The Painted Desert Loop: Day 2 Blanding to Canyon De Chelly.

 The Blue Sage Inn

   Our Lodging in Blanding was the Blue Sage Inn. It's a vintage building designed by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright. It's small and without bells and whistles but charming and unusual for this part of the country.

The Bears Ears from Blanding

Click on images to enlarge.

Blanding enjoys a setting with great views in every direction. Anywhere you look, is you vision is not blocked by a building, you can see mountains.


From the street next to our motel, we could see the Bears Ears.


We enjoyed the Edge of the Cedars Museum which is focused on Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) civilizations that populated the area from the eighth thru the twelfth century. The number of artifacts is amazing and the whole experience very informative.

Heading south, with Canyon De Chelly as our destination for the day, we took a small detour into the Bears Ears NM, looking for ruins.


  The Monument is dotted with small ruins, which are often found in cliffs that make them nearly inaccessible.  I won't go into detail, but over a period of approximately five hundred years beginning about 700 CE, the people that built these structures moved about the four corners area, sometimes building larger settlements, sometimes smaller.

                                                                                   


Moving on, we crossed The San Juan River at Bluff, UT, and moved into the Navajo Nation and scenery that shows why this is called The Painted Desert.
                                                 
                                                                     


                                                                                  


Much of this terrain is reminiscent of Monument Valley but the farther south we traveled the more people's homes were scattered among the mesas. By the time we reached Rocky Point, the landscape was fairly dotted with houses and hogans.

Chinle, at the mouth of Canyon De Chelly, was surprisingly large. There are a lot of Navajo Nation administrative offices and a youth prison as well as BIA offices. There is also a lot of government-built housing and, overall, the town is crowded and noisy.

The Canyon, by contrast, is pleasant and very scenic.

                                                                     


There are two scenic drives, North Rim and South Rim. We drove the South Rim before checking in at our motel. The Canyon had and has an important role in the life of the Navajo Nation. It's broad and well-watered in areas and at least some agriculture appears to be ongoing. 


 

The walls reach as much as 700 feet and contain several ruins that are so positioned it's almost impossible to imagine how people accessed them.




A closer view of the above ruin

Tomorrow we'll drive the North Rim then head on to The Petrified Forest. Tonight, we're staying in Canyon De Chelly at the Thunderbird Inn, a facility run by the Navajo. I hope you can keep following along!


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