ZION NATIONAL PARK trip
Oct. 20-28 2018
PART 13
Probably still BIA 35.
We must have taken UT 262, but this has to be a road running east off UT 262 to Hovenweep National Monument.
The road to Hovenweep was one of the trip's roadly highlights. This road was so full of potholes that we almost decided to just turn around and go back - because some people don't like cool stuff like that.
Yes! More potholes!
The potholed road bears a tiny route marker that's too small for anyone to read. I think Google Maps calls this Hovenweep Road.
Getting closer to Hovenweep.
The pavement seems to relax a bit on this road.
Closer still to Hovenweep.
Some of the beautiful scenery at Hovenweep. The monument contains Ancestral Puebloan villages that were inhabited by hunter-gatherers from roughly 8000 B.C. to 200 A.D. and by later groups until about the 14th century. This scene is a remnant of an old village.
Another view of the Hovenweep ruins. (The magic word!) Hovenweep became a protected area because - in the words of one observer - people "have turned the ground well over and have taken out much pottery, breaking more, and strewing the ground with many crumbling bones."
More Hovenweep remnants.
A final view of Hovenweep. I can't hike any significant distance, because my energy level is practically zero.
This sign does the Doublemint thing for Cortez, Colo. It's the same distance on both routes.
This stop sign has seen less funny days.
I'm not sure where this is.
A SLOW sign like it's 1956!
I'm not even gonna try to guess where this is, or even whether it's Utah or Colorado.
See the deer on the left!
More great scenery of the Four Corners region.
America's economic recession of the late 2010s was hitting this stretch of highway hard. This is north on US 160/491 approaching Cortez. US 491 was US 666 until the Bush regime renumbered it in 2003 as one of its "faith-based initiatives." No, I'm not making this up. I got in heated arguments on the Internet back then with people who defended this change and denied that it had anything to do with the government's growing religious extremism - even though news accounts confirmed it in plain sight.
Our mandatory Sesame Street reference! Here, US 160/491 crosses McElmo Creek. Hahaha! Elmo!
US 160 uses Main Street in Cortez.
US 160 heading away from Cortez.
South on Main Avenue - old US 550 - in Durango.