Canyonlands is a big national park in southern Utah that we’re tackling in sections; we’re camped near the south section now and we’ll move to the north section tomorrow. It’s got a lot of interesting rock formations, petroglyphs and pictograms, but—big deal to us now—a lot of green. It’s been since we were waylaid in […]
Recent Posts
Life in the Valley of the Gods
Valley of the Gods was part of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah when Obama designated it; Bears Ears was the first national monument created by request of and with input from Indigenous tribes. The protected land size was reduced under Trump, restored under Biden, then reduced under Trump again, and, thanks to lobbying from […]
Goodbye for Now, New Mexico
Yesterday, we pulled away from our campsite—looking out over the Angel’s Peak Badlands—and we headed north, out of New Mexico. For me, it was hard to say goodbye. At this last campsite, a spot Tracy chose for access to Chaco Culture, we were on BLM land looking at snow capped mountains in the distance, the […]
Chaco Culture
You hear about this place. But there’s no preparing for it. It’s certainly not just another stop on a tour of Puebloans’ ancestral villages. I could tell you random facts that struck me, such as that the smallest room in one of the “main houses” was found by archaeologists to have more turquoise than any […]
Friendships on the Road
Note from Shelly: This is a very welcome guest post! We met Tom and Amy at the Airstream rally this past fall. (They’ve been living full-time in their trailer for the past two years; they lived on a boat before that.) We talked about this topic at a brewery yesterday in Santa Fe. It’s tough […]
What National Monuments Preserve
That’s what I was going to call this post, seeing as how yet more national monuments are on the current administration’s chopping block, as well (of course) as the jobs of park rangers across the country at national parks and national historic parks. I knew when we started this “summer of parks” in the West […]
When Housekeeping Is the Barrier-Breaker
There’s a beautifully written book entitled, Housekeeping, in which author Marilynne Robinson’s radical hero, a vagrant, estranged aunt, moves into a rural house to be the guardian of two teen girls. What could be seen as her neglect of housekeeping allows nature to slowly take over the old house. What’s really happening is a breakdown of the […]
El Morro and El Malpais
These are national monuments in western New Mexico: off the beaten path, managed by the National Park Service. There are 138 national monuments in the United States and 63 national parks. El Morro Roughly, this means “The Headland.” El Morro is a giant sandstone outcropping with a life-saving pool of water at its base (created […]
Western New Mexico via BLM Land
We’re in the El Malpais National Conservation Area, a little north of the National Monument. Tracy’s walked on some of the lava flows that made people long ago name this the bad land, but I haven’t yet, so I’ll save those photos for another post. I can catch up to this point, though. We had […]
Camping and Hiking along the Gila River
We’ve spent a week boondocking in a horse corral between the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument visitor’s center and the trailhead to the cliff dwellings hike; in short, along the Gila River in western New Mexico. The Gila is one of the longest rivers in the West, with a gigantic watershed. People have lived along […]
