When we decided to go through Four Corners and to Mesa Verde, we heard about a coal-powered steam train that runs from Durango to Silverton in southwestern Colorado. As soon as I heard the word “Durango,” I wanted to go – coolest, most evocative Western town name! (The name actually comes from the Basque word “urango” meaning “water town” – not very romantic.)

Durango was founded by the Denver & Rio Grande Railway in 1879. The railroad arrived in Durango on August 5, 1881, and construction on the line to Silverton began in the fall of the same year. By July of 1882 (9 months later! – private money, not government), the tracks to Silverton were completed, and the train began hauling both freight and passengers. The line was constructed to haul silver and gold ore from the San Juan Mountains, but passengers soon realized it was the view that was truly precious. The train has been in continuous operation between Durango and Silverton since 1882, carrying passengers behind vintage steam locomotives and rolling stock indigenous to the line.

The train was steamed up and waiting for us at the station.

Patrick could have booked a seat in the cab with the engineer, but it would have cost $1000!

The narrow-gauge track follows the Animas River, back and forth on both sides of the river

for 3½ hours along cliffs,

through steep canyons,

and next to rock walls

of the most gorgeous granite you’ll ever see.

Along the side of the tracks we saw many piles of brush, and one of our fellow passengers, who had recently retired from the Forest Service, explained what they were: during the summer months, crews clear out underbrush that would be fuel for forest fires and leave it in piles. Then after the snow flies, they come through and torch it. Good plan! We saw no evidence of forest fires along the route.

In places the river was placid, but there were some rapids that invite white-water rafting in warmer weather.

Shortly before we arrived in Silverton, there was a train holdup! Masked men on horseback stopped the train and rode along the side.

They didn’t actually take our money, though, although we offered it – we know that volunteers often collect for charity by these train robberies.

Silverton is at 9,000 feet, and as we approached we began seeing snow on the San Juan Mountains to the east. These mountains are all over 10,000 feet high, but they seem shorter because we’re looking at them from only a few thousand feet lower.

The weather continues blessedly cool and comfortable, in the 60s and 70s. But the altitude is difficult to handle: our RV park and Durango are at 7,000 feet, and we haven’t been below 6,500 feet for several days. We have been told to drink liquids constantly, and we do. It seems that at these altitudes, ordinary breathing causes a loss of moisture, which leads to dehydration and headaches. Every night here I’ve woken up in the small hours with a headache, dry mouth, and thirst. I’m told our bodies are adjusting by producing more red corpuscles that will process oxygen better, but we’re not going to be hanging around long enough for those new corpuscles to catch up.

We had a couple of hours in Silverton, ate lunch, visited little shops – cute place, about what you’d expect.

Then we climbed aboard for the ride back to Durango, clickety clack, clickety clack. Fun day!

We woke up in Tuba City yesterday to a cool, crisp morning – yay! We have been hot for months, and we don’t like hot. At all. What a blessed relief. Finally!

Continuing northeast through the Navajo reservation, geologic history continued to unfold in the tiers of sandstone layer-caked in bands of red, bright orange-red, pink, and greyish-white,

with weirdly formed monadnocks dotting the landscape (monadnock: an isolated rock hill, knob, ridge, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a gently sloping or level surrounding plain).

Erosion reduces plateaus to mesas, mesas to buttes, and buttes to pinnacles. Every formation was interesting,

with the stories of mud, dinosaurs, inland seas and lagoons, wind, sea creatures, and sand dunes told in the structures left behind.

By lunchtime we reached Four Corners, the point where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. It is the only point in the United States shared by four states, and in addition it marks the boundary between two Native American governments, the Navajo Nation to the south (which maintains the monument and charges for entrance as a tourist attraction) and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Reservation. Like everyone else there, we had our photo taken:

The rock here changed from mostly red to mostly grey sandstone,

and as we drove into southwestern Colorado we found broad sweeps of mesas

and fewer of the bizarre monadnocks.

Our RV park is located just outside the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park, and from our site we have a stunning view of the eponymous mesa.

This morning we took a bus excursion called The 700 Years Tour to learn about the Ancestral Pueblo people who lived here. We had an excellent guide, an anthropologist/ biologist recently retired from 30 years with the National Parks System and equally conversant in the geology, archeology, flora and fauna of the park. We drove to and along the top of the mesa, carpeted with a dwarf juniper-piñon forest.

Unfortunately this part of Colorado has suffered drought for all but one of the past 17 years, which caused lightning-struck fires through two-thirds of the forest, so most of it now looks like this:

Because both juniper and piñon trees branch out immediately above the ground, a forest fire doesn’t just burn the needles or leaves at the treetops, it scorches everything down into the ground, including all the microbes and worms and everything. They estimate it will take 300-400 years for these forests to recover.

The mesa is not actually a mesa but a cuesta – an important distinction because a cuesta is not level, it slopes to one end. This cuesta slopes to the south, providing ideal growing conditions for the Puebloans as they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers. You’d think that would be a good thing, right? But actually hunter-gatherers were healthier and had life easier: because they ate basically meat and veggies (the “paleo” diet), they were taller and healthier, had better teeth and fewer children (average two) because the women had so little body fat they rarely ovulated, and worked only about 19 hours a week to sustain themselves. As corn, beans, and squash (carbs) were introduced and became staples, women gained body fat and gave birth every year from the onset of menses until a young death – they have not yet found a female skeleton over the age of 30.

The Mesa Verde area was settled by 400 AD, and we saw evidence of early semi-subterranean “pit” houses with walls and roofs of mud, clay and grasses. Later they started building masonry walls and integrated villages rather than scattered homes. They developed pottery and replaced spears with bows and arrows.

We visited a structure called the Sun Temple, built over a period of some 20 years around 1200 AD and never finished. It’s large and finely crafted, obviously a ceremonial center.

The theory is that some change was taking place for the Pueblo people and maybe they were appealing to their gods for assistance or relief. Around this time they all started moving from the top of the cuesta to alcoves in the rock sides, spaces created by sandstone sitting on a shale (hardened ocean bottom) shelf where water had accumulated to carve out the alcoves from the softer sandstone.

Why did they move? Unknown. Because the population had grown so large that all the top of the cuesta was needed for crops, or for better protection from the elements, or for defense? Whatever the reason, they brought their masonry skills to the construction of complicated and elaborate pueblos in these alcoves, not just a few but many, many pueblos in many alcoves.

Our last stop was Cliff Palace, and there we climbed down the cliff to see it up close.

Going down was steep and precarious – no OSHA rules here! (Our guide told us they were grandfathered in.) In the picture above, it looks like a dollhouse – here’s one with people to show the scale:

This multi-storied pueblo is south- and southwest-facing, providing greater warmth from the sun in the winter, had 200 rooms, including storage rooms, open courts, walkways, and 23 kivas (round, below-ground ceremonial and communal gathering rooms). Many of the rooms had been plastered and brightly painted, with art on the walls. Standing right next to where these people lived a thousand years ago was mind boggling.

Then we climbed back up, and the way out was even more perilous than the trail down.

We used the same handholds that the Puebloans had carved out of the rock and worn with their fingertips when they went up and down the cliffs even before they moved into the alcoves.

They lived in these cliff dwellings for only about 80 years; by 1300 all the people were gone – no one knows why. The last quarter of the 13th century was dry, but they had survived droughts before. It was also unusually cold; this was the time of the mini-ice age in Europe. They probably went south to New Mexico and Arizona and became or merged with today’s Zuni, Laguna, and Acoma people. Our guide told us that when he has asked people from those tribes what their traditions tell them about why their ancestors left, they say: It was time to go.

We drove north from Phoenix through the surprisingly green Sonoran desert with its iconic Saguaro cactuses.

We’ve driven this road before, two years ago, on our way to Cottonwood and Sedona, but this time we stayed east and went through Flagstaff and into the Painted Desert and the huge Navajo reservation. North of Flagstaff, sheltered by its imposing San Francisco Peaks,

we passed through a volcanic area of cinder cones and craters. Then suddenly we were in the Painted Desert and the vast valley of the Little Colorado River. Most of this side of the valley, what is called the Moenkopi Foundation, is surfaced with dark red sandstone, shale, siltstone, and mudstone layers, in myriad combinations of colors.

The Moenkopi Foundation was laid down on an extensive west-sloping plain across which a Triassic sea advanced and retreated several times, leaving behind the bones of sea creatures that decomposed into sandstone and shale. Skeletons of fossil amphibians and casts of reptile footprints have been recovered from Triassic rocks over 250 million years old, at a time when the continents were still attached to one another.

Our road turned east and traveled through more colorful Mesozoic rock formations in hues of green, blue, and yellow as well as all the shades of red and pink.

The layers of rock were endlessly fascinating to watch. Photos can’t begin to do it justice.

Our destination for today was Tuba City, and I wondered what connection there could be between the Navajo and tubas. The story is that Tuba City was named to honor Chief Tuuvi, a Hopi leader of the late 19th century. The Navajo name for the town is Tó Naneesdizi, which refers to springs under the ground. The Navajo reservation completely surrounds the Hopi reservation, like a donut around its hole, and Tuba City is on the Navajo reservation, not the Hopi reservation, so I don’t know why the Navajos don’t call the town by its Navajo name instead of by an adaptation of a Hopi name. Clearly there’s a lot I don’t understand here.

Anyway, our RV park is just behind the Navajo Interactive Museum, a wonderful interpretive center that we spent some time in this afternoon. In it is a Code Talkers display that celebrates one of the most important moments in Marine Corps history, when during World War II 29 Navajo volunteers were recruited by a Marine general who had grown up with his missionary parents on the Navajo reservation. The Navajo language has a complex grammar and an unwritten language, and it was spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, made it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training, so it was thought that it could be used to transmit military information by undecipherable code.

Staged tests of these 29 volunteers under simulated combat conditions demonstrated that Navajo men could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds, versus the 30 minutes required by machines at that time. The Navajo code talkers were commended for their skill, speed, and accuracy demonstrated throughout the war. At the Battle of Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. These six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. Connor later stated, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” By the end of the war, there were over 500 Code Talker Marines. The museum has a number of artifacts and memorabilia from their experiences.

In the cultural part of the museum, the first thing you see is a replica of a hogan, the traditional home of the Diné (Din-EH), which is actually what the Navajo call themselves. It can be round, cone-shaped, multi-sided, or square, with or without internal posts. The frame is covered with weeds, bark, or grass, and earth, except at the apex, where the smoke from the fire in the center of the floor is allowed to escape. The door always faces east to welcome the rising sun for blessings, wealth, and good fortune (which I believe is also a Chinese feng shui principle).

Inside were some beautiful pieces of pottery,

although the Navajo are known not for their pottery but for their weaving.

There were lots of magnificent examples of weaving that, I’m sorry to say, brought back the memory of when we wove small Navajo rugs in 3rd grade and a classmate convinced the teacher that my beautiful and intricate design was hers. I was stuck with her boring and misshapen rug, and I’m still pissed.