What a day!

Yesterday was like a week of days rolled into one!

We started off with a leisurely buffet breakfast at the motel (free with the room) and then went back to the window rock to catch the morning sun. Going westward to Ganado (and especially when we were coming back), we saw folks along the side of the road, picking piñon nuts. I love that high country around Sawmill ... tall ponderosa pines.

The visit to Hubbell was old home day for me. We talked to the present superintendent and one of the Navajo employees I had worked with. One of the traders present had worked at Hubbell after I was there; another's mother had visited Hubbell's as a kid, when his mother played cards with Mrs. Hubbell (probably Dorothy Hubbell, not her mother-in-law, Lina Rubi). So, the tour through the Hubbell home turned into a lot of sharing of tales about Hubbell's and trading in general. I remembered seeing masked yei-bi-chai dancers coming down the road 30 years ago to the trading post, where they received bread and other foods; a trader said masked dancers had come in a van to his trading post only the day before!

My son's first religious ceremony was a purification of the premises and everything on it by a Navajo medicine man after lightning struck a cottonwood behind the trading post, which was part of our reminiscences of Friday Kin'licheenie, an ancient man who had worked for Roman Hubbell.

And, as you might expect in a bunch of traders, some rugs were hauled out and we had quite a discussion of weaving and rugs and their history.

The bottom picture is of the doorway to the trading post. Next up, rug trader Steve Getzweiler is showing the group a very complicated and well-done rug he recently acquired. If you enlarge that picture, you can see the left-hand segment is a pictorial of a horse escaping a lasso, and you can see a disembodied hand on the throwing end of the rope, at the edge of the rug.

A new departure is shown in the next picture up; it's a blanket/shawl woven from alpaca wool in traditional designs. The model, my lovely sweetheart and traveling companion to all these out-of-the-way places, said it really felt good!

Above that is the house I lived in while supt. of the park for three years in the mid-70s. Historically, it was the school teacher's house, and it was made of ammo boxes filled with dirt and rocks ... the walls are about two feet thick!

Off to St. Michael's mission near Window Rock (actually, I think it has its own post office). I've been by it many times, but never stopped in. We enjoyed the quiet of the old place with its avenue of golden cottonwood trees.

Onward to home ... with a few stops! Like the flea market near the highway intersection in Window Rock. We didn't buy the bowls of blue corn meal mush that were offered, having just been to McDonald's.

North from WR, there are lines of cliffs and red rock buttes. A little further north, there seems to be a layer of greenish sandstone underlying the red sandstone (the green doesn't show as strongly in the pic as it seemed). Further north, a lava layer overlies the red sandstone.

We went up past Wheatfields Lake, did a quick tour of the Dine' College campus in Tsaile and went on up to Lukachukai, where we turned east on Navajo 13. Wow!

The afternoon sun on the red rock buttes and cliffs was stunning, offset by dark green conifers and blazes of oak and aspen color. Then we met a Navajo family bringing their cattle down from the high country ... kids, horses, four-wheelers, calves and all!

At the top of the pass, heading down toward Cove and the town of Shiprock, we had a ghostly view of Shiprock in the distance. As we got closer the combination of the thin lava dike running toward the National Natural Landmark and the way Shiprock rises out of a flat plain was surreal in the late afternoon sun. (Actually, everything else eroded away from Shiprock.)

What a day! tv