Our last 2 days

Our first stop today was at the Four Corners. It was fun to be there again. 

I bought some fun souvenirs - some to hang on our Christmas tree:

Our next stop was Blanding, Utah. We visited the Edge of the Cedars state park and museum. Behind the museum was a prehistoric pueblo and the museum contained the artifacts found there and in other places. These are a just a few of the things we saw.

Turkey feather blanket:

Turkey feather blanket missing the feathers:

Insect-leg necklace -- I don't think I could

put insect-anything around my neck!!

Macaw [from the Purple Macaw of  Mexico] Feather Sash:

This is Yucca Fiber. I look at a yucca plant, and I don't see this!

These unfinished sandals were made between 550 & 700 A.D. Made out of yucca fiber!!

Plates and knives:

 Behind the museum - Kent going down in a kiva

Will he come back up?

We saw lots of other things in the museum - pottery, baskets, etc. but these were some of my favorites.

We drove on to Moab where we found a picnic table and played games - which I lost abysmally!! But that's ok - we had dinner in a fun place and then wandered a bit around down town Moab before calling it a night!

Saturday morning we checked out of our motel, bought lunch and drove to Arches, where we spent a few hours before driving home.

This was another wonderful trip, thanks to all of Kent's careful planning! And even though we have been to Arches many times, it never gets boring!!! We hope you enjoyed "traveling" with us!!

Chaco Canyon

Today was a lot of driving - and a lot of it on unpaved roads. We went from Gallup, New Mexico to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We stopped at this shopping center to get some food. We were the only non-Navajos there. 

 The last 20 miles of the drive, looked like this. It was slow going but we finally made it:

Chaco Canyon contains several prehistoric big houses, or pueblos. We took pictures of a few small ones.

 

The white circles in the beams are where they took a core sample to date the wood. They refilled the holes with numbered cork.

These are kivas:

Our favorite place here was the Pueblo Bonito. It was built in stages from CE 850 to 1150 by ancestral Puebloan people. It was a special place where clans stopped and lived during their sacred migrations. Here's one migrating now!

This shows the original back wall [to the left of the door]and then a later wall that was added and created more small rooms accessed from the back only:

Here you can see the beams that would have held up the roof:

This is one of several kivas. It is a round ceremonial room used for ceremonies. Some were large enough for hundreds of people.

If you were standing inside the kiva looking up - this is what the roof would have looked like:

They, apparently, were very short people!

Kent called this the "Nancy door":

Archeologists think it was used as an astronomical marker. It was built in the eastern part of the pueblo and when the sun rises on the morning of the winter solstice [my birthday], sunlight goes through the opening and hits the opposite room behind it. Who knew I had my own door!!

Here is a close up of the rails and beams used to support the roof. Plus, I thought this guy was really cute!!

We really loved this place and probably would have stayed longer, but we had that 20 miles of dirt road to travel, before dark. Fortunately, the road out wasn't quite as bad as the road in!! Happy ancient ruins!

Arizona to New Mexico

Today was another adventure and new sites. Our first stop was here:

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this!

We felt like we were walking on some alien planet. All those logs you see are pieces of petrified trees!

If you're interested in the process read below.

Here are some close ups: 

Another shot of the "alien" landscape:

These next pictures are of an area called the Blue Mesa. I began the walk with Kent, but very quickly there was a steep decline which I "declined" [Kent's joke] to take. I took this picture in the parking lot. The car was parked next to ours. I thought it was funny, and would only work if they were facing the right direction:

😂

Here are Kent's pictures of the Blue Mesa:

On our way out, we stopped to see some overlooks of the Painted Desert:

We had planned to go to Canyon de Chelly. However, we would have had to add about 2 hours to our drive to go in and then come back out, so we went to a place called Window Rock instead. There was a nice museum there - the Navajo Nation Museum. Window Rock is the capital of the Navajo Nation. We noticed as we were driving that many of the businesses were handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. New concept for me!

The museum was not an archaeology museum but a political statement about the 1868 treaty between the US military and the Navajo Nation and on our treatment of the Navajo people. A lot of the story was told through art and craft work. It was a nice museum - and another reminder of a dark part of our American history. I thought we both took more pictures than this, but these were all I found:

Our day ended in Gallup, New Mexico.