Dear everyone,
The following is our trip diary from Colorado and Utah.
Friday
We left Chicago in good weather (we had clear weather the
entire trip), although the temperature – in the low-mid nineties some of the
week – was about twenty degrees hotter than usual. At least we weren’t in Florida facing off
Hurricane Helene [over 200 dead and counting], with Milton on the way this
week. Climate change will come up in the
discussion of the disappearance of the Fremont!
We had to check bags because we were taking hiking sticks,
which, I concede, could be conceivably used as deadly weapons on an airplane.
Our egress through the Colorado airport was also slowed because some of the terminal
shuttles were not working, hence a long line to get on. We actually went up to the C terminal from B
to make sure we could get on a train - - there is no way to walk between
terminals except in emergencies.
Cindy had e-tickets for the train, and we got off the stop
prior to Union Station and found Lucas waiting for us. We headed to his
apartment - - it’s much nicer than his old one and then to the King Sooper to
get snacks and breakfast food. Later we walked to our Airbnb. This is an apartment in a fabulous old
redstone mansion. Our living quarters
were down a wooden spiral staircase off the main floor which had fantastic
inlaid wooded floors and tons of antiques, including at least a dozen wind-up
clocks (not running). The lighting in
the apartment was a little bizarre, and everything seemed so expensive that I
felt a little uncomfortable staying there.
That evening we had a nice dinner with Lucas, and Carlos
Madrid with his second wife Julie. We
ate at a nearby ramen restaurant called Uncle
(delicious), and then walked to the L bar
for some more alcohol - - they have $7 cocktails every day from 4-7! The bar,
on Broadway between 1st and Ellsworth, has neighbors such as gourmet
ice cream, voodoo donuts,
cannabis dispensary, sex shops. Why not
just sleep on the street? Some do!
Saturday
The next morning Lucas picked us up, and we drove up the mountains into Dillon to see Jacob and Christine. They have a cute house with a big yard in a nice neighborhood. Miso wants all of you to visit. We took a short hike up Tenderfoot Mountain, where we saw aspens turning yellow and had vistas of pleasure craft on the Dillon Reservoir. Beyond aspens, we saw rabbit brush (super allergenic), rose hips (Christine picked some), sage, chickadees, tree swallows, magpies and crows. Afterward, Jacob and Christine served us lunch of grilled chicken and salad, then we had the long drive back to Denver, where we ate dinner at a Nepalese restaurant called Fish Tail. Pretty good, but Uncle was better (and pricier).
Sunday
Our Utah adventure began with a Lyft for the three of us to
the airport, where we had breakfast at a restaurant in the airport called Snooze, and
then an uneventful flight to Grand Junction, in western Colorado. Grand Junction
is an agricultural town along the western slope of the Rockies at the confluence
of Colorado and Gunnison rivers, in a large valley between the Colorado National Monument and the Grand Mesa. It is home to Colorado
Mesa University, which owns and operates the Maverick hotel, where we were to
stay one evening. We were picked up at
the airport by Arlene (the wife of Mark Connolly, one of the staff, who was a
former Utah state game warden), who brought us to the hotel. She was also
supposed to pick up another Crow Canyon (CC) tourist, Gretchen Whisenand, but
Gretchen had some kind of travel plan change which hadn’t been properly
communicated to the CC staff - - that all got worked out eventually.
The hotel was modern, well appointed, and staffed by
hospitality students at the university.
It was pretty early in the afternoon, and we asked the front desk for
advice on a nice walk - - we were given two choices, one to walk around campus,
the other to walk to some kind of park in the other direction. I made the wrong decision, and we walked to
the park. The sun was scorching, and the
walk was uninteresting - - mostly large roads, and the park was unappealing. It was a way of using up a couple of hours
though. We got back, showered, and
watched some kids ride on a practice road bike/skate hill course outside.
Drinks and dinner were on the schedule so we could meet most
of the rest of the CC staff and tourists (some scholars met up with us a couple
of days later in Green River, Utah).
Afterwards we had a PowerPoint lecture by Elizabeth Hora, the public
archeologist for Utah. The indigenous
people that lived in Utah 1500 years ago are called the Fremont (named after
the Fremont river,
named after John C
Fremont) because as far as we can tell, they no longer exist - - they
either died out or were absorbed by other tribes that came into this land
later. The Fremont lived in this area
from 400 until 1300 AD. They were mostly
foragers until 800, and then gradually became part-time agriculturists,
eventually becoming the northernmost tribes growing the three sisters: corn, squash
and beans. Their peak population was
between the years 1000-1200. There was a sister
culture south of the Fremont known as the Ancestral Pueblo. We know they were different because their artifacts are different. However, traces
of a viable, sedentary culture disappeared in the 1300s, likely due to climate
change (the little ice
age). About 30 tribes, including
Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, etc., trace lineage to this area now, but we don’t
really know how closely related they are to the original Fremont, because we
know there were migrations eastwards by “Numic” speakers and southwards
by “Athabaskan”
speakers that may have driven the original indigenes out.
CC Staff:
Kate
Thompson – Program Manager. Kate
worked on this trip for a year getting permissions for our group to go onto BLM
land and private property sites. Unflappable and flexible.
Adam
Kacksetter – Assistant, safety officer (frequent exhortations to bring
water and drink water)
Mark Connolly – Former Utah game warden
Benjamin
Strickland – the youngster of the group.
Often would climb up a bluff in five minutes to scout the way (the same
route would take us 30 minutes!)
CC Participants:
Donna Berg - - She was a competitive intelligence analyst at
Los Alamos. She is married to the
painter Tom
Berg
Carol
and John Stansfield. She is a retired English teacher. She created an outdoor school year for fourth
graders in her district (the students went to a separate schoolroom out in the
woods for a year). John was a
professional storyteller. He appears to
have suffered a small stroke or is in the early stages of a neurodegenerative
disease.
Gretchen Whisenand – retired librarian and horse racing
devotee
David
Hansen -- retired chemical engineer from Green River WY (The same river as
seen in Utah). He worked in the soda ash
industry
Cynthia Doty -- Does a lot of adventure trips in the west -
- off trail biking, rafting, hiking. Her husband is an ex-air force officer who
taught at the AF Academy.
Susan Raymond – Recently took up fencing. Her ancestors left the Midwest after the
Chicago fire and took a wagon train to Colorado.
Monday
We set out at 8 AM, driving three large vans - - each could
seat 8 comfortably. However, one van was
full of luggage, and three cars convoyed with us to Green River Utah. The landscape was low mountains at the
western end of the Rockies, and then scrubland and desert. There is at least one small herd of
pronghorns. Some of the ground was just sloped sheets of eroded rock with a
coating of windblown dust, completely sterile. This area is known as the Cisco desert.
In the distance we can see the La Sal Mountains,
south of Moab. We stop for a rest break on the way, where we
can marvel at the landscape. I see yellow headed
blackbirds, as well as some plants: Apache plume, pickleweed and shadscale
(similar to four
wing saltbush). Pickleweed and
saltbush are in the saltbush family, and the leaves indeed taste salty; we
tried them!
There is no real town in Green River - it seems like Breezewood PA
- - it’s in a convenient spot between two highways: 70 going E-W and 191 going
N-S. As such, the whole hamlet is a
string of gas stations and motels. It is
noted as the melon capital of the world; there is also a small museum
named after John
Wesley Powell. We are staying at the
River Terrace hotel directly across
the street from the museum, and along the banks of the Green River, which
starts in Wyoming, and runs into the Colorado south of Moab. There is a lot of river rafting around here
(evidenced by many car carriers with river rafts), but the river is shallow and
placid in town. Just north of the town
is the beginning of the Book
Cliffs.
We dump our luggage off in one room, and then head west for
the San Rafael Swell. This is a big bump in the middle of this
eastern Utah basin, formed 60 million years ago. The eastern edge of the swell is folded and
steep, and is known as the San Rafael Reef.
We drive into the swell and head north from Thompson Springs
into Sego Canyon, where we get our first look at petroglyphs. What do they mean? Within boundaries everyone has a pretty good
idea - - the glyphs aren’t showing space aliens, complex math, or a modern day
Walmart. But no one can tell if the
figures are showing something practical, like “this is a good hunting ground”,
symbolic like “this is the genealogy of my clan”, or religious. Also, some of the more complex figures were
written (or overwritten) by other people years after the first images were
placed. There are a lot of questions.
Beyond the petroglyphs, we also see a large flock of pinion jays, and (I
believe) an orange
crowned warbler. Plants include “Mormon tea”, which
allegedly contains ephedra or pseudoephedrine (scientific studies dispute
this). It was used medicinally in times
past; however.
We head back to the hotel, where Rebecca (Becky) Hammond
gives us a lecture on the history of the Utes in the John Wesley Powell museum across the street. The Utes were trading
with the Spanish in the 1600-1700s. The
Spanish were not honest dealers. The
Spanish had numerous expeditions through the Ute homeland, and renamed the
indigenous trails after Spanish explorers. As usual, every treaty that the Utes
made with the US government (from the early 1800s onward) was broken. There
were still battles with the US up to 1879.
Becky is related to some of the Ute leaders of the past ( and recently her family held
a lot of the tribal offices for her reservation [there are several different
Ute reservations] ). The Utes continued to have tough times,
with the land allotment scheme of 1896 to try to force Indians out of the
reservations, and forced boarding school of children in the early 20th
century. Utes did not even become partial US citizens
until 1924.
After the lecture, a few of us pile back into one van and
drive west to see more petroglyphs in the Swell off of the Spirit Arch trailhead. I also note chipmunks/ground squirrels, and white crowned
sparrows. Part of the pathway is
quite narrow and has a sheer drop of forty or more feet into a rocky canyon - -
I’m glad we don’t stay to late, but by the time we get back to the hotel it’s after 7:30 and dark, and for some reason we have to wait in line to eat at the next door
restaurant, the Tamarisk.
Tuesday
We meet up with the other two scholars on our trip, Sharon
Gloshay, an Apache, and Georgie
Pongyesva, a Hopi. Then after breakfast, we head back into the swell for a
day of petroglyph searching in the Ferron Creek area, or the western parts of
the Swell, particularly the Rochester Rock Art panel. This area probably had year
round water, making it suitable for long term habitation. After lunch we go to Three
Fingers Canyon to see more. I see
some small bats at the mouth of the canyon.
On the way back out of the area where the canyon is, our van
gets stuck in the steep sides of a sandy arroyo (out drive in and out was
rivalled for roughness only by the tundra buggies
in Churchill. The other van has to come back.
The first attempt to tow us forward fails, because the tow rope breaks.
So, the other van comes behind us. We jack the stuck vehicle up, and we dig out
a lot of sand, and then the other van tows it backward out of the arroyo. We gather a lot of flat rocks and place them
in the sandy area, and are successful in getting the vehicles past the bad
area. It’s a good thing - -the sun was
going down, and those desert nights are dark and cold! Luckily, there aren’t very many large
predators in the area like lions or hyenas!
Dinner, when we get back is one again at the Tamarisk. I recommend the Asado de Puerco.
Wednesday
We load up our excess luggage in one of the rooms at the
hotel (to hold while we are away), and take out towels and pillows. We head north to Price, passing a big solar
farm. I’m surprised there aren’t more of
them out here - - there’s tons of sun, and a lot of land that could not be used
for farming.
In Price our first stop is the Prehistoric Museum. This is a small-to-moderate sized museum with
two wings - - one is devoted to paleontology (this area known as “Carbon County”
for all of its coal, oil, and gas deposits, and is equally rich in million year old
fossils), and the other half to archeology/anthropology of the native
peoples. Our Indian
guides clearly feel a bit insulted that their history is considered ‘prehistory’, and
that the exhibits in the museum somehow give the impression that they are as
extinct as dinosaurs. I don’t think they like the fact that their artifacts are
displayed for everyone to see, and also some depictions of indigenous life make
it seem joyless and hard. So, there is a bit of a culture clash here.
Certainly, Indians justifiably feel this is yet one more exploitation of their
culture by know-nothing Europeans. On
the other hand, the esthetic of the museum is atheistic and ‘scientific’. Plus, Europeans have a long history of
displaying the religious artifacts and bones of their own forbearers, so why
should the Indians complain? These are
points of view that can only be reconciled with many conversations of good will
- -some of which is happening now, but will surely take years to resolve.
Anyway, the museum is small, but the exhibits are well laid
out, and we get a private tour led by the two curators. Afterwards, they take us to a private room
and show items in their collections that are not out for display. There is a long conversation about
repatriation between the Indian scholars and the museum staff - - emails are
exchanged, and hopefully some good long term connections are being made. One
problem for this particular museum is that many things are donated from “private
collections” and there is little information about where/when/how the objects
were obtained. Tracking down who has the right to decide how the objects are
handled can be difficult.
Afterwards we eat lunch at the Tangerine Eatery. They have 12 different frozen yogurt
flavors! I can’t convince Cindy to share
one with me; however. Then we head back
south through a suburb of Price called Wellington, and then into Ninemile Canyon. No one is sure where the name comes from,
since the canyon is actually about 40 (or more) miles long. It was one of the main east-west routes from
the Uinta Basin on the
west to the Green
River on the east. Ninemile Creek,
one of the tributaries of the Green River has water practically year round, so
it was a good site for settlement.
There were ranches and so on along the canyon, but gas was
discovered in the earlier 2000s. There
were lots of industrial trucks ferrying along the narrow, twisty dirt road, and
raising a lot of dust and causing erosion, as well as harm to the many
petroglyphs. Eventually some protection
(and money) was laid out, and a few million were spent paving the road. There are several hundred registered
historical sites presently and several hundreds more waiting in the wings.
We are staying at the Nine
mile ranch. There is a combination
of bed and breakfast (where Cindy and I are staying), small cabins (Lucas), and
camping facilities - - a lot of the staff is just camping. We dump off our luggage in our various rooms,
and head out again. We visit three sites, where we are joined by Tim, a longtime
resident of the Canyon; he and his wife Darlene now live northeast of the Canyon
in Vernal (Darlene is meanwhile cooking a chili dinner for us back at the
ranch). We see the Owl panel (the owls
are ‘fake’ and date from the 1970s, but the rest of the panel is old), a panel
with a post-European Indian on a horse, and another panel called ‘Shaman calls
sheep”. We see lazuli buntings, a
glimpse of a Golden Eagle, a herd of wild elk, and a spider entrapping a
beetle. It’s pretty late by the time we
get back to the ranch. Tim is quite a
character, and reminds me a lot of the man who was poling us through the Ill River
in France, except he speaks English, so we can understand all of his
inappropriate jokes.
We have dinner at the ranch’s campsite, about a block from
the ranch house. It’s dead black when we
leave, and I periodically use the flashlight function on my phone as we stumble
back. The night sky is so dark we can
see the Milky Way and a thousand thousand stars.
Price - Prehistoric museum entrance
Thursday
I wake up before dawn (not that impressive here - - we are
west of the hour line, and the sun takes a while to peek over the canyon
walls). I have some time to do Tai Chi
forms, and listen to the elk bugling in the forest - - it’s that time of year. The ranch also has chickens, ducks, and two
friendly cats. I stumble over to the
campground where I have some cowboy coffee with the CC staff (boil about ½ pounds
of coffee beans in a gallon of water). For some reason I
also get into a long discussion with the Indian scholars about beauty
pageants. Apparently the Miss Navaho
pageant includes a timed sheep butchering event. There are also flickers and magpies flying
about.
We drive off to view Coyote Calling the Stars, and then do a
scramble to see some granaries on top of a bluff. This is probably our hardest climb up and
down for the whole trip. We go on to “Daddy Canyon”,
where we have lunch and see some petroglyphs, including Rasmussen cave, and
then the Great Hunt panel. We see a bull
snake on the road on the way back, and Georgie Pongyesva tells us about the
Hopi Springs restoration project.
That evening we have dinner cooked by the family that runs
the Nine Mile ranch - - fry bread with chili, and exceptional peach cobbler
(cooked in a giant pan for ranchers!)
Friday
Another early morning with elk bugling, plus some mountain bluebirds near the campgrounds. Later we have one last scramble to see some petroglyphs, and look at another granary from afar. How did the people get up there? We have lunch at the ranch, and then Georgie gives a talk about something that I don't recall. it was about Hopi history and her work between the tribe and different federal and state agencies. Afterwards, we smolder some fresh juniper in a firepit, and waft the smoke over our bodies to cleanse ourselves from any lingering supernatural presence. My coat still smells of smoke even after washing. Then we gather our luggage and drive back to Green River. Just on the way out of the canyon, we surprise a golden eagle capturing some poor mammal.
We have dinner once again at the Tamarisk. Afterwards, we sit on the patio of our hotel,
next to the river, and Kate tells us a sad story of her two months as a
photojournalist in Mongolia in the 1990s.
She lived with a family of eagle hunters, how they caught the nestlings,
trained the eagles, and let the eagles fly free after ten years with the
family.
Saturday
We drive back to Grand Junction with Becky and Adam, and fly
to Denver with Lucas, and then onward to Chicago. The Aspens are turning yellow, and from a
distance look like golden lichen growing along a rock face.
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