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Utah Trip Report/Long Version

by texsubaru on Sun Nov 05 04:35:06 PST 2000

*Note: To avoid my admittedly long-winded travelogue, just look for the kinda on-topic paragraphs about Subarus marked with asterisks. We left Austin just before 4 p.m on Oct. 8, headed northwest. *Once we were out of the Austin area, Subarus became rare enough that we started a little road game, "Spot the Subie," in which the first one of us to see a fellow Subaru would yell, "Subaru!" ("Forester!" or "Outback!" were also good responses). From Central Texas, across the South Plains and on into southeastern New Mexico, we scored very few Subaru sightings. We stopped for the first night at the small town of Post (about 40 miles south of Lubbock) where we stayed at the Hotel Garza, a 1915 railroad hotel that's now a B&B. The little hotel is a bit rustic, but in a nicely Old West sort of way. It's an excellent bargain, with the only downside being that it is right next to the railroad tracks, so you could hear late-night freight trains rumble by. The next day we cruised across the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico, driving to Taos via Las Vegas, N.M. (we made it a point to bypass Albuquerque because friends told us the Big I -- construction work on the intersection of I-40 and I-25 -- has been a terrible mess). We spent the night at the Taos Inn, in a room that was part of a small turn-of-the-century adobe home. The room was exceedingly nifty, but I'd still have to say that this hotel was rather seriously overpriced. *Subaru sightings began picking up considerably as we had approached Taos and remained fairly common as we made our way through northern New Mexico. We spent most of the next morning at the Taos Pueblo (I've been there before, but Christine hadn't). After leaving the pueblo, we made a short, obligatory stop on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge just west of Taos, then took a strikingly beautiful drive on US 64 through the western half of Carson Nat'l Forest to Tierra Amarilla, where we stopped briefly so Christine could shop for weavings (found absolutely nothing that we could afford). I'd been looking forward to the next stage of the trip, the drive from Chama on across southwest Colorado, but it started raining fairly heavily on us even before we reached Pagosa Springs, Colo. Though I felt relatively safe in our Forester, it was still miserable enough driving on the winding, hilly and unfamilar roads that I couldn't enjoy whatever scenery was visible through the downpour. The rain began easing up around Cortez, but by then it was getting dark anyway, so we continued on through intermittent showers to Moab. *One thing that was reasonably easy to see in southwestern Colorado were Subarus. They were so ubiquitous on the Colorado roads that we finally gave up on our "Spot the Subie" game. *Our first full day in Moab was the only time we gave the Forester a slow-speed workout. Wendy, our hostess, led us out on a scenic drive a little ways along what she called the River Road beside the Colorado River, and then on a rougher stretch of dirt road along Kane Creek to a high overlook called Hurrah Pass. Not actual off-roading, but certainly a bit of fairly rough-roading. The Subaru handled it all with great aplomb, never even vaguely threatening to bottom out. Most of the rest of our rough-road outings, we took our friends' new-ish Toyota RAV4 -- partly because of the RAV4's slightly higher ground clearance, but mostly because our host, Eric, was driving since he was the only one who knew exactly where we were going. *We spent some time comparing their RAV4 with our Forester: The RAV4 won on most off-roading points, but Eric admitted to preferring the Subaru's engine power, handling and highway ride. The Forester's back seat also was a tad roomier (but neither was enormously comfy packed with two adults and a child seat on a 120-mile daytrip). Our friends showed us around Arches Nat'l Park (I was most impressed by Double Arch), and a few of the highlights of Canyonlands Nat'l Park -- Canyonlands seems much too vast to cover thoroughly unless you devote the bulk of your vacation to it. We also made a quick stop at the adjacent Dead Horse Point State Park, which is terrifically scenic. Our friends (one of whom is an archaeologist with the National Park Service) also took us on a day hike down into a canyon on BLM land west of Blandings, which was just filled with 13th-century cliff dwellings and had a few Anasazi stone towers along the rim. There are few things more humbling than worrying intensely about scrambling up a large, very steep boulder along a high canyon wall, then watching your best friend not only nonchalantly climb over it, but do so with his 2-year-old daughter dozing peacefully in the L.L. Bean baby pack on his back. *Moab had a lot of Subarus per capita -- although a lot of them had out-of-state plates, rather than belonging to locals. Moab is a major mecca for mountain bikers, and I noted that the Impreza Sport Wagon seemed to be the preferred vehicle of the mountain biking set. I didn't get to find out if that's because it's viewed as notably cooler than the Outback or Forester, or just because it's the most affordable of the Subaru wagons for a young person on a budget. We left Moab on Oct. 16 and drove back into Colorado to Mesa Verde Nat'l Park, where we spent the night in the Farview Lodge. Christine and I both really liked the lodge; the rooms aren't special -- just motel units without TVs or phones -- but we had a wonderful view (in the morning, a small herd of wild horses came grazing right by our window). Also, the lodge's restaurant was quite good, though a tad pricey. We had wondered about how bad this summer's fire damage would be. Much of the northern part of the park was thoroughly blackened, but the parts of the park where we visited archaeological sites were all unscathed. We spent a very busy day at Mesa Verde. The ruins at Mesa Verde might not be quite as impressive in scale as, say, New Mexico's Chaco Canyon, but the sheer variety was stunning. We rolled west into Arizona the following day, with a brief jog up to the Four Corners Monument. It's only worth a short stop for a goofy photo op, but it WAS a hoot to drive slowly around the marker as Christine yelled, "OK, we're still in New Mexico, oh, now we're in Colorado, and now we're in Utah annndddd now back in Arizona." We looped back up into southern Utah, via the town of Bluff, and then down into Monument Valley. I'm glad to have finally seen Monument Valley in person, after decades of seeing it in movies, but the scenery didn't beat Arches or Canyonlands. In fact, we found the badlands before we got to Monument Valley (just north of Mexican Hat) more exotic -- it looked all for the world like the backdrops in the old "Roadrunner"/"Wile E. Coyote" cartoons. We visited to the old Gouldings Lodge and Trading Post, where we enjoyed seeing a lot of old movie paraphernalia, before continuing south into Arizona. We drove on to Chinle and the entrance to Canyon de Chelly Nat'l Monument right after dark. At Canyon de Chelly, we stayed at the Navajo-operated Thunderbird Lodge, which was extremely nice, except for a bit of trouble with hot water in our room (the lodge blamed it on their "historic plumbing"). Of all the places we visited on the Navajo reservation, the Thunderbird Lodge's gallery offered the best-quality Navajo arts and crafts we saw on this trip, with especially fine rugs. Of course, this quality meant we couldn't afford any of it, but I did buy a very nice silver-and-turquoise necklace for Christine from a Navajo silversmith we met while in Chinle. We did the hike to the White House cliff dwelling down in the canyon the next morning, hit a few scenic overlooks and then headed west into Hopiland in the afternoon. I've been to Canyon de Chelly before, and I think Christine wasn't that impressed having just been to Mesa Verde two days before, but she did think the canyon scenery was pretty. Our next stop was the Hopi pueblo of Walpi, high atop First Mesa. I'd been there once before, but really wanted to visit another still-occupied, living Indian pueblo after having spent so much time at ancient Indian ruins. And Christine had never even met any Hopis before, so she found it pretty interesting. There were also some good pottery bargains, and we bought a quite nice shallow bowl from an extremely old Hopi lady at Walpi (also got to glimpse her pueblo home's kitchen -- no running water or electricity, but she did have sheet linoleum on the floor). We also made a quick stop at the Hopi Indian Cultural Center's small museum at Second Mesa, before turning around. We were trying to make it to Ganado, Ariz., to visit the old Hubbel Trading Post, but it was closed by the time we got there. We spent the night in Gallup, N.M., staying at what's become our favorite classic Route 66 accommodation, the 1930s-era El Rancho Hotel, which was a hangout for visiting movie crews for decades. An exceedingly offbeat place, probably not to everyone's taste since it has certainly seen better days, but we love it. We got a late start the next morning, and lit out across New Mexico, going from Gallup to the historic town (I think the entire town is an officially designated national historic site) of Lincoln. We stayed the night at the Casa de Patron, a B&B in an 1850s adobe building where Billy the Kid was reputedly held for a few nights under house arrest while negotiating with the governor for a pardon. It was a nifty house, though one of those B&Bs where you feel a bit like you're staying in someone's guest bedroom. (My experience has been that tends to bother your average guy -- myself certainly included -- while most women, like Christine, feel totally comfortable with it). That evening, we drove over into the nearby tiny town of Tinnie for supper, where we dined at a general store that has been enlarged into a large rambling Victorian eatery, which apparently attracts a fair bit of well-heeled travelers from Ruidoso. The food was pretty good. The next morning we toured Lincoln, where I tried to indoctrinate Christine into Billy the Kid lore and the history of the 1870's Lincoln County War. Around noon, we reluctantly climbed back into Forester and launched into the long drive home, making it through West Texas, via Big Spring and San Angelo, to Austin in a little over 10 hours. Whew! Congrats if you really read all this -- though I have to wonder if ya didn't have anything better to do with your time ... ;-)