Thursday, October 13, 2016

Road Trip

We drove north yesterday to spend the afternoon walking through three of the Anasazi Great House sites at Chaco Canyon.  The last five miles of the washboard road into the Park is a stern test for any vehicle, but the old Toyota held up pretty well.


A lot of people have discovered that this is the best time of the year to visit Chaco. The campground is reservation only now, and it was full up in the middle of the week.  Since I wasn't up to camping out this time anyway, we decided to head back to Cuba to get dinner and spend the night at the Frontier Motel.

Kiva at Chetro Ketl, Chaco Canyon

On the way home on 550 we made a little side trip at the turn-off to San Luis which leads to the Guadalupe Ruins, the southernmost Chaco outlier.  We did not drive that far in, but we did stop to enjoy the early Fall color along the Rio Puerco and some nice views of Cabezon Peak.


I shot a couple rolls of color in the Pentax, so hope to get those processed later today and will put anything worthwhile on my photo blog.

2 comments:

Jim Grey said...

Your truck looks like a perfect road-trip machine, especially when the roads are uncertain!

Mike said...

I haven't put a lot of miles on the truck since I got it a couple years ago, but it has enabled a few nice adventures. It has also done some useful work. The day after we returned from Chaco we used the truck to move a piano for a UNM student who is the daughter of some old friends.

The T100 is the best of the 4wd trucks I have owned. It has good ground clearance, and a 6 cyl engine which gets good mileage and still has good pulling power. The little Chev Luv I drove in Idaho got me through a lot of rough country, but I often had to resort to chains on all four wheels when it got high centered on snow drifts. My Nissan Frontier which I used in southern NM had plenty of ground clearance, but the 4 cyl engine was under powered for any serious work.

My first truck was a '48 Studebaker with a '53 engine. Margaret and I drove it from Seattle to Mexico City in 1969. I sold it when we got to San Francisco where we remained carless for much of the next seven years.