To Chaco

We woke up early on Thursday morning, and headed down the road to Chaco Canyon Historic Park, part of the National Park System. After 40 miles on the main highway, we turned off onto a narrow paved road, which turned to dirt for the last 13 miles. There have been proposals to pave the road into the park, but the park would prefer the road to stay dirt, to help limit the number of visitors. The road conditions were good for most of that 13 miles, but towards the end of the drive, we hit the bad washboard that shook everything and everybody. Marianne suggested that the final washboard was the riffraff filter, to discourage the casual visitor.

When we arrived in Chaco, around 10 AM, we headed straight for the campground, worried that there would not be a space for us. However, the campground was about half full. Most of the campsites were not large enough for RVS , but we chose one of the campsites and backed in, helped by a young boy, Chance, from Mississippi.

After lunch, we headed for the visitor center, where we saw a movie, and then to Pueblo Bonito for the tour. The ranger's commentary was not directed to kids at all, but the girls enjoyed wandering around the site, going through the little doorways from room to room. Chaco is such an interesting place. After the tour and a little wandering around the site, we headed back to the visitor center, where the girls bought Chaco posters.

We did a little birdwatching, finally identifying what we thought was a Gray Catbird. At dinner, the girls read stories from children's books. We had hoped to do some starwatching, but the sky was still a little light at 9:30PM, so we mostly saw the planets. We were able to identify, however, that the tent pad in our campsite has an astronomical alignment, in the four cardinal directions. Marianne commented that everything at Chaco has an astronomical alignment, which is probably true. ;-)

Richard, Marianne, Ariana, and Erica