Epic western trip, part 2

Well, I'm taking a break from working on one of the bathrooms in our house, a task necessitated by poor engineering when our air conditioner was installed many years ago (more on that later)...  In the picture above, the kids look so overjoyed because they've been "reunited" with mom (Hope) after several days absence.  Recall that we we started this epic western journey, Hope had to remain in Arkansas a few days to finish up some things at work.  She flew out to meet us in Durango, Colorado, where I was to give a talk at a meeting the following day.  My meeting went well, according to the mule deer buck below who apparently was just content sauntering through the venue in the middle of the afternoon:

While I was attending the meeting, Hope and the kids explored the Durango area, visiting museums and town and venturing south to Aztec Ruins National Monument, where they got to explore more prehistoric structures (below):

I had earlier begged them to put off their original plan a day so I could join them...Given that my meeting was only one day, we were able to leave early the next morning for an all-too-quick visit to a really cool place--Mesa Verde National Park!  Below, we entered their elaborate new visitor center underneath a towering mesa:

Unfortunately, we had to make some time, so we could only afford about a half-day at Mesa Verde, so that limited what we could see.  We opted to take a short (but steep) hike down a canyon to see Spruce Tree Ruins, shown in the following couple of pictures:

 

 

We also drove along one of the scenic roads that had overlooks into a number of the canyons where other cliff dwellings were visible:

Including the largest and most impressive, Cliff Palace (note the crowd of people on the right side of the photo for scale):

Mesa Verde is a huge park, with lots of neat ruins and things to see and do--we'll definitely have to come back in the future with more time on our hands!  Our next destination was Flagstaff, Arizona, where we planned to stay the night and visit some more national parks the next day.  En route, we passed right past the famous "Four Corners" monument, which is on the Navajo Indian Reservation.  I remembered stopping here as a kid 30+ years ago, and thinking it was kind of neat, if rustic.  So, we figured we'd make a stop ourselves.  Things had changed considerably over the decades!  The Navajo were now charging admission, and the handful of Indians selling jewelry and pottery out of their cars years ago are now replaced by formal booths surrounding a fancy plaza, where people lined up in the 90+ degree heat to take family pictures on the four corners:

After just a couple minutes in line, I opted to take a more generic photo of the corners themselves, and we then browsed some of the shops before moving on:

Four Corners proved a disappointment; our next stop did not!  The afternoon was wearing on, but the opportunity to visit another national park along the route was too good to pass up, so we turned off the main road and headed into the Navajo Nation again.  What a great adventure!  We went to Navajo National Monument, which also had cliff dwelling ruins set amidst the spectacular red rock desert of the area:

These pictures hardly do the scenery justice--it was stark and dramatic, full of dust and rock and spectacularly gnarly (and old) pinyon and juniper trees:

We also got to see some "wild" horses--well, we think they were wild; the gray mare below has a brand, but we thought they were more escaped than tame...

We arrived in the Flagstaff area just before sunset, so we had to put off visiting our next national parks until the next day.  Both also proved well worth the time!  Our first stop was Sunset Crater Volcano National Park, which contains a large area of fairly recent volcanoes, lava flows, and dramatic landscapes:

It was a gorgeous morning, so we hiked a couple trails and marveled at the jagged lava flows and tenacious trees growing amongst the boulders:

Right next to Sunset Crater is another national park full of prehistoric Indian ruins, Wupatki National Monument.  We hiked out to several of these structures; the one pictured below really impressed us with how it was constructed right on a large rock formation:

This rock formation is somewhat easier to see in this picture:

Again, our need to move down the road and get into California necessitated that we leave these parks before we really wanted to...However, as we pulled out of the Flagstaff area, we couldn't help but notice billowing clouds of smoke from nearby:

The nearby national forest was conducting what they had labeled a "managed fire", which are used to help maintain certain vegetation conditions.  Pretty spectacular from a distance, and a sign of how at least parts of the interior west had received enough rain this year to conducted this prescribed burn--such would NOT be the case in California, Oregon, and other parts of the west coast.  But, that will come later...