A Return to Homolovi State Park

We revisited the Homolovi State Park recently, and once again we could not have been more pleased with the campground.  Our favorite campsite is 22.  It provides an excellent view towards the City of Winslow.  The railroad cars seem to run almost no stop and you can catch a train whistle off in the distance if the conditions are just right.

HOMOLOVI STATE PARK SPACE 22 2012 Top, 2016 Bottom

It seems as if many travelers use the Homolovi campground as a stop over place, as many RV’s arrive in the late afternoon and leave early the next morning.  There were a few other sites which held occupants who stayed several days.

Homoloi State Park has been established to protect 4 ancient Native American communities Homolovi I, II, III, IV.  Homolovi II is the main attraction and is open year round.  Here are some photos from our 2012 visit, as we did not revisit Homolovi II this time around.  The majority of the photos are of the huge amount of pottery shards that can be found everyone around the partially excavated ruin.

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Homolovi I is also open year round, but is not excavated.  It does however also have large amounts of pottery shards around the site.  Here is an exposed wall from the site.  I do not know if this was excavated, refilled, and then this has become exposed, or if it was intentionally left exposed, but it is really the only exposed wall at the site.  Beautifully located right next to the Little Colorado River.

Homolovi III – was at one time excavated, but it is now under the Little Colorado River.  Homolovi IV is an impressive structure (so I am told by the Park Rangers), but due to budgetary constraints is only open for guided tours in the fall.  I intend to go back this fall if my schedule permits to visit Homolovi IV.

Within the boundaries of the Park was once the Mormon settlement of Sunset.  There is a small cemetery accessible via a trail from the visitor center parking lot.  Photos are unavailable of this site as the camera would have been pointed directly at the sun, will try to get photos of this on our next visit.

From our base camp here at Homolovi State Park we visited two National Monuments, Tuzigoot, and Montezuma’s Castle/Well.

Tuzigoot is an impressive place it a lovely area of Arizona.  Sitting up on a hill, the people who established this community had a beautiful view of the area.  Although I am sure they selected the site for purposes of practicality, I am sure they benefited by the beauty that surrounded their home.

This was Bandit’s first visit to a National Monument and a trail where he would potentially encounter a large number of people.  Bandit who was dumped near our home at about 4 months old, was possible abused, as he seems to have extreme fear of people.  He is getting much, much better, and let me tell you, once he does meet you, he LOVES you.  Anyway, he did pretty good, but, it was kind of stressful for all of us on this first attempt.

At Montezuma’s Castle the crowd was just too large for us to feel comfortable taking Bandit on the short walk to see the Castle, So Jim sat in the lovely picnic area with Bandit as I visited the Monument.  Quite an impressive structure, and to think that people actually lived up there, hanging off the side of the mountain, well it is kind of amazing.  At one time visitors were allowed into the structure, but that had to be stopped due to the damage it was causing to the Castle.

Down the road just a few miles is the Montezuma’s Well section of this Monument.  Here, a bit less crowded, we decided to test Bandit out once again.  He did marvelously this time, and there was actually quite a few people, but we had a much better feeling about this place which I think helped our stress level and we didn’t transfer that to him.  This section was almost more impressive that seeing the Castle, as the trail was longer and more challenging than the short paved walk at the Castle.  This well really is an oasis in the desert pumping up thousands of gallons of water a day from a natural spring.

Along the way I was able to get a County Courthouse Photo, two Post Office photos, and several National Register of Historic Places.

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But at the end of the day – This is what it is all about.

Till next time……

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More on Baird’s Chevelon Steps/Rock Art Ranch

A trip from 2012

Yesterday I posted the two photos I took on our 2012 trip to Homlovi State Park outside of Winslow Arizona.  I always research potential day trips from the campground (or hotel) we are staying at.  I had found this place called Rock Art Ranch.  It was somewhat difficult to obtain information, but I finally discovered that on Saturday’s (usually but not guaranteed) at 1 PM, the owner of the Ranch would accept visitors and take you on a tour of the petroglyphs located on his ranch.  We lucked out, he was receiving guest the Saturday we were at Homlovi.

After drive down a long dusty dirt road we reach Mr. Baird’s ranch.  He opens the various buildings he has on this ranch which contain collections of exquisite Native American pottery, early American farmhouse furniture, and various knick knack collections.  He shows us a newspaper article with a photo of him as a young boy with a gorgeous Native American pot that he had found while roaming around the ranch.  I guess maybe that began his love for collecting this wonderful artifacts.  His love for this ranch and the entire area was evident as he exuberantly told us stories of the old west and the wars between the ranchers.

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After spending some time looking through his collections, he has us follow him across his ranch until we reach Chevelon Creek.  At the creek he explains a little bit about what it was like to grow up on the ranch, and how the steps leading into the canyon came to be.  There is a large structure where there a many picnic tables (this is the structure in the photo from yesterday’s post), which was great because we had come fully prepared with our picnic lunch.  It was a bit eerie that we were the only two people on this tour, but at the same time it was wonderful we had this magical place all to ourselves.  Mr. Baird told us that this was the end of the official tour, showed us how to get down into the canyon and said we could spend as much time down there as we liked.  He even said if we had brought camping gear we could camp right there on his ranch.  Since we only RV camp that would not have been possible, as the roads going across his ranch to this location were really not suitable for our Class C.  But the fact that he is open to share this wonderful place with people renewed my faith in humanity.  Mr. Baird then drove away.  After we ate our lunch we descended the Chevelon Steps to the canyon below to find hundreds, if probably thousands of petroglyphs.  All up and down this canyon, nearly everywhere you look you could find these carvings in the stone.  We were able to explore this canyon at our leisure, something we often can not do on other hikes of this nature due to the usual crowed of visitors also trying to get a look or photo of the rock art.  I don’t know how long we actually stayed, time seemed to stand still while we were in the canyon.  This is a must see for anyone who enjoys this type of adventure, especially if you enjoy exploring in near solitude.

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Blog Redo – One of my favorite things to do on any trip

So I have trashed all previous blog posts here on Trip With Two, because I really never used this blog for what it was intended for, TRIPS.  I started using it for my other passion, scrapbooking, but decided to start a blog specifically for that.  You can find that blog Here.

I had originally envisioned Trips With Two to be a place to share my love of travel and photography.  A rank amateur at best at both of these endeavors, I enjoy them more than anyone can imagine.  My dream (although I need $250,000.00 to achieve this dream, and there is no hope of that $$$ in sight, maybe I should start a Go-Fund me page (LOL)), is to be able to pack up the hubby, the dog and the cat into the RV and Full-Time it while hubby and I are both able to enjoy the pursuit of our travels.  But we need to leave like NOW, and with no funds that just ain’t going to happen.  However, on a more pleasant note, we do what we can do and we thoroughly enjoy every moment of it.

Year ago I wanted to visit every County Courthouse in American, there are 3,144 of them.  I altered that dream some years ago realizing I was not going to be able to achieve that dream, and I started requesting County Courthouse photos from friends, family, and people I encounter through social media in order to make a scrapbook page of every County Courthouse in America.  So this interest will more frequently be documented on my  scrapbooking Blog, but should I actually be out an about on one of our trips at get to take my own photo of a County Courthouse, I will most probably share it here.

Another component of my travels, and probably my favorite right now, is taking photos of the places that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It was 2013 when I first began focusing on these places for photo opportunities, and of course they also end up on  scrapbook page.  But one thing that I have really been enjoying is the fact that if a photos has not yet been uploaded to Wikipedia for the place, I can load my photo and be a part of Wikipedia.    Yesterday I realized that I had taken two photos back in 2013 (before I realized the Wikipedia thing), that were on the National Register of Historic Places, and did not have a photo.  Here is a link to the Wikipedia page for the National Register of Historic Places – Navajo County and if you check out the listing for Baird’s Chevelon Steps and Chevelon Creek Bridge, those are my photos.  Here they are in  case you don’t want to visit the page – but I think you should, that is if you are into travel and history, you can find some really interesting things to see when you are out and about.

 

So, I will try much better to keep this Blog more on point, and post more frequently.  I have lots of past travels I will share with you, interspersed with our current travels.

Till next time……