There is no way to leave the Rockies more thoroughly than to travel south on US 550 from Durango and turn right at Farmington. Within a few minutes the high mountains and wealth of Colorado drift behind, and the road opens up to another kind of country altogether. Around here it's called Indian Country. And our next destination, Canyon de Chelly, was inside the Navajo Nation.
I'd heard that the Navajo reservation was one of the poorest places in America, and I expected to see grinding poverty and more than a little desperation. I was surprised, then, to see brand new community facilities springing up in even the most remote towns, neatly tended houses and trailers, and a general lack of the garbage and chaos one usually associates with poor neighborhoods in other parts of the country.
One of the first sites on the reservation is Ship Rock:
It's just a big-ass hunk o' rock, and I think that's all you need to know.
Our first stop in Navajoland was the Teec Nos Pos trading post, in the town of the same name. I don't know what Teec Nos Pos means in Navajo, but my guess is "store full of nice things you can't possibly afford". The trading post, like most in Navajoland, includes both a small general store and a "rug room". The rug room at Teec Nos Pos contains some of the highest quality genuine Navajo rugs you can find anywhere, and a decent sized rug with a nice pattern will run you at least $600. $1400 for something big enough to cover a twin bed Trust me, that's a bargain. The same rug in Santa Fe will cost 40-60% more.
You think gas prices are high? Try buying a Navajo rug.
Put off by the prices, we got back on the road without buying anything and headed west for the "town" of Mexican Water, where it was rumored we'd find the junction with the highway that would take us south to Chinle, the town next to Canyon de Chelly. At first glance, Mexican Water appeared to consist of a gas station in the middle of nowhere. But upon closer examination, we realized that a Navajo "town" is constructed differently than other towns--there may be one or two businesses in a central location, but most of the people do not live clumped together. The houses and trailers are spread out over a great distance, so that each family has an endless vista and total privacy.
South we went, and passed by this spectacular butte somewhere between the middle of nowhere and the outer edge of timbuctu:
People honked at us as we took pictures, so I'm not sure if we violated some sort of rule.
And finally, we arrived in Chinle. Chinle, which means roughly "mouth of the canyon" in Navajo, has a full set of schools, some reservation housing developments, a few major hotels, a couple of trading posts, and lots of unattended horses and dogs running loose on the roads. Further in, it has Canyon De Chelly National Park, which is jointly managed by the Federal government and the Najavo people.
And it is those people who have maintained--or perhaps also developed--a unique culture in this remote part of the country. A culture which can be a bit off-putting at first to a traveler. At the Canyon De Chelly visitors' center, several Navajo docents assisted tourists with questions. I asked one of them how long a particular trail was. The docent said "half a mile roundtrip". I asked if it was difficult. They said no. Later on, I found out the trail was a couple of miles round trip, and the return portion is up an extremely strenuous hill.
Was the docent deliberately lying? I don't think so. I don't think he'd been on that trail in a long time. What I sensed from him, and several other people I encountered on the reservation, is a lack of urgency about giving tourists accurate answers. To the locals, an approximation is good enough. I found that if I pushed people a little bit, the answers would often get more accurate and more detailed with each successive question.
Is this a Navajo thing? If I had grown up in a city, I might think so. But I grew up in small, rural towns, and I've run into this before in rural non-Indian communities. I think it is just a reflection of the slower pace of life in a small, isolated town. Sometimes it's just easier to see a culture when it is separated by race or history from your own.
On to the Canyon. You may meet people who have gone to Canyon de Chelly and driven the rim routes, looking down into the Canyon from viewpoints. I'm telling you right now, that if that's all you've done, you haven't been there. The only way to fully experience the canyon is to also take the all-day Navajo tour.
You can't enter the canyon without a guide. This is because the canyon floor is actually owned by several individual Navajo families, and they are rather graciously allowing tourists to drive through their property to see the canyon. This ownership arrangement occurred after the Navajo returned from the concentration camps in New Mexico (where they had been brutally sent by the US government), and it is unlikely to change in the near future. Seeing the canyon from the floor is, therefore, a privilege. Luckily, it is one the Navajo are happy to oblige.
We took a tour with the Canyon de Chelly Thunderbird Lodge, the only lodging inside the park. It's a decent motel, with nice interiors and everything you could want except usable phone service. But if you can go two days without calling somebody it's the best choice in Chinle. The Thunderbird tours are the only ones with actual bathrooms (they own all the bathrooms in the canyon) and the Thunderbird lodge is the only Navajo-owned establishment in town, so there are many reasons to stay there. But the best one is that the tours leave right from the lodge, and the guides are excellent. Ours was named George.
George loaded us into the 26-seater propane-powered 4wd jeep-like-thing and took off into the canyon like a bat out of hell. I mean, that guy can DRIVE. Immediately, the soft colors of the desert floor fell away behind us, and we found ourselves immersed in a spectacular sandstone canyon, water flying up from the wash below us.
It is basically impossible to properly photograph this place. It is truly spectacular in a way you can't see from these pictures. Narrow, 500 to 1000 foot sculpted sandstone walls, turning every few hundred yards so that you can never see too far ahead to know what wonders await.
The jeep was comfortable and quite a fun ride. This is the sort of tour kids and teenagers would really get into for the vehicle alone.
The stream that runs through the canyon dries up later in the summer, but we crossed it over a hundred times as it carried spring runoff from the nearby mountains.
We saw numerous Anasazi ruins, smaller than Mesa Verde, but in a far more spectacular setting. This set of ruins, known as "Mummy Cave", was improperly restored by an archeologist who was incorrect about the size of the doorways. He did such a bad job that the Navajo and Hopi (Hopi may be descendents of the Anasazi) forbade any further restoration.
Cottonwoods grow throughout the canyon, and the spring brought a blizzard of cotton spreading their seeds far and wide.
The picture above was taken near the small mesa where a band of Navajo resisted American attempts to drag them off to concentration camps for over a year. To this day, it is forbidden to go up on top of the mesa to see what the resistors left behind. The Navajo even have a no-fly zone over the canyon to prevent people from peeking. It's a sacred place, in the sense that a tragic chapter in Navajo history should not be violated by looky-loos. The whole story is too long to relay here, but the gist of it is that the US government killed more than half the Navajo people through concentration camps and forced marches in the 19th century. Every Navajo you meet today is a descendant of the survivors of those atrocities.
Update: I completely forgot to tell you all about the man-eating sheep. So we're in the jeep, bouncing along about halfway up the Canyon, when I suddenly hear an enormous "ROOOAAAAAARRRRRRRGHGGHGHGH". I turn to the left, and I swear to god, there was a sheep the size of a grizzly bear bearing its teeth and roaring at us. I swear to god. I have never seen anything like it in my life. Big, giant, massively unsheared, ram's horns, the works. It was unnaturally large. I can only assume that if the jeep had stopped, it would have attacked and eaten all 26 tourists in an instant.
Last installment coming next week: we check out some really old grafitti, go shopping with the Zuni, and wrap up the great roadtrip of 2004.
Table of Contents for A Great Southwest Road Trip:Part 1: Albuquerque and Carlsbad
Part 2: Santa Fe
Part 3: Taos
Part 4: Pagosa Springs, Colorado
Part 5: San Juan Skyway, Colorado
Part 6: Mesa Verde
Part 7: Durango & Silverton Railroad
Part 8: Navajoland and Canyon de Chelly
Part 9: Zuni Pueblo, El Morro & El Malpais
Part 10: Wrap Up of the Great Southwest
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