Sunday, November 29, 2009

September 2009: Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota

In September, we traveled to Wyoming so that Tom could attend a meeting of railroad writers and historians in Sheridan. Our route took us through Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, as well as Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, with a side trip to Red Lodge, Mont. On the return leg, we traveled via Rapid City, S.D., and Vail, Colo. In both directions we were able to visit friends along the way, and both coming and going we went through beautiful country with, luckily, good weather all the way.

The first friends we saw on this trip live in St. George, Utah. Gail grew up with Marcia in Massachusetts. She and her husband, George, retired and moved to St. George several years ago. It’s a great base for visiting Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks, which we had done on previous trips. This time, we arrived late in the afternoon, and had dinner with them at the Gun Barrel, a steak and game restaurant. Tom had bison steak and Marcia had elk medallions.

From St. George we moved on to Salt Lake City, where we took a “side trip” to Boston, Mass., which we’ll describe in a separate report. When we got back from that trip, we spent the first night on the road in Logan, Utah, a historic and very appealing college town 85 miles northeast of Salt Lake City. Leaving Logan, we got our first taste of fall foliage as we drove through Logan Canyon.

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By mid-day we were driving along the Snake River north of Alpine, Wyo., which also had some nice foliage.  Both here and in Utah, we were surprised by the reds and oranges, which we associate with the fall colors in New England. We thought the color of fall in the west was more typically yellow, due to the predominance of aspens, cottonwoods, willows and related trees.
In early afternoon, we reached the south entrance to Grand Teton National Park, just north of Jackson, Wyo. The Tetons come into view suddenly as you approach the park from this direction, and although we had seen this view many times in 2008 when we worked in Grand Teton, it still takes our breath away.
We had reservations to stay two nights at Jackson Lake Lodge in the park. On our way there we stopped at one of the places we had missed visiting during our Grand Teton summer, the Chapel of the Transfiguration. It was built in 1925 and is used for Sunday services during the summer by St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson. The chapel was designed so that as you sit in the sanctuary and look toward the alter, you have a magnificent view of the Tetons.

That evening we had dinner with our friend Rosanna, who Tom had worked with at Jenny Lake Lodge in 2008. It was a lot of fun catching up with her.

The next morning we attended the Sunday service at the Chapel of the Transfiguration and then went to Jenny Lake Lodge for lunch.  We were lucky to see many of the people we had gotten to know there in 2008.  And, we had a great lunch of trout. Then it was back to Jackson Lake Lodge for dinner in the employee dining room, where we reconnected with more of our friends from last summer.

The next day, our destination was Red Lodge, Mont. This took us through Yellowstone National Park and out the northeast entrance near Cooke City, Mont. Along the way we got some great views as we descended from Dunraven Pass (where the Absaroka Range can be seen to the northeast) and then traveled along the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River near Calcite Springs.

There are two main routes from Yellowstone to Red Lodge: the Beartooth Highway, which reaches an elevation of 10,947 feet and is acclaimed as one of the most beautiful roads in the U.S.; and Chief Joseph Highway, less direct than the Beartooth but also very scenic (click here for a map showing the Chief Joseph and a portion of the Beartooth).  We had done the Beartooth in 2008, so we decided to go via the Chief Joseph.

This road is named for Chief Joseph, the leader of the Nez Perce Indians, who in 1877 led the remnants of his tribe across 1,400 miles, pursued by the U.S. Cavalry, in hopes of reaching Canada rather than undergo a forced relocation to a small reservation in Idaho. The retreat was unsuccessful – Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce surrendered 40 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border in October 1877 – but the stamina and strategic skills of the chief and his tribe earned them the respect of many military leaders.

The summit of the highway, at an elevation of 8,048 feet in the Absaroka Range, is Dead Indian Pass, where one of the wounded Nez Perce warriors had been left behind and was then killed by Army scouts. As you climb toward the summit from the direction of Yellowstone, the road winds through several corkscrew turns, with turnouts where you can view the valley of the Clarks Fork River to the west and north.

The descent from the summit going east offers very different views, as you look out toward the next major range to the east, the Big Horn Mountains. Between the two ranges lie the Bighorn Basin and its dominant geographic feature, Heart Mountain. In addition, there are red rock formations along the highway as you descend from the pass.
We arrived at Red Lodge in mid-afternoon. We had a reservation at the Pollard Hotel, which is managed by our friend Angela Beaumont. Until the end of the 2008 season she had served as general manager of Jenny Lake Lodge.

Angela greeted us warmly and made sure we had a very nice room with a balcony overlooking the rear lobby of the hotel.
The hotel has historic character (it opened in 1893) but with modern amenities and a friendly staff. Both the guest rooms and the public areas are nicely furnished and well maintained.

We had an excellent dinner in the hotel’s dining room with Angela and her husband, classical guitarist Michael Beaumont. In the morning we enjoyed breakfast in the hotel dining room and then explored Red Lodge before leaving for Sheridan. The town’s retail blocks consist largely of brick and masonry buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century, and there are a variety of shops and eating places to choose from.

Our route to Sheridan took us over the Big Horn Mountains via U.S. Highway 14A (aka the Medicine Wheel Passage) to Burgess Junction, and U.S. 14 beyond. The photo below shows our little Honda Fit as we got ready to start the climb.
The drive across the mountains turned out to be more of an adventure than we anticipated, thanks to a major highway reconstruction project. As Marcia wrote in her travel diary, “We drove through mud, rocks and huge potholes, concerned the Fit would bottom out and get stuck.” But the worst did not happen, and by late afternoon we arrived in Sheridan.

Tom was attending the three-and-a-half day annual meeting of the Lexington Group. Marcia came prepared with a big bag of scrapbooking materials, and the Candlewood Suites where we stayed proved well-suited for this type of project since it had a large work counter. She also spent some time exploring downtown Sheridan and decided that it was no match for the charm of Red Lodge.  But we did find a couple of good Mexican restaurants and had meals there on separate nights with railroad friends from the Lexington Group meeting.

The centerpiece of the meeting was a bus tour of the Powder River Basin coal mining region south of Gillette, Wyo.  Inexplicably, Marcia declined the opportunity to go on this day-long trip. But Tom certainly enjoyed it!

The mines themselves are open pits covering thousands of acres. The coal lies in seams covered by a few yards of topsoil, and large draglines like the one shown here are used to remove the “overburden” so that coal can be removed with mechanized shovels. This is at the North Antelope Rochelle mine, which in 2008 produced more coal than any other mine in the world.
This doesn’t seem like a hospitable environment for wildlife. But one of Tom’s unexpected discoveries was the number of pronghorn (commonly known as antelope, although they’re unrelated to African antelope) that live near the mines. The pronghorn graze even in busy areas like this one where coal trains are loaded.
After touring the mine, the three Lexington Group busses found a place to take a break so that everyone could enjoy their box lunches, in close proximity to a busy piece of railroad.


Our next stop was Custer State Park, S.D., where our friend Pat was spending the summer working in the store at Sylvan Lake Lodge. Marcia and Pat had worked together at the Jackson Lake Lodge gift shop in 2008, and we had visited Pat at her home in Florida earlier this year. She showed us around the lodge, which was built in 1937 and has a style similar to that of many national parks lodges of that era.

We had a very nice dinner with Pat in the lodge’s dining room. Tom had bison, appropriate since the next day Pat would be among the Custer park employees involved in the annual “Buffalo Round-Up.” To keep the park’s herd at manageable size, each year they conduct a bison drive through the park that ends up with some of the animals being cut out for commercial sale.  We didn’t stick around for this – we had seen plenty of bison on trips to Yellowstone when we worked at Grand Teton.

We stayed that night at Rapid City, about an hour north of the park, and in the morning headed for our next overnight stop, Douglas, Wyo. Along the way we stopped at Mount Rushmore, which we had visited in 2007, but decided to revisit since we were in the area.
In addition to the iconic sculptures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, this national park features an emphasis on Native American culture and history. Its superintendent for the past five years has been Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa who has worked to provide visitors with information about the Sioux who were driven from the Black Hills following the discovery of gold in the area in the 1870s. The teepee shown here is part of Mount Rushmore’s Heritage Village.
In Hill City, S.D., a one-time mining town that’s now a tourist destination, we had lunch, and then Marcia explored the shops while Tom followed the Black Hills Central tourist train out of town.
Back on the road, we passed through Edgemont, S.D. (more coal trains), Lusk and Shawnee, Wyo. (ditto) and finally arrived in Douglas.  In the morning, we headed south to Denver, where we would turn west toward Vail. At mid-day, we stopped at Fort Collins, Colo., where we searched for a lunch spot and stumbled across a folk art store (South by Southwest) that happened to contain a winery tasting room (Trail Ridge). The tasting room, in turn, happened to offer a cheese and cracker plate that was perfect for lunch, along with a glass of wine. It was an unexpected treat.
After lunch we drove around Fort Collins (home of Colorado State University). We liked the town very much. Time didn’t allow us to linger, but we do expect to get back to here soon.

We picked up Interstate 70 near Denver, and reached Vail in late afternoon. The aspens along I-70 were spectacular.
We explored the commercial area of Vail that evening. It was the off season, and many restaurants were offering two-for-one specials and other incentives. This allowed us to have a nice but affordable dinner at a European-style restaurant, where we sat on the patio and enjoyed the views.

The next morning we had a breakfast at the Lodge at Vail, an upscale Swiss-style property, where (again, because it was the off season) we had the dining room to ourselves. We were interested in stopping here because it is managed by Vail Corporation, our employer when we worked at Grand Teton. We then proceeded west through Glenwood Springs, Colo., where our stop happened to coincide with the arrival of Amtrak’s eastbound California Zephyr.
The rest of the day consisted mainly of a long desert crossing from Grand Junction, Colo., to Green River, Utah. But the desert can be beautiful. As Marcia wrote in her travel diary, “There are canyons, rock cliffs, mountains, rock formations and outcroppings in all different sizes, shapes and colors.” Beyond Green River, we had another few hours of mountain-climbing before we reached our overnight stop at Richfield, Utah. From Richfield it was on to Henderson, Nev., where we stayed with Marcia’s sister-in-law Marilyn and her husband Michael. By coincidence, it was Tom’s birthday, and the next day was Marilyn’s, so we celebrated with a nice dinner at the Orleans in Las Vegas.

From Henderson, it’s a 400-mile drive to Santa Maria. We’ve done it many times, and the key to a successful trip is timing it to avoid the Las Vegas traffic on Interstate 15. We were on the road early, and around noon we stopped next to the railroad at Tehachapi, Calif., to enjoy the picnic lunch that Marilyn had made for us.

It was a great trip – we visited lots of new places, saw many friends, and came back with a long list of things to do on our next trip to these areas.

Text and images ©2009 Tom and Marcia Murray 

Thursday, November 12, 2009

October 2009: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico

In October, we spent three weeks on the road visiting destinations in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. We had originally planned to attend an Elderhostel (now Exploritas) Spanish course in northern New Mexico, but when it was cancelled, we decided to go ahead with our trip anyway. We're glad we did. It was a beautiful time of year to be in this part of the country.

Our first major stop was at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona. We have stayed here several times since 2004, and we've enjoyed it every time. It was built in the 1920's as a Fred Harvey Hotel, designed by architect Mary Colter. Most travelers reached the hotel via passenger trains on the Santa Fe Railway's Chicago-Los Angeles main line. Eventually it ceased operating as a hotel and became a railroad office building.
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After the Santa Fe stopped using it, the building was threatened with demolition but was saved by Allan Affeldt and his wife, artist Tina Mion, who have been recreating Mary Colter's masterpiece with a blend of originality and faithfulness to Colter's vision. It has a wonderful restaurant (the Turquoise Room), a cozy bar that's reminiscent of a railroad club car, and the most fascinating public spaces of any hotel we've been in. Much of the wall space is taken up with Tina Mion's paintings, and throughout the hotel there are other works of art and craft, both old and new, including some pieces designed by Mary Colter that have found their way back to Winslow after years in the hands of collectors.

From Winslow we traveled to Gallup, New Mexico and then north through the Navajo Nation, en route to Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. As the park service web site says, Mesa Verde "offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. Today, the park protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. These sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States."

We took the self-guided tour of Spruce Tree House and the ranger-guided tour of Cliff Palace, as well as the driving tour of Mesa Top Loop Road where we saw more structures and remains from different eras of civilization. There are many impressive things about the cliff dwellings, not the least of which is that the dwellings were accessed from the mesa tops by means of hand- and foot-holds dug into the sandstone cliffs. The engineering of the dwellings is amazing, too, given the limited tools that the Pueblo people had available.

We stayed in the park at Far View Lodge, in a rustic but well-furnished room with a balcony and an expansive view of the Colorado landscape. It appeared that the rooms in this section had recently been updated. We had an excellent meal in the lodge's dining room; the menu had a lot of local foods which were well seasoned and spicy. That evening we went to a ranger program on the contrasts and similarities between the Mesa Verde settlements and those of others nearby during the same period of time.

Following our tours of the the cliff dwellings, we left for Durango, Colorado, about an hour away. We spent two nights at the Country Sunshine B&B, about 12 miles north of town. We often use TripAdvisor in picking places to stay, and this B&B had one of the highest reviewer ratings we had even seen on the site. The accommodations were fine, but the reason Country Sunshine is such a standout is the personality of the host, Walter Hammerle. He's from Austria, and he runs the B&B with his wife Jodi, who's from the U.S. Walter goes out of his way to make each guest feel welcome, and he's a gourmet chef, too. He learns why each guest is in the area, and then makes suggestions and recommendations to enhance their stay.  Each night he prepares a special dessert for guests and in the morning he makes a superb breakfast.

The reason we were in Durango was to ride the Durango & Silverton, a remnant of the Denver & Rio Grande narrow gauge railway system that once spread across southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The train runs from Durango north to Silverton, a distance of 45 miles, much of it through the canyon of the Animas River. The trip takes most of the day, and includes a two-hour layover in Silverton, which bills itself as a "gritty little mining town with Victorian pretensions."

As Marcia wrote in her trip journal, we had "great blue-sky weather with gorgeous scenery along the way, through the wilderness of mountains and canyons, climbing mountainsides with dropoffs into the valleys below." Tom spent most of his time in the open-air gondola car so that he could get the full benefit of smoke and cinders from the steam locomotive.

Our next stop was Chama, New Mexico, for another narrow-gauge trip, this time on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, another segment of the former Rio Grande network. Unlike the Durango & Silverton, which has a long history as a tourist attraction, this 64-mile section of the railroad was saved by a group of locals and rail enthusiasts who were (and are) passionate about preserving service over 10,015-foot high Cumbres Pass, the highest mountain pass reached by rail in the U.S. The railroad is owned by the states of New Mexico and Colorado and operated by an interstate agency, which hires a private group with rail operations and maintenance expertise to oversee daily operations.

We took a bus to the east end of the railroad, Antonito, Colorado, and boarded a train for the trip to Chama. Some might say that the C&TS's scenery isn't as spectacular as the Silverton train's, but there was plenty of variety and several places where one could look over the side of the car into deep gorges and scenic canyons. The C&TS strives for authenticity, and at several places along the route, old buildings, water towers and other structures have been preserved, allowing the passenger with a little imagination to understand how hard railroading in this country must have been in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in the winter. Our lunch stop was at Osier, where we had a cafeteria-style meal which was included in our ticket price. Again, Marcia enjoyed the comfort of an enclosed car while Tom went the smoke-and-cinders route. The open-air car had an excellent narrator, Bob Ross, who has been involved with the railroad for more than 30 years and is a director of the Friends of the C&TS.

When we got back to Chama it was late afternoon, but we had one more goal for the day: to visit Tierra Wools, in the small town of Los Ojos, south of Chama. The weavers of Tierra Wools are local women, mostly of Spanish and Mexican heritage, who create beautiful rugs, blankets, garments and other items. The wool is shorn from local sheep, and washed, dyed, spun and woven entirely by local people. They give classes to outsiders and sell their products through their store in Los Ojos.

Our next overnight stop was Santa Fe, but en route there from Chama we passed through Abiquiu, where Georgia O'Keeffe had lived and worked for many years. The scenic beauty of this country would inspire any artist.

We also visited Taos, about 70 miles north of Santa Fe. Thanks to our GPS and some misleading maps, we ended up on a very steep mountainside dirt road without guardrails in the Rio Grande Gorge.  While unintended, this route still gave us some beautiful views.

We only spent a couple of hours in Taos, mainly walking around the plaza, but this will be on our to-do list the next time we visit northern New Mexico.

We spent a full day in Santa Fe exploring the plaza and visiting nearby museums and shops. One highlight was the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, where we saw her interpretations of some of the scenes near Abiquiu that we had viewed the previous day. Our delicious lunch was at Milagro 139.

From Santa Fe we headed south to Las Cruces where our friends Con and Susan have lived for several years. Their house has a view of the Organ Mountains, so named for their resemblance to organ pipes. We sat on their rooftop patio one evening watching the colors of the mountains change as the sun set.

We spent two days with our friends, the first one devoted to exploring the area around Las Cruces and nearby Mesilla, where we had an excellent Mexican meal at La Posta, and later explored shops and other attractions around the plaza. In Las Cruces, we spent a long time wandering through the aisles at COAS Books, one of the largest and best-stocked bookstores we've seen in any city.

On the second day, we spent some time exploring the Aguirre Springs Recreation Area on the east side of the Organ Mountains, and then headed east to White Sands National Monument, which has 275 square miles of dunes consisting of fine particles of gypsum. The dunes are constantly being changed by the winds, and the white sand combined with the backdrop of nearby mountains makes for a beautiful landscape. Susan and Marcia joined the other kids there to ride their "snow" coasters down the dunes.  The sand doesn't get hot, even on a bright sunny day.

On the way back, we stopped at the museum of the White Sands Missile Range, which has played a role in U.S. missile development since World War II.

From Las Cruces it was on to Tucson, where we stopped at the eastern section of Saguaro National Park, which has thousands of examples of its namesake cactus as well as hundreds of other plant species typical of the Sonoran desert environment. It's on the fringe of metro Tucson, so it's a stark example of a place that could have been overtaken by developers had it not been designated as a national park.

After Tucson, we spent some time with our friend Jeanne in Phoenix. She grew up there, so she knows the area very well, and she took us on a tour of the city as well as neighboring areas including Scottsdale. She works as a hostess at a Mexican restaurant, Aunt Chilada's near her home, and before we left town we had a delicious Mexican breakfast.

Our next stop was Prescott, a city that played an important role in the early history of Arizona and was once its territorial capital. We stayed at a budget Marriott hotel, but we had dinner in the bar of the historic Hassayampa Inn, which we can highly recommend. From Prescott we went to Clarkdale for another train ride, this time on the Verde Canyon Railroad. This 20-mile ride along the banks of the Verde River passes through red rocks country similar to nearby Sedona. The combination of geology and vegetation makes for spectacular scenery.

After leaving Prescott, it was back to La Posada for one more night, but first we stopped at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. If you ever have a couple of hours to spare in Flagstaff, go to this museum. It does a fine job of explaining the development of Native American culture through the centuries in the Colorado Plateau area, using a combination of artifacts, scientific explanations, and art.

At La Posada, we enjoyed another terrific meal in the Turquoise Room. In the morning we awoke to a dusting of snow (in the desert, no less). If we hadn't already been headed for home, that would have been a signal to do so. We spent one more night on the road, in Kingman, Arizona at a chic new Marriott Springhill Suites.  We found a great hotel restaurant through TripAdvisor, and enjoyed our dinner at Hubb's Bistro in the Hotel Brunswick.

The next day, we arrived home in Santa Maria, with the feeling that the past 20 days had been well spent. Have we used enough superlatives in describing this trip? Yes, we had a great time.

Text and images ©2009 Tom and Marcia Murray