Day 18(4/18)
Zag, Zog . . .
After carefully laying out our route prior to leaving Palo Alto, we almost immediately began to change it. Going to Mesa Verde was the first major change and stopping at Monument Valley and Shiprock were done on the fly after that, I think in Zion. To date our trip had been going along as well as we could have hoped, so I guess we were sort of due. As if the spirit of the land wanted to reprimand us for snubbing Antelope Valley, we drove right past the turnoff for Monument Valley and didn’t notice until we were too far beyond. That put us off and a dark cloud hung over us on our way down to Shiprock.
The air cleared however when we realized that we could stop at the actual four corners without much of a detour. And so we did. We turned off the road and paid a fee to the Navajo Nation, who maintain the small park surrounding the actual medallion. It’s in a kind of amphitheater surrounded by native crafts vending stalls (common all over the southwest). And, there’s not much else there. There doesn’t have to be. It may seem silly, but there’s something powerful about being at the actual place where four states come together. After taking a picture of a family, their dad took a picture of Connie and me standing in all four states. Then it was on to Shiprock.
Shiprock, (Navajo: Tsé Bitʼaʼí – The Rock with Wings) is an eroded volcano core rising 483 m (1583 ft) above its base about 17.3 km (10.75 mi) from the town that bears its name. Navajo legend tells of how the great bird brought the people here from the north. It is sacred to the Diné (Navajo for the Navajo people), though that doesn’t keep others from climbing it – which has been illegal since 1970.
We could see it in the distance as we drove into where the town was supposed to be. The typical outskirts never turned into a series of shopping malls, pawn shops, bars and so on. We passed the Shiprock office of the Navajo Tribal Police (as per The Fallen Man) and got to a tee intersection and wondered which way to turn toward the actual town. Neither way looked promising, so we went left through a little less of more of the same and soon were driving out of whatever we had just driven through. I immediately went into a mode familiar to both of us from our many years of adventuring – calorie mismanagement melt down – though we rarely recognize it until after making bad decisions. We retraced our route leaving behind the “town” of Shiprock, the dark cloud mentioned before now hailing on my head. On the first rise that gave me clear shop of Tsé Bitʼaʼí, I took a picture, probably from about 21m (13 mi) away. Had I turned right instead of left, we could have taken pictures from less than a mile.