Canyon de Chelly National Monument

Nov. 2021

White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly NM, Arizona

I accidentally forgot to publish this post, so it’s out of order on the main blog page. We visited this spot before we headed east into New Mexico.

After visiting the southwest corner of Utah, we continued working our way farther east and south to find warmer temperatures for the winter. We stopped in eastern Arizona to visit Canyon de Chelly. We meant to visit it in May, but it was closed then due to Covid-19. We booked a jeep tour with a Navajo guide, which is the only way one can explore the bottom of the canyon, as it is within Navajo land. The canyon was much larger than I had realized. The floor of the canyon is quite wide and filled with cottonwood trees and invasive shrubs that had been planted years ago by a government agency, and which still had some fall color. The ride into the canyon was in deep sand, and at the start, there aren’t any canyon walls. The walls just gradually start rising higher as you go into the canyon, and eventually are 600 feet above the canyon floor. The tour lasted about 3 hours, and our guide told us that he had lived in the canyon when he was a boy. He pointed out the trail that he would climb to the rim to take the bus to the boarding school in town every Monday and return on Fridays. He pointed out the place where he grew up and said his sister still spent summers there. He said his aunt was the only one who continued to live in the canyon, although the canyon is still used for sheep and horses. We saw a small flock of sheep that was being watched by a couple of dogs. Our guide pointed out many petroglyphs and ancient ruins that had been built under cliff ledges and which were scattered all over the canyon.

Toward the end of our tour, our guide parked in a lovely spot where sounds would echo, and he played a tribal song on his wooden flute. It was a beautiful moment in a really special place.

We wish we had had time to drive along the canyon rim, but it was going to be dark soon, and we had a long drive back to our campground.

The spot where our guide played his flute for us.

Just a few of the many petroglyphs we saw. This one is unusual because the Kokopelli is lying down.

The spot where our guide grew up.

From here, we travelled a couple of hours east on I-40 to stay in Grants, NM, in order to visit El Morro and El Malpais National Monuments. By mid-November, the nights were getting pretty cold in the higher elevations of northern New Mexico, so we planned to push south after a few nights in Grants.