Days 37-43: Arches, Mesa Verde and the Pinto Bean Capitol of the World

When you see the pictures in this post, you will not empathize at all with the following statement:

This week was kinda boring.

I mean, relatively.

With my mom flying into Albuquerque today for a week of exploring New Mexico (yay!), I found myself killing some time in the Pinto Bean Capitol of the World (Dove Creek, Colorado) and Santa Fe National Forest this week.

Despite having 3-4 days worth of compelling stuff to do in the past 7 days, the pictures suggest enough beauty to fill 10 days. Or more.

And the pictures are probably right.

Arches National Park in southeast Utah is a photographer's dream. There are improbable red rock formations, including arches of course, that look lit from within at sunrise and sunset. Delicate Arch is the iconic image of Utah: it even appears on their license plate.

There is only one hike of any significant length in Arches: Devil's Garden. For much of this hike, there is no trail as such. You look for cairns (piles of rocks) set upon rock formations to figure out where the trail is. At times, you cross "fins." A fin is basically a narrow rock bridge that you walk across in 40 mph winds and hope you don't die. Here's the scariest one (I had to kneel down to turn around and take a picture of it, and my stomach still flipped as I craned around to take this picture for you, dear friend).

Utah's scenic highway 211 takes you to Canyonlands National Park, a huge and largely undeveloped park south of Arches. The mix of fall colors and red rocks was gorgeous.

Get ready for a non-ironic Stephen Colbert moment. I am finally learning what is awesome about RVing. It's not parking in a gravel lot with five feet between you and another fiberglass behemoth, cooking outside on a hot plate. It's this: did you know you can camp FOR FREE pretty much anywhere you want in national forests and land owned by the Bureau of Land Management? God bless America! Check out my campsite outside Canyonlands. I expected John Wayne to ride by.

Roadside attraction: a house built into rock in the 1950s.

Speaking of building houses into rocks, let's move on to Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado. When I was in middle school, there were organized school trips every spring break. One I never took was to Mesa Verde. So my inner teenager was pretty excited to come here.

In the 13th century, ancestral Puebloans built towns into nooks just below the mesa-top. These towns are preserved at Mesa Verde, which is also a UNESCO world heritage site.

Native Americans lived in the Four Corners area (where modern-day Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet) from about 800 to 1200 A.D. Around 1200, ancestral Puebloans moved up from the lowlands to build these towns into canyon walls. Was this due to increasing violence and the need for towns they could fortify? No one knows. But, then, around 1300, they promptly abandoned these towns and moved south.

Looking at these towns, and native American pottery and other artifacts at the Anasazi Heritage Center (where I broke my unofficial 'no museums' rule for this trip), I felt humbled by the sophistication of these cultures. Portraits taken of native Americans in the 19th century suck your gaze in. These people were clearly not to be trifled with. I would like to learn a lot more about these cultures.

And that's good, because I haven't felt moved to learn anything for weeks.