I'm getting ahead of my self in the planning and ironing out my itinerary out of order. Chronological ordering is for the birds! Day 5: December 27th 2007.
The novelty of staying in a town named Mexican Hat is just too good to pass up. Located 20 miles north of Monument Valley, it offers cheaper hotel rooms than the only
hotel in MV, the Gouldings Lodge, which charges $80 a night. I'll save $30 by staying there, and it's closer to the places I plan on visiting this day.
My Mexican Hat
The real Mexican Hat
A view of the hotel is in my last post, which is on the San Juan River. This will be a long day of driving, I'll be in the car for about 5 to 6 hours. I'm starting to discover that the places I'd like to visit involve long driving distances, with little time to hike and explore. With that in mind I'm pondering adding an additional day somewhere in the middle of the trip to have one full day to just go wandering aimlessly in the desert.
Itinerary
6AM -> 30 minute drive to Moki Dugway Overlook
7AM -> Sunrise
8AM -> Drive to Goosenecks National Park
830AM -> Goosenecks
930AM -> Drive back to hotel
1030-> Leave for Flagstaff
12:30PM -> Lunch in Tuba city
1:30 PM -> continue drive to Flagstaff
3:00 PM -> Wupatki National Monument
4:30 PM -> Arrive Flagstaff
7:00 PM -> Lowell Observatory
Moki Dugway Overlook / Muley Point
Moki Dugway Overlook
Muley Point
Another Muley Point Picture, click the image for an amazing view.
180 panoramic, click to scroll.
3-mile section of hairpin turns descending 1100 feet from Cedar Mesa. From the top, the views of southern Utah and northern Arizona are among the best in the country. Once again, Utah is known for having badass names for their parks and roadways.
Goosenecks
Around Mexican Hat, the San Juan River is slow-moving and flows through a relatively shallow canyon with many wide curves; more of these convolutions can be seen in the nearby Goosenecks State Park. The park, to which entry is free, has just one extended viewpoint of several huge river bends, now flowing one thousand feet below ground level in a deep canyon with a series of stepped cliffs and terraces; this is recognized as one of the best examples of entrenched river meanders in the world.
Wupatki National Monument
Wupatki is the only known location in the Southwest where physical evidence from at least three archeologically separate ancestral Puebloan cultures is found together in a number of archeological sites.
Lowell Obversatory
West of downtown Flagstaff, Arizona, founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell. Its initial instruments were a 12-inch refractor leased from Harvard and an 18-inch refractor borrowed from John Brashear. These were replaced, in 1896, by a 24-inch Alvan Clark refractor, which was temporarily erected at a site in Mexico for better viewing of the December 1896 opposition of Mars before being moved to its permanent home in Arizona. The original observatory building at Flagstaff, housing the 24-inch Clarke telescope, at an altitude of 2,210 meters (7,180 ft.) on top of a mesa known as Mars Hill, is now a National Historic Landmark. From here Lowell sought evidence of Martian canals (to support his thesis that Mars was inhabited by an intelligent, technological race) and of a ninth planet. The latter, subsequently named Pluto, was eventually found at the observatory by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Between 1912 and 1920, Vesto Slipher made observations of the red shifts of galaxies which helped lay the foundations for the theory of the expanding universe. Lowell astronomers were also the first to detect the rings of Uranus.
I'm attempting to add more places then just photo ops on the tour. Seeing Indian ruins, and going to an astronomy observatory I believe will change things up a bit. I cannot remember ever looking through a telescope, so to be able to check out multiple types in a place where hopefully artificial lightening from the city will be minimal will make it a sight to see. Also, this will give me the opportunity to do something at night aside from just sleeping.
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