The second part of Amy and my northern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado road trip started of with one of the best train rides I’ve ever done, and it’s said to be the best in the US, the Durango to Silverton historic narrow gauge (3 feet) train ride. It climbs into the mountain along and sometimes high above the Animas River to Silverton and used to haul tons of silver but now tourists. We also saw the Annular “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse while driving through the Navajo Indian Reservation, a great place to see it. We continued to see ancient Pueblo sites like Aztec Ruins National Monument (with a huge restored Kiva), Coronado State Historic Site, which has the finest precontact mural art in North America, found in a Kiva (now removed to the site’s Museum, and copies are now in the kiva that we went down into). And finally El Maispais (bad country) and El Morro National Monument. Hiked to the crater of a long extinct volcano with dark lava all around and down into a lava ice cave with 20 feet of ice in an otherwise very arid land. At El Morro we saw another source of water in the area, a huge pool fed by rainwater from the mountain above, with hundreds of petroglyphs made by ancient Indians and Spanish and Americans dating back to the 1600s. For photos of this trip see these links:
Album III: https://theskeltonview.smugmug.com/20...
Album IV: https://theskeltonview.smugmug.com/20...