Equipo Williams

Our first night out of Salt Lake City we went south to Kodachrome Basin State Park.  This is a little bit outside Bryce Canyon and was a spur of the moment decision because we thought that the Bryce would be full on Labor Day.  The park gets its name from the bands of multi-colored rocks in the surrounding hills and lies at the top layer of the Grand Staircase formation.  We spent a day hiking around and looking at rock formations and box canyons.

After Kodachrome we headed into Bryce Canyon itself and grabbed a campsite in the park.  Bryce Canyon has a shuttle running the length of the park, so we were able to set up camp and then go explore without the car.  The first day we travelled down the road and stopped at the various lookouts.  The hoodoos and canyons are very impressive, but I really wanted to go down and hike through them, so on the second day we went to Sunrise Point and descended into the canyon.  This was one of the best and most scenic hikes of our entire trip: walking among the hoodoos, going through little openings in the rocks, wandering through the pinyon and juniper forests.  The return hike was a significant ascent which was made more challenging by the altitude: our house is at about 100 feet above sea level and climbing at 8000 feet above sea level left us wiped out by the time we reached the canyon rim.

Next down the road was Capitol Reef National Park.  The campground was full, so we ended up camping up the road a bit in the Dixie National Forest which was a better campsite anyway: cooler, more spacious, and with a better view.  We did the Grand Wash hike in the park which let us go through a narrow slot canyon: it was a fairly hot day but inside the canyon was cool in shade and the rock formations were amazing.  At this point the kids were starting to get National Park fatigue, so the hike was a bit more of a mule-drive than I’d like, but we got them through.

We needed a laundry and supply day, so we got a hotel in Moab rather than try and camp around Arches National Park.  The arches in Arches were amazing and often improbable and precarious-looking, but I think by the time we were at Arches the kids were rock-saturated and were more interested in relaxing at the hotel pool. I think we would have been more impressed by Arches had we had a break from the parks, and my enjoyment of the parks is more or less directly proportional to the amount of time hiking in the park and inversely proportional to the number of other people there. Because of Arches’ timed-entry system, we could only go in later in the day and we didn’t have as much time to explore as we would have wanted.

Jessie and I left the kids in front of their screens at the hotel and had a mini-date in the hotel bar.  We decided that we had probably done enough geology with the kids but hadn’t been to any Native American sites since the Dakotas.  Heading out of Moab the next day we decided to make Hovenweep and Mesa Verde priorities.  Both feature ruins of settlements made by Ancestral Pueblo people that are about 800 years old.  I had known of Pueblo ruins further south, but apparently before they lived in Arizona and New Mexico the ancestors of the Pueblo had been farther north and had migrated south at the end of the 1200s. 

Syd had pulled a muscle in his leg, so our exploring at Hovenweep was limited but the ruins perched on the edge of the canon were quite impressive, although they made my acrophobic engineer self a bit nervous.  Definitely not the place I would build a structure.

Heading out of Hovenweep we went down the road to the northeast and crossed into Colorado.  It was about an hour drive down to Mesa Verde National Park where we grabbed a first-come campsite in their campground and called it a day.

The next day we drove around the ruins of Mesa Verde.  Sometimes there are experiences where I know exactly what I am going to see before I get there because I’ve researched it or otherwise know what it is, but then the actual experience is more impressive than I could have guessed.  I suppose awe is the right word.  That’s how I felt when I saw the cliff structures at Mesa Verde.  It wasn’t that they were bigger or different, but I think seeing them in their environment is different than seeing them in a picture.  You can’t grasp their relationship to the surrounding landscape and canyon in a picture.  We did the park loop tour and saw the various cliff dwellings.  Audrey learned from a ranger that they led tours into a few of the cliff dwellings and the kids thought this would great.  The tours were sold out for the day, but, given that we have all this time, we decided to spend another day in Mesa Verde so we could go to the Balcony House tour the next afternoon.

The next day we had some time before the tour, so we did math lessons in the morning after breakfast and then went for a short hike.  I mis-read a map so the hike I had intended to do wasn’t real, so we went to the Spruce Tree House area and did the Petroglyph Loop.  The kids wanted to do it backwards, so we ended up walking out along the canyon rim before dropping down to see the petroglyphs.  The walk back inside the canyon was much more exciting: squeezing through cracks between boulders and generally hugging the canyon wall back toward the dwellings let us imagine what it must have been like for the builders 800 years ago.

The tour of Balcony House was an adventure.  The website lists the tour as consisting of scaling the face of the cliff via several tall ladders (32 feet and two 17 foot ladders) as well as climbing a 60 foot open cliff face with uneven stone steps.  I figured if the Park Service would sell me the tickets (and the kids tickets), then it was probably safe enough.  The ladders were fine, and the open cliff face had hand-holds, but I was a bit nervous about the kids.  There are no pictures of us traversing those areas because I though that didn’t need documenting.  Being inside the dwelling was a much better way of imagining what it would have been like for the Ancestral Pueblo and the rangers were quite helpful in setting the scenes of what a day in the life would have been like.

We left Mesa Verde and turned northeast in to Colorado and the Rockies.