We meet up with Kathy and Bill to celebrate their 70th birthdays!

 We met up with Kathy and Bill in Mexican Hat, Utah, to celebrate their 70th birthdays, but mostly just to see them.  It was so wonderful.

This area of the country means a lot to us because of how much time we have spent there on our road trips.  It is where some our favorite places to camp and hike over the years have been.

On our way to Mexican Hat we stopped north of Flagstaff and took a nice hike.

And drove by Lake Mary and Mormon Lake (below), which we had never seen before.

 

To get to Mexican Hat we drove through Monument Valley.  We had visited this area in 2015.  Monument Valley was made famous by John Ford, the movie director, and John Wayne.  They made several films together here.

 ...including The Searchers, Dan's all-time favorite film.

And then, 40 years later Monument Valley was once again made famous by Forrest Gump.  In fact, it is even labeled on Google Maps.

 

We all stayed  at the San Juan Inn, which is almost carved into the side of a large rock high above the San Juan River. 

We have never stayed at an Inn before where we had to be careful about where we parked our car.

Early every morning we went on a hike from this motel along the San Juan River.  When we start it is pitch black, so we get to watch the sun coming up.  Really stunningly beautiful.

On our last day we took this hike later in the morning with Kathy and Bill.

A full moon lit us up on our early morning hikes.

 

One day all four of us hiked to the "hat."  This is the rock that Mexican Hat is named after.    We took a group photo:

Dan decided that the hat was precarious, and might fall and hurt someone.  So, he volunteered to push it over:

The next day we went to Valley of the Gods.  It is a lot like Monument Valley, except not quite as large.  But it is also pretty isolated.  We have camped in five places there--in 2015 and 2017.  And have hiked all over the valley.  It was really nice seeing it again. 

  

  

 

 

We showed Kathy and Bill our very favorite campsite in Valley of the Gods.  We stayed at his site for two weeks in 2017, where we celebrated Thanksgiving surrounded by these majestic towering buttes.  Bill took a photo of us that captured the joy we felt as we returned to this campsite where we have so many sweet memories.

We also took a quick trip to Gooseneck State Park.  It's major attraction is a curve in the San Juan River.  It's really something:

 

The next day we traveled up the Moki Dugway to Cedar Mesa.  The Moki Dugway is a road that goes straight up (practically) the side of a mountain.  It is quite unbelievable.

 

On the way up one can see Valley of the Gods in the distance:

 

 And when you get to the top of Cedar Mesa one finds a mesa of Cedars. Imagine that.

 

This area is also Bears Ears National Monument.

Here are the Bears Ears that it is named after.  Note the absence of an apostrophe.  We don't know why it isn't called Bear's Ears. 

A closer shot as we drew near the “Ears”:

The gravel road we traveled on went between the two ears.  We joked that we visited the Bear's Forehead;

One of our main reasons for making this trip today was to show something to Bill and Kathy.  We had spent several nights in this area camping and hiking.  One day, on one of our hikes we came upon a sight that we will never forget.

So, today we went back to this area.  It involved driving on rough 4-wheel-drive roads.  Fortunately, the Toyota 4Runner was more than up to it.

Then we walked:

..until we came to a road that descended into the valley.  It had not been used in many years.  It was amazing to consider how old vehicles, many without hydraulic brakes, had descended this road.   

We found out later that it was "Old 95."  The "new" 95 was completed in 1976, but we cannot find out how long before 1976 this part of the road was decommissioned.  

It is truly a sight to behold:

After we drove out, we found "new" 95.  After driving several miles we found where this old 95 road had met up with it.  You can see the road in the middle of the next photo, working its way down into the valley:

Every afternoon we would sit on the deck at the Inn until it got too hot, at which point we would move indoors:

And then the big event!  Kathy and Bill's birthday celebrations.  Kathy's was this week, and so we combined it with Bill's whose birthday it is in a few months (but we were afraid we wouldn't be with him to celebrate).  It's funny that the candles all melted together in the car, so that they looked like the buttes that we had seen in Monument Valley and Valley of the Gods.  How appropriate.

It was so wonderful to spend this time with two people who we love and have meant so much to us for such a long time.