We took a short detour via Los Alamos, a sleepy town renowned for developing the atomic bomb in the mid 1940s. We took our photo with Dr Oppenheimer, and had to show ID (Dom was impressed) to travel past the research facilities (one of only two in the US classified to undertake nuclear weapons research).
Bandelier National Monument ('park' to the Aussies) has a modern information centre and gift shop. Some of the camping facilities were washed away in a flood in late 2011, and haven't been repaired yet.
A five minute walk presented the first of the Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, hewn and built into the sandstone from 1150 to 1550 CE. The architecture and detail is impressive.
A further 30 minutes upstream brought us to the Alcove House, 140 feet above the canyon floor, accessible via stairs and ladders.
From Bandelier, we crossed the forest covered mountains (to a height of almost 10,000 feet!) to Cuba (not the hand-rolled cigar Cuba) where the temperature plummeted.
A windy drive on the highway north, dodging tumble weeds and dust, with nodding donkeys, burning gas wells and oil refineries for company, saw us to Durango, Colorado. Dom saw several high speed convoys of blackened windowed oil exploration vehicles overtake us. (Why didn't I? I'm pretty practised at high speed napping)
Having checked out the accommodation choices in Durango on the internet, we turned into the Doubletree by Hilton, and scored a large room and free breakfast. It was very cold by this time, and it had started snowing intermittently at ground level (which was 7000 ish feet above sea level!). Dinner was across the highway in town, at a brew bar. The town itself was quaint, and reminded us of a cross between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, which we visited last April.
No comments:
Post a Comment