August 23-29, 2025: Pueblo Road trip: El Malpais -> El Morro -> Chaco Culture -> Aztec Ruins -> Mesa Verde NP -> Yucca House -> Hovenweep-> Canyon Chelly -> Hubbel Trading Post -> Petrified Forest NP

Petrified Forest

With Morgan's maternity leave coming to an end at the beginning of September, we decided to take a proper road trip and cover much of the north of New Mexico we had not been to, as well as parts of southern Colorado and east Arizona. In all, over seven days we managed to hit 10 different National Park sites, cover 1500 miles, and fit a four-month-old, a three-year-old, a dog, and us two adults into 5 different hotels. 

24 hours in the car in one week with one toddler, one infant, and one dog. What could go wrong?!

El Malpais NM and El Morro NM: (FYI-- NM stands for National Monument, not New Mexico).The first day of the trip. El Malpais may have the nicest visitor center of any non-National Park-level facility and it was completely empty. The park itself is mainly for driving through which we did on the way to El Morro, where we hiked up to the beautiful cliffs and saw the inscriptions of priests going all the way back to 1605! 15 years before Plymouth Rock!  

Chaco Culture NHP: Chaco Culture was the worst journey-- 20 miles over unpaved dirt roads, and then the park itself was just one large driving loop. The visitor center did have some nice pottery though.

The next park, Aztec Ruins NM, has got to be one of the more confusing parks in the entire system. The ruins are not Aztec, they are Pueblo. There is no evidence of any type of Aztec culture at the site. Speaking of the site, the visitor center is just an old home of a guy named H. Abrams, who had some ruins in his backyard. So around 1905, H. Abrams builds a fence around the ruins and starts charging people to come through his house and look at the ruins he claimed were Aztec. Whether Mr. Abrams actually believed the ruins to be Aztec or just called it that to attract more visitors is unclear, but 100 years after the National Park service acquired the site they are still calling it Aztec Ruins instead of calling it by a historically accurate name. The ruins are Pueblo earth mounds and not cliff-style dwellings like those at Mesa Verde or Hovenweep.

Mesa Verde NP: We spent two days and two nights of our trip 8500 feet above sea level at the Far View Lodge in the park itself and while the hotel room was keeping on brand as sparse, small and not very cozy, the rest of the hotel and the park was a delight. Mornings and evenings were in the high 50s-- perfect weather to sit on the balcony sipping coffee and watching the blue birds, elk, deer, wild horses, chipmunks and bunnies frolicking like they were auditioning for a new Bambi movie, or to grab a light jacket and a glass of wine from the bar in the main hotel building and sit outside the overlook and watch the sunset. There is plenty of cliff-style ruins and earth mound ruins and trails to keep things interesting. Looking back, it was the highlight of the trip and two days in the park is the perfect amount of time needed to explore.

Following Mesa Verde, a quiddity of a National Park, we were bound to be let down a little, and sure enough both Yucca House NM and Hovenweep NM were just more Pueblo sites and Mesa Verde NP had already done a great job of explaining the history and culture of the Pueblo people. That said, Hovenweep is the better site with paved trails and being able to see its ruins without binoculars. While not NP sites, we also went to the Four Corners monument, which was a bucket list item for Morgan, and on the drive down from Colorado to Arizona we passed near Shiprock, New Mexico, which is the most singularly impressive natural site I saw on the entire trip. 

After leaving Colorado we stopped at Canyon De Chelly NM. It is unique in the NP system in that it is the only site we have been to that is not just federal NP land, but also an active reservation (Navajo) and as such, the Navajo have a unique agreement that allow them to sell their wares throughout the park, something they take full advantage of and was a little disconcerting the first time we pulled over to a scenic overlook and had three different vendors approach our party. We did buy some little trinkets, and even took a photo with a very insistent vendor who said he was famous and the picture would one day be worth a lot of money-- crazier things have happened!

After Canyon de Chelly, the convenience store that is Hubbell Trading Post felt quaint, low threat. It's both a NP site and a still working store for the local community-- think a Native American bodega where quilts and pottery that look hours to make is sold next to Gatorade. We stayed for an hour looking at items and watching the video explaining how the post has been essential to the community for the last 100 years, but ultimately, nothing caught our eye. 

We finally stopped for the night at a historic hotel on the Old Route 66- the El Rancho Inn, where we booked the Marx Brothers suite. This was the room that Chico and Harpo allegedly stayed in while filming the Marx Brothers Go West in 1939. The hotel oozes the prior-year charm of Route 66 and Monty loved that he got to meet a "real" cowboy as the valet wore a cowboy hat as well as he got to "discover" a secret room hidden behind a bookcase. My favorite part of the hotel though was the mattress, the first above-motel quality one of the trip.

This is what Route 66 is all about

We finally ended the trip with Petrified Forest National Park. This park reminded me of Big Bend in that the more you drive and travel through it, the more different eco-systems there are to find. For instance, the above picture of Monty and Goldie is right outside the Painted Desert Inn, which is no longer a hotel but a visitor center, and where there is no actual petrified wood, just beautiful vistas (as well as ice cream that is still served at an old timey soda shop and that Monty devoured).

It is not until 20 miles later into the park, at a lower altitude and a higher temperature, that there is the actual acclaimed petrified wood, and yes, it is everywhere. The logs look like overgrown brown sticks of chalk and while we enjoyed the hike and learning that the wood is so old, it had already petrified by the time T-Rexes roamed the area, there is only so much petrified wood to look at before it sort of all looks the same. 

Final Notes: My favorite part of the entire journey was not actually a park site, but a drive from Mesa Verde to Canyon De Chelly where we had to drive up, over, and then down over the Chuska Mountains and the forest. In that drive, the landscape in an instance changes at the border of New Mexico and Arizona from gray shrub prairie to bright red rock, and the climb through the junipers all the way up to 9,000 feet is breath-taking--- both in terms of view and steepness of the road.