Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

First off, I want to thank everyone who has been visiting the blog and commenting on the posts.  It is very encouraging, and we hope you are enjoying our posts (almost as much as we are enjoying the trip itself).

Secondly, you can now stalk us in near real-time.  We have added a new feature: on the right-hand side there is now a map showing “Where We Are Now”.  We will update this daily with our current location (cell phone signal permitting).  We had a widget like this on the old Solstice blog, but keeping that up-to-date was a complicated process involving a sextant and a ham radio.  Cell phone apps make everything so easy.

We took the scenic route instead of the I-40 today (I was again driving) – up AZ Highway 77 to AZ 264, then north on AZ 191 to Chinle.  We had planned for an early arrival at Canyon de Chelly National Monument.  But but hadn’t planned for the time zone change (the Navajo reservation follows Daylight Savings Time, unlike the rest of Arizona).  So it wasn’t until afternoon that we started exploring the park.

Most of the canyon part of Canyon de Chelly is off-limits to anyone hiking without a guide.  But there are two roads that follow the rim of the canyon.  The park ranger told us that the South Rim was best seen in the afternoon, so that’s the one we chose.  There were pull-outs all along the road with overlooks down into the canyon.  I know I use this word a lot but it really was breathtaking.

There is one trail down into the canyon where you are permitted to hike without a guide – White House Trail.  It’s a 2-hour hike down into the canyon (550 ft elevation change) leading to some Anasazi ruins.  You can see the ruins from the overlook by the road, but we wanted to get down there and see them up close.  Here’s the view from up top.

Luckily for us, we are driving around in our house, so we were able to throw on some hiking clothes and fill up our water bottles and go!  We got a really good view of one of the Navajo farms as we passed it down in the valley.  When I saw an authentic hogan, I had to take a photo.  Dad, if you’re reading this, remember when you helped me build that Navajo hogan diorama for that fifth grade project?  (I say “helped” but really I mean “remember that time you spent two days sawing branches and stucco-ing them together with mud while I watched cartoons?”.  My contribution was making some tiny pots out of modeling clay.)  Anyway, here’s a real-life version:

We made it to the bottom easily (going back up is always the hard part!).  We were rewarded with a close-up view of the White House ruins.  The ruins aren’t Navajo in origin; they were built by Puebloans around 1,000 years ago.  The people who built them were long gone by the time the Navajo settled here.

We were pretty tired after the hike, but that didn’t stop us from continuing down the road to the Spider Rock viewpoint.  This is probably the most famous shot of Canyon de Chelly – it’s the one we see in all the guidebooks anyway.  Spider Rock is an 800 foot spire that rises up from the canyon floor.

We are now in the Cottonwood campground just outside the visitor’s center.  We plan to stay here another night so that we can explore the North Rim tomorrow morning.