The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

In Durango, Colorado, there is a mighty effective tourist attraction. In 1881 the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad built a spur track to Silverton mainly to haul silver ore down out of the mountains. When the price of silver dropped, they shut down the line; however in 1981 a Floridian named Charles Bradshaw took it over and renovated the tracks and equipment.

Now it serves as one of the world's best steam train rides.

At the time we visited, the D&S was running three trains a day over 45 miles of narrow-gauge track. The engines are coal-burning (local bituminous - smelly but nostalgic) steam engines, pulling parlor cars (transverse seats looking forward) and reconditioned cattle cars (parallel seats looking to the side).

The trip begins in Durango, in a cityscape, which soon changes to a fertile river valley replete with gardens and horse farms. About the time the passengers are getting used to this bucolic scene, the train enters the canyon of the Animas River. While not as deep nor as large as more famous canyons, this is a true gorge. In places you could file your fingernails on the rocks on one side of the train while people on the other side of the cars are looking straight down into the river. Because of the sharp curves in the track, the trains are restricted to 10 MPH in the canyon. After emerging from the canyon, the train travels past dozens of abandoned mines, then arrives in Silverton. There is an approximate 2 hour layover before the return trip. That's just about enough time to find a meal and wander around the streets for a while. Like most tourist towns, it is replete with "souvenir" shops and artsy-crafty stores It is possible to stay over night and arrange a one-way trip, returning by auto or bus.
This train trip is a destination for many railroad buffs, as well as touristy types like we are. I heartily recommend it.

Bryce Canyon National Park

Are you afraid of hoodoos? How about mazes or fins? Strange language for a National Park, but they all belong there.

Perhaps some elementary geology would help to explain how these things happened. The plate tectonic theory, which is pretty generally accepted, says that huge land masses are afloat on the molten center of the earth. Millions of years ago, the North American plate and the Pacific plate collided, forming the Rocky mountains. Behind these mountains was a large, shallow sea. Over the centuries, the skeletons of sea creatures drifted down. As the mountains grew higher, the sea drained off, leaving these sea creatures as limestone. Erosion began to carve the limestone as well as companion mudstone and sandstone. The softer material was eroded by wind and water leaving the harder as strange looking pillars. Some of these pillars are capped with even harder rock, and look something like scarecrows; hence the name "hoodoos". Fins are tall narrow pinacles of rock that have been worn off at opposite sides. Bryce Canyon is not a single canyon, but a multitude of rivers, gullies, canyons. That's why it's described as a maze. One local farmer, when asked to describe Bryce Canyon, reported only "it's pretty, but a Hell of a place to lose a cow." The visitor to Bryce looks down into the canyon from many viewing areas, each giving a different look at the complexities of this most rugged area.

Zion National Park

Southern Utah is an arid rocky desert. That's what makes Zion canyon such a surprise when you first see it. The canyon was carved by water, and there is still plenty of water today.

The canyon, where the National Park is located, was carved by the North Fork of the Virgin River. The canyon was named by a Mormon, Isaac Behunin, who settled there. He so enjoyed the peace and refuge he found that it seemed natural to call it Zion.

Driving into it from the southwest, the visitor sees one of its most unusual landmarks, Checkerboard Mesa. A network of vertical and horizontal lines gives the cliffs their checked appearance. Water.trapped in a 2000-foot thick rock, trickles out slowly, to carve the horizontal lines, and normal weathering carves out the verticals.

Inside the Park a visitor drives or walks in the canyon looking up at the magnificent cliffs and rocks in a multitude of colors.One of the most prominent features is Weeping Rock. This is a vertical cliff with springs seeping from the face. It weeps at all times of the year.

At the head of Zion Canyon is the Narrows, a defile that is as much as 2000 feet high, but only 20 feet wide. The river flows calmly through the Narrows most of the time, but in rainy weather can turn into a raging flash flood.

The Kolob Arch is a sandstone natural arch and at 310 feet wide, is the largest freestanding arch in the world.

Mesa Verde National Park In southwestern Colorado is a National Park commemorating, not the works of nature, but a race of cliff dwellers who inhabited the area possibly in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Evidence suggests that these people, called Anasazis by the Navajos, first began to farm the Mesa (Mesa Verde is Spanish for "Green Table'), and gradually began to build their communities on the cliffs at the edges of the mesa. Reasons for this are not completely clear, but the need for more arable land on the mesa, or as a defense measure are suggested.

There are three pueblos currently available to visitors: the Mug House, named for the pottery that has been discovered there, Long House, and Cliff Palace. Cliff Palace is the only one we're familiar with.

Underneath an overhanging cliff, and hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, the Old Ones began to build their dwelling places. Rather than using adobe, as the earliest Spaniards did, the Anasazi built with flat stones, stacked up at times several stories high. Dwellings were in the front of the buildings, with storehouses behind, against the cliff walls.

Circular pits are a distinctive feature of the pueblos. These are thought to be religious in nature, and are carefully built, faced with stone, and including a side tunnel, probably for ventilation. It appears that each clan had its own pit, or "kiva". Since there are twenty-three kivas at Cliff Palace, 23 clans are thought to have dwelled there. Access to the dwellings was, and still is, even in these days of tourism, by ladders, which would have made defense much simpler. The pueblo could not have been reached from the canyon floor, nor could a foe have even thrown rocks from above, since the pueblo was protected by the tremendous overhang of the cliff above.

A visitor feels intensely the mystery of the original inhabitants; how did they live? Why did they leave? Where did they go?