Durango

Durango is an hour’s drive from our campsite in Cortez, Colorado. It was founded in 1880 as a railhead and smelting base for the ore mined at Silverton, 45 miles away. Silverton, at 9,300 feet, is one of the highest towns in the USA. The clue is in the name: Silverton. It produced mainly silver, but some gold too.  The mining prospered and Durango grew. The General Palmer hotel was built in 1898 and has a frontier look.

General Palmer ran the company that built the narrow gauge railroad from Durango to Silverton in the years 1881/82. In 1921 the price of metals fell and mining contracted, so Silverton and Durango went into a gradual decline. Mining ceased altogether in 1991, but the railroad continued as a tourist attraction. Fortunately, it’s a very scenic route and the town has rejuvenated year on year from the visitors who come to ride the railroad.

The railroad company complex houses a museum with railway memorabilia including some old engines similar to those it actually operates.

There’s a fine coach called General Palmer after the railroad boss. I suppose that’s the same as naming Trump Tower after Donald Trump. 

Some of the locomotives have risen to wider fame. This one appeared in “Around the World in 80 Days”. The caption tells more of the story.

The open coaches await the next journey to Silverton. Arriving at 9,300 feet has to be a chilly passenger experience most times of the year. 

We parked near the long, straight track heading out of the town, so I thought we would wait and capture the arrival of the last train, the 5:15 pm from Silverton. We’d see it coming a mile away, I thought.

But the train came from the other direction and appeared unexpectedly at the station. I just got a quick snap on before it shunted off behind some engine sheds.

Durango retains a friendly, small town atmosphere and, although we didn’t ride the train, we felt that we’d experienced something of its railroad history and heritage.

The Navajo Indians

Monument Valley is now a Navajo Tribal Park, part of the Navajo reservations that extend across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The Navajo is the equal largest tribe, the other being the Cherokee, but the Navajo hold the greatest reservation area, 27,000 square miles, larger than each of the 10 smallest States.

We take the Monument Valley tour with a Navajo guide, who is keen to point out the cultural aspects of their homeland as well as to flesh out the film making history.

Just after we set off, she points out a hogan. This is a traditional Navajo dwelling used these days for ceremonial purposes only. We know it’s not a current home as there’s no satellite dish on the roof.

 The Valley contains many sacred Indian sites. This is the Totem Pole, the really tall one.

We passed several stacks of wood, some distant, some near the track, looking like bonfire preparations. The guide explained that these were traditional burial sites.

The Navajo have a great weaving tradition, particularly rugs, and these became a marketable product from 100 years or so ago. So the Gouldings tapped into a demand that was already in existence. This is a photo of a Navajo weaving trading post in 1913.

This is an example of an individual rug.

As our rickety vehicle rattled around Monument Valley, the guide explained that, in their folk tales, the tribe had migrated into North America via the Bering Strait when it was frozen over some 10,000 plus years ago. Part of the tribe stayed in Canada, but the others settled in the Utah, Arizona, New Mexico area. This is borne out by current research into historical migration patterns.

The guide said that they may originally have been a Japanese people as they have some words in common with the Japanese language. This is ironic as the Navajos were used in the World War 2 as “code talkers” in the Pacific theatre fighting the Japanese. Because their language is so complicated and spoken only by the tribe itself, the Navajo “code talkers” sent and received classified military messages much more quickly than using code machines. It was highly successful and the language was never unscrambled. Clearly there weren’t that many words in common with Japanese.

But back to the tour bus, a modern day version of the bone-jarring covered wagon. Our guide is the short lady at the rear of the bus. This was taken at one of several trinket stops, but we weren’t tempted.

There were some dramatic views interspersed with the Navajo commentary. You can see why these two buttes are called the left and right mittens.

Final stop, final photo, this time of us against the full scenic panorama. She sang us a Navajo lullaby on the return journey to the campsite. Wouldn’t want to risk it it personally, it might set the kids on the warpath.

Just two most interesting days in Monument Valley, and now on to Cortez in Colorado.

Monument Valley

We head for Monument Valley, the iconic cowboy film location. How this came about is an interesting story that we’ll look at later in this blog.

It’s barely 100 miles from Moab to Monument Valley, and good roads. We pass through the town of Mexican Hat and see how it got its name from the balanced rock at the edge of town that looks like a sombrero.

We think we see our destination in the distance. A long, straight road leading to misty, jagged pinnacles. 

The campsite is in the village of Monument Valley and we are allocated a pleasant pitch. Here’s Jane sat nodding in the sunshine like a cowboy who’s ridden 50 miles. To be fair, she’d had worse- me driving for 50 miles.

The campsite is called Goulding’s Camp Park; the store in the village is Goulding’s Supermarket; the hotel is Goulding’s; the garage is Goulding’s. Everything is Goulding’s. There is a reason.

Harry Goulding and his wife bought a large area of land in Mounument Valley in the early 1920’s as a business opportunity. They had the idea of running a trading post, bartering food with the Navajo Indians in exchange for their hand crafted items like blankets and jewellery. These they sold on.

The Gouldings lived in tents for a few years then built a permanent premises with comfortable living quarters above. This still stands and is now a free museum. Pictures below show the Trading Post first, then their lounge.

The Trading Post was a success, both for the Gouldings and the Navajos. But the great depression of the 1930’s caused the demand for Navajo products to plummet. The Gouldings then had a desperate idea to bring back prosperity to the Valley. They decided to travel to Hollywood to persuade the film makers to use the Valley as a location.

By perseverence, they got to see top director John Ford and showed him their photos of the Valley. He was suitably impressed, and agreed to use it as the setting for his latest cowboy film, Stagecoach, starring a new actor called John Wayne.

The film was duly shot against a background recognisable today, as shown by the following Stagecoach film clips and my photos of the same scenes.

Stagecoach was a hit and launched John Wayne on his carreer of over 140 films. The Gouldings did the catering and accomodation for the film crew and actors. It was a financial success for the Gouldings and for the Navajo. They were hired as extras on top money for those days: $5 per day or $8 if they brought their own horses.

The film company also hired the Medicine Man so that it all ran smoothly with the Navajo extras.. For this he was paid $15 a day and, as John Ford said, worth every cent. Here he is.

As part of the museum, the filmset cabin from Stagecoach has been preserved. It still looks the part, complete with shifty character outside.

Inside the décor is authentic except for the cheesy lifesize cardboard cutout of John Wayne that I’ve left off camera.

The museum stagecoach also looks ready to roll for the next take.

Director John Ford made many films at this venue and had a particular spot he liked to spend time just gazing at the view. It’s now called, predictably, John Ford’s Point and you can pay $5 to sit on a horse contemplating that same vista or $0 doing so on foot.

It’s still a popular film location: literally dozens of movies have been shot here. The museum cinema  has free nightly showings of  early John Wayne movies, but we weren’t here long enough to fit that in.

However, we did take a tour of the Valley, run by Gouldings of course, with a Navajo guide.The Navajo is the subject of our next blog.

Canyonlands

This is the biggest park in Utah. It’s full of spectacular canyons and other geological features. It’s also got many dirt roads, used today by off-roaders like jeeps, dune buggies and macho tour vehicles such as humvees.

The roads predate the tourist trade and were built to service the mineral extraction industry. Uranium was discovered as early as 1910, but it was the discovery of a rich lode in the 1950’s that created the mining boom. This was the cold war era at its most intense and the population of Moab tripled between 1950 and 1960.

The photo shows a low-level and a high-level dirt road. The high-level road runs just below the canyon rim with an unprotected 1,500 foot drop. The off-roaders are welcome to it!

But all the mining roads seem to contain a suicidal section. This safe looking low-level road on the left of the next photo heads straight for the edge of a canyon within the main canyon. It’s got a name, “White Rim Road”, which describes its course precisely along the edge of the rim, and it runs for over 100 miles.

The lower canyon is carved by the Green River, which flows 700 feet below the White Rim Road, and is a spectacular sight in its own right.

Looking deep into some of these canyons with binoculars reveals some odd structures, columns hundreds of feet tall that could almost be made of brick. They aren’t, of course, just jagged, chaotic shapes carved over millions of years.

We did see a some creatures, not many with all the tourists around, but there were quite a few chipmunks that moved too quickly to photograph. This one obliged.

Some of the groups of grasses and pieces of dried wood grouped together almost into a formal garden.

 Now we’ll leave Canyonlands (doesn’t it sound like a Disney theme park), and follow the Colorado River upstream before it reaches Canyonlands. The scenic drive is a regular road next to the river with pulloffs to admire the views. The 1,450 mile long Colorado is a big river even here, 1,000 miles from the sea. 

And it still manages to have carved out a canyon through which it swiftly flows.

So it’s a good river for the adventurers as there are sections of rapids for the rubber boats to negotiate. They don’t seem to be too challenged here, though. Easy to say that when you’re stood on the riverbank.

Tomorrow we leave Moab for Monument Valley. There are many more locations we could have visited, but we are close to gobsmacked overload. 

Arches National Park

Arches, the closest park to Moab, was designated a National Monument in 1929. We asked ourselves how could this one be much different from other National Parks we’ve seen. The theme is rock formations and arches, hence the name. The scene is set soon after the entrance. The freestanding rock pillar in the center is several hundred feet tall.

Some pillars could have been deliberately carved into recognisible shapes. This one is called The Sheep.

Size is sometimes difficult to appreciate in photos. Balanced Rock, as it is called, is the size of three school buses and weighs an estimated 3,500 tonnes. That’s not cement, by the way, keeping it in place, but  a different strata of rock. There are many other examples of precariously balanced boulders.

So let’s now look at some arches. This is Double Arch with a span of 148 feet. You may pick out tiny figures that are people going to and from the arch.

 North and South Windows resemble a pair of spectacles. Bit heavy on the nose perhaps.

Worth a second glance are the fantastic shapes of the ancient dead juniper trees. Navajo Indians collect and dry juniper berries from living trees to make necklaces.

The arches are all sorts of strange shapes. This is turret arch, with a waving figure in the background to give an idea of scale.

The oddest arch is Delicate Arch. It looks like the bottom half of a body, and is 60 feet tall. Some arches are genuinely precarious: in 2008 one fell.

There are a staggering 2,000 plus arches altogether, The previous photos  show some of the more notable ones, but we didn’t have the time and energy to find the biggest. Landscape Arch is in a more remote part and is the world’s largest at 290 feet span.

No-one lives in the park because no-one is permitted to in any National Park, other than those essential for running the parks. But before 1929 there were a inhabitants were drawn to this wilderness. Here is Jane outside her dream home, the ex residence of a Mr Wolfe.

John Wolfe left his wife and children in Ohio and journeyed west with his eldest son in 1898. They settled in this valley and built a cabin, eking out a living by subsistence farming. A daughter came in 1906 and was appalled by their primitive living conditions. She insisted they build a new cabin with a wooden floor. This is the upgraded cabin- so what must the predecessor have been like! 

Other past dwellers include the Ute Indians who left some animal rock etchings near the Wolfe ranch. The experts say that these were carried out some time between 1650 and 1850.

 At one pull-in we watched the antics of a raven on the back of the truck in front. He dived into the back clearly looking for food. It pays dividends: a chap told us he’d seen a pair of ravens a few days earlier find and devour a packet of crisps, a bag of Gummy Worms (jelly babies) and an apple. Smart birds. 

Finally, the narrowest possible entrance. I’m squeezing between the rocks, if you can recognise the dark figure. Junk foodies beware!

But worth the effort. A golden sandstone arch about 20 feet high awaits on the other side.

Yes, Arches National Park was different and impressive, attracting 1.5 million visitors a year.