As we were getting dinner ready, Officer Friendly came over to tell us 550 of the parks rules, and what kinds of tickets he can write of we fail to obey. He has a gun, so we listen politely. By the time he is done (seriously, about 15 minutes), it is dark, and we eat and get into our tents... is about 9:30 now. We wake up as early as we can. ...Officer Friendly suggested we should leave no later than 8am, after getting our parking permit so we don't get a ticket. He warns us about the heat. We figure we can handle it, have been hiking in the desert every day for 2 weeks. We bring our bikes, lunch and as much water as we can. We stop at the visitor center to get our permit and find out that we will also need backcountry hiking and biking permits, but still need to stay on the trail. A park focused on human- created ruins is very different than one dedicated to nature. The others were mostly open 24 hours a day, and no permits.
At last we set off on our bikes for the 9 mile loop. We bike the first 5 miles to the apogee and decide to hike out to see the petroglyphs. We get our permit, then skirt the cliffs dodging the cottontails and see a slew of petroglyphs from ancient times to the present day. We have always been interested in graffiti from seeing ancient and modern juxtaposed in Greece. Byron's signature on Sounion, for instance, is itself a site people come to see. Is it vandalism or a universal desire to mark one's passing through space, or through life shared across time? The only differences are the age and the number of passers-by. We are not yet interesting until we become historic, and we are too many for our individual passing to be noteworthy.
This is the point that the kids totally revolt. It is hot, we have been camping and hiking every day for 2 weeks. Officer Friendly may have been right. We don't go on to the alluring pictographs 2 miles onward, even though they may depict the supernova of 1006...so we eat lunch and finish the loop, biking the last 4 miles to the visitor center. We agree to hang out there an hour before the guided tour of Pueblo Bonito, the largest (500-600 room!) ceremonial building filled with rooms that were dark, and hard to get to, alongside big kivas. No one knows what it was for, exactly, as it is very well-built and huge, but seemingly only for ceremonial use. Ellie completed her 5th Junior Ranger booklet and we watch the movie and read all the signs. We are not the only people trying to stay cool. We take the tour, which was fascinating. The rest of the afternoon we spend hanging out in the visitor's center, as are most of the other tent campers.
When the visitor's center finally closes at 5pm, we return to the campsite and play some games in the foyer of the tent with the fans going while Phil cooks. As I am washing the dishes, Officer Friendly parks his truck and sits himself down at our picnic table. It turns out he was a young veteran about to go to to Tel Aviv for a second BA to learn Arabic and middle eastern culture to set himself up for a career in intelligence. He is a park ranger because it was a law enforcement job. Now we get it. We take a loop around the park to see if there are any animals (nope) and end with a rousing game of National Park Monopoly.
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