We woke up this morning in the Canyon de Chelly National Monument campground and it looked like it had snowed because all of the cottonwood trees were covering the ground with their puffy white seeds.
Canyon de Chelly is one of my favorite places on earth. It is a heart-shaped canyon with a very narrow entrance and 700 foot vertical walls that has been inhabited (almost) continually since about 700 AD, and perhaps earlier by a succession of different groups. The Canyon walls have hundreds of cliff dwellings, pictographs and petroglyphs. The canyon floor is currently inhabited by the Navajo.
The catch is that to access the ruins, pictographs and petroglyphys you either make a long hike into the canyon or drive a four-wheel drive vehicle into the canyon. We hired a Navajo guide named Deborah, whose family lives in the canyon, to help us take our truck through the difficult canyon entrance and up the many side canyons to the historical sites.
The path through the narrow entrance into the canyon is up a riverbed, which appears to be dry, but is really a few inches of dry sand over soupy wet sand (aka quicksand).
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| 1300 year old petroglyphs |
We made the passage into the canyon without too much difficulty but we nearly got stuck twice on the way out. Other visitors were not so lucky. As we were going out of the canyon another vehicle was stuck in the sand and a truck was trying to pull them out of the sand.
One more thing, Joan picked up another Junior Ranger badge. Actually, she has been quizzing us on the brochure for Canyon de Chelly for the past two days so she really is an expert on Canyon de Chelly.
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