Vacation With Adventure

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS SEPTEMBER, 1933 Vacation With Adventure

THE greatest vacation adventure Arizona has to offer still awaits probably 99 out of every 100 residents of the state!

Have you seen Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forests, Oak Creek Canyon, the White Mountain Country, the Coronado Trail, the Bradshaws and all the other fascinating vacation spots that dot Arizona's map?

Would you then like to take a trip involving more real adventure, more stark, unmarred beauty, more endless fascination, than any of these? Would you take it knowing that ever-present in the background is a slight element of danger?

Then by all means plan to visit Canyon de Chelly!

In all the vast wonderland that is Arizona there is nothing with which to compare this awesome chasm and its companion canyons, Del Muerto and Monument.

They form a triumvirate of deathless beauty in which the world is forgotten and time stands still.

The three canyons, forming one of Arizona's newest national monuments, lie in the northeast corner of the state, in the very heart of the Navajo Indian reservation.

There is nothing quite like them any where, and yet to analyze the fascina-tion they exercise in the traveler who seeks adventure in out-of-the-way places, and to translate their glamor in terms of cold print, is almost hopeless.

tion they exercise in the traveler who seeks adventure in out-of-the-way places, and to translate their glamor in terms of cold print, is almost hopeless.

The canyons begin at Chin Lee, curiously-named site of trading posts and a government Indian school, which is set almost squarely at their mouth.

Chin Lee itself is easily reached from any part of Arizona, over excellent highways and good reservation roads. The adventure begins when Chin Lee is left behind, and the walls of the canyons rise abruptly to shut out of sight and out of mind all that is involved in the complex business of civilization.

Canyon de Chelly, Canyon Del Muerto and Monument Canyon are primitive. Make no mistake about that. They are as they were almost when time began in this forgotten corner of the state.

You will meet men and women and little children. But from the time you enter the canyons to emerge days or weeks later, you will hear only your own English spoken.

You will see houses built a thousand years ago or more, and changed little from the way they were when Columbus “discovered” America. You will see great wall paintings executed centuries before mural decoration was developed as a superb art in the ancient civilizations of the Old World.

You will travel scores of miles where there is no faint sign of a road or track, yet over ground trod by hundreds of generations of an intelligent people who developed their own high culture.

You will sit in the very dwelling place of the gods, and regard on every hand the finest masterpieces of the uncontrolled forces of erosion. You will, in short, see one of the few places in the world where centuries pass as minutes, and leave no mark of their passing.

There is no introduction to Canyon de Chelly. At one minute you are traveling on the short road from Chin Lee to Thunderbird ranch. At the next you have swerved abruptly and are between canyon walls that rise 500 feet straight from the floor to the sky. Within a mile or two the sheer walls have risen to 800 feet and at times approach 1,000.

The canyon is narrow, even at the point where, five miles from the mouth, Del Muerto branches off to the north from de Chelly, which continues eastward. And nowhere is there a road. Keep that firmly in mind.

Ahead of you always there is only a bed of soft, yielding sand as fine as powder. It is perhaps one-tenth to one-(Continued on page 20)