Whipcream and Ruins

Funny how things work out (read on to see what I mean)...

Oh no!  Canyon de Chelly's wall has turned to whip cream! 

Dylan's blog from yesterday actually only focused on the last part of the day, we spent the first part in Canyon de Chelly (pronounced: sh ay).  It was actually my second visit - I still have no idea how I ever knew about this place!  It's tucked away in the north east corner of AZ only an hour from Four Corners.  Anyway, it's fantastically interesting landscape.  The rocks in the canyon look like the whipped topping on a banana split!  The canyon walls are smooth and a spectacular color of red.  Yesterday was especially beautiful because of the brilliant blue sky!

Another interesting feature of Canyon de Chelly is that there were (about 1,000 years ago) many cave dwelling Indians, and today you can see many remains of the structures as well as some petrogliph.  Here's the catch the National Park is on Navajo land and so there are some rules (certain places you can't take pictures, you can't hike into the canyon without a Navajo guide and at every pullout and vista there are Navajo's selling jewelry and painted pottery - they are nice, but you feel like you are running the gauntlet to get to this rich, beautiful scenery!).  There's one place you can hike out to (about 3 mile round trip), and we did - but you are still quite far from the amazing cliff dwelling structures.

So - here's the weird/cool part.  This morning we stopped by the Post Office on our way out of town and got a 'hot tip' to stop by Mesa Verde National Park - we went on a ranger lead tour INTO one of the cliff dwellings!  Amazing!!  About 300 feet up the canyon wall - talk about Penthouse!  You enter from the mesa top, of course.  It's quite a journey.  A 30 foot ladder
into the dwelling, crawling on your hands an knees through a tunnel and 2 ladders to get out!  All worth it and quite a nice ending to our canyon days.

P.S.  Someone didn't screw the camel back on right.  So as we hiked the water bladder spilled it's contents, giving the very odd look that I had peed my pants.  As a side note this had to be the day I wore white pants!