my new spot was reserved by someone else and I wasn’t going to do without WiFi. There were other spots and I did think I could move to one of them and get the same signal strength but I was looking forward to Silverton more then staying here. So, I only stayed the week and moved on. More on that later.

The picture above is after I moved to the new spot. Thing about this park was that it owns property right on the Animas river. It was this river, and the San Juan river that it joins several miles from here, that makes the Farmington area possible, and to live up to it’s name.

A few hundred feet from my RV, and down an embankment, you find this area by the river. It has been improved by the whites that took over this land in the 1880’s but back in 1250, the Pueblo People who occupied this area would have lived, farmed, fished, and hunted right here!

The archeologists tell us that the land around here hasn’t changed much geologically since the Pueblo People lived here so you’re looking at pretty much what they would have seen back then.

I enjoy trying to imagine what it would have been like back then. No TV, no WiFi, few cares…as long as you did your part in finding food every day. There would be bullies of course, but perhaps you learned to avoid them. Or you had a skill needed by the tribe and were held in high regard. Or perhaps you were a criminal no one trusted so you were watched all the time. So much so that you considered just wandering off and finding your own trail. Or you were a warrior who didn’t have to do much of anything, unless there was a threat. Or you were a hunter and only worked occasionally, and just lounged around the rest of the time. Whatever you were in your previous life, wouldn’t this have been an ideal place to live?

In the picture below showing this idealic spot is a modern covered picnic table. One day when I happened to wander down to the river, which I did every day, there was a young woman sitting there. With a bike loaded up with what looked like all her worldly possessions. It was late afternoon and I could see that she was cooking something that smelled pretty good. So I wandered over to talk to her and soon found out that she was a traveler. She’d almost crossed the country, alone, on her bike. Hailed from Tennessee. This was very interesting to me, being a traveler myself, so I engaged her in conversation about her travels for a couple hours that day, and a couple days afterwards. One thing I found fascinating is what she did when the weather turned sour on her. What she’d do is drop and pitch. She’d been doing it for so long, she could stop and set up her tent and camp within minutes. Oh, sure, sometimes it could be very uncomfortable, like in a sudden cold rainstorm or snowstorm, but in the years she’d been traveling, she’d only felt the need to hitch a ride into a town a few times. She told me of one time where she got hit with a sudden snow storm miles from the nearest town, on a back road that wasn’t much traveled. She hadn’t made it to town because she was sick, and misjudged both the weather and the distance. Had to stay in her tent for several days, sick, until the snow storm died away, and she could hitch a ride into town. Now that’s an adventure.

Like I say, her stories and adventures were fascinating and after I found out she made and sold jewelery to pay for her travel, I ordered and bought a couple pieces for my daughter. Over priced I thought, but, they were hand made to my specifications, sooo, I didn’t complain.

I hadn’t come here to Aztec merely to visit with travelers or enjoy a simple RV Park down in a van by the river, I’d come to tour the Aztec Ruins National Monument. Easily within bike ride distance from the RV park and not that far on foot either. Of course the name isn’t correct (or is it?) as the village was built by the Pueblo Peoples around 800 years ago. I’ve often wondered over the years if the Pueblo People were Aztecs that escaped the horrors of that race of cruel masters. By DNA testing, scientists have discovered, recently, that the Zuni and Paiute-Soshone American Indians share a rare genetic marker with Aztec peoples. I said escaped because there is no evidence of ritual sacrifice by the Pueblo Peoples so if they were Aztec, they didn’t bring their brutal religion with them. No matter what the epoch, there are always intelligent people who don’t buy into the weirdness that is religion. Perhaps they start their own weirdness, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I biked down to the National Monument and was blown away by the site. I had no idea the place was this big. The internet pictures I’d quickly scanned during my search of the area don’t do the place justice. It’s just so cool. I thought I’d only be here for an hour or so but the first trip took four hours, the second trip the next day was another two hours.

Pretty good stone masonry going on here. Watch out for snakes.

Now looking at those low to the ground windows, you can tell these people where not dumb asses like we moderns are. They knew that putting living spaces below ground was not only more comfortable most of the year but that heating those spaces during winter would be either unnecessary or minimal. As the village grew, and added stories to the buildings, the below ground stone work and living spaces below helped maintain heating/cooling above through thermal inertia, convection, etc. Or something. Tide goes in, tide goes out, you can’t explain that. (Sarcasm right there).

You can see the ancient logs poking out here and there. They had local trees so they didn’t have to travel as far to find it as some Pueblos did.

Check that place out (above). Can’t you just see a bunch of people sitting around a fire and swapping stories?

Below is a fairly typical ‘T’ doorway for the Pueblo People. Archeologists think it’s design was to allow bows and spears to be moved around efficiently.

One of the kivas. Would have been covered with a pretty extensive roof.

And then we move to the restored kiva. The crown gem of this site. Back in the olden days, the chief archeologist assigned to investigate this site thought it would be cool to rebuild this huge kiva that was here at the site. It was unique at the time because there was enough evidence that it COULD be restored. So many other sites the scientists basically had to guess how things were built. Here it was fairly obvious. So, it was ‘restored’ using local materials. This is how those people so long ago would have hung out. Not bad. Sort of like a city council of today. In fact that’s an apt metaphor.

Rooms of the care takers. Probably had some religious influence but that’s hard to avoid no matter what the age.

Look at this ceiling. Cool, huh? This place is amazing. Keep in mind it was built in 1250 or so. Long before those f’in Spanish came here looking to steal as much gold as they could. When they arrived the place had been abandoned for several decades.

Wouldn’t this place be a great place to visit with friends, neighbors, visitors from foreign lands, and your own leaders?

Impressive.

And a shot from long distance atop another section. There were at one time several three story buildings.

And that’s it. That’s the tour of the Aztec ruins. Hope you enjoyed it.

After I left, I ran into this little creature. I’d wondered what the screams I’d heard earlier had been about.

Just a little whine here, I had intended to publish this over a month ago but once again, my computer died. What happened is a mystery, but one night when I shut down the computer, it took an inordinate amount of time to shut down. I noticed it. Hmmm. No Win7 upgrades were going on. Nothing displayed on the screen other then the shut down splash screen.

Next morning, at turn on, it just never got anywhere. Eventually, I just shut it down. It took a MONTH but I finally got up and running with a different hard drive WITH all my missing photos, like all those above. It took this long because it was very difficult to extract all my pictures from the bad hard drive. The drive is only 5 months old and I had not got around to having a full back up, I’ve since fixed that issue.

Anyway, sorry for taking so long to post.