4-4-2007

South Rim Canyon de Chelly

At this overlook I see one farmer is preirrigating his land. I talked with a woman who said that she owns land down in the canyon where she grows her fruit trees. She said that when the high water comes I think end of April, the land gets flooded and soaked up and then they depend on rain for the crops. Some of the farmers do irrigate but not much land was done that way.

There is a cliff dwelling at the left.

Another one. They sure picked out some nice places to live.

Here is a spot of ground that evidently has been damaged with salt. It would be interesting to know if it is caused by irrigation water or if it is a natural saline seep area.

There were a few spots that had been cleaned of the mesquite trees and brush. I guess they are going to plant more crops.

This is the ‘White House’ cliff dwelling that you are allowed to walk by yourself down into the canyon without a ‘guide’.

There are some nice stairs cut in the rock to get down the steep places.

This stretch had a lot of work done on it, it is almost wheel chair ready. Want to race? Actually they did a lot of work on this trail and even made tunnels in the rock to get past really hard places.

The White House from the canyon floor.

There are a couple of interesting petroglyphs on the wall that is way up there. They must have had a major scaffolding to get up there to do it. I think the one below is of a turkey. They kept turkeys as domestic animals. In on of the museums they had a blanket of turkey feathers that they wove. They used to skin rabbits and weave strips of fur to make blankets but then they found out how to use feathers. It is like today we use down comforters rather than heavy wool blankets. There seems to be nothing new eh?

Rez dogs. I don’t usually pet Rez dogs but these two ‘trail’ dogs were pretty cool and very used to working the crowd for treats. The one on the right was just coming up the trail with a family. They said she went all the way down and back up with them. She likes cheese…..

You can make out this trail going down into a different part of the canyon. You are not allowed to go anyplace other then official areas without a native guide. There are no trespassing sign all over the place.

Spider woman rock. She is like a God to the Indians. It is a very impressive rock.

I met these gals and helped them take photos of them with their cameras. They posed for me in this one. The one on the left is from Costa Rica and the one on the right is from Equador. They were both surprised that I had ridden my motorcycle down through their countries last winter. They both teach school in Virginia and were out here for spring break. They were both really nice ladies and spoke excellent English.