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Good day everyone, Jodi and I left Benson, AZ to head to Lory State Park, CO. In the town of Bellvue, outside of Fort Collins, CO. We left Benson, AZ the 1^st of April and took a month and a half to get to Colorado. We have seen some really interesting places on our trip.  Everyone calls the places you most want to see a “Bucket List”. We have seen a few bucket list places along our trip.

For Information on each photo, please click on the photo, then scroll through the photos. You must view the blog through the web page. Click on the title of your email to go directly to the blog web page. The title to this blog is:

“Exciting trip from Arizona to Colorado”

Our first stop was Lost Dutchman State Park, Apache Junction, AZ

We were at Lost Dutchman State Park 5 years ago and had a great camp site with a view of the Superstition Mountains. Well, I got us another site with a great view, and it was really fun being there again and doing some hiking. We got some good pictures..

OUR NEXT STOP

Our second stop Camp Verde, AZ Montezuma Castle Monument & Fort Verde

Here we visited the Camp Verde, AZ Montezuma Castle Monument: cliff dwellings dating back to the 1100s. This was amazing to see. Fort Verde, was a military fort back in 1871 – 1891. It was Camp Lincoln before it was called Fort Verde. During the Indian wars they used this little fort as a supply base for the patrols and scouting expeditions eastward into the Tonto Basin. It was at the time of the end of the Indian resistance in central Arizona.

Montezuma Castle Monument, Camp Verde, AZ

Camp Lincoln/Fort Verde

The pictures below of Camp Verde/Fort Verde were taken from the Website of Fort Verde, I take no credit for any of the photo of the Fort.

OUR NEXT STOP

Our Third Stop Was Tuba City, AZ Navajo Nation Reservation

Tuba City is the largest community within the Navajo Nation. Tuba City is considered the western regional hub of the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation covers 17 million Acres (26,000 Square Miles) which is the largest land area assigned to a Native American Jurisdiction within the United States. The Navajo people traditionally call themselves DINE (din AY) which means “The People” in Navajo. This was the area that we were able to see fossilized Dinosaur Tracks just 5 miles outside the town of Tuba City. The Moenkopi Dinosaur Tracks are located on Highway 160 just west of Tuba City on the Navajo Nation.

OUR NEXT STOP

Our Fourth Stop Was Cadillac Ranch, Bluff, UT  Bluff Fort / Monument Valley

Hole-in-the-Rock Trail

We stayed here for two reasons, we wanted to see Monument Valley and Fort Bluff, a small fort by about 260 or so Mormon settlers, men, women and children that did the impossible by settling this area of Bluff, UT.  The story below of how Bluff Fort got started, helps to understand what this area of Bluff, UT is all about.

Bluff, the first Anglo community in southeastern Utah, was settled in April 1880 by Mormon pioneers seeking to establish a mission on the San Juan River in the present-day Four Corners area. The San Juan area of southeastern Utah was then known as a refuge for lawless men. The San Juan Mission would act as a buffer for the rest of settled Utah, establish law and order, and maintain friendly relations with the Indians in the area.

A “mission call” went out in December 1878 and was answered by numerous southern Utah families, many of whom gave up fine homes to move with all their possessions to the remote San Juan area. Seventy families consisting of around 250 men, women and children, left Escalante in south central Utah in October 1879 intending to establish the mission at Montezuma on the San Juan River.

Hole-in-the-Rock, Kane County, UT.  Photos above by Kenneth Mays.

Using a route advised by a previous scouting party known as the “Escalante short cut”, the pioneers expected the 125 mile trek would take 6 weeks. Instead, the journey extended 260 miles over 6 months via the Hole-in-the-Rock-Trail in arduous, winter conditions.

Historians consider the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition one of the most extraordinary wagon trips ever undertaken in North America and a fine example of pioneer spirit. Many sections of the trail were almost impassable. To allow wagon passage, the men spent 6 weeks blasting and chiseling a path through a narrow, 1,200 foot drop in the sandstone cliffs known as the Hole-in-the-Rock, which is still visible at present-day Lake Powell (Glen Canyon National Recreation Center). Brothers Hyram and Benjamin Perkins had experience using explosives from their days as miners in Wales, and were put in charge of drilling and blasting to make a path for wagon passage.

Most of the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail is still visible and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two sites on the Hole in the Rock Trail are part of present-day Bears Ears National Monument, Shash Jaa Unit.

By April 1880, the pioneers were too exhausted to continue to their intended destination 20 miles upriver and chose to settle along a flat area in the river valley. Calling the new location Bluff City, the pioneers began dividing the land, building log cabins, and digging a ditch from the river for crop irrigation.

We had reserved and paid for a 3.5 to 4 hour tour of Monument Valley and for some reason there was a mix up on our reservation. They were going to tack us onto another 2 hour tour so we were not going to get our 3.5 to 4 hours. We contacted the company and they ended up giving us a private tour with just the two of us. The tour guide was a young indigenous individual from the Navajo area and he was very knowledgeable. We had a long 4 hour tour and it was amazing.  Here is what we saw of Monument Valley.

MONUMENT VALLEY TOUR Utah/Arizona

If you have watched any western movies with John Wayne and other famous movie stars back in the early 1930s to 50s, the backdrop of many of them were filmed in Monument Valley. Monument Valley became famous due to John Ford, a director that filmed many movies there, drawing many people and tourists to Monument Valley years later. The first western movie by John Ford with John Wayne was “Stagecoach” released in 1939 filmed on location of Monument Valley.  Other movies were “Fort Apache” with John Wayne and Shirley Temple released in 1948, and Tom Hanks in “Forest Gump” in 1993 when he did the “Run Forest Run” scene with Monument Valley in the background of Tom running up the road, then stopping in the middle of the road.

Click on photos for more information

OUR NEXT STOP

Our Fifth Stop was Moab, UT Arches National Park

We started nice and early and had to have a reservation time to get into the park. This park gets really crowded fast and we got there at 9am. We had an awesome day seeing most of the park. It got really windy later in the afternoon, and we did see just about everything we could during our time that we had. Here is what we saw.

OUR FINAL STOP

We are here at Lory State Park hosting for the next few months. We arrived here the 16^th of May and have been hosting a little over three weeks. Such a beautiful park. Its just outside of Fort Collins, Co. Cheyenne, WY is about 50 miles due north of us, and Denver is about 70 miles due south of us. Fort Collins has a lot to offer, shopping, breweries, wineries, live music, and it even has a Drive In Theater.  The State Park is a day use park and has over 26 miles of hiking, biking trails and some horse equestrian trails.  Jodi and I have gone on two nice hikes so far, and plan on doing many more on our days off.

The job we are doing here is kicking our butts, but we are getting in shape. A lot of it is grounds maintenance like mowing, weed eating, cleaning BBQ grills, emptying trash cans, power washing, painting picnic tables and keeping all of the restrooms clean and stocked. Its an all day job, but we do have 4 days off to recover from working very hard at doing all the above. Its rewarding. We work hard and then play hard. 

Here are some pictures of our view from the site near the park’s maintenance building. This is our home for the next few months.

Pictures of our first 2.8 mile hike in Lory State Park. The Well Gulch Nature Trail

Pictures of our second 2.5 mile hike in Lory State Park. The Quarry Ridge Loop Trail. Such a beautiful park full of hiking trails.

This Blog has been a long time coming, and we worked hard on this blog to get you some good information on our trip from Benson, AZ and our travels to Colorado. It was full of some of the best tourist locations such as State Parks, National Parks and private parks. We had a great time and enjoyed all of our travel adventures on this 1,000 mile trip.  We are excited to be here at Lory State Park and we are enjoying every day we work and the days we don’t. Exploring this State Park and exploring the surrounding areas of Ft. Collins. Hope you all enjoyed our blog and pictures. We do work hard and we also play hard when we do our travels from place to place. We enjoy hosting and volunteering at various State Parks, National Parks and Corp of Engineer parks. 

To everyone out there, we are thinking of you all and hope you are all doing well. Stay tuned and keep your eyes pealed for the next adventure blog that we post… 

The Bobble Head Travelers,   Jodi and Mark

Good day everyone!!  It’s been a while since we have done our travel blog. We have been in Benson, AZ for the past 4 months, since October.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years have come and gone. We had our tripod Christmas tree set up and our little Christmas tree inside. The holidays just didn’t feel tremendous this year. For one, the tornadoes that wiped out close to 9 states; Mayfield, Kentucky is totally gone. What kind of Christmas did they have? Not a very good one. On top of all the bad weather, we have the new Covid variant that is now in every state in the US. On the first of December we had one case in the U.S., 22 days later it was in every state. When are we going to be done with Covid?? Maybe in the year 2025…We shall see!!  If only people would just do what they should, this would get better much faster. I’m not saying it’s going away, it will be around for very very long time to come.

Pictures of our RV site and some pics of a nice rainbow that was during one of our rain storms here, and a few sunset pictures.

One of the biggest tourist and popular places to see is Tombstone “The Town Too Tough To Die”, and it’s just 20 miles from Benson. The history of Tombstone is very interesting. You may know the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral with the Earp brothers and Doc. Holiday against the outlaw Cowboys that included the Clanton and McLaury brothers. This is what made Tombstone famous. The finding of silver was really the main thing that made Tombstone get its name and put this little town on the map. They still do reenactments of the O.K. Corral shootouts in downtown Tombstone. There are a few mines that you can tour when you visit this unique little town, along with some great saloons and restaurants.

Mr. Ed Schieffelin was told when he was looking for his big bonanza of silver in that area, he was told all he would find is his own tombstone, so when he found millions of dollars worth of silver, he decided to call this town Tombstone, hence the name of this small town in Cochise County..

It’s a fun town with much to see and great places to eat. There are a lot of original historic buildings and saloons. One is the Bird Cage Theatre, a popular saloon and still one of the original buildings with memorabilia from the late 1800s, we still need to visit this saloon which is now a museum that you can walk through for a small fee.

We still have a few more sites to see here in Arizona. There are a few places around Benson and at this time we have visited Tombstone, Kartchner Caverns, Bisbee, Chiricahua National Monument, Amerind (American Indian) Museum and Triangle T Guest Ranch. There are so many things to see in these small towns. We are going to Bisbee again. It’s such a small town but there is a lot to see and we needed more time. We are going to try to see The Desert Museum outside of Tucson, as well as a few movie set locations where over 100 western movies have been filmed; The Old Tucson studios, Tucson, AZ,  Mescal studios, Mescal, AZ (between Tucson and Benson)and few others. Parts of Tombstone movie was filmed in Tombstone too.

Pictures of Tombstone, AZ

We went to Kartchner Caverns State Park. This park has two large caverns to tour and we had a chance to see the better one of the two. You can not take pictures while touring the caverns, so there are no pictures to show, but I will show you some from the internet. (I did not take these pictures shown below.) The State Park also has a really nice campground and a few hiking trails.

Pictures of Kartchner Canvern State Park, the two caverns

Just a few miles south of Bisbee is a town called Lowell, AZ.  This town was left in the time zone of 1900s. This is Erie Street, “historic” Lowell, Bisbee, AZ. It felt like we went back in time walking down the street of this little town.

Pictures of Erie Street Lowell, AZ (Click on a Photo for more Information)

We went to Bisbee, a real neat quaint town that seemed to be the biggest Copper mining town in all the United States back in the late 1800s. It ranked1 of 5 Copper mines in the world, producing 25% of the worlds copper back in the days. Bisbee is just 11 miles from the Mexico border. When we went to Bisbee we didn’t have enough time to see all the fun stuff in this town, so we are going again soon.  There are lots of little shops, museums and neat little hidden treasure’s. 

Pictures of Bisbee, AZ (Click on a Photo for more Information)

We had a chance to see another awesome National attraction;. Chiracahua National Monument. This place is similar to Bryce Canyon, but smaller and without the red stone color. This place has a lot of green moss all over the rocks and a lot of balanced rocks, and pillars. There is very good hiking throughout the canyon. 

Pictures of Chiracahua mountains

The Amerind Museum just 15 miles down east I-10 from Benson, is dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Native American cultures and their histories. Just a walk around this place with the landscape of hundreds of rocks and boulders on this 1600 plus acres is just amazing.

Pictures of Amerind Museum area, (Click on a Photo for more Information)

Less than a mile from the Amerind Museum is a place called Triangle T Ranch with 160 acres that has some history to it. Established in 1922, the Triangle T Historic Ranch boasts a colorful and exciting past. Apache Chief, Cochise, and his band used the ranch as a winter camp for many generations. Other well-knowns that stayed on the ranch include President John F. Kennedy, General John J. Pershing, and Dr. Leon T. Silver just to name a few. High ranking Japanese from WWII were detained on this ranch: 22 adults and 15 children. Japanese war criminals were detained here for about 5 months, then were exchanged for American POWs. In the 1950s, Part of the land was made into the Amerind Museum as mentioned above. The new owner then built a Saloon/restaurant and opened it up for western movies. Some more famous actors and great western movies and shows were filmed here: the original 3:10 to Yuma 1957, with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, some of the original Lone Ranger, the High Chaparral TV series 1967-71, Stagecoach with Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, & Willie Nelson. A few other movie stars that have stayed at the ranch are Gene Hackman, John “the Duke” Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evens.  It was a very unique place to visit and maybe get a drink or dinner at the ROCK Saloon. 

Pictures of Triangle T Guest Ranch (Click on a Photo for more Information)

This is only some of what we have done here in Arizona. We will be doing some more between now and the time we head up to Colorado for the summer. We will post some more interesting travels when we get settled up at our Summer hosting job.  

So we were going to head back to Spooner Lake State Park at Lake Tahoe, NV after leaving Benson, but they are still renovating the park with a new Visitor Center, a new picnic area and adding an amphitheater.  They’re not quite done and won’t be when we want to arrive there, so we found another summer hosting job in Colorado.  We did want to go back to Spooner, but we will have to try to get back there in a few years when they are done with the renovations.

We are leaving Benson, AZ April 1^st to head to Lory State Park near Fort Collins, CO.  Jodi got online and looked for a few State Parks in Colorado, Lory State Park contacted us.  We had a Virtual interview and got the hosting job. We are so excited and ready to get back to hosting/doing some work.  Fun Fun.. It is a day use State Park, so yes we are all by ourselves during our evenings.

So on our way up to Lory State Park, we have to burn about a month and half to get to up to Colorado without us getting snowed in at some locations. We hope that arriving to the State Park mid May will be good and clear of any snow or snow storms. We shall find out.  When we leave Benson we are going to stay in the area of Tucson for a couple of weeks. After that, we are going to Lost Dutchman State Park for a week, then we go to a park in Apache Junction for another week, just a few miles from Lost Dutchman SP. We have been to Lost Dutchman SP before and loved it there. Such a beautiful place and a great place to hike…

We are going to start heading up to Monument Valley, where lots of western films have been shot. This is the Navajo Nation territory covering about 17,544,500 acres. We are going to get a tour of the area, so do hope to see and get plenty of pictures…

We then head further north to Utah up towards Moab, the Arches national Park. Another one of our Bucket list Parks.  We do hope again we don’t get snowed out. 

Picture of Arches by Adhemar Vargas Baigqorria

From Moab, UT, we are heading into Colorado by way of I-70 into Denver and then up to Fort Collins. Wish us luck.   We will be posting some great pictures when we get settled into our summer spot at Lory State Park. 

Do hope you have enjoyed this big informational Blog. We want all of our friends and family to be safe and healthy. Stay tuned and see what we will venture to next… Stay in touch and make some comments about any of the photos and or posts and we will respond back. Miss you all and hope to see you again someday soon.

Bobble Head Travelers Mark and Jodi