Grants, New Mexico, United States
Today we transferred from Albuquerque to Grants, NM,
stopping to visit two national monuments outside of Grants along the way. I have put most of the commentary in the
captions of the photos, but here are a few highlights:
The two national monuments, El Malpais and El Morro, turned
out to be both further apart than we realized and more involved than we
realized, so we ended up having to do an enormous amount of driving back and
forth. We went to the El Malpais visitor
center first, and discovered that there are two big branches of the park—one of
which goes to El Morro, 46 miles away.
El Morro, however, turned out to close at 4, so we decided to go there
first and then double back to El Malpais, which does not close (except the
visitor’s center).
El Morro is an interesting spot; it became famous because it has a deep permanent pool of water, which drew far west travelers in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries. People who stopped for water then carved their names into the sandstone--very old grafitti which is now a historical record.
Modern day travelers can't carve their names into the rock in the hope that they will some day become historical; the big difference, of course, is that those people who traveled by here in centuries past were doing something significant, not just visiting air-conditioned visitor's centers. Makes you think: these people set out to cross unknown land and just hoped for the best in terms of finding water. Seems like madness now!
We got just about
everything done, and were headed to the last stop with a 1.5 mile hike out on
the lava field, when we encountered a guy who ran his car into a ditch last
night, and had been waiting the better part of 24 hours for someone to come
by. He didn’t want us to call 911
(suspended license and worried about fines he can’t pay), and we couldn’t get a
line out to anyone else, as we were down in a bowl. He wanted us to try to tow him out, but that
violates the rental agreement, so we refused.
We did, however, abandon the hike and drove out to where we could get a
signal to call a friend of his to go tow him out.
(Clyde, the guy in the ditch, apparently had
no cell phone. We don’t know why he
didn’t just walk the half mile or so to the main road and flag down big pick-up
trucks. Lord knows there are plenty of those!
I couldn’t get his friend, but got her voicemail (with name, so we knew
it was the right number). Left a
detailed message and told her to call back if she had questions. She didn’t call back, so we figure she went
and hauled Clyde out of the ditch.
This led us to ponder the question of what it must be like
to live like that—with no margin for dealing with trouble when it comes
along. Probably many, many people do
live just like that.
That put an end to our touring day, regardless, so we headed
into Grants and the hotel. We discovered
that since it was Monday, no restaurant in town was open (except fast food and
the one where we ate lunch), so we booked it over to the next town over, where,
Yelp told us, there would be an excellent barbecue place. Yelp got it right again.
Tomorrow, Petrified Forest NP and the Wigwam Motel in
Holbrook, AZ.
2025-05-23