Ever Heard of Hovenweep?

I’m writing this in the parking lot of Mesa Verde’s amphitheatre. I have 3 hours to kill before tonight’s program starts. Sitting in the car (sideways, so my back dries), sucking on a freeze pop, Ozzy on the radio—life is good. Especially considering that I was originally supposed to be working today. Bought this day off with the early airport run on Saturday. It’s been in the mid- to upper 90s today, with no shade to speak of. Up on MV, though, it’s 84 and breezy. I’m about to break out my picnic, such as it is. I always feel real when I’m in City Market, but sometimes I wish there was a Wegmans available. Had sort of vague plans for dinner tonight, but have been hungry all day and want to really eat. I haven’t looked at the food in the cooler since last night, but as of then, it could only be called a cooler out of deference to tradition—the air inside was as warm as anywhere else. So I have a little bit of leftover salad, but not sure if it’s edible. Thought I might get a slice or two of pizza, or some other quickie item, but alas, I’ve been conditioned to think that Wegmans represents reality. What I did dredge up at City Market was almost-out-of-date cottage cheese on sale for $1.19, raspberries on sale for 97 cents, and, after some problem solving, freeze pops on sale for $2.50/bag (as opposed to the popsicles I was originally dreaming of, I can let these thaw in the car, then just refreeze them when I get “home”). If I’m still hungry, I can cook up the dried soup.

Today’s main attraction was Hovenweep National Monument. Like Aztec Ruins yesterday, it has a parking lot just slightly bigger than Parkleigh’s. It’s located in the midst of a maze of back roads in Utah near the Colorado border, it’s yet another Ancestral Puebloan site, and a lot of people just don’t bother with it. I did the Square Tower Group trail—what’s cool about the building remnants here is that they’ve survived in groups so you can get a better sense of what it would have been like to be here at the time. This cluster had, as best as archaeologists can figure, homes, storage units, communication/defense towers, and a reconstructed dam. I’m getting so I can “read” the masonry and figure out what era it was and what went on there. The architecture here was especially good, and in pretty good shape, give or take. I particularly liked “Eroded Boulder House”, where the inhabitants found a boulder with a good overhang, enclosed the underside with walls, and lived in it, Flintstone-style. Everything encircles a small canyon, and the distance between the structures if you walk around the rim implies that the people simply went up & down to get from place to place. Apparently, if you know where to look, you can still see hand & toe holds at a lot of these sites.

The Square Tower Group requires a 2-mile walk to see. The brochure I had talked of an 8-mile trail that links Square & Holly groups, and that’s what I had intended to do, but the 8 miles was in addition to the 2 to check out the squares, and the ranger said I wouldn’t be any more enlightened by seeing both, so since it was hot and I was (as ever) tired and hungry, I opted for just the Square Group. I saw pictures of the other stuff, and I think the ranger was right. There’s a definite point of diminishing returns. Hence my super-early arrival at MV.

Today’s other diversions have included a pass-through of Shiprock, on the Navajo rez. The town is as bleak as other reservation towns I’ve been through, with an apparent passion for chain link offsetting the disdain of vegetation. The fast food restaurants are glitzier than Kayenta’s, though. I tried to visit the eponymous rock, but highway 491 is as close as you get, and they’ve thoughtfully strung power lines in front of the highway pulloff, so I didn’t even get a clean photo. You can just about see it from Cortez, anyway—it’s big! It’s a sacred site for the Navajos; I guess they don’t want a bunch of crowds defiling it.

Driving up 491, I saw the big rock thing (volcanic plug, maybe?) that so impressed me when I did my first shuttle to Ute headquarters at the beginning of June. It’s still pretty cool, but not especially distinctive. The urge to photograph it has passed. So I wonder again if I have rock ennui. Not entirely. Back for more next week.

Realized in the demo post, I forgot to mention the Mennonite woman I saw there. Demos have the best people watching anywhere!