2010 November 16, from Cedaredge CO, Hello, Everybody, I spent most of October in southwest Colorado and northwest New Mexico, visiting all of the 'attractions' there which I have previously dismissed and driven by. The PDF Frugal Shunpiker guides to NM, AZ, UT, and TX, by Canadian Marianne Edwards, are inspiring me to re- visit those states and see all the interesting places I have missed earlier. I spent a couple of days with my friend Chris Noble in Cortez, whom I last saw a couple of years ago when he was volunteering at a fish hatchery in Arizona. We even discovered an excellent Mexican restaurant in Cortez. My first stop was El Malpais ("badlands"), a combined National Monument and BLM area with many square miles of lava flow with collapsed tubes making huge rubbly gulches and caves (which I stayed out of, not having the required hard hat and not wanting to risk a fall or even a twisted ankle down in a cave while hiking alone). The BLM road along the western edge offers nice undeveloped camping, but is not one to try if wet - - the Ranger Station has a notebook of photographs of stuck vehicles to prove the point. At one point last spring they had 11 trucks/cars, 1 ranger, and 2 tow- trucks stuck out there, and the tow-trucks now refuse to come there in the wet. I spent 5 days in the Big Tubes area, hiking on the little trails which are marked with rock cairns and which are surprisingly easy to get lost on. A ranger told me that they recently found the scattered bones and bits of clothing from a father and daughter who became lost 9 years ago. I was glad to have a GPS! The hiking brochure lists 3 GPS coordinates on the trail; I found that 2 of the 3 were wrong, and spent some time providing the rangers with a complete set of coordinates which they can use in a new brochure they are working on. Just a few miles west of El Malpais is El Morro National Monument, a huge cliff with a small pond at the bottom, which has been a stopping point in this dry country for hundreds (thousands?) of years. The pool in unusual in that there is no spring or stream, only rainwater draining down from the cliff above. There are a couple of thousand prehistoric and more modern inscriptions carved into the cliff face, and a very nice trail which switchbacks up the cliff face and then over the top and back down the other side. Chaco Culture National Historic Park was my next stop, with the major large 'Pueblo' Bonito Anasazi Ruin. The main road in is famous for 15 miles of extreme washboarding, but I sneaked in a back way which is reputed to be impassable but which turned out to be mostly quite smooth and with almost no washboarding. So much for 'what everybody knows.' There is a nice trail which climbs up through the rubble at a cliff-face, overlooking a small Anasazi ruin, and then along the edge of the cliff to directly overlook Pueblo Bonito. Nearby is the BLM De-Na-Zin badlands area (Najavo for 'crane', of which there is a petroglyph nearby), extremely remote and primitive, with just a little parking area permitting camping, and no real trails through the badlands. Nobody around, and fun hiking and route- finding. These are not places you want to get lost in! Up the highway, just south of Farmington, is the BLM Angel Peak Recreation Area, a good dirt road which climbs up to expose a huge area of badlands unsuspected from the highway. A small camping area at the top of the road has great views, but is somewhat marred by the noise of the 24/7 diesel engines at oil/gas wells scattered around for miles in the entire area. Aztec Ruins National Monument offers something unique: a completely reconstructed Kiva (believed to be used for religious ceremonies), which, with its plastered and painted interior, gives a completely different appreciation of what the Anasazi 'cities' were like, very different from your impression from just the bare rough stone walls. Chris recommended the Sand Canyon hike in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument southwest of Cortez, and in addition to nice views and rock formations, there was an unexpected nice Anasazi ruin up in an alcove. There are thousands of such ruins scattered around the Four Corners area, some just tiny granary walls and some more elaborate like the one I saw. The new slideshow is 10_10_Oct_CO_NM.exe The server address is: http://www.meetmarsha.com/~john (note the tilde ~ before the john part) Boilerplate follows: Each browser is a little different, but generally you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I have used my up-to-date Zone Alarm and SpybotSearch&Destroy to be sure the .exe files are malware free, so you can safely ignore Windows's warning about 'dangerous <.exe> files'. Right-Arrow or Right-Click or SpaceBar will advance to the next picture. Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture. Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems stuck. If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it's not realistic to download these large files on a phone line; please let me know, as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the individual images, perhaps to print, just let me know. I periodically remove older slideshows to put up new ones; let me know if you want me to send you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or of all of them from 2004-2010 along with their accompanying emails, on CDs. And if you don't want to get any more emails like this one in the future, just let me know. If you have friends who might be interested, I'll be happy to add them to my email list and they can download the slideshows if they have a Windows computer and broadband internet connection. None of this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the pictures, the better. Regards, John Armitage 1-970-250-6080 john@qued.com