September 19 – October 10, 2020

Having returned to the US and officially retired ­- but hobbled from travel overseas for a time due to Covid 19 concerns – we have turned to domestic destinations for the near future. We’ll have to set the “abroad” part of our travels aside for now. This trip was to visit our daughter Paige in Nashville on our way to a southwestern vacation with our daughter Chelsea in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hitting a few bucket list destinations on the way.  So with masks in hand and our hand sanitizer ready in the car, we packed up and headed west from North Carolina.

We are cautious in our travels and try to follow all local requirements as well as those we know make good sense. Our homework indicated New Mexico required a negative test to enter the state.  It wasn’t clear to us just how to do this coming from across the country. In the end we had our tests done in the Chattanooga. The test was available 7 days a week, for free with no referral and results loaded to an on-line portal we set up in 24 hours.  Simple!

We headed out on the morning of September 19 to our first day destination of Memphis, Tennessee.  I’ve made this drive many times, and this day I was reminded of the “Three States of Tennessee” billboards I saw on roadsides as a child. We drove from the mountains of the east, through the Cumberland Plateau of middle Tennessee where we visited our daughter Paige, to the Gulf Coastal Plain of west Tennessee and our first day destination of Memphis.  I had set up 3 goals for our stay here – see the ducks at the Peabody Hotel lobby, have some Memphis BBQ, and listen to some Beale Street Blues. We did all three and were off to a great start.

We headed out the next morning, driving through the rain across the rolling hills of Arkansas.  It took us a couple of days to transit the Great Plains of Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas (including the obligatory stop at the Big Texan steakhouse in Amarillo) before reaching the mountainous terrain of eastern New Mexico and the Santa Fe region.  This was about a 1600-mile trek from west North Carolina to Santa Fe – the US is a bigger country when driving than it is when flying!

Santa Fe has a population of about 150,000, and at 7000 feet is at a higher elevation than any other state capital, making for a more comfortable environment than much of southwest.  We had a full agenda for our 12 day stay with our daughter Chelsea and her husband Joe.  Here are a few of the highlights.

La Cienequilla Petroglyph Site

Lynn chanced upon this little gem while looking at local trail maps. Just a few miles from Santa Fe, this non-descript facility is little more than a small dirt parking lot with a couple of information signs next to some basalt outcroppings of the La Bajada Mesa. The landscape is dotted with cholla cactus and blooming, bright yellow chamisa flowers. Trail guidance isn’t the best, but with a bit of rock scrambling we were treated to a wonderful display of hundreds of petroglyphs, left behind by the Puebloan people living in the area between the 13^th and 17^th centuries. There were many kokopelli and Thunderbird carvings on the basalt rock outcrops, as well of dozens of other petroglyphs.  We had fun picking our way through the rocks, exploring and guessing what the different rock art might have meant. The El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro passed through here as well, perhaps contributing to the density of the petroglyphs found here. This 1600-mile trail leads from the Santa Fe area to Mexico City.  Its origins date back to around 1000 AD, later expanded and used by Spanish conquistadors.

We wrapped up this excursion with a trip to a nearby food truck, where I had my first beef tongue burrito (burrito lengua).  Tasty!

Santa Fe Farmers’ Market

We visited this treat a couple of times, a short walking distance from Chelsea’s house.  This is one of the oldest and largest farmers’ markets in the country. It serves 150 farmers and producers from 15 surrounding counties when operating at capacity.  There weren’t that many during our visit owing to the late season and Covid 19 concerns, but we were very impressed with the variety and quality of the offerings.  All manner of peppers are popular here, with roasting on the spot available from some vendors.

Chaco  Culture National Historic Park

Besides seeing our daughter, this was one of the priorities for the trip and we were not disappointed. This park is located about halfway between Albuquerque and Farmington in the northwestern part of New Mexico, high in San Juan Basin on the Colorado Plateau. This arid and remote park isn’t the easiest to get to. We drove through a patchwork of Indian reservations, state land, Bureau of Land Management properties, and National Forests. The last 20 miles to the park is on a dirt road.

This complex of buildings was a major center of culture for Ancient Pueblo people from about 900 – 1150 AD. The park had few visitors during our two days of wandering through the ruins, about 10 miles of meandering. It was interesting to note variations in construction techniques that evolved over the period of habitation, and how solar/lunar phenomena were factored into the orientation of the buildings. One interesting piece of rock art was the “Supernova pictograph” a star-crescent-hand pictograph that possibly depicts the Crab supernova in 1054 AD. This was during a period of peak habitation at the park, and the supernova is documented in Chinese records as being brighter than Venus and visible in daylight. Hopi oral traditions hold that their ancestors saw this “blue star” and were directed to converge at Chaco.

The park campground was closed during our visit, and we brought provisions to camp on open landscape. We chanced upon an alternative and stayed two nights at “Chaco Outlier Campsites” in a small building not much more than a yard barn but with beds, stove, and access to a clean toilet with hot shower. We had the place to ourselves, with a beautiful vista of the landscape and complete silence.

Bisti Wilderness

Our next trip after Chaco was to the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, about a 60-mile drive northwest from Chaco. Bisti is a name derived from the Navajo word meaning “badlands”, a fitting title for this rolling landscape of arid soil, hoodoos, “cracked eggs”, capped pinnacles, and petrified wood trunks.  There is scant evidence of plant life. This region is even less travelled than Chaco.  A small gravel parking lot and a few information signs are all that greet visitors.  There is a trailhead, but little of a defined trail after that.  Visitors can wander as they wish to see what interests them. I think we hiked about 5 miles.

The wilderness region covers billions of tons of coal and associated gas and oil reserves, a constant source of concern for wilderness advocates from those with other priorities.

Bandalier National Monument

Another distinctive archaeological attraction in the area, this monument is about 50 miles northwest of Santa Fe.  Volcanic activity in the area about 1.5 million years ago left an ash layer hundreds of feet thick, which compressed over time to a soft malleable rock known as tuff.  Ancestral Puebloans lived in this area from about 1150-1550 AD, carving homes into the mesa walls from the tuff.

Descendants of the residents here now live along the Rio Grande and maintain oral traditions of the area.  These descendants still work with park staff on issues affecting the monument.

On the way back to Santa Fe, we added a quick bonus stop to the Valles Caldera just west of Los Alamos. This caldera, 14 miles across, is one of only about a dozen supervolcano locations on earth, all of which will erupt someday at least seven times larger than any volcano in recorded history (a supervolcano by definition will eject at least 240 cubic miles of materials. Won’t that be a special day?)

Wheeler Peak

I am very casually working on climbing the highest peak in each state, so summiting the 13,167 foot Wheeler Peak near Taos was added to the agenda. This was about a 10-mile hike round trip with 3000 feet of elevation gain. This isn’t an especially difficult hike except for the elevation. Anything over 10,000 feet makes a difference when arriving from the low elevations of the east.  We enjoyed a splendid hike, topped off with a visit to dinner at Rancho de Chimayo.

We also enjoyed trips around Santa Fe while we were there to local restaurants, shops, and brew pubs. I bought a bag of pinon nuts from a parking lot van, and Lynn picked up a sun dress from one of the many downtown shops. Joe grilled up some chicken on a ‘disco’ grill made from a farm plow disc for delicious tacos. We enjoyed short local hikes with the fall colors on the quaking aspens.  We really enjoyed our stay in Santa Fe and getting to spend time with our daughter and her husband – a real pleasure to see what fine young people they have become.

Our return trip was a little more casual and enabled us to get a few more sites in.  Leaving Santa Fe, we headed south and spent an hour or so at the International UFO Museum in Roswell before heading to southwest Texas and Big Bend National Park. The National Park campground was booked to our surprise, but we made an excellent adjustment, staying at the spacious, tent-only Rancho Topango Campground in the small town of Terlingua just west of the park. We left the fly off the tent and slept under the stars. The next day was spend slowly meandering through the National Park, heading on from there through Texas backroads to begin the trek back across the country to Asheville, North Carolina.