Goodbye to the Centenary of the National Park Service

As the year comes to a close on the Centenary of the NPS, so will my travels to our National Parks. The new year beckons with a new goal—turning this sabbatical of travel and blogging into a book. But first, here’s the last entry of “Notes from the Road.”

Aztec National Monument's central plaza (Photo by Hunner)

Last Monday, I left Durango and headed south to warmer climes. I visited Aztec National Monument, one of the places where people gathered after they left Chaco in the 12^th century. A reconstructed kiva, the only such one in the National Parks, offered a great place to imagine dancers and drummers, priests and supplicants holding religious ceremonies. There, the walls echoed with a recording of such singing and drumming. Crouching through low doorways and walking around the ruins, I marveled at the window Aztec offered into the world of the Ancestral Puebloans. In the documentary film about Aztec at the visitors’ center, one of the Native American narrators commented about the transitory nature of the place. She said that her people have always been a migrating culture and that her ancestors left this and the other places that I have visited the previous week because it was time to move on. For me, this rings truer than drought, warfare, or other reasons offered by archeologists. Leaving Aztec NM, I drove through Farmington, Shiprock, and Gallup and hopped onto Interstate 40 to get to Grants at the base of the sacred mountain of Mt. Taylor.

Interior of the reconstructed kiva at Aztec (Photo by Hunner)

Grants has seen better days, evidenced by its closed restaurants and boarded-up stores. Perhaps it never recovered from the uranium mining boom of the 1950s and 60s with the consequential environmental and health challenges. I left Grants the next morning on my way to finally go to Sky City at the Pueblo of Acoma. I first stopped by El Malpais NHP just south of Grants where Ranger Dalton informed me that the Sky City is operating winter hours and is only open on weekends. So much for my advanced planning. So I quickly reorganized and headed for El Morro where over the centuries, people have carved names and symbols into the soft stone cliffs. From Native American petroglyphs to Don de Oñate’s “Paso por Acqui” (I passed by here) in the early 1600s to railroad surveying crews in the 1850s, El Morro has documented the many people who used the pond at the base of the cliffs for water in an arid land.

The cliffs of El Morro National Monument (Photo by Hunner)

The pond at the base of El Morro that has attracted travelers for centuries (Photo by Hunner)

Don Onate's signature at El Morro  (Photo by Hunner)

After marveling at this isolated outpost of the NPS and talking to volunteer Rob, I swung through the Pueblo of Zuni for a fill-up and turned south for Pie Town and U.S. 60. A quick coffee and some apple pie at Pie Town prepped me for a visit to the Very Large Array on the Plains of St. Augustine. Some might recall Jodie Foster in the opening scenes of the movie “Contact” in front of the large satellite dishes peering into space which was filmed at the VLA. At the site, scientists from around the world converge to listen to the full range of radio waves that emanate from stars, galaxies, and planets. Their research has changed our understanding of the universe. It was a great juxtaposition of the 21^st century with the 12^th century of Chaco and the other pre-contact Native American sites I had just visited.

The dish at the Very Large Array. Notice the line of the dishes that recede in the background (Photo by Hunner)

An example of the images of radio waves recorded by the VLA (From exhibit at the Visitors' Center)

I continued that Tuesday by stopping at the Bosque de Apache Wildlife Refuge south of Socorro, New Mexico. Here tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes, Canadian Snow Geese, and various ducks winter.  At dusk, the cranes glide into a pond by the side of the road to spend the night protected by water from the predatory coyotes. As they flew overhead honking and softly landing in the ponds, avid birders with cameras the size of bazookas rapidly shot photos with the sunset in the background. I often stop by this time of year for some rejuvenation of the generosity and beauty of nature. I ended the day with a soak at Rivers Bend Hot Springs in Truth or Consequences on the banks of the Rio Grande.

Sandhill cranes settling in for the night at the Bosque. (Photo by Hunner)

Birders at the Bosque (Photo by Hunner)

So here’s the deal. This is my last blog. I have decided that I now need to shift my writing and focus to a book about the history of the U.S. from those places that I visited where history actually happened. I can’t continue this weekly blog and also write the book. I have enjoyed writing for you and am a bit saddened that I have to pull the plug, but I can’t devote the time needed to the blog. I want to thank you for reading and following me and also thank those Parkgonauts and community history scholars that I met along the way. This has been a great way to spend seven months, visiting over 100 NPS and historical sites and driving 20,000 miles. If you still want to read my take on the NPS and historical sites, you can always revisit my earlier blogs.

I am still driven by history, it’s just that now I will drive my desk, researching and writing and trying to make sense of my journey and our country’s past and present. Stay tuned—this is not the end of Driven by History. It is just the end of the road trip. Now comes the real work—the book.

Sunset at the Bosque de Apache (Photo by Hunner)