Saturday, June 4
Got up with no clear destination for the
day except that we wanted to go to Four Corners, i.e. UT, CO, NM and AZ all
meeting their borderlines in the only four-state corner in the US. We had been informed by the lady in the
reception that the area was ugly, but since I found it to be of geographic
interest to my kids if nothing else, we wanted to check it out.
By
mere coincidence we got off 163 on a little gravel road in the Valley of the
Gods to look at the scenery. The road turned out to be the famous 16-mile drive
through the Valley that is mandatory according to all visitors guide-literature.
Without knowing the exact extent of it, we just kept going as the scenery that
unfolded before our eyes was irresistible and allowed no turning back. The road
was all gravel in good shape, but it still kept our speed at maybe 20mph and
with frequent stops it took us a few very well-spent hours before we emerged on
261.
Back
on smoother grounds, we drove back to 163 that we let us take us past Bluff and
to Montezuma Creek and UT-262 into CO where it became CO-41. Before crossing
the UT-CO border we saw one of those duck-like oil-pumps, easily accessed right
by the side of the road, so I stopped to go out and take a look at it. The
fulcrum was propelled into its slow-moving motion by a very low-rpm engine that
sounded just like, and probably was, one of those boat-engines that were fairly
common when I was a kid in Sweden.
The strange sharp popping sound from the exhaust hose on the ground brought out
weird echoing sounds from the surrounding cliffs and with the smell of the raw
oil and the peculiar silhouette those pumps have, a surreal feeling came over
us.
In
Colorado we got back on US-160, now heading
south-west towards the Four Corners. The
monument, a circular concrete slab surrounded by Indian sales-stands, is right
off the main road on Navajo-owned land and there was a small charge to get in
there. Sure enough, the area wasn’t very pretty but it was fun to hang out
there for a while and the stands provided amazingly cheap and beautiful
hand-crafted jewelry to my wife and my daughter (of course they both regretted
being thrifty after we had left).
For
some odd reason we all agreed that it would be cool to have lunch in New
Mexico, so we made a left turn on US-64 in Teec Nos Pos to get to Shiprock. The
road was ruler-straight for many miles and the scenery boring yellow-brownish.
The round-trip took way too long for having lunch at Burger King in the not so
exciting Shiprock and it was later than it should
have been when we finally came back through Teec Nos Pos. Right before Red Mesa, AZ, we turned north on the
unmarked little road to Montezuma
Creek, UT. The road
was very desolate and fairly narrow but paved and relatively smooth through a
friendly rolling landscape. Well back on 163 we drove straight back towards
Mexican Hat, but made a right turn on 261 to get to the
Goosenecks, a deep cut
meandering of the San Juan River 400-500
meters into the bare rock. I wished I had had a camera with a wide-angle lens!
First major goal decided during the trip: Get a digital SLR with a good general
purpose zoom-lens (the D-70 sure looks appealing) for the next major trip. I
don’t take a lot of pictures on an every day basis anyway, contrary to one of
my invented arguments for not dragging around a bulky camera, and on occasions
like these I can deal with both the bulkiness and the extra effort required for
photography-artistry.
Back
at the motel we relaxed for a while and then left the kids in the room with
coke, chips and candy while we set out to take a look at the sunset in Monument Valley. Unfortunately, and unlike Valley
of the Gods, Monument
Valley is all fenced on
the sides of the road, supposedly by/for the Navajo’s, so we hung out on a
rest-stop for while and then drove up to the state-park run motel and grocery
store. The motel as well as the store is all dry-land, i.e. no beer to enjoy
with the view, and the motel itself looked very much like a Soviet concrete
bunker town apart from the view so we took it off our list of future
possibilities. Besides, why stay there when the San Juan Inn is such a cool
place, conveniently located between the two valleys.
So
we returned to our beaten track through Monument Valley,
stopped to devour the sunset a bit more and then headed back to the hotel. By
coincidence, I spotted a vividly colored mountain side and stopped to snap a
picture.
Goosenecks, a deep cut
meandering of the 
