2025: Summer at Four Corners

Each year I’ve been on the road I’ve written a recap of our travels, and I’m not letting this one slide by without the proper Come Look at My Vacation Photos! post. We spent this spring and early summer at so many national parks, national monuments, and national forests in three of the Four Corners states: New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado.

I began this by pointing out what I learned that the dedicated park workers and volunteers do at these national sites: protect historical and environmentally valuable places, conduct crucial research, educate visitors about unique ecology, geologic formations found nowhere else, ancestral architecture, art culture, on and on. But this post was getting weighed down by my attempts to make a connection: that each location and all that it preserves is at risk right now. So I’ll stick to a couple of photos per location and a link to a blog post. Meager, but enough to say: Come Look at My Vacation Photos!

April in New Mexico

White Sands National Park

White Sands is oddly like the desert I was about to see in New Mexico and Utah: it’s a seemingly homogeneous landscape, but it’s actually subtle in its changeable beauty. Its small signs of life and shifts in sunlight and shadow take patience to witness but are unlike the in-your-face beauty of anywhere else.

I was surprised by this dualism nearly everywhere we visited this summer.

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

My first exposure to ancestral dwellings of people who have lived in this part of the country for so long, people whose stories are best told by their descendants who still live here.

El Moro and El Malpais National Monuments

We visited the former dwelling sites of people way up on top of mesas and we walked on lava landscapes.

All while staying way out on our own, fully immersed in this unusual landscape of piñon trees and desert sand.

Bandelier National Monument

I met crucial park workers here, explored cave dwellings, and wondered at petroglyphs.

Plus, of course, beautiful hikes, and a strange visit to Los Alamos.

Chaco Culture National Historic Park

Chaco Culture is a UNESCO world heritage site worth additional research on my part; I believe it ties together most of the ancestral sites we saw over the summer as having most likely been the cultural center for this entire area of civilization.

May in Utah

Valley of the Gods

An area of Utah that’s so unlike what I was expecting. So vast, so dramatic. And we camped right in its midst.

Canyonlands National Park

Such a large and varied park that there are two sections; I made it into only one but Tracy never held back. As always, petroglyphs and pictographs are everywhere, some protected, some not.

Arches National Park

So much more than arches.

Dinosaur National Monument

A sports-field-sized wall of partially excavated dinosaur bones preserved and presented just for the public. Astounding.

June in Colorado

Colorado National Monument

This park is one drive that looks down into many steep canyons and over at towering pinnacles.

Mesa Verde National Park

Here was the most informative ranger-led tour of cultural sites we’d gone on all summer. Again, I need to re-visit my notes; this ranger sent me a timeline connecting all of these significant sites, and I plan to create my own timeline so I can put them in context of when I saw what and how it connects historically.

Colorado was beginning to look like this for us:

San Juan National Forest

Boondocking near Durango allowed us to spend time in the Colorado I had imagined: bright green alpine valleys below giant, snow-capped mountain ranges.

Camped by a fast-flowing stream among spring flowers.

Rio Grande National Forest

Near the headwaters of the Rio Grande River. Such a surreal experience for me, seeing as how we spent three winters at the outlet of the Rio Grande in South Texas. Such a huge river.

It’s headwaters is rife with waterfalls.

That’s one way to present the summer, segmented by national parks, national forests, and national monuments.

Friends of Summer 2025

But there’s also the people! Few, but significant.

Fellow Airstream fulltimers Leon and Rachael were our neighbors in Austin, Texas, for all of March while Tracy rebuilt the broken trailer hitch. So grateful for their support and company.

In New Mexico we stopped at Doug and Melanie’s new homebase (an RV, of course!) to help fix it up. Can’t wait to see them again when they visit Wisconsin next summer.

Our paths crossed several times with new friends (also Airstreaming fulltimers) Tom and Amy, with whom we have so much in common. Maybe we’ll see them this fall.

In Durango we met up with Scott and Vanessa; Scott and I went to college together, so this was a super fun, nostalgic meetup at a brewery that overflowed into a full day of hanging out at the campsite.

I could include a photo from an amazing stay at Angel Peak, or the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival, the hailstorm in Grand Junction, the cowboy near Creede, the cows surrounding us … everywhere! The rattlesnakes, the coyotes, the breweries, the hikes, the happy hours by the trailer.

This will have to do to recap this one summer (really just the spring and early summer) chocked full of travel, learning, hiking, boondocking, adventure adventure adventure. Our last summer on the road.