Chapter 37 – El Malpais, El Morro, Santa Fe
Dave and Helen Damouth
www.damouth.org
May 27, 1998
4/24 We're camped among jagged lava flows at Cibola Sands RV Park in Grants, New Mexico, after a short and uneventful drive from Albuquerque. The weather has looked threatening for days, but now is producing a series of thunderstorms which are marching through the area one by one. One storm hit just as I was outside with voltmeter, extension cords, and a handful of plug adapters, trying to figure out why we didn't have power in the trailer. I got driven inside by painful hailstones. Later, I finally solved the perplexing power problem by moving to another campsite. We're still not sure whether the problem was inside or outside the trailer, after two hours of diagnostics, but at least things are working normally at the moment. Later, the park owner disassembled the power pedestal and didn't find anything wrong. He retightened all the connections "just in case" (old underground aluminum wiring – which automatically makes one suspicious).
4/25 The parade of thunderstorms hasn't stopped. And it's cold – we're at 6200 feet, and it is still very early spring here, with temperature dropping to 35 degrees at night. We drove Southwest to El Morro National Monument through intermittent rain, which changed to snow as we gained altitude and crossed the Continental Divide at 7800 feet. El Morro is only a little lower, but we decided to hike anyway.
At the base of a long ridge of 250-foot high sheer sandstone cliffs is a year-round pool of fresh water, filled by a little waterfall pouring off the plateau during the rainy months. This has been a stopping place on a major East-West migration route throughout recorded history. It is especially interesting because much of the history is recorded right here – in inscriptions cut into the soft sandstone cliff face. I don't think I've ever been in a place with such a strong feeling of history. The earliest inscriptions were made by Zuni Indians about 800 years ago. A row of bighorn sheep carvings and other more abstract symbols are still clearly recognizable. Beginning with inscriptions in 1605, a sequence of Spanish missionaries, Army Officers, and explorers, carved their names, and sometimes entire paragraphs describing the purpose of their trip. Two governors of the New Mexico territory signed their names here as they passed through. Don Juan de Oņante passed through here and signed his name while returning from his mission to officially colonize New Mexico, bringing 400 colonists and 7000 head of cattle from Mexico. General Don Diego de Vargas signed his name here in 1692 during an expedition to pacify the Indians, who had revolted and kicked out the Spanish 12 years earlier. Beginning in 1849, there are inscriptions from Americans – first an Army topological expedition, and then a series of immigrants headed for California. Sixteen members of one wagon train signed their names here. Later, the Army Camel Corps came through, and the commander inscribed his name and rank. In 1868, a survey party from the Union Pacific Railroad signed their names here, but then chose a more northerly route for the railway, after which the traffic past El Morro withered away.
We climbed a trail to the tops of the cliffs and got snowed on for a few minutes while absorbing yet another chapter of history. A well-preserved Zuni pueblo has been partially excavated. It was built in 1275 A.D., and abandoned about 1350 A.D. In that short time, a compact complex of at least 875 rooms was built, constructed up to three stories high and housing about 1200 people. Like the other pueblos from that period, there is little evidence to explain why they were abandoned.
4/26 We drove to El Malpais National Monument, intending to drive a portion of CR-42 to an area of huge lava tubes. We stopped at the park Visitor's Center, and the Ranger talked us out of trying this trip. Yesterday's rains had turned some clay portions of the road into a greasy mess that even 4-wheel-drive vehicles can have trouble negotiating. She suggested the El Calduron area as a substitute, and we're glad we went there. A couple of lava tubes are just a short walk from the parking lot. Dave explored one tube for half a mile or so before it narrowed down to a muddy belly crawl. It is old enough to have acquired a few decorations – small stalactites and stalagmites.
El Calduron itself is a relatively young cinder cone, reached by a couple of miles of interesting but poorly marked trail. The volcano belched two different colors of cinders at different times, giving a strange layered look to the cone – a black layer on top of a reddish earlier layer. We hiked over and around the cone, then continued around the loop trail back to the car.
4/27 Today, we drove a long loop, down the east side of El Malpais on SR 117, then across the backcountry on CR-42, a largely unmaintained forest road, then back up the west side of the park on SR 53. The Lava Falls trail leads from SR 117 a mile or so over interesting and varied lava flows. At the end of the trail, thick, smooth, flows of lava had cascaded down the side of a hill. In other places, we walked past deep subsidence craters. The path was rough – marked by stone cairns and otherwise unimproved. It's worth the hike to see the almost surreal landscape.
County Road 42 took us close to an area of really big lava tubes, reached by several miles of difficult trail. The road was still damp in places, but we had no trouble negotiating it with the 2WD truck. Again, the trail over the lava is marked by cairns, but is otherwise unimproved, and the lave surface is very rough, making for slow going. It was late in the day and we didn't have time to do the whole thing. Dave did get to the first of the huge lava tubes. This one was around 100' in diameter, and extended for a long distance (further than I had patience to follow. For several hundred yards, the ceiling had collapsed, forming a deep vertical-walled lava canyon.
4/28 Chaco Culture National Historical Park "preserves the ruins of 13 major great houses, called pueblos, and several thousand smaller sites that exemplify the development of the Chaco Anasazi A.D. 900-1150". The pueblos at this site were huge. The largest covered several acres, contained around 800 rooms, and some sections were four stories high. Most of the rooms were built in a crescent, surrounding a huge plaza. I counted 25 of the round, sunken, ceremonial rooms called Kivas, scattered through this one complex.
The workmanship is impressive. Sandstone blocks of various sizes were cut and dressed to make tightly-fitted walls that were very smooth, inside and out. In the last, and most sophisticated, phases of the construction, the adobe mortar joints between stones were so thin as to be almost invisible. In the four-story portions of the building, the stone walls were about three feet thick at the bottom, gradually tapering to about a foot thick at the top.
A network of roads, still clearly visible in satellite photographs of the region, connected these pueblos with others, some of them long distances away. The artifacts found here indicate that these roads supported a thriving trade in all sorts of products, from as far away as the Gulf of California.
The roads may now be worse than in Anasazi times. The last 35 miles of our 90-mile trip from Grants was unimproved dirt – bumpy, rutted, with ragged ridges of bedrock sticking out through the dirt in places. We followed the official road signs in driving to Chaco – a circuitous route which brought us in from the northeast. The worst portions of this road had been graveled and/or graded in recent times, so it was dusty and slow, but otherwise quite passable.
In leaving, we took the shorter route, labeled variously as State Route 57 and Navajo Service Route 14, which our map indicated was a fairly direct road straight south to I-40. This was a mistake! Both the State and the Navajos seem to have abandoned this route. All the route numbers and other road signs have been removed, and the road was rutted and washed out in places – clearly unmaintained. If there had ever been gravel, it was long gone – and the surface was adobe. We could see deep ruts left from when some heavy 4-wheel drive vehicle had driven it after a rainstorm.
To make things worse, after we had picked our way slowly south on this road for 10 miles or so, we became aware of a big black thunderstorm approaching from the southwest. The storm passed just south of us while we were about half way along the 20-mile stretch of unmaintained road. We had visions of being mired in slick, soft, adobe for weeks before someone found us. Fortunately, the heavy rain fell elsewhere and our route got only light rain. The road remained reasonably firm, and we heaved sigh of relief when we finally came to a blacktop crossroad. We looked back and found signs at the intersection, warning that the road was unmaintained and impassable after rain. Now they tell us! There were no such signs at the other end.
Throughout the southwest, there are frequent warning signs about high winds - usually in mountain passes, where the mountains funnel the wind and increase its velocity. New Mexico goes one step further. Each of those signs has a big orange windsock attached to it, which allows drivers to estimate the direction and strength of the wind.
4/29 We woke to find drifts of hail on the ground and sounds of dripping water all around us as ice melted off everything. The wind is howling, blowing so hard that it is difficult to walk against it. We worried about driving with this much wind, and almost aborted our plan to leave. But we're only going 140 miles to Santa Fe, and can afford to do it slowly and cautiously, so we finally decided to go anyway. As it turned out, the driving really wasn't a problem. I gradually pushed the speed up to 60 mph, and the truck and trailer still felt quite stable. The gusty, shifting crosswinds did require more attention to steering than usual to avoid drifting out of our traffic lane, but otherwise the trip was easy and uneventful. By mid-afternoon, we were settled into Ranchero de Santa Fe Camping Park, about 10 miles southeast of central Santa Fe. This appears to be an old KOA which is now being systematically upgraded. It's in a miniature pinyon pine forest. Most of the interior roads are narrow dirt, winding through the trees. In one section near the front, the roads have been widened and graveled, and the sites also leveled and graveled, so that they are quite acceptable for big rigs. We're in a back-in site which seemed somewhat more spacious than the pull-through sites at the other end of the park road. After setting up in our assigned site, I walked around the rest of the park, and if we ever come here again, we'll probably choose one of the less improved sites higher up the hill, back in the woods. Some of these are big enough to handle our rig, and a few even have full hookups.
4/30 A reconnoitering mission into Old Town Santa Fe. We wondered if any of it would look familiar from our visit here 39 years ago. In fact, the plaza and Governor's Palace are about as we remembered them. Many of the other old buildings have apparently been spruced up, but otherwise unchanged. Two fairly large hotels have appeared a couple of blocks away, but are fairly well disguised as imitation adobe. The long row of Indians selling their silver turquoise jewelry in front of the Governor's Palace look like they've been sitting there forever – dark, heavily-lined weather-beaten faces wearing stoic expressions, most of them with short, broad, fireplug shaped bodies.
Every shop for blocks around caters to tourists. This area contains the highest concentration of art galleries I've seen anywhere. Business must be good – many of the galleries are large, very expensively furnished and full of surprisingly expensive art. I admired a large Ansel Adams photograph in a gallery that specializes in old original art photography, and then discovered that the asking price was $65,000.
We bought a four-day pass which includes the four museums in the immediate area. The Fine Arts museum was mostly uninteresting to us – specializing in local contemporary art. But one traveling exhibit made the whole thing worthwhile: a wonderful collection of ancient Iranian clay pottery, some of it over 3000 years old. The workmanship was of very high quality, and the artisans had a sense of humor – many of the pieces were designed with a quirky humor that was surprising. For example, a vase that was shaped as a subtly distorted human torso, standing on stubby but unmistakable human legs and feet. Many vases were animal shapes, distorted to form graceful spouted containers that were apparently intended for ceremonial wine drinking.
We had an early dinner at Jacks, in the middle of Old Town. We chose this place based on an interesting menu posted outside. It turned out to be patronized almost entirely by local people, who all seemed to know each other. The food and the service were excellent. We'll probably go back again.
5/1 The Georgia O'Keefe Museum has a large and attractively hung collection. All but one room is paintings (and a few watercolors and sculpture pieces) from this one artist. The one exception is a room devoted to Alfred Steiglitz, initially her teacher, then her agent, and then her husband, and to artists and photographers associated with or influenced by Steiglitz.
We located Cheryl Ammann, with the help of PhoneSearch, our CDROM national telephone directory. Cheryl lived in our home and helped care for our children 22 years ago, while she was a college student in Rochester. Over the years, we had lost track of her. She's living in Los Alamos, working at LANL, and she and her friend John drove down to Santa Fe to have dinner with us last night. It's amazing how old friendships can be renewed almost instantly. We talked for hours, over dinner, and may find an opportunity to get together again before we leave the area.
5/2 The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture was a very enjoyable stop. They have attempted to record the traditional cultures with exhibits and with videos of old Indians talking about the culture. They also have the most extensive collection of southwest Indian pottery we have seen. The pottery is nicely organized to provide comparisons and interrelationships of the design elements among the various pottery-making pueblos, and also nicely puts the modern pottery into the context of the ancient designs.
5/4 Another cold, windy, rainy morning. It's 41 degrees at 10 A.M. – time to leave. The clouds broke into occasional patches of blue as we headed southeast on US 285, then east on Interstate 40. More importantly, it warmed up as we dropped several thousand feet on the way to Amarillo, Texas. The combination of a strong tail wind and the gradual elevation loss gave us an unbelievable 18.9 miles per gallon for the day. I've re-checked the arithmetic, and that's what is says!
We stopped at Overnite RV Park, and discovered that we again forgot check for the location of airports and railroad tracks. A major railroad runs about 1/4 mile north of us, with an active switchyard for local industry, so we can hear the throb of the big diesels almost constantly. Worse, we are directly under the approach path to the major runway of the airport. Big jets are lumbering directly above our trailer, perhaps 200 feet up. Little white Air Force jets – trainers, we assume - are coming in at a steeper angle, somewhat higher as they pass us. They come past quite frequently, and I can easily distinguish the beginners by their erratic wobbles as they make their final alignment with the runway, crabbing into a stiff gusty crosswind. We hope we'll be gone by the time the wind changes direction and this becomes the takeoff path. This RV Park has instant telephone connections at 24 sites, and workmen were busy digging trenches and pulling wire, improving more sites with phones and new electrical cables. I didn't discover that they offered phones until we were already settled in a non-phone site. It doesn't matter much – there's a convenient modem hookup in the laundry, on a dedicated line. Here, they've done what I've often suggested but rarely seen: A home-style phone jack has been spliced into the phone line which runs to a standard Southwest Bell pay phone. This is about a 15-minute job, using about $1.98 in parts. Yet it works fine. The phone company gets their normal revenue on computer calls- 800 numbers are free to the caller, but I still have to deposit $.35 in the payphone before the computer can dial a local call.
5/5 Don't miss the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum when in this area. It's a little out of the way – in the town of Canyon, about 15 miles south of Amarillo - but worth the detour. We spent most of the afternoon there, finally getting kicked out at closing time. I learned a lot about various aspects, both past and present, of the oil and agriculture industry. There's a complete antique oil drilling rig set up in the middle of the museum. Another big room has a collection of antique farm windmills. I finally understand exactly how those old farm windmills automatically adjust themselves to varying wind speed.
Several people had suggested we see Palo Duro Canyon. We tried! We were able to drive a couple of miles down in the canyon. But most of it was closed. The road in the canyon is under water in places, and under several feet of mud and sand in other places where the water has receded. The region to the north and west had heavy rains over the past couple of weeks. We noticed as we drove along I-40 that the low points in the rolling terrain usually contained temporary lakes, often many acres in extent. The radio is predicting more flooding in southwest Kansas. A friend reported flooding in Colorado Springs last week.
5/6 We realized late yesterday that Helen's billfold was missing. This morning, we searched the truck and trailer carefully without finding it, then began a full day of backtracking yesterday's wanderings. We saw the sights all over again, as we went back through each of the places that we previously visited. The search was unsuccessful. Fortunately, the billfold only contained a little cash, a driver's license, and one credit card. Late in the day, we called to freeze the credit card, and stopped to get a new driver's license (quick and easy – lucky this happened while in Texas, where we are residents). We make a point of carrying a single credit card, and keeping two others in the trailer for emergency use. It paid off – we simply shifted to using one of the secondary cards while waiting the two weeks for our primary card to be reissued and to get to us via our forwarding service. Postscript: Two days later, we found the billfold – it had slipped into an invisible place in the crack between the passenger seat and the center console of the truck. Oh well – the old credit cards needed replacing anyway – the magnetic stripes were getting hard to read. And Helen now has a spare driver's license.
5/7 The drive from Amarillo to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was a fast and easy 275 miles, 4 1/2 hours, all on Interstate 40.
Oklahoma looks wonderful - a very pretty region to drive through this time of year. Everything is intensely green – a zillion shades of green. The only exception is the fields of cut, drying, hay - patches of golden straw color scattered amid the green. Some of the wheat fields are beginning to ripen – already with hints of gold in the swelling grain heads. And we're back among real trees - *big* trees, for the first time in a long time. The terrain alternates between vast expanses of flat farmland, and gently rolling hills, mostly in pasture or hay.
We rolled into Rockwell RV Park in mid-afternoon on a weekday and were startled to find it full. Oklahoma City is jammed with homeless tornado victims and itinerant insurance adjustors. Vacation RV's are being borrowed or rented to house the homeless. This park has run temporary phone lines down a whole row of RV sites for use by the insurance folks. Don't know if this affected their decision, but they told me that by next year they will have instant phone service in at least some of their sites.
The park called our second choice, only a mile down the road, and reserved the next-to-last space for us. By the time we got there (about five minutes), the last space was also gone. Anyway, we're comfortably set up at Council Road RV Park. It's modem-friendly, and the sites are mostly 25' x 80 pull-throughs, unusually spacious for an urban RV Park. We're in a back-in site along the outside wall of the park – not as long as the pull-throughs, but still quite pleasant. There's even quite a bit of green grass – really nice after the unremitting dirt and gravel of RV Parks further west.
5/8 Visited the Oklahoma City Art Museum. It's not worth the trouble. They have very little exhibit space, and most of their permanent collection was missing – replaced by a couple of uninteresting special exhibitions.
Crystal Bridge and Myriad Botanical Gardens, a square block of landscaped park downtown, was wonderful. The whole complex is an I. M. Pei design. The Crystal Bridge building is kind of weird – a huge translucent plastic cylinder laying on its side, the ends supported on small hills so that it spans a little lake. The interior space is one of the nicest greenhouses we've seen. One end is tropical rain forest, with the lush profusion of vines, epiphytes, ferns, orchids, etc., that one expects to see in such places. The other end is dryer, although still tropical, and has a wide range of other interesting hot-weather plants from around the world. Zebra Longwing butterflies were fluttering all over the place. They have a self-sustaining breeding colony. Little lizards were scuttling around keeping the insect population in check. Big lizards were present, although not seen by us, and keep the little lizards and the mice down to a manageable level.
We were there at a quiet time and were fortunate to get a private tour by a permanent staff member who really knew the collection, followed by some time with the Assistant Naturalist for the facility. The weather has gone from too cold a few days ago to too hot today – about 90 degrees, with little breeze. We hadn't dressed properly for an afternoon in a humid tropical greenhouse on a hot sunny day, and, our profuse sweat probably helped water quite a few plants.
Later, we took a scenic drive south and west, crossing the Canadian River twice and getting a look at suburbs and farm land in the region. The road kill here is predominately armadillos – first time we've been aware of them.
5/9 Only 120 miles today – an enjoyable drive along I-44, through verdant rolling farmland. This is pretty, and surprisingly unpopulated, country. About halfway from Oklahoma City to Tulsa, Oklahoma, we passed a shopping mall which was in the path of one of the recent tornadoes. The steel framework of the buildings was still there, although twisted into pretzels. Nearly everything else – walls, roof, contents, was simply gone, vacuumed up and carried away by the funnel cloud.
After finding the Oklahoma City RV Parks nearly full, we had called ahead for Tulsa reservations just before leaving. As it turned out, we probably didn't need to. Mingo RV Park is much fuller than we would expect for this time of year, but still had a few empty spaces late in the evening. We're only a few miles from downtown, but the park is spacious and pleasant. Our site is about 25' x 70 feet. About 50 feet of shared lawn separates us from the row of sites on the next street. We’re looking across a wide paved drive to a grassy area on the other side. And the place is modem friendly, with modem hookup at a convenient desk in the office.
The afternoon was spent at the Gilcrease Museum. Mr Gilcrease, a minor oil baron, built an extensive collection of Western American art, but also assembled fine collections of pre-Columbian objects, and some nice examples of 18th and 19th century Eastern American paintings. There is no mansion here. Mr Gilcrease lived in a quite modest house, and spent his fortune buying art. In fact, he overspent, got into serious financial difficulty, was nearly forced to sell his art collection, and was bailed out by the City of Tulsa. Mr. Gilcrease subsequently gave the collection to the city, and signed over rights to future oil royalties to endow a Foundation to preserve and display the art, resulting in a large pleasant art gallery on a hilltop surrounded by forest and landscaped grounds.
We've not usually been fans of "western" art as such – but Mr. Gilcrease collected the best of the genre (including western landscapes from some of our favorite "eastern" artists), and we enjoyed it very much - A lot of Remington, Thomas Moran, Bierstadt, and others of that ilk. A traveling exhibit of Norman Rockwell art filled a couple of large rooms. I spent quite a while looking at hundreds of Saturday Evening Post covers, pleasantly immersed in nostalgia. Rockwell had a long career – these magazine covers began in my parent's youth and continued through my college years.
5/10 Visited the Tulsa Garden Center. A mildly interesting small greenhouse, extensive but poorly maintained gardens, and a small but tasteful "Italianate Villa". Like everything else in Tulsa, this place was built with oil money. It was built in 1919 by David Rabinowitz, a Russian immigrant who got mildly rich in the scrap metal business in Ohio, then moved to Tulsa, changed his last name to Travis, and got very rich in the oil business. The basement "ballroom" did extra duty as a place for Jewish religious services, before there was a synagogue in Tulsa.
5/11 The Philbrook Museum of Art is another "must-see" place in Tulsa. The large mansion and surrounding gardens are large and generally tasteful – built in old Mediterranean style with unlimited amounts of revenue from the rich oil fields. The art collection is also excellent – again reflecting lavish spending back when ancient artifacts and art from European "old masters" were still relatively cheap. I found it interesting that the same guy who built this place also donated the huge Philmont Scout Ranch, near Cimarron New Mexico, to the Boy Scouts of America. I spent a wonderful week hiking the mountains at Philmont as a Scout in 1952.
Later, we drove a few miles south of town to tour the Francoma pottery factory. I didn't think much of their pottery designs, but it is interesting to see how it is manufactured, in relatively high production quantities.
5/12 Last night, we had an "interesting" evening, sitting in the trailer listening to the tornado warnings. The concert we were listening to on the radio was interrupted about every 10 minutes all evening by the Emergency Reporting System, to tell us about the progress of the various severe storms in the area. Flash flood warnings were posted for the county east of us. A severe thunderstorm passed a few miles north of us, with reported 60-mph winds. Lightning was been flickering all over the sky for hours. Golf-ball-sized hail was reported. A tornado was sighted about 30 miles southeast of us, moving away from us. During a lull in the rain, I walked over and verified the location of the RV Park's storm shelter (it looks solid). The Oklahoma natives in the trailer next to us assured us that there were loud warning sirens nearby, and that they would also bang on our door if their automatic storm alert radio went off. With this assurance, we slept soundly.
We're off to Oz this morning, hoping to find the yellow brick road that will lead us to Junction City and the RV Club get-together at Milford Lake State Park.