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Published: April 19th 2006
Canyon de "Shelly"
Shelly on the rim of the canyon that might have been her namesake: Canyon de Chelly.
Palm Springs, Calif. - Canyon de Chelly, Ariz.
Mile 3,834 On our trek into the southwest—destination Canyon de Chelly—we’ve been offered several different pronunciations of the famous Anasazi dwelling place. Upon arrival in the Navajo Nation, we received the definitive answer: it’s not Canyon de
Shelly, but
d’Shay, as in the French. I was a bit disappointed!
Jeff and I began this chapter in California’s contradictory Coachella Valley, a seemingly arid desert in which thrives Palm Springs, with its acres of green golf courses; the San Andreas Fault, whose folded rock forces groundwater up to the surface and feeds native palm oases; and the most productive (nonnative and irrigated) date palm “gardens” in the country. Date milkshake, anyone?
Our hosts in the Palm Springs metropolis (La Quinta, actually), were the extended family of Grady, my first cousin twice removed. We know Grady’s sister Polly well (we’ll be visiting her in Ohio), but had never met Grady. Three pleasant days later we had become happily acquainted with his children, Drew, David and Leah (who kept an improv theater game going for a whole hour one evening!), and their mother Lorraine, as
Canyon de "Jeff"??
Jeff looking down into Canyon de Chelly, on the Navajo Reservation. well as Grady’s wife Julie and her precocious 8-year-old, Adam. We broke out our bag of summer clothes for the first time, with sunny days in the 80s. Highlights were Grady’s cooking (see photo of the pile of barbecued ribs we polished off) and attending a Little League game in which Adam hit a home run!
And go figure, we got harassed by a cop our first night out of L.A. We were parked on the street of Grady’s sleepy cul-de-sac, next to the house because the driveway was sloping. It was 10:30 p.m. and I still had the light on because I was finishing up my daily log entry, but Jeff was fast asleep when a hard rap came on the door. “Sheriff’s Department,” was the only identification. Sleepily we dressed and opened the door so we could explain we were not vagrants. Turned out our gruff welcome-to-the-neighborhood came from the unobservant cop who lived next door to our hosts and hadn’t bothered to notice the orange electrical cord connecting us to their abode before so rudely intruding on our peace. Without apologizing, the cop explained he’d just gotten off his shift and had “never seen anything like
Palm Tops
Desert palms are native to the Palm Springs valley and thrive in oases along the San Andreas Fault. this” parked in the neighborhood. He demanded to know why, if we were visiting relatives, we weren’t sleeping in the house! We didn’t bother with a thorough explanation of our chosen mode of life for the year.
But now we can identify with the author of Blue Highways, the round-the-country travel memoir I just finished reading. (Thank you to Howard in Port Townsend for being the first to recommend it, and to Susan on Guemes Island for giving me a copy!) William Least Heat Moon writes, after being harassed by police for parking his van overnight on a quiet side street one too many times, “I’d traveled ten thousand miles and had not encountered a single hoodlum. But I’d been taken for one several times.”
Our final destination in California was Joshua Tree National Park, one of the newest parks in the system, and one that was formed primarily to protect vulnerable desert plants, including the Dr. Seuss-inspired Joshua trees and the cholla cactus. Our two nights of dry camping in the desert (no water available anywhere in the park) were bookended by visits to mineral hot springs: at Desert Springs on the way in, we sunbathed and
Shelly & Grady
Shelly and Grady, her first cousin twice removed, stand at the bearded base of a native desert palm. dipped in a hotel’s commercially developed pools, and at Tonopah on the way out, we splurged on a private soak in our own clawfoot tub, in a much funkier setting.
We wished we could have spent more time in Joshua Tree NP, but we managed to pack in a lot of exploring. The highlight was a ranger-led hike for us and six other people, up a canyon wash to a played-out but once very rich gold mine called Lost Horse Mine. The ranger was full of stories, the view from the top was panoramic, and we got a good feel for the diverse geology and habitats of the park. Joshua Tree was also where we first put our homemade awning to good use. Jeff had taken instructions from a friend on how to manufacture shade out of a tarp, two bamboo poles, and light line, and after assembling it in Palm Springs, it worked marvelously (see photos of awning and its satisfied maker at rest). It rolls up and stows securely on our roof racks when not in use.
We had a date to keep in Phoenix: a spring training baseball game! Our friend Sierra from Seattle was
Julie & Adam
Julie and Adam dig into a pile of Grady's barbecued ribs during our stay in Palm Springs. We ate well! visiting her friend Pedro in Phoenix, and we arranged to all meet up for a Seattle Mariners vs. Anaheim Angels game in the A’s Tempe Diablo Stadium. We got the cheap seats on the grass behind the left field wall, but they were the best seats as far as we were concerned. How often do you have to don a straw hat to watch the Mariners play in Seattle?? OK, so our beloved team was squashed 15-4, but we celebrated anyway with a dinner of excellent Cuban cuisine under the gaze of Camelback Mountain.
Also in Phoenix we reuned with former Port Townsend residents Sarah and Tom. Sarah, a fine reporter, was my successor’s successor at the Leader newspaper until she and her fiancé (now husband) Tom, a photographer, moved back to their home state of Arizona. They now both work for different area newspapers and treated us to breakfast. It was great to catch up!
We stayed in Scottsdale with my mother’s college roommate and her maid of honor. How’s that for a longtime connection? Sue and her husband Dan shared stories of my parents during their courting days as well as updates on their children, one
Adam at First Base
We attended Adam's Little League game in Palm Springs. of whom is my age and about to have her first baby. We may visit her in Denver. Their son works in Jeff’s field as a city planner for Phoenix. Jeff asked me to note that he thought the city had made notable progress in its urban planning since he’d visited eight years ago. Although the edges of the metropolitan area are still sprawling into agricultural land, each municipality seems to be investing in its downtown and in public transit (a light rail is going in). This is good news for a place whose population numbers continue to spiral upward.
Sue and Dan gave us member’s passes to the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, and there we had the once-in-a-lifetime experience of helping to release scores of new residents into the butterfly garden. The new arrivals were shipped from a butterfly farm in Florida, chilled on ice, and packaged—wings folded flat—in wax paper envelopes. I kid you not! As the butterflies warmed up, visitors like us who happened to be at the scene were invited to “open” these little gifts. The technique for the moths, we were told, was to insert your finger into the envelope and let them
Adam Takes Off
At his next at-bat, Adam hit a home run!! climb on, then transfer them to a stem once they had perked up. See the sequence of photos taken with my right hand of my left hand doing just that!
“Are you going to the Grand Canyon?” everyone in Arizona asked us. That answer is “no.” Both Jeff and I have made trips there independently in the past, and one goal of this trip is to seek out uniquely new experiences for the two of us. That’s why we headed north and east into Indian country instead. There is no escaping the fact that this nation was well-populated by other people before the Europeans we are both descended from came on the scene, and although our ancestors tried their best to obliterate the “Indians,” many survived. We owe these people the respect of learning what we can about what survives of their cultures, and I tell you, much of what we’re learning on this trip is glossed over or ignored in high school U.S. history courses. Parents, take your children to Canyon de Chelly…
The Canyon is a National Monument administered by the National Park Service, but the land is part of the Navajo reservation, and that makes
Awning
We tested our new awning in the field at Joshua Tree National Park. for some interesting mixed uses. The floor of the canyon itself is actively farmed and grazed by Navajos, just as it was by the Hopi before them and the Anasazi before them. And the ruins—the famous cliff houses—were built by the earliest group of people about 1,000 years ago. They are remarkably well preserved, at least to the point it’s easy to visualize them as whole buildings, unlike many archaeological sites.
This history fills a gap in our nation’s narrative: namely, what was America like before the 1500s? The answer, at least for the Southwest tribes: rich and fulfilling. The worst trouble came in the mid-1860s, when the rest of the U.S. was at war with itself but Kit Carson was authorized to burn the crops in Canyon de Chelly and forcibly remove all its inhabitants. The Navajo were imprisoned by the government for four years at Fort Sumner before being allowed to return to their ancestral lands. One gets the feeling they never forgave the injustice (yes, there’s some associated guilt here).
There are no fees or passes required to enter the monument or to camp in the official campground, which we did. It was quite cold
Awning Maker
In the shade our home-made awning cast, the awning maker takes a well-deserved rest. and blustery our first day there and we decided to do a self-guided rim drive and hike, and wait for better weather on the morrow to decide about paying for a guided jeep tour into the canyon (which had been recommended to us). But the first day’s activities turned out to be quite fulfilling, with the changeable clouds providing great photo opportunities at the rim lookouts and the hike to White House Ruin (see photos), which we had all to ourselves late in the day, giving us the shivers of ghosts past. So we skipped the tour, drove the opposite rim of the canyon this morning in full sunshine, and now we’re off to Colorado to explore more cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park tomorrow.
In between Phoenix and Canyon de Chelly we overnighted in Cottonwood, Ariz., and made day trips to the hilltop Tuzigoot Ruins of the Sinagua peoples, the revived funky hillside mining town of Jerome, and the desirable city of Sedona, where the sign codes are even stricter than they are in Port Townsend! The McDonalds “M” logo wasn’t even yellow, it was blue and posted on an adobe building. No other signage, no name.
Cholla Cactus
Joshua Tree NP is home to the rare, head-high cholla cactus. A restaurant that looked unique but was totally recognizable. We shared a pie in a pizzeria where we were thrilled to see a window advertisement for “gluten-free pizza.” The crust was quite good, even I have to say.
Then we drove the length of the Mogollon Rim, a place that has resided in Jeff’s imagination since he became a Louis L’Amour fan. At the end of March, the 7,000-foot rim still carried a rime of snow. At sunset, we looked out on unbroken pine forests rippling like waves against the ridge’s shore. Very beautiful. At Tonto Natural Bridge State Park, we explored “the largest natural travertine bridge in the world,” and encountered native javelinas (small wild boar). Also, we drove through the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert (adjacent national parks), marveling at what mineralization can do.
And we had two successful pick-ups. You may recall from the last blog entry that my digital camera had to be left in L.A. for repairs. Well, I had it back in my hands a week later after it was FedEx-ed to our Scottsdale hosts. And when Matilda’s fresh-water pump gave out after 17 years of loyal service (we think it was
Cholla Closeup
The beautiful woody "bones" of the cholla cactus. the original), we simply ordered a new one from GoWesty and picked it up four days later at General Delivery in the Ganado Post Office. Jeff had the new pump installed within the hour.
Next stops: southeastern Colorado, then northern New Mexico and Kansas (we could use more host contacts in those two states, if you have any suggestions to pass along). With snow in the forecast later this week, we’re not planning to attempt the mountain passes to the Denver area this spring, but will swing through on our northern leg in the fall.
Lastly, we’ve been bothered lately with having to change our watches back and forth as we entered Arizona (which doesn’t observe daylight savings time) and then the Navajo reservation (which does), and now today we undo this “daylight savings” with an hour leap ahead… Clock time really matters so little to us, and we are constantly forgetting the day of the week. It reminds me of another line from the road tripper William Least Heat Moon:
“On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler’s fourth
Sierra & Shelly
We met up with Sierra from Seattle in Phoenix for a Mariner's spring training game. dimension—change is.”
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Testerman parents
non-member comment
Sheff and Jelly's saga is inspiring!
We continue to enjoy your wonderful photos. How special to see Sue and Dan. They look just the same as they did 34 years ago at their wedding, 2 months before ours. What great southwest vistas, bridges, and formations. Matilda's new brim seems perfect. Nice to be sunny and warm enough to need it. Bill has always wanted to see the Indian ruins and now he is seeing them through your lens. Anxiously awaiting more.......love, Mom and Dad