September 26

September 26

We passed out of the Grand Canyon after one last scan of the skies for Condors and a look at some archeological ruins. It helps having an archeologist for a mother, she was able to give us our own little tour. As we were completing our circuit of the ruins, a guide was finishing her own tour. Of course Momma started asking questions like “when was the site excavated? and What artifacts were found?” So we were talking and she asked where we were from, and when we told her Vancouver, she said “I have ancestors near there”. She was Dine, the Navajo’s name for themselves. In the 1700’s some of the Athapaskan’s moved south to Arizona, the Navajo’s. She was the first Navajo I had seen.

Our route was through the Navajo and Hopi reservations and on to Canyon de Chelly (prounounced “d’shay”) where we would camp. By some weird quirk of a government’s ideas, the Hopi reservation is inside the Navajo’s reservation. This is especially weird because all this land was historically Hopi. The Navajo part of the reserve is sparsely peppered with hogans, the traditional octagonal houses of the Navajo. The Navajo were nomads, living few and far between with their sheep. The Hopi, on the other hand, were farmers. They would live on the mesa’s (flat mountains) and farm the fertile base of the mesas. They farmed without irrigation, relying on rainwater catchment systems and special drought resistant varieties of corn and other plants. Many Hopis still live and farm traditionally and climate change has hit them hard, when they need all the rain they can get.

Old Oriabi is the oldest continuously occupied village in Arizona and one of the oldest in the US. They are off the electric grid and have no running water either. If they want electricity, then they need solar panels (or generators). Most of the houses are still made of stone, and the new houses are often built on top of the old ones. We talked to a couple who live there, and they said they were happy with where they lived, but that the corn fields were taking a real hit because of the lack of rain. “Last year”, they said, “ no one was able to harvest any corn, but this year was better”.

We got to the Canyon de Chelly campground after it was already dark. All our headlamps were packed, so I kept on walking into trees and rocks. Lesson: pack the headlamps where you can find them easily. There were coyotes singing and dogs barking the whole night. The dogs kept on barking long after the coyotes left. The canines woke me up, and outside the tent, I could hear animals walking. I think it was the coyotes; they weren’t making enough noise to be dogs. Also, there were too many of them. I wanted to see them, but it was too dark out (and I didn’t have my flashlight).