Day Five – We are going to head out into the wilds of the Navajo Reservation for the next two days, starting with a visit to Navajo National Monument, home to three of the largest Anasazi cliff palaces in the Southwest. You will explore a world of magical canyons and learn about a complex Native-American civilization that dates back to before the time of Christ. Get ready to widen your cultural horizons!
Best Place To Eat
Drive into Page and eat breakfast at the Glen Canyon Steak House on Lake Powell Boulevard.
Insider Tip!
- Stop @ Safeway – No liquor on The Rez and very few services, so get gas and stock up on supplies before you leave Page.
How to Get There
Go past the line of churches and on the far end of town, turn left at the traffic light onto Coppermine Road. Go a little less than a mile and turn left onto onto Highway 98 and head off into into Navajoland.
Navajo Generating Station
Navajo Generating Station is a coal-fired power plant located on the Navajo Indian Reservation, on the southeast side of Page. This large facility sitting in the middle of the high desert provides electrical power to the people of Arizona, Nevada, and California. It also provides the power for pumping Colorado River water for the Central Arizona Project, supplying water to central and southern Arizona.
How to Get There
Kaibito
35 miles from Page is the Navajo village of Kaibito. As of the 2000
census, there were 1,607 people, 333 households, and 302 families.
Take a little side trip into the village for a cultural experience.
Be respectful!
Tuba City Junction
30 miles from Kaibito is the turnoff to the Hopi town of Tuba City,
the gateway to the magical mesas of Hopiland.
Go left on Highway 160 to Navajo National Monument (13 miles)
Black Mesa
At the Black Mesa Gas Station, about 5 miles from the Highway 160 turnoff, is the infamous Black Mesa. Turn right onto the Peabody Coal Access Road and follow the Coal Slurry Line up onto the top of the mesa. This area is open to the public and features the two largest open pit coal mines in the world. The slurry line feeds coal to the hungry generating plant you passed on the outskirts of Page.
“Basketmaker Anasazi inhabited Black Mesa over 7,000 years ago, and some of their ruins – the ones that didn’t lie within a coal deposit – still bear witness to the wonder years of those first human inhabitants.
Many people followed, including the Spanish, who called it Mesa de las Vacas, or plateau of the cows. Pueblo Indians, like the Hopi, occupied the area after the Anasazi collapse in around 1200 AD.
And the Navajos rolled in from New Mexico in the early 1800s, grazing their cattle seasonally – more permanent homes soon followed. The central portion of Black Mesa has been embroiled in a decades long legal fight between the Hopi and the Navajos over the ownership of Black Mesa.
After laying waste to much of Appalachia, the Peabody Coal Company came west in 1968, in search of the black ore that fuels so much of America’s power. They liked what they found at Black Mesa and started leasing mining lands from each tribe. They signed lucrative, long-term contracts with the less-than sophisticated Indians and made off like bandits. Today, Peabody Coal operates the two largest coal mines in the world at Black Mesa, the Peabody Coal Mine and the Kayenta Mine. Their massive earth-moving machines literally eat away the land in building- sized buckets and they deplete the underground aquifer by almost a hundred feet a year in the process.”
– The Canyon Chronicles
How To Get There
Return to Highway 160 from Black Mesa and turn left on Route 564 for 9 miles.
Navajo National Monument
Navajo National Monument is located within the northwest portion of the Navajo Nation. Sitting atop the slickrock Shonto Plateau above Tsegi Canyon, the park the park showcases three-well preserved cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloan People: Keet Seel, Betatakin, and Inscription House. There are few services in the park other than a visitor center with a museum, two small campgrounds, and a picnic area. Rangers guide visitors on free tours of the Keet Seel and Betatakin cliff dwellings. You can obtain an overnight backcountry permit to camp at Keet Seel. Or you can also hire a local Navajo guide who lead jeep tours and pack trips. The Inscription House site is no longer open to the public because of its extreme isolation, fragile nature and potential for vandalism given its isolated location far from park headquarters.
“Navajo National Monument is a rather confusing place. It showcases three of the largest and most well preserved Anasazi ruins in the Southwest – Betatakin, Kiet Siel, and Inscription House. They were occupied from 1250 AD to 1300 AD, when the inhabitants, referred to by the Hopi as the Hisatsinom, mysteriously abandoned their homes. But the Anasazi were not Navajos, and yet the monument is named after them and is surrounded by Navajo land.
The park headquarters overlooks Tsegi Canyon and the Betatakin Ruin, also known as Ledge House, at an elevation of 7,300 feet.
The Hopi believe that their people emerged from their underground home in the Third World through the Sipapu, or hole in the earth, at Betatakin.
There is a Visitor Center, Park Service housing and maintenance buildings, two small campgrounds, a picnic area, and two short self-guided rim trails.
The Park Service also leads a daily-guided tour down into the 560-feet-deep Tsegi Canyon to the Betatakin ruin.
All three ruins are located in cavernous rock overhangs, and the combination of shelter and the dry humidity have protected them from weathering and damage.
Kiet Siel, which means “broken pottery” in Navajo, was the first ruin to be discovered by the white man in 1895.
The Wetherill Brothers from Durango, Colorado had stumbled onto the incredible ruins at Mesa Verde a few years before while running cattle in the Mancos Valley and after that they were hooked.
They spent their ensuing days trying to find more and more Indian ruins. Their explorations would take them to Canyon de Chelley, Chaco Canyon, and Kiet Siel, where they set up trading posts and gave guided tours while they looted the sites and sold the artifacts to museums and collectors from around the globe.
The Wetherills were ranchers and had no formal archaeological training, but they had a nose for snooping out what are considered today to be the preeminent Anasazi ruins of the Colorado Plateau. And in those days, it was pretty much finders keepers.
Archaeologists have always looked down their noses at the Wetherills, considering them nothing more than glorified pothunters. But the fact is, they brought the attention of the world to the Anasazi treasures that were in need of preservation, and in their own amateur – and often misguided – way, they provided a great service to us all.
In fact, Richard Wetherill is credited with coming up with the word Anasazi, which means “Ancient Ones” in Navajo.”
– The Canyon Chronicles
Insider Tips!
- Annual Pass – Don’t forget to use the Annual Pass you purchased at Zion. This will get you into the park for free. This is your fifth National Park. You have now saved $45!
- Reminder: The Navajo Nation operates on daylight savings time, so watch out for your time zones! (ex: In Arizona it would be 8:00AM, in Monument Valley and on the reservation it would be 9:00AM.)
Best Things To Do
Navajo NM Visitor Center – Very Interesting!
Best Hikes
Two Mesa Top Trails Behind Visitor Center Are Always Open
Sandal Trail – Paved trail leads top overlook of Betatakin/Talastima cliff dwelling (1-mile round trip).
Aspen Trail – Branches off Sandal Trail to descend 300 feet to view ancient aspen forest (0.8-mile round trip).
“We took the Sandal Trail that ran across the rim above Tsegi Canyon to the Betatakin Overlook.
Along the way, we encountered a strange sight, a small gray mouse, eating a large grasshopper. Tim explained that it was called a grasshopper mouse and the Monument is one of the few places on earth where they can be found.
“A carnivorous mouse?” exclaimed RW. “Hell, even Walt Disney didn’t have one of those.”
As we stared across the canyon at the magnificent ruin, Tim gave us an overview of the park.
“Navajo National Monument was created by President Taft in 1909 in order to preserve the three large overhang ruins that date back to the 13th Century. They are fragile as hell, but still pretty much intact. And we work hard to keep them that way. “
“How do you get down to Betatakin?” I asked. “I don’t see a trail.”
“The trail is on the other side of the canyon and you have to go with a ranger. We do one tour a day that leaves at nine and we limit the number of visitors to twenty-five, so we can keep a handle on things and make sure the ruin doesn’t get damaged by people walking through it.”
– The Canyon Chronicles
Insider Tip!
- Betatakin Run Hike – The only way to hike down into Betatakin is to go on the free ranger-guided hike that leaves each morning from the Visitor Center at 9AM. The hike is free and involves a very steep descent to the canyon bottom.
Betatakin means “House Built on a Ledge” in Navajo. In Hopi, the name of the place is Talastima, or “Place of the Corn Tassel”. Betatakin is smaller than nearby Keet Seel, with about 120 rooms at the time of abandonment. However, like Keet Seel, Betatakin was constructed of sandstone, mud mortar, and wood. Today only about 80 rooms remain, due to rock falls inside the alcove. Betatakin only has one kiva (underground ceremonial chamber that you climb into from a ladder in the roof),whereas Keet Siel has several. Betatakin was built in an enormous alcove measuring 452 feet high and 370 feet across between 1267 and 1286 The first excavations occurred in 1917 under Neil Judd, and continued into the 1950s and 1960s under archaeologists like Jeffery Dean. During its two-decade heyday Dean estimated a maximum population of about 125 people.
– Park Service Brochure
“The Anasazi had first occupied small villages atop the mesa, but in the 1200s they started moving down into the canyon and erecting monumental villages built of sandstone blocks and mortared together with mud within enormous, south-facing overhangs, which afforded the occupants some seasonal sun and shade.
Theories abound as to why the Anasazi built places like Kiet Siel – for better defense, to be closer to their crops and water, or maybe because they simply preferred the living arrangements.
Perhaps some Frank Lloyd Wright emerged with a better idea about how and where to live.
No one knows for sure. There is no written record and the rock art cannot convey a people’s motivations in this regard.
In its heyday, Kiet Siel contained over 150 structures, including six kivas, pit-houses, granaries, and an impressive two-story circular tower.
It was no mean feet to erect the tall walls at Kiet Siel without them falling down, and everything had to conform to the space limitations of the cave.
The place has a pleasant, homey feel to it, and the buildings follow the contours of the enclosing sandstone, as if an extension of the cave itself.
The builders of Kiet Siel were as architecturally savvy as any of their counterparts in Europe at that time. They definitely knew what they were doing.”
– The Canyon Chronicles
Best Lodging
Wetherill Inn in Kayenta ($140)
Featuring an indoor heated pool, this motel is a 40-minute drive from Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. Each room includes free Wi-Fi. A continental breakfast is served daily.
A business center and a gift shop with jewelry and pottery made by local artists is also available. Guest laundry facilities are on site.
Four Corners Monument is a 1-hour and 20-minute drive from the motel. Canyon De Chelly National Monument is 75 miles from Wetherill Inn Kayenta.
Camping
Canyon View Campground @ Navajo National Monument
April 1 through September 30
This simple tent campground is a tenth of a mile away from the visitor center on an unpaved road. It is free, quiet, and has fine canyon views on both sides. There are 16 sites, but three of which are good for group camping up to 15 tents. These group sites can be reserved by calling (928)672-2700. There are composting toilets, charcoal grills, and no water; water is available at the other campground. People enjoy this campground for its silence and spectacular night skies. Open fires are not permitted at anytime and anyplace in the campgrounds.
Sunset View Campground
Open All Year
This free tent campground with paved roads is close to the visitor center, has 31 small sites with picnic tables, charcoal grills, and parking spaces. There are restrooms and running water available at a comfort station in the campground. No hookups or dump stations are available; RV’s are limited to 28 feet or less. The campground is on a first-come, first-served basis. In the winter, campers should be prepared for cold temperatures and snow. The terrain is sandstone and surrounded by a pinyon pine and juniper forest.
Kayenta
Kayenta is one of the largest cities on the Navajo Reservation. It has a population of about 5,000 people. It is a full-service city offering contains a motels, service stations, restaurants, a large Bashas’ Diné Market, Ace Hardware, a Navajo Arts and Craft Store, the Black Mesa Twin Cinema. Most of the businesses are located around the Junction of Highway 160 and Highway 163.
On the east side of the town there is a paved landing strip that can handle small single engine and twin engine aircraft used for air tours.
Best Places to Eat
Blue Coffee Pot on Highway 160 in Kayenta (Navajo Taco!)
Insider Tip!
- Alcohol is not served anywhere on the Navajo Reservation, and technically, it is illegal. You should be very discreet when consuming alcoholic beverages and keep your containers and bottles out of sight.