Canyon de Chelley

June 16, 2009 Tuesday Canyon de Chelley We go the Visitor Center early and watch a video of the Puebloan Ancestors or Anasazi as they used to be called.

We hike down this large three-fingered Canyon to the “White Hose Ruins”. So called because of the white plaster used on the outside. This is now the only hike we can take on our own. Otherwise one must hire a Navajo guide so that you do not disturb the local cultivations and residents that now live in the area. Again like so many places this is different than we expected from our readings and the pictures we have seen. This Canyon is sculpted yellow sandstone with high Mesa’s on top and BIG. In some ways similar to the Grand Canyon. The mesas on top of the Canyon are where modern Navajo now make their homes.

In the Canyon we talk to the local people who sell jewelry at White House about their life now and then. They talk about the current organization and how violations of the law are handled only by tribal courts. It is special to connect with people who live her and whose ancestors have for many generations before. We buy a special sandstone carving of a healing hand with a spiral on one side reversible to other side of dancing figure, kokopelle with flute playing for rain and a the sacred corn plant next to him, petroglyphs found in this Canyon. The Native artist is Burb (from Burbank) and has a backpack with Maui on the outside that he traded from a tourist. And so the visit continues. He hopes to come to Maui one day. We hope he will too.

We stop at an overlook at the other finger – Canyon de Muerto - and at Massacre Cave, where the early Spaniards shot a cannon into a cave where people had gathered to escape them. They said they killed 90 warriors, accounts from the Native peoples say more and mostly women and children. We rest here in the midday, napping before the next car journey. After we pack, ready to leave, the car won’t start!! The battery is dead. Like this Canyon, muerto. It is now 4:30pm and as we wait for the next tourist to come we realize that we are the end of the less traveled canyon and late in the day and there may be no one else coming here today!! AND we have no phone reception so no AAA! We decide to go back to the main road and look for help, so Gerrit takes the bike with a vow to return with help. The help comes with him shortly after – so nice to meet the helpful Native American grandmother who comes to show her grandkids the Massacre Cave which they have not seen before. She helps us.

We get on the road again. On the way we take another of the famous navigation’s better short cuts over a high mountain pass which the car is barely able to get over, unlike all our previous runs. Our reward for getting over is this mystical bluish landscape of a valley with peaks sticking out, one a bit like Devil’s Tower in the Close Encounters film!! As we approach closer and closer we think it is called Shiprock which had been recommended to us. It is amazing jagged roundish crown of a rock with a high point reaching to the heavens. And the rest of the trip continues like this with exciting buttes and ranges of stone mountains, more whitish than Arizona and Utah. This is New Mexico. We get to Mesa Verde on the edge of Colorado late at night.