Friday, July 13

Friday, July 13 Santa Fe to Gallup, NM           

The day started with a surprise: I was sitting at the desk by the window in the study at the back of the house, checking email, when I looked up into the eyes of a large coyote, about 20 feet away, just coming around the corner of the house. My iPhone was in reach; I picked it up, glanced down to click on the camera app, looked up, and the coyote was gone. I turned to the other window on the SW side of the house; no sign. It had just disappeared.  Was it a ghostly apparition from the past? More likely it was a coyote on its morning trash rounds, looking for open garbage cans.

Coyote (not the one I saw)

We left Santa Fe at 10:30, headed for Gallup, at the suggestion of Ralph Bransky. An hour later, a short way out of Albuquerque, we turned off at a sign: National Petroglyph Monument. The landscape, which had been tawny sandstone bluffs and sagebrush desert, was now dominated by black lava hills, the spawn of a volcanic eruption millennia ago. Over the centuries, for whatever reason, travelers and inhabitants had marked the rocks with symbols: stars, spirals, animals, the outline of a hand, complex astronomical diagrams. To see them we had to clamber up a steep trail through the jagged rock, to the top of a small volcanic mesa. It was 95°, and while we made it to the top, we were both affected by the heat and felt we’d seen enough petroglyphs. We did see a roadrunner, however, no doubt to complement the coyote.

Message From an Anasazi Astronomer?

We drove on toward the west, hurtling along Interstate 40 at 75 mph. The hills grew steadily bolder, great red sandstone cliffs rising higher and higher above the land. The mesas grew ever higher and broader, each surrounded by a skirt of fallen rock that had peeled off the cliff faces over time.

At 4 we pulled into Gallup, and checked in to the amazing El Rancho Hotel (at Ralph Branksy’s insistence – and he was dead right). A Holiday Inn it’s not, and that’s why it is highly sought after. The hotel, built in 1937, and now owned  by a Native American, has three stories of rooms, laid out in a curving arc. The interior walls are brick inside and out; noise from neighboring rooms is nonexistent. Each room is named after a Hollywood star of the 1930s: ours is a corner room named for Rosalind Russell (we had a choice of her or Alan Ladd; no contest. Other rooms are named for Doris Day, Betty Grable, Betty Hutton, William Bendix, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn). Supposedly they all stayed at the hotel at one time or another; the landscape is familiar to anyone who grew up watching cowboy movies of the 1930s and ‘40s.  Once Technicolor came along, the flaming red cliffs and deep blue sky would have been irresistible to any director of a good shoot-em-up.  In fact, I thought I recognized some of the landscape from old serials. 

The king- and queen-sized beds are modern, but everything else in the rooms  has a 1930s feel. The bathroom is lit by a pull-chain light over the sink; it has white hexagonal floor tiles. The dresser, desk and bedside table (there’s only one) are 1930s maple. We love it. 

And the lobby! Two stories high with a large Navajo-motif chandelier, Navajo rugs and wall hangings, heavy oak furniture, and a pair of stone staircases with railings and balusters of varnished tree limbs curving up to a balcony half-way up, with doors leading off to the curving corridors. And there’s an old-fashioned human-operated elevator leading up to the second and third floors. If you want to use it you have to find the desk clerk.

Lobby of El Rancho

We had a good Mexican meal in the dining room. We had been urged (by Ralph) to go down the street and “eat at Earl’s” but we were feeling pooped, it looked like it might rain, and the food was very good.