While we were sad to leave family behind (especially my little playmates), it was great to be back on the road. Amarillo, Texas was our first stop for an overnight on our way west. It was the first time we had ever stopped here, so after setting up we jumped back in the truck and drove out along Hwy 66 to Cadillac Ranch. This is a famous spot where ten Cadillacs are partially buried standing on their noses, with their tail fins in the air. Visitors are encouraged to spray paint graffiti on them, resulting in hundreds of layers of paint and a wildly colorful display. The cars are barely recognizable as Cadillacs, with paint cans littering the ground around them. When we visited, they were all standing in water surrounded by several yards of mud, probably due to all the rain we have had this year, but that didn’t stop Bill from grabbing a discarded can of paint and adding his mark.
The rest of the Route 66 Historic District in the area proved to be pretty disappointing as did the dinner at Smokey Joe’s, chicken fried steak with jalapeno gravy. Next time we will try out The Big Texan Steak Ranch. The nearby Jack Sisemore RV Museum however turned out to be pretty cool. It’s a free attraction attached to an RV dealership in town. They had at least two dozen really old RV’s (some from the 30’s), and twice as many antique motorcycles, old cars and other items. It was all very well kept and we could go inside all the RV’s to check them out. Most were in original condition, including the upholstery which was pretty wild in some units. Definitely worth a visit (and Dessa is very happy that we are RVing in 2019 and not in the 1950’s).
Our second stop (and our second visit) was Albuquerque, New Mexico, we had come here for the balloon festival in 2015. As we approached the landscape changed dramatically, and we began to see mountains and valleys. I was anxious to ride my new Indian motorcycle on some real twisty roads so the first day we rode up to the peak of the Sandia Mountains at 10,378 feet elevation. Apparently on a clear day you can see up to 100 miles (I’d say we could see 60+ when we were there). We had noticed the day before that strong winds and rain had blown in late afternoon, so we rode up early. Even so it was very windy on our return trip but we did beat the rain. During our four days we had some wild weather. The canyon winds were so strong that one afternoon I thought they would blow the trailer over, they must have been at least 50mph.
We did some hiking at Petroglyph National Monument where there are thousands of petroglyphs. We also suffered a moth and ant invasion, requiring that we get traps for the ants and super smelly repellents cakes for the moths. They were huge Miller Moths and they are nocturnal coming out every night when we got into bed, so it was hilarious watching Bill try to swat them down in the buff (maybe you should have been helping instead of laughing), especially since they liked to fly at his head. We have no idea how they got in, but it was all over the news so apparently, everybody was having similar problems. So far, I have thrown away two pieces of clothing with little holes (don’t feel sorry for her because it gives her an excuse to go shopping).
Heading for Mesa Verde, we started to see snow-capped mountains as we approached Durango, where we stopped on our way to Cortez to drop Bill’s motorcycle off for some brake work. When we went back to get it, we went next door to Serious Texas BBQ, where we had their excellent Texas Tacos, chopped brisket topped with jalapeno relish and cheesy pan-fried potatoes wrapped in a tortilla. Don’t know why they are “Texas” tacos, since I have never had anything like it before, but it was great (easily enough for 2 meals and not to be missed if you go to Durango). While we ate on their riverside patio, watching the kayakers, we noticed a bike trail along the river. We came back a couple of days later to ride the fifteen-mile trail and to get more tacos (Dessa is really enjoying her new e-bicycle. I was huffing and puffing and she was happily cruising along at 15mph).
We came to this area for 2 reasons: Four Corners and Mesa Verde National Park. Four Corners Monument (the intersection of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado) was out in the middle of nowhere, about an hour’s drive away from our campground near Cortez NM. Not sure what we expected but it was pretty under whelming. The monument is on a Navajo reservation land and they charged $5 a head to see it. The monument itself is a small metal plaque showing the intersection of the 4 states and is surrounded by a large complex of vendors selling Native American crafts (They get about 250,000 visitors a year plus vendor sales so they are making some money. Also, it turns out that the plaque marks the wrong spot, the actual Four Corners per GPS measurements is 1807ft West). One pleasant surprise is that people lined up politely to take turns taking their pictures so you could get a shot without crowds of strangers. We don’t recommend this stop, even if you happen to be driving past, which given its location is highly unlikely.
The campground that Bill chose was right across the highway from Mesa Verde National Park. Our research indicated ranger guided tours was the only way to see the cliff dwellings located in the park and to get tickets you had to appear in person. They only sold tickets two days in advance, so Saturday morning we were waiting at the door at 7:15 (and yes it was a lot of fun getting Dessa out of bed that early – it reminded her of getting ready for work) along with several other people to buy tickets. We signed up for all three cliff house tours and at $5 each they are very reasonable (this price doesn’t include entrance to the park but we have a National Park pass). All of the tours were over an hour’s drive from the visitor’s center.
Saturday afternoon we took our first tour to Long House, which entailed a 2.25-mile hike. The tour was led by a Puebloan guide who was very knowledgeable and also a bit obnoxious. Bill and I are generally not too fond of guided tours, too many people, the slower pace and we are the jerks that always want to be in the front rather than plodding behind (and neither of us likes to have people in our photos). Sometimes the guides are likeable but often not so much. The cliff dwellings were very cool, they were built by the Pueblo people who lived on the mesa top in pit houses for about 600 years before beginning construction beneath the overhanging cliffs. The complexes were three and four stories high in some places, consisted of up to 150 rooms and every stone was hand hewn. There are paths now that allow tourists to visit but when the Puebloans lived here they climbed the steep walls using only small notches in the walls while carrying heavy water jugs and babies on their backs. After only about 100 years, they abandoned these cliff homes. The prevalent theory is that this was the result of a 24-year drought but no one knows for sure.
Sunday, we did Cliff Palace. It is the largest of the Cliff Dwellings but had a shorter hike and was a shorter tour (it’s in the best shape of the 3 sites and the most visited). Our guide on this tour was a young woman that was less obnoxious but also less informative. Right after Cliff Palace, we did our 3rd and final tour to Balcony House. This tour required climbing some barely angled ladders up the side of a sheer cliff. Once at the top, we were surprised to see there were no rails to keep anyone from falling over the edge. The guide was a really old guy who was pretty funny, telling everyone it was strictly forbidden to take photos of his rear end while he was climbing the ladders. To get from one side of the dwelling to the other we had to crawl through a tunnel that was only 18 inches wide. He and Bill barely fit through the opening (He also told us that you couldn’t take pictures of him in the tunnel. I should have told Dessa this also applied to me).
The scenery along the awesome curvy roads in the park was beautiful and they were having a super bloom of wildflowers due to all the rain. The bushes and trees were full of baby cicadas making loud buzzing sounds. The only animals we saw were feral horses, one of which was a horny stallion, as you will see in the photos and video. We had perfect weather and either toured dwellings, hiked, or rode the motorcycles to the end of the park road for four straight days. We struggled a bit to adjust to the 6000-foot elevation change, with Bill having breathing problems at night when he was lying flat and both of us huffing like we were dying on slight inclines but we seemed to be better by the time we headed to our next destination.
Visiting all (or as many as possible) of the National Parks is on my bucket list, so our next stop was Moab, Utah to see 3 of them. We rode our motorcycles to Canyonlands National Park first, stopping at Grand View, overlooking Island in the Sky, the canyon and the deep gouges carved by the Colorado and Green rivers. Wearing our jeans and boots we did the short hike to Mesa Arch perch on the edge of a ravine, it had a massive crack in one side making me wonder how many more years it will still be an arch.
Closer to Moab is Arches National Park. It is known for having 2000 arches, the most famous of which is Delicate Arch, 52 feet tall and standing all alone. We had been to Moab and Arches in 2008 for a long weekend when Bill was living in Denver but it is definitely worth a second visit. The hike to Delicate Arch is three miles roundtrip, with the first half being all uphill with an elevation gain of 480 feet. We went early to avoid as much heat as possible but it is still the desert. There are always lots of people, all taking their turns posing inside the arch for pictures, so it is almost impossible to get pics without them (see above to know how happy that makes us). In addition to the arches, there are amazing rock formations shooting straight up, some with giant boulders balanced on top. It makes you wonder how they could possibly be left standing and where did all the rock that must have once surrounded them go?
Capitol Reef National Park was two and half hours west and it was not near any city we would be likely to visit, so we took a day to go see it. It was named for the white sandstone domes that look like the Capitol Building in DC, and Reef for the Waterpocket Fold, an 87-mile long barrier. I was skeptical that it would be much different from Arches and Canyonlands but it proved to be worth the drive. It was not the desert we had been in at the previous parks, instead it was very green. We chose to do the Fremont River hike, almost 3.5 miles with a 500-foot climb, it was still hot and we were still huffing and puffing all the way up. This area of the park used to have a settlement in it and there was a little shop selling ‘traditional’ fruit pies. At the end of our hike we decided to treat ourselves to three mini pies (the fruit filling was good but the pastry was undercooked). After lunch we drove to the end of the park road. This started a section of off-roading that was very narrow in places, especially for our fat ass truck. It was bumpy as hell but fun and very scenic. Unfortunately, as soon as we got back on the paved road we could hear a tapping from one of the tires. Thinking it was a rock, we got out to check but it was a large bolt.
It didn’t seem to be leaking air but with a 140-mile drive to get back to Moab and the 80-mph speed limit we decided it would be wise to change the tire. It wasn’t easy to get the spare out, or to jack up the truck with double wide tires and then when we were done, the jack refused to drop, so we had to drive forward to get off it. Gluttons for punishment, we did not let that stop us from doing another two-mile hike with lots of climbing to the Natural Bridge (turns out bridge is another term for arch but it was still worth the hike).
We visited Yellowstone in 2015, but it was on our way to Glacier National Park, and it is so vast we definitely did not see all of it last time. As we headed for it, the temperature started to drop from the 80’s we had in Utah, to 37 degrees. At check-in in West Yellowstone, they advised us that a hard freeze was expected overnight and the next morning it was snowing. Once again, unexpected cold weather caught me unprepared. No gloves, no cap and definitely no heavy coat, I guess I never learn (don’t be fooled, Dessa would have been cold and grumpy even if she had those things. She reminded me that my job was to keep the temperature in the 70’s). After waiting till noon for it to warm up to 45, we drove to the park. It was Saturday and the park was packed. Shortly after we turned towards Old Faithful, we came to stopped traffic and after sitting in it for 20 minutes, we turned around (not as easy as it sounds on a 2-lane road, I think Dessa did a 10-point turn with me blocking traffic) to take our seven-hour planned loop in the other direction. After our first three stops at Gibbon Falls, Monument Geyser and Artist Paintpots, we realized we had been gone three and a half hours and barely completed a quarter of our route.
There are so many places to stop, and they take some time because most require some hiking. We decided to make a beeline for the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and the Lower Falls. Both were great, really beautiful and totally worth the hike down into the canyon. A ranger with a spotting scope showed us an Osprey nest on the tip of a rock pinnacle, with a baby waiting patiently for its next meal. Next stop was Hayden Valley, billed as the best place to see wildlife. We immediately started to see lots of bison and finally a lone wolf. Turning around after the valley, we still didn’t get home till seven, having done less than half of our planned drive. On our second day, we made it to Old Faithful without the horrible traffic from the previous day (we started a lot earlier which helped). Wanting a different perspective from our 2015 visit, we hiked up a nearby trail to take our photos from above. After waiting patiently for half an hour, she finally gushed but the chilly weather caused lots of steam and the wind shifted to blow in our direction keeping the geyser from being clearly visible. A few more hot springs, geysers, mud pots and steamy basins and we were done with our two days at Yellowstone. Still more to see next time.
Our final stop before crossing into Canada was Glacier National Park. The gray chilly weather followed us all the way as we drove along the barely populated valleys, surrounded by mountains. It is amazing how underpopulated the last thousand miles has been. Except for the parks, I would be surprised if there was one person per mile. The towns are barely a blip and this is truly cowboy country. People that don’t live in Texas often think of it as cowboy land but that is far from true (especially around the bigger cities). Here you actually see the massive ranches and the ranchers on horseback, no farms, just cattle and land. As we drove 400 miles from Yellowstone to Glacier, we stopped half-way in Helena at the only Walmart between the two towns. In Glacier, I had to buy a can of tomato sauce and it cost $3.00, triple what I normally pay. There are as close to zero options as you can get and restaurants are super expensive. Come prepared! (More important to me was the total lack of usable internet. we had zero ATT service even with our high gain external antenna and the campground’s Wi-Fi, like most, was pathetic)
One word describes Glacier…spectacular! When you picture an image of America the Beautiful, this is where it comes from. I’m not sure how many times I said WOW but it was pretty much on every turn along the Going-to-the-Sun road. Stunning vistas of lakes with forested, ice capped mountains, as the backdrop. Waterfalls running everywhere, long ones down the sides of the mountains, smaller ones pounding into pools and streams at the bottom and cascading over the walls of the road inches from our truck, in the Weeping Wall section. There were warnings at the gate about vehicles over 21 feet long and 8 feet wide (we are just under 22 feet long and 8 feet wide). They were not kidding; the road was super narrow for long sections where our side of the road was a jagged rock wall and the other side was edged by a short rock barrier before a several hundred-foot cliff. I was trying to stay away from the wall with our fat truck and they were trying to avoid the cliff, with both of us fighting for the stripe in the middle. We survived without damage but Bill was sweating bullets (I do most of the driving when we tow and Dessa does most of the driving when we don’t. She occasionally forgets about the fat ass of our Dually and I could picture us catching the back end on the rock wall, spinning into the oncoming traffic and forcing someone over the cliff). He’s such a worry wart! We did shorts hikes to several waterfalls, passing signs that warned of bears in the area. This is Grizzly country and they are more dangerous than any other bear (but only for the slowest runner in the group). We had forgotten our bear spray and bells from our 2015 tour, so we had no protection. Fortunately, there were lots of people in the area (so Dessa wasn’t going to be the slowest runner either). We took our chances and enjoyed our hikes but stopped and bought some Bear spray on our way home (we’ll need it for our hiking in the Canadian Rockies).
We stayed in St. Mary, at the Eastern Entrance to the park, and Logan’s Pass is about 1/3 of the way across the park and had only been open three days because of late spring snow. I would say the best part of the park was between Logan’s Pass and Avalanche Creek. Past that, the mountains are behind you and it becomes all forest on one side and lake on the other. It took us about five hours to drive through the park and after eating at a roadside taco stand in West Glacier (the food was great but it wasn’t much to look at and Dessa is always wary), it took three hours to drive all the way around the south tip of the park, back to St. Mary. Ugh! We should have turned around and drove back through the park. It was predicted to start raining the next afternoon, so wanting to ride the motorcycles, we got on the road early while it was still in the upper forties (but we were well bundled up with our leathers including chaps, since the wind from riding drops the temp about 10 degrees).
Glacier National Park becomes Waterton Lakes National Park once you cross the border into Canada, and by the time we got half way to the border, it looked pretty dark ahead, and soon after it started to sprinkle on us but we forged on and thankfully stayed dry. In the Glacier Park brochure, I had seen a great picture of the Prince of Wales hotel standing before a long lake with mountains on both sides. When we arrived, it was obvious that pic had been taken from high up a cliff behind the hotel. Not wanting to try to scramble up a cliff, we settled for pics of the lake and a small town at the foot of the mountains. Lunch at the hotel was disappointing, greasy fish and chips but looking out at the panoramic view was great. We rode down to the little town for my favorite Canadian desert, a Beaver Tail, which is fried dough covered with cinnamon sugar. Delish! Forced to turn around at this point because the road to our next stop in the park was still closed due to snow, we headed home. The US border guard was not very nice (especially compared to the Canadian border guard), complaining because we rolled up to the booth together (he complained that there was only one of him and there were now 2 of us. I wonder what he said to the truck in front of us that had 4 people inside but I kept my mouth shut – shocking, I know) and then not liking that Bill had both of our passports. He made me roll back so he could “interview” us one at a time. A few minutes later we finally saw what I had most wanted to see…a grizzly. He was standing in the road in front of us. The bear spray and my camera were locked in my saddlebags but even if I could have gotten to my camera quickly enough, I wasn’t about to stop and he bounded down the road and into the bush. Awesome!
That was six of the 59 national parks, plus 1 Canadian park, in three weeks. Next stop Canada, where we will spend most of July enjoying Calgary, Banff, Kelowna and Vancouver.
You can find all of our pictures and a short video HERE
Great pictures guys …. you continue to keep us entertained with your escapades. Safe travels.