On our long drive out to Mesa Verde we had some spectacular monsoon thunderstorms fill the sky all around us. I looked at the weather radar as we drove through the Navajo Nation and realized we would be driving right past Navajo National Monument and that it would only be a 7 minute detour to drive from our route. I managed to convince Heather and David to take a quick stop to stretch our legs and break up the drive. It is a small monument, mostly devoted to protecting the two cliff dwellings of Betatakin (visible from a rimtop overlook trail) and Keet Seel (only visible with rare multi-day ranger tours), so gets minimal visitation compared to Mesa Verde. We enjoyed a nice overlook of the Tsegi Canyon network, then checked out the nice visitor center before they closed (with some particularly nice pottery examples and overviews of the two ruin complexes. We then took the short half-mile jaunt along the wet pavement of the Sandal Trail out the the overlook of Betatakin (Ledge House in Navajo). The complex of what once was at least 120 rooms sits multi-tiered on the bedrock slope at the back of one of the more spacious open air alcoves I have seen anywhere in the Southwest. The alcove is about 560 ft deep and similar in width and height. Though seeing it through binoculars was mostly a tease, we still took a few minutes to admire the construction, layout, preservation, and to think on what it must have been like in its 13th century heyday. It was a nice appetizer to the many cliff dwellings we would see the following days at Mesa Verde.
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