Our Nest on Wheels

 by Steve

October 2020: the Coronavirus pandemic was raging in the US, although the spread wasn't as bad as it would get later in the fall. We had just spent the summer in the Tucson area, where they recorded the hottest summer on record in more than 100 years of record keeping. We needed to get out of the desert for a while. So we headed to southeastern Utah, where it's easy to isolate and there are interesting things like pueblo ruins and cliff dwellings to discover.

We invited our friend Larry to come along. Larry lives in Prescott, AZ, and like us had spent the summer doing a whole lot of nothing, wanting to avoid exposure to Covid-19. Larry is a fun guy, pretty adventurous, and (we thought) probably a good hiker. But most important was that Larry's truck has 4-wheel drive. So Larry came up to Blanding, UT, for 5 days or so, and we planned out some places to see.

The area around Blanding is riddled with ancient ruins. The areas of Bears Ears National Monument, Cedar Mesa, and Grand Gulch contain hundreds of these sites. Some are fairly accessible, but many of the sites require multi-day backpacking trips or longs treks down roads requiring vehicles with high clearance. Our Honda HRV couldn't get us to one of the more impressive cliff dwellings, Moon House, because the access road is 8 miles of high-clearance-vehicle road followed by 1.2 miles of 4-wheel-drive road. But since Larry has 4WD, this one was on the table.

 by Steve

Two years ago, we stayed for a short time (4 nights) in Blanding, Utah. This small town in southeastern Utah is not on most people's radar for tourist spots. For us, it was a convenient location for seeing Natural Bridges National Monument and the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. We didn't know what else might be in the area. What we learned was that this area is just chock-full of rock art, cliff dwellings, and ruins, most of which are not advertised or on any maps of the area. But the folks who run the RV park we stayed at told us of a couple locations where we could see cliff dwellings, and we followed their directions and were amazed at the things we could discover. Here's an example of a dwelling we found in a side canyon off an unmarked trail.  We wrote about this back in 2018.

So this year, when we were looking for places to travel where we could avoid crowds and COVID, this area came to mind. This is the site of the Bears Ears National Monument. But with the monument's greatly reduced size, most of the ruins and cliff dwellings that we visited were no longer within the monument's boundaries; rather they are just on BLM land, where they do not have the same protections. These fragile ruins are mostly protected by ignorance -- people don't know they are there, and many are difficult to get to. On our last day here, we hiked to Tower Ruin, which is pretty typical for many of the sites in this area.

Tower Ruin is located just a few miles outside of Blanding. There are no signs to it, nor does it appear on any maps of the area. The trail to it does not appear on any trail maps, nor is it really a trail (there's no trailhead signage, for example), but rather a route. The only way to find this is to follow the directions that previous hikers have left on select websites, in this case gjhikes.com. In our first attempt to locate the trailhead, we missed the spot and continued a few tenths of a mile down the dirt forest service road we were on.  We ended up spending about 50 minutes scouring the cliffside for a way down into the canyon before determining that we were not in the right spot. When we did find the right spot, we were able to find the route and begin our descent into the canyon, following cairns left by earlier travelers. Here's our first view of Tower Ruin.

The trail into the canyon was described as being a bit tedious over loose rocks and dirt. We were expecting a barely controlled slide down a boulder strewn scree slope, but it turned out to be much easier than that. After picking our way to the canyon floor, we simply followed the well worn path to the base of the dwelling.

So, we spent the summer in Tucson. We never thought that we would do that, but the combination of a global pandemic and a friend here who was dying of ALS made us choose to sit tight this summer. When we arrived in Tucson last fall, I remarked to Jane that it would be interesting to be here sometime to witness the "monsoon" season. Didn't expect to do so right away, but here we are. Tucson gets only around 12 inches of rain in an "average" year, with half of it falling in the months of July, August, and September. The rainstorms that produce those totals can be quite spectacular, we've heard. Giant thunderclouds fueled by gulf moisture and triple-digit desert heat result in massive downpours, dry riverbeds suddenly spring to life and fill with water, and many roads you shouldn't drive on, lest you be swept away.  

Here's a picture of one of our summer storms. You can see that this one is primarily over the Santa Rita mountains, but some rain did fall on us.

Well, the monsoon rains did not really materialize this year. We had a couple of decent thunderstorms, but they were very localized and didn't really drop much rain. We had one that produced enough rain to make water run down the street and through some nearby arroyos, but the Santa Cruz river has stayed dry all summer. This is the second summer in a row now where they are calling it the "non-soon," as the rains did not come. At this time in an average summer, there would have been 4.6 inches of rain. We've had 1.6 inches.

But we have had heat. Locals told us that June is the hottest month, and when July and August come along, you get these great cooling rainstorms. Well, not so much this year. The month of July set a record for the hottest month in Tucson in 125 years of weather records. That record lasted exactly 31 days, until August 2020 surpassed July and became the hottest month on record. And with it, summer 2020 became the hottest summer on record for Tucson.

We have seen some interesting wildlife here. During our first week, a gila monster walked by the back patio gate. Later that week we saw a horned lizard in the front of the house. Hummingbirds and bats are frequent visitors to the feeder on the patio, and we've seen javelina, coyotes, and bobcat in the neighborhood. Of course, lizards are pretty common here; we even have one that lives in the garage. But this is the guy we didn't expect to see.

by Steve

Should I stay or should I go now?

If I go, there will be trouble

And if I stay it will be double

So come on and let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

As I write this in early April, 46 states are under some form of "stay at home" order. Exactly what this means varies from state to state, but generally it means people should travel only for "essential" services (like groceries, gas, prescriptions, or exercise), or for work (assuming you're essential and can't work from home), or to get to your home. So snowbirds who wintered in the south can travel back home, but generally will need to self-quarantine for 2 weeks upon arrival. But where does this leave full-time RVers?

Many states have closed their state parks. Some have banned "recreational" travel and won't let RV parks take new reservations. But because many full-time RVers live permanently in an RV at a park, stays of 30 days or longer are sometimes exempted from these restrictions, at least at private RV parks. So technically we could book stays of a month or more and still travel to them and be (somewhat) within the "stay at home" orders. We live in our motorhome, so we're always home, right? While some full-time RVers are still traveling and assuming "business as usual," most are opting to stay put until this pandemic is passed. That seems to us to be the more responsible approach, so we're staying in southern Arizona for now. We are still able to see some local sights without interacting with any other people.

Like the view from the summit of Wasson peak in nearby Saguaro National Park.
Or some local petroglyphs. These are just outside Saguaro NP West.

Some RVers think we'll all be traveling again by June, or maybe late summer. Others think that we're done for the year. Many of these restrictions are set to end by May, but they might get extended. The reality is that we really don't know. So we're looking at the very real possibility of spending the rest of the summer in Arizona, something we really didn't want to do.

If you know much about RVs, you know that they are not insulated very well. Three inches of insulation in the roof and an inch or so in the walls is about all they have. This means that you really can't live in one in the Sonoran desert, where the temperature can hit 110 degrees. Our rig has 2 a/c units, but realistically they would likely run non-stop just to bring the temperature into the 80s. We'd spend a fortune in electricity to live in what is basically a hot tin can in the desert. So we're looking at other options, like renting a house for a few months. As retired people without a home, we don't "have to" go anywhere. And right now that seems like a good thing.

We'll let you know what we figure out!

 Looking into a pueblo through a remaining window.

 Hundreds of rooms in this pueblo and multiple kivas (round) on the right.

 As these were multi-storey buildings, some of the walls were (and still are) quite tall.

It's challenging to grasp the scale of this place. The pueblos are so large, that you can only picture a portion of one at a time.

Imagine this multi-storied structure, with lots of roof decks and hundreds of people going about their daily business.

Another large kiva.