A day that starts with an hour-long massage at Ten Thousand Waves, ends with a Rocky Mountain trout “…dusted with blue corn meal, pan-fried and served with a jocana slaw, fried squash blossoms and grilled horseradish sour cream…” AND has a Dairy Queen cone in between is a VERY good day. That was the case yesterday, Thursday.
Ten Thousand Waves is one of my two “must” stops during any visit to Santa Fe. The massage therapists are fantastic and worth the exposure to the (somewhat) New Age atmosphere. The spa itself is a series of multi-level earth-tone wooden rooms and platforms blending into and concealed by the indigenous landscape in the hills fifteen minutes northeast of Santa Fe. It’s billed as “Japanese-style” because of its communal (bathing-suit optional) hot tubs, architecture, and landscaping. (It certainly isn’t by the ethnicity of staff: there’s nary an Asian face in sight.) Some of the offerings are a bit exotic: aside from the nightingale-dropping facial (mentioned in a previous post), there are four-handed massages; massages with hot stones; in-water massages, to name the ones I remember.
Mine was just a simple deep-tissue massage with warm oils and focusing on the neck and shoulder areas, which are tight in the best of times, but now particularly so from all the accumulated miles of driving. “How was it?”, you ask. Well, it was the shortest hour of the trip. And the most heavenly. Jeanette (the therapist’s name) found the trouble-spots on both shoulders AND the release point for a recurring neck “crick”. I could have stayed on that table the entire day, but finished instead with a soak in the hot-tub, which, at that hour – 10:30 am – was empty. I skipped the cold-plunge this time. (On a previous visit, I rolled in the snow before climbing into one of the private tubs – there are several available. It was….different.)
My destination for Thursday’s drive was Mesa Verde National Park in the southwest corner of Colorado, with its spectacular and well-preserved ruins of Ancestral Puebloans (the new term vs. “Anasazi”) dwellings.
The road, mostly Route 550 North, goes through Cuba (!) and the town of Aztec (more about the “Aztec Ruins” later), and changes from flat to climbing and winding as it enters Colorado. And what has been a harsh, dry, inhospitable landscape of ground-hugging brown vegetation transforms, within a matter of miles, into hillsides of pine trees and irrigated fields. It took a little time to adjust to seeing so much green, particularly the green of grazing grass, after so much desolate scrub. Seeing snow-capped mountains (the Rockies?) in the distance, after the two days of crossing the flatlands of Texas and New Mexico, was also a reminder that I was making progress.
My main companion each day is NPR, when more powerful stations broadcasting country music, Christian rock (what a strange concept), or fundamentalist preachers do not drown it out. In the Southwest, many of the NPR stations have programs addressing the needs and interests of the Native American population. (If you look at a map of Arizona and New Mexico, there is a large patch-work of lands belonging to tribes whose names are familiar from movie Westerns: Apache, Hopi, Ute, Navajo, Zuni, Mescalero, etc. ) Thursday, for example, I listened to a call-in show with a dermatologist debunking the myth that dark(er) skin peoples are naturally protected from sunburns. The most interesting call was from a hunter in Alaska (!) asking about the sun-exposure from “…being out on the ice for hours at a time…”. You don’t get that on commercial radio!
(This is my first extended exposure to the state/status of Native Americans and it’s depressing and shaming. The top story on the Santa Fe NPR news was about Hopi tribe voting against having casinos, thus becoming the only tribe out of 23 in New Mexico to decline the opportunity. Considering the visible poverty in the Reservations I passed through, it’s admirable because, whilecasinos have not proven to be panaceas, they do inject cash and provide (some) employment. And yet, they are passing up on a projected $24 million/yr in revenue, according to the story. It also must be bitterly ironic to have one’s cultural artifacts be collectibles on eBay and worth thousands of dollars on “The Antiques Roadshow”, yet have both the highest unemployment AND lowest post-secondary education rates in the country. The history of injustices is lengthy and old news, as we all know, but the consequences are in the present and eye-opening when seen -- even briefly -- first-hand. It made me think about things that need doing.)
Thursday was also the day when I crossed the Continental Divide, at an elevation of 7380 ft., near Aztec, NM.. My dim recollection from 7th grade history/geography is that it has to do with….with…..I can’t remember. (If anyone knows and wants to add a comment to explain, please do!). Which brings me to the subject of Aztec Ruins National Monument, outside the town of Aztec.
Do NOT be fooled: there are NO Aztec (the culture) ruins at Aztec Ruins National Monument. What you find out there is that settlers in the 19th century THOUGHT the ruins (which are Native Puebloan) were Aztec because they couldn’t believe the “Indians” could build such structures. But the name stuck for the town and for the ruins, in what I think is a deliberate misnomer to attract tourist dollars, i.e. they are ruins and they are in Aztec (the town). The ruins themselves are interesting, but certainly not as much as they would be if they WERE from the Aztec civilization.
Despite my comments in the previous posting about The Far View Lodge at Mesa Verde National Park, I do recommend it because of its location inside the park. The nearest other lodging is 30+ minutes away, more if you are stuck being an RV on the spectacular-but-narrow-and-winding road between the Park entrance and the Visitor Center. By staying at The Far View , one can sleep a little later and still be there early enough to get tickets for the ranger-guided tours of the cliff dwellings. The rooms don’t have TVs or telephones, but do have outside balconies with chairs and that “far view”: there is nothing in sight for miles and miles. (A great place to sit, just after sunset, in the cool of the 7000 foot altitude, sip a single malt, and watch bright Venus above a sliver moon against a blue-black desert sky.)
The Metate Restaurant onsite, according to my waitress, was “..rated the 6th best in the entire state by Colorado Magazine”. Without having tried the five ahead of it, I would still rank it sixth. My trout was dry (I had the same dish tonight at the Holiday Inn in Chinle, AZ, and it was half the price and twice as moist), the rice pilaf lumpy, and the “strawberry and blueberry shortcake”, just a few strawberries (and even fewer blueberries) plus a dollop of whipped cream sandwiched between two cookies passing for short-bread. (If there is one thing I know, it’s short-bread: it’s one of the “S”s that make Scotland a frequent destination.) I ate, wrote post-cards, and tried to ignore the screaming child two tables away.
The two cliff-dwelling sites I toured this morning are easily recognizable for images, particularly Cliff Palace’s, that have become iconic. It looks the way ruins should look: structures intact enough to be recognizable for what they were originally, yet with enough jagged edges and incompleteness to show abandonment and create an aura of mystery. Photos make it look bigger than it really is. The sandstone-colored buildings stretch for less than the length of a football field and only a depth of less than a hundred feet – eighty nine feet, if I remember the Ranger’s recitation. All of it is recessed under the protective overhang of the scooped out base of the mesa, and the height of the natural opening, which I would estimate at a couple of hundred feet, gives it a dramatic frame and majesty.
Walking within the site and peering into the buildings is a humbling experience: the daily life of the Ancestral Puebloans was not easy. Forty would have been old age and infant mortality is estimated at 50%. Water was scarce, and in the case of Cliff Palace, the nearest source was miles away – speculation about their departure from the site centers on a 23 year-long drought in the late 1200s A.D. Access from the top of the mesa was via toe and hand-holds carved on the face of the cliff, not the series of ladders and wide steps we used (which still made my palms sweat). I left grateful for being born in our time.
Tomorrow, Saturday, it’s another on the list of “1000 Places To See Before You Die”: Canyon de Chelly National Monument, with the oldest Ancestral Puebloan ruins known, and then a three and half hour drive to Flagstaff followed by dinner in Sedona.
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