Old Campers in the Canyons: TALIN’S GRADUATION AND MESA VERDE: MAY 17-19

Tuesday May 17 our grandson Talin graduated from Valley HS in ABQ something like 12^th in a class of over 200; he will start college this fall at San Diego State, as will his brother Tanner at Berkeley. Smart, good-looking boys. When they focus on something they will both do great things. After the ceremony we celebrated at a tiny Mexican place which was really good (really authentic I would guess).

L to R: Glen, Thomas, Jen (behind Glen), Glen’s sister Laura, Sally, Annie (Mike’s wife), Mike (Talin & Tanner’s grandfather), Mary, Tanner, Talin, waitress trying desperately to get us to finish.

However the overabundance of green chiles disturbed my GI tract ecology for about three days.

Wednesday we put Sally on a plane to Atlanta and Jen and Thomas to San Diego, kissed Glen goodbye and hit the road north to Mesa Verde, driving about 300 miles past the Four Corners into monument mountain country and shiprock, a huge storm front coming through with sandstorms and pelting rain, high winds.

Lots of one-lane repair work on US 491 where you would sit for 30’ minutes, the flaggers wearing masks because of the sandstorm.

At one of these I cut the engine and was playing with my camera, when wham! I had failed to put the Toyota in park and the wind blew us right into the car in front of me. Plastic bumpers, no damage.

We came in off the vast plains in the four corners area with monumental, lonely mountains

And climbed up to find a verdant high plateau like at Ruidoso—pines and juniper--cut with deep canyons. Sort of the the ecological and geological reverse of the plains!

The storm front followed us all the way to Mesa Verde and as we approached the entrance, now at about 6000’, it started to snow. We drove into an increasingly dense, wet snow up to the gate; we knew we had a problem when we saw snow plows going the other way. We are beginning to think that the camping we had planned (we had reserved a campsite) was out of the question. I asked Mary if she would call me a wuss if we decided not to go tent camping in heavy snow? You can imagine the answer. Amazingly, they had rooms at the lodge and that’s where we stayed. Here’s our motel door:

What we got for the evening and next 2 days was furious wind and heavy snow and sleet broken by occasional bright sunshine. Nevertheless, the Park is just wonderful. Lois and I passed here in 1972—can that possibly be 39 years ago?—on our way from my post-doc in Oregon to my USDA job in Mississippi, and I never forgot the strangely compelling sight of the beautiful cliff dwellings, abandoned by the ancestors of the current pueblo peoples 800 years ago, about the time of the high middle ages.

The Park does a masterful job of teaching you the anthropology and culture of these mysterious people, showing how they developed the pueblo architecture, community, agriculture, art, and it really is compelling, maybe because it is such an alien environment and you are awed by these people’s wonderful ingenuity (no metals!) in surviving here, and even more, developing masterpieces of art and lifestyle. The Park brochure says it well:

“The structures are evidence of a society that, over centuries, accumulated skills and traditions and passed them on from generation to generation. By the Classic Period, from 1100 to 1300, Ancestral Puebloans were heirs of a vigorous civilization, whose accomplishments in community living and the arts must be ranked among the finest expressions of human culture in North America.”

They are not just being polite to the current descendants. When you see the pueblos and the art that has been found there, you are just awed. If you ever get the chance to come here, be sure and take the half-day guided tour by a park ranger. It’s $35 and that’s too high, I think it would knock out too many people, but it is great, the Rangers love their work and they are knowledgeable. We got a lady named Jo and she was just wonderful.