< more recent | 15-21 October 2022 | older >
21 October 2022: Continued the journey eastbound today heading towards the Great Sand Dunes National Park. I crossed the big mountains of the Rio Grande National Forest at Wolf Creek Pass at an elevation of almost 11,000 feet, and the views were breathtaking. When I came down from the mountains my route went through the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge before reaching my turnoff. I had hoped to be able to camp at the Sand Dunes, but the park campground was full so I settled on a campsite at a Hipcamp not far from the park. I was pleasantly surprised with the campsite location which was in the middle of a beautiful desert prairie surrounded by distant mountains. It was private and quiet and much nicer than the national park campground, although it meant I would have to wait until morning to see the dunes up close. I settled in there for the night with a nice campfire and the sound of a distant coyote chorus keeping me company…
20 October 2022: In the morning I made a visit to Mesa Verde National Park to see the cliff dwellings, though I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to explore. I concentrated on a few areas of the park (and some sections were closed), and just appreciated the magnificence of the structures and wondered about the civilizations that built them and what happened to them — that is one of the great mysteries of the southwest…
19 October 2022: Packed up camp and left Moab, taking a new route back east that will go through the “middle” of the USA in order to scout some areas for something we may be including in the Nomad Overland Rally for 2023. Decided to really focus on the history and archaeology of the Indigenous Peoples and search out some key sites. In that spirit I stopped at Newspaper Rock on my way out of Moab, kind of “paying my respects” to the ancient ones before heading towards Colorado and the Hovenweep National Monument which straddles the Utah-Colorado border. I took a route that went through Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and made a short stop at the Lowry Pueblo site before arriving to Hovenweep. It was late in the afternoon by the time I got there, and I just had time for a walk around the Square Tower loop — other hikers going out as I was going in told me to beware of the rattlesnakes, saying they had seen two of them right on the trail, but I was lucky and did not have any encounters with them …
18 October 2022: Today was the final day of LONCON’s optional activities and it was a “more challenging” trail, that was also a new-to-me trail on the south side of town. It was an interesting trail and had a few staircases and more complicated rock climbs. Towards the end of the day we encountered a section where the trail itself had been washed out in the recent flooding and we had to scout a different way back to the trailhead which made for a more dramatic ending to the day. Back at basecamp we said our “goodbyes” …
17 October 2022: Today was the first optional trail day at LONCON, and the group headed back towards Seven Mile Rim, but instead of doing the trail, we went straight to the big obstacle — Wipeout Hill. This was a big teaching moment focused on picking lines and doing some spotting. We “warmed up” by practicing spotting on a flat section of trail near the obstacle, then we walked the obstacle to pick lines, and then, those of us who wanted to drive the obstacle got to do it. That is when things became more interesting as one of the participants got stuck in the soft sand at the bottom of the obstacle, and needed to be winched out. An interesting lesson in recovery got added to the day…
16 October 2022: Today I had a break from the group activities as the LONCON program for the day was TreadLightly! Tread Trainer Training, and I am already certified as a Tread Trainer. So I took the day to go drive a modified version of a favorite trail, Seven Mile Rim — without the optional obstacles. I had a map of the route from a previous trip and I hoped to go out to the cave near the end and finally see this petroglyph that I have never managed to locate on previous trips. However, an unexpected encounter with a disoriented hiker near the Determination Towers caused a change in plans — I “rescued” the hiker, driving him back out to the parking area where he had left his car, instead of going to the cave. It was the “right” thing to do, and so the petroglyph will have to wait for another time…
15 October 2022: Day Four of LONCON got off to a pre-dawn start, as we all went out on a timed scavenger hunt around Moab. We paired into teams of two for a very fun selfie-based “hunt” and Barbara Rainey, of the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame, and I had a great time going after all the locations and even doing two of the hikes! In the afternoon we wrapped up the “offical” part of the LONCON event, though the optional activities would continue for a few more days…
THIS MONTH:
Fall Roadtrip West, heading from NY to Moab, on the slow road. Taking a different route westbound, with lots of interesting stops along the way. The plan is to go via NY, NJ, PA, OH, MI, WI, MN, SD, WY and UT, camping as much as possible and hitting some key destination locations …
COMING UP SOON:
Attending the Ladies Offroad Network Convention in Moab, UT. The 6th annual convention will be held October 12-15, 2022, with lots of hands-on opportunities to gain all types of offroading skills, learn and engage with other offroad ladies as they share their stories, and laugh the whole way. The convention is an action-packed, interactive 4-day weekend educating, motivating, and guiding offroad ladies…
USnomads.org is very proud to be presenting the second edition of the Nomad Overland Virtual Adventure Rally in 2023. This is a new kind of rally experience — a ten week event that participants can do from anywhere within the continental U.S.A. Competitors design their own routes as part of the rally, then drive it in a points-based online competition that includes optional activity tasks, quests and weekly challenges. The 2023 rally will run from 5 June – 13 August and is open to any driver within the United States who has an off-road capable vehicle — stock or modified. Registration for 2023 is open now. For more information see the Rally website …
WOLF CREEK PASS
Wolf Creek Pass is a mountain pass at 10,857 feet on the Continental Divide, in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. It is the route through which U.S. Highway 160 passes from the San Luis Valley into southwest Colorado on its way to New Mexico and Arizona. The pass is significantly steep on either side (6.8% maximum grade) and can be dangerous in winter. The creation of the first road along Wolf Creek Pass began in 1911 and finished construction in 1916. The 12-foot wide road was doubled in width in 1930 and was paved 20 years later. A 900-foot tunnel on the eastern portion was opened in 2005. The Lobo Overlook, at 11,760 feet elevation on the north side of the pass, provides commanding views of the continental divide…
MESA VERDE CLIFF DWELLINGS
Mesa Verde National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that protects some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites in the United States. The cliff dwellings of the Mesa Verde National Park are some of the most notable in North America. Starting around 7500 BC Mesa Verde was seasonally inhabited by a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians known as the Foothills Mountain Complex. The variety of projectile points found in the region indicates they were influenced by surrounding areas, including the Great Basin, the San Juan Basin, and the Rio Grande Valley. Later, Archaic people established semi-permanent rock shelters in and around the mesa. By 1000 BC, the Basketmaker culture emerged from the local Archaic population, and by 750 AD the Ancestral Puebloans had developed from the Basketmaker culture. The Pueblonians survived using a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans, and squash. They built the mesa’s first pueblos sometime after 650, and by the end of the 12th century, they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. The structures, built into natural cliff alcoves, ranged in size from one-room granaries to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they lived in these cliff dwellings, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. In the mid-1200s, the population began migrating to the south, into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By the end of the 1200s, most everyone had migrated away. One of the most spectacular cliff dwelling in the park is known as “Cliff Palace” and it is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. Cliff Palace was constructed primarily out of sandstone, mortar and wooden beams. The sandstone was shaped using harder stones, and a mortar of soil, water and ash was used to hold everything together. “Chinking” stones were placed within the mortar to fill gaps and provide stability. Cliff Palace contains 23 kivas and 150 rooms and had a population of approximately 100 people. Some suggest that Cliff Palace was a social, administrative site with high ceremonial usage, and many archaeologists believe that Cliff Palace contained more clans than the surrounding Mesa Verde communities because of the higher ratio of rooms to kivas. From the late 13th century to 1880s, Cliff Palace slowly deteriorated from the effects of water, wind, freeze/thaw cycles, a variety of animals, and the inherent qualities of the prehistoric structures themselves. Over the course of six centuries, Cliff Palace was visually transformed from an imposing assemblage of buildings,courtyards, and subterranean kivas to an array of stone structures rising from tons of rubble and debris. Still remarkably impressive, the effects of time were nevertheless evident. However, with the ‘discovery’ of Cliff Palace in the late 1800s, this gradual process of decay rapidly accelerated. Casual visitation and commercial exploration employed everything from pick and shovel to dynamite in an effort to recover all types of artifacts. In the end, the form and fabric of Cliff Palace was heavily damaged throughout its extent, with the natural processes of deterioration now altered by human activity. It was finally protected with the establishment of the National Park in 1906…
MORE NOTES FROM THE ROAD:
8-14 October – Moab LONCON
1-7 October – Roadtrip West
22-30 September – Roadtrip West
16-21 September – Roadtrip West
1-15 September – Long Island
August – Long Island
15-31 July – Serbia
1-14 July – NE Roadtrip
16-30 June – NE Roadtrip
1-15 June – Long Island
May – Nomad Rally Prep
16-30 April – Long Island
7-15 April – Heading Back to NY
1-6 April – Heading Back to NY
27-31 March – Death Valley- DVE
21-26 March – LON Skills Camp
15-20 March – Death Valley
8-14 March – Nevada
1-7 March – Glamis Training
16-28 February – Roadtrip Southwest
1-15 February – Long Island
8-31 January – Long Island
1-7 January – Florida to NY
28-31 December – Okefenokee NWR
24-27 December – Ocala National Forest
19-23 December – Heading South
10-18 December – Long Island
1-9 December – Paris
16-30 November – Paris
1-15 November – Roadtrip East
25-31 October – Roadtrip East
17-24 October – LON Top Ten
Archive
SPECIAL REPORT
All about exploring ghost towns and abandoned places in the USA and beyond, with tips, and information on the many different types of sites to be found across the globe, including detailed guides for eight specific sites… [read]
RE-OPENING
Report from the first trail run with the Off Road Consulting group at Rausch Creek Off Road Park as the post-pandemic phased re-openings begin in Pennsylvania and some of our favorite local trails re-open to the public after the two-month shutdown… [read]
REFLECTIONS
EGYPT: CAIRO REFLECTIONS
A quick overview of impressions from a stop in Cairo during our recent scouting mission in Egypt and Sudan … [read]
SPECIAL REPORT
A look into south-eastern Algeria on the border with Libya and Niger: overlanding with the Tuareg in one of the most remote corners of the Sahara … [read]
