Danita feeding the horses

We’re beginning to look forward to coming home. Our route is drafted, and an alternate is also drafted. We have our normal 3-day weekend, but of course not much of anything will be open tomorrow. We did chores yesterday. I did a bike ride and Danita visited Best Friends, a huge animal sanctuary that is located near Kanab. Today we went to communion service and had breakfast out. Tomorrow one of the people we work with invited us to Thanksgiving dinner.

Mormon Fort. The first caretaker was Mr. Winsor. It became known as “Winsor’s Castle”.

Since we’re being so lazy, here’s a few pics of Pipe Spring.

One can see the entire width of he Arizona strip from our property (about 60 miles). It’s not hard to see if somebody is coming. The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is on the horizon.

Our Longhorn Cattle

This shot of the fort shows the spring-fed pond

After visiting Valley of Fire, we drove to our hotel in Mesquite. Winds were quite high. After dinner winds were still bad. I ran over a tumbleweed. I decided it wasn’t wise to try to avoid hitting it when driving 70 MPH. Self-driving cars are in the news these days. I wonder what a self-driving car would have done? Yesterday we drove back from our hotel in Mesquite, NM. We stopped at a couple of Mormon sites in St. George, and we watched the movie “Arrived”. (Highly recommended.) Our car looks awful from the wind, sand, and overnight moisture. Today is Friday, which is our Monday.

I wasn’t motivated to take any pics, so here’s a sunset sequence. We certainly don’t get to see this stuff at home.

White Dome area – slot canyon

Our work schedule was modified to help cover for departing rangers. We are working Friday to Monday. That starts our “weekend” a day earlier. (I am having a little trouble thinking of Monday as my Friday. The combination explodes in my brain.) We are on our last planned large trip this week. We drove to Nevada to visit the Valley of Fire state park. It’s a beautiful park with several trails. We walked two of them. The first was the White Dome Area. The trail goes down into a canyon, which gets narrow and becomes a way cool slot canyon. Coming out of the canyon, we climb a hill to get an overview of part of the park. The colors are stunning – reds, pinks, yellows, whites, and even some purples. We hadn’t seen all of these colors in one spot before today.

Rainbow Colors

The next trail was the petroglyph trail. The colors weren’t as stunning, but the petroglyphs were. This was awesome enough that it warranted eating lunch there. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anywhere near lunch time, so I had a snack instead.

After the second hike, we did a brief tour of the visitor center movie and displays. I was pretty tired, and the weather was threatening high winds, so we left to go to our next stop, the Lost City Museum.

Petroglyphs

I had high hopes for this museum, but I was pretty disappointed. The concept is cool. They built a museum on top of an Anasazi Village archaeological site. (Anasazi is Navajo for Enemy, so the PC term these days is “The Ancient Ones”. But that is vague and nobody knows what it refers to.) The museum divided the dig into three sections – one to show what it looked like before the dig, one for what it looked like after the dig, and an “interpretation” of what was there. That was OK. But the rest of the exhibits were a mash-up of ancient artifacts, reconstructions of those artifacts, and modern Indian art. They weren’t clearly delineated and nothing was dated, They had some panels referring to what was present at different geological times, but they seemed to be randomly thrown in where they had empty space.

Lost City Museum

Nevertheless, the museum was on the way to hour hotel, it didn’t cost much, and it provided a nice view of the Anasazi. Some of the reproduction baskets were stunning. The CCC built a fake village outside the museum. The picture shows Danita playing around the fake village. There’s no way either of us could have squeezed ourselves inside any of the Anasazi rooms.

Star Trek Enterprise

Here’s a bonus pic. I took it on the petroglyph trail. It looks to me like the Star Trek Enterprise emerging from the rock. (Stark Trek Generations was filmed at the park.)

Pioneer Names

After last weekend’s extravagant outing, we are enjoying an easy weekend this week. We took a half-day trip to Snow Canyon. (Some of the sandstone is white — like snow.) We saw a cliff where pioneers wrote their names in axle grease in the 1890s. At the bottom of the cliff, other people had written their names, much more recently. The names at the bottom of the cliff are graffiti. The names from the 1890s are a feature.

Snow Canyon

We also took a pleasant walk into a slot canyon. We walked all the way to the end. There was a low lookout nearby. It was quite nice, but it wasn’t quite awesome. I didn’t eat any meals in Snow Canyon.

There was unhappiness in Pipe Spring this week. Running a park is labor intensive. To keep costs down, the parks use a mixture of volunteers, seasonal workers, interns, and temporary contract workers. This keeps the number of permanent employees down. (You know, the kind of employees that get benefits like medical insurance.) The folks at Pipe Spring were bending the rules and hiring people for more months than they are allowed to work by reassigning the people to different jobs at different pay grades. This week, the results of an audit came back. They got wrapped on the knuckles rather hard. Several seasonal employees will be leaving earlier than they planned.

That’s about all the news this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Watching the Ballooners

We started our second day in Page, AZ by watching the balloon ascension from our hotel room. This was totally unplanned. We learned the annual balloon ascension would be the weekend we are in Page. After we checked in, we learned one of the ascension sites was visible from our room. The weather didn’t cooperate, but it sure was fun watching them mill around from the comfort of our room.

Glen Canyon Dam Visitor’s Center

From there, we visited Glen Canyon Dam. It was a pretty standard dam tour. I think Hoover Dam was a lot cooler. Although the visitor center building is a very cool.

View at the end of Hanging Garden Trail

We took a short hike to a hanging garden – which means moss-like plants growing on the wall of a wet rock. If the garden wasn’t all that great, the hike itself was very nice. Notice Danita near the bottom of the picture.

Lake Powell from the Boat

I especially liked the “Castle” on the right near the horizon. I’m still doing my new hobby of eating in amazing places. Yesterday I ate at Lee’s Ferry (the original, upstream location) and Horseshoe Bend. Today, I ate at the top of the Hanging Garden trail and on the Lake Powell boat trip we took after the hike.

Navajo Canyon, Navajo Wash Wall

The boat tour included travel up two canyons. The first was Navajo Canyon, which contains a way-cool wall with “Navajo Wash”. It looks rather like a psychedelic mural. This photo really doesn’t do it justice.

Antelope Canyon

We also visited Antelope Canyon. The channel kept getting narrower. We were in a substantial boat. We were all convinced the boat wouldn’t even fit. The pilot managed to turn it around and drive it back out.

After that, it was time for the drive back to Pipe Spring. Tomorrow’s a work day …

Navajo Bridge

We are on an overnight trip to Page, AZ. We started out with a communion service and breakfast in Kanab. Then we drove to the Colorado River just above the Grand Canyon. Navajo Bridge was built in 1929, making it efficient for cars to cross the Colorado River. By 1990, they needed a wider bridge that could handle heavier trucks. They left the old bridge up for pedestrians to use.

Original location of Lee’s Ferry. “Lee’s Backbone” is in the background.

Before Navajo Bridge, the only way to cross the river around here was to take Lee’s Ferry. John D. Lee was a Mormon. Back in 1857, Brigham Young was building a theocratic nation-state in Utah. President Buchanan took exception to that and decided to send out a civil governor, judges, and 2500 Federal troops. The Mormons decided the only reason to send troops would be to throw them out of Utah. This set up a hysterical war mentality that ultimately lead to the Meadow Mountain Massacre, where the Mormons in southern Utah killed 110 people in a wagon train trying to go to California. John D. Lee was the only person identified by name to participate in the massacre.

Building at Lee’s Ferry

Brigham sent Lee to a remote lumber mill for a few years. Then he sent him to the even more remote Colorado river to establish a ferry service for Mormons who wanted to move into Arizona. Lee created the ferry a few miles upstream of where they eventually built Navajo Bridge.  Lee’s ferry used a steep hill, gaining 300 feet of elevation, called “Lee’s Backbone”. It was the hardest part of the journey to AZ. Wagons had to be double-teamed with oxen to make it up the hill. A few years later, Lee was tried for the massacre, found guilty, and executed by being shot. He was not the only person to participate in the massacre, but he was the only person ever punished.

Second location of Lee’s Ferry

Lee’s widow took over the ferry and moved it downstream, closer to Navajo Bridge. The new location avoided the steep hill, but snow melt made the river impassible in the summer. Over the years, a cable was added to make the ferry safer. The ferry was used to transport materials for the Navajo Bridge. Unfortunately, the ferry sank about 6 months before the bridge was complete. They had to finish the bridge without the ferry, which added over a hundred miles of travel between the two sides of the bridge.

Steam Engine

Most people around here don’t know about the two different locations for Lee’s ferry. So now you know more than most about a small piece of Mormon history. The steam engine shown here was brought out when they found gold in the area. Charles Spenser started a gold mining company. Besides the steam engine, there are also remnants of a large steam boiler and the steam boat. The gold was very fine — really just dust. The plans for removing the gold were a total flop. The gold mining company was a spectacular failure.

Horseshoe Bend

After that, we went to Horseshoe Bend. This is an easy 3/4 mile walk to a point where the Colorado River goes through a spectacular 300 degree bend around a piece of sandstone rock. The vantage point is high above the river. The view is quite dramatic.

We finished the day with hamburgers and ice cream for dinner. We’re snugly ensconced in our hotel room in the city of Page, AZ; well positioned for tomorrow’s adventures.