September 27

September 27

Today we had the earliest start yet. We got into the car and drove away from our campground at 9:00. At least, for us it was 9:00, for everyone else it was 10:00. The Navajo reserve is on a different time than any where else in the state. The plan was to hike into Canyon de Chelly (d’shay) and out, and then see a couple other places of note along the rim. There is only one hike we could do into the canyon without a guide or a permit. The trail went to the White House, a set of ruins from the Ancestors of the Pueblo People (the Anasazi). It was named the “White House” because it used to be plastered white.

Canyon de Chelly was how I imagined the Grand Canyon. It had straight red sandstone walls, dropping down “very” deep (that’s the depth my mum said it was when I asked). The bottom of the canyon is flat, with cottonwoods and grass growing by the river. Part of the ruins are built up in a cliff, the rest down below, on the ground. People think that the original house on the ground reached up to 1.3 meters below the cliff dwelling. That is how people got up to the cliff dwelling.

Most of the cliffs are vertical, with no ledges or handholds for the ancient peoples to have used to climb up. Even climbers today, with all their fancy equipment can’t climb a vertical wall that is entirely smooth (at least without drilling bolts into the rock). My mother and I couldn’t think how people could climb into the canyon, so we asked my Dad, an old mountain climber. He said that as long as there were some fault lines or cracks in the rock it would be easy to climb up the walls of the canyon. He said that sandstone is a sticky rock, so as long as the wall isn’t too steep, it would be easy to climb—and showed us ways that people could have gone that followed weaknesses in the rock. We climbed back to the top of the canyon, on the conventional trail.

Next we drove along the canyon rim to Spider Rock, so named because Spider Woman lives on there.Spider Woman taught the Navajo how to weave, and she would come take misbehaving children away to her rock. Spider Rock is two tall pinnacles joined at the base in the center of the canyon. At the base of the tower are some Navajo ruins. With the binoculars you can see the hogans. On the top of Spider Rock is some grass and a few scrub trees. It is amazing that seeds flew over the canyon to the top of the tower.

We were able to see other ruins were from the Ancient Puebloan Peoples (Anasazi). There were three ruins in the cliff. The first was in a series of caves near the top of the canyon, but we couldn’t figure out how people got in: all the surrounding cliffs were smooth. Through the binoculars we could see the remains of stone walls in the caves. The other two ruins were a fold in the rock, like a deep crack, or overhang. We could see house remains and walls in there.

Then we drove on to Gallup, a town just over the New Mexico border. We ate great Mexican food for dinner at a small diner and stayed at a generic American hotel. It had WiFi and the sound of the trains kept us up all night: but a hot shower and clean laundry were nice!