ALBUQUERQUE TO FLAGSTAFF

The Sky City Cultural Centre and Haak'u Museum is rick in cultural architecture, and serves as the reception centre for visitors to the Pueblo of Acoma. It is the gateway to Acoma 'Sky City', Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, is more than just a tourist destination. Its part of the New Mexico's cultural heritage as the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America and the 28th Historic Site designated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Acoma history is also the story of the Southwest from its initial role as the home to the Anasazi people to the thirteenth century founding of the Pueblo, which is still alive and well as a community and touchstone for Native Americans in the area , and nationwide.

SKY CITY CULTURAL CENTRE AND HAAK'U MUSEUM.

The village on the Rio Puerco (Puerco Pueblo) is a prehistoric settlement built of shaped sandstone blocks by ancestral Puebloan people. It was inhabited between AC 1250 and 1380. At its peak the pueblo had over 100 rooms with a possible population of 200 people. During the villages occupation, fields of corn, beans and squash sustained by the summer rains would have filled the rivers floodplains.

Puerco Pueblo was not isolated in space or time. The river provided a travel corridor across the grasslands of the Colorado Plateau. Large and small communities existed up and down the Rio Puerco and Little Colorado River. Puerco Pueblo would have been visited by travelers and traders from far outside the ancestral Puebloan cultural area who brought different types of potter and goods as well as new ideas to the residents of Puerco. Researchers study these types of interactions through the wide variety of artifacts and rock art found in or near the village.

A hotel at Gallop where movie stars frequented.

Badlands was a term that could send a shiver down the spine of the most intrepid explorer of the past. The term originated with indigenous people of Montana and the Dakotas, the phrase 'make sica' literally meaning 'badland'. Today the term refers to a spectacular, highly eroded landscape.

Summer thunderstorms and winter snowmelt easily carve the soft shale and sandstone into a maze of sharp ridges, steep hillsides and deep V shaped gullies. Water drains through tunnels, or 'pipes' inside the hills and gullies, washing out loose soils and undermining slopes that later collapse and sinks and slumps.

The landscape changes rapidly with every cloudburst and drop of water. Three inches of soil can wash away from the steepest slopes in ten years.

The colourful mesas, buttes, and badlands before you compose a natural work of art - the Painted Desert. Wind and running water cut these features from the Chinle Formation deposited over 200 million years ago when this area was a vast inland basin near sea level. The colours are due to ancient environmental conditions in which the sediments were originally deposited as well as the type of minerals present in the rocks.

Besides being colourful, the Chinle Formation contains valuable fossils record of Late Triassic plants and animals ranging from ferns and shellfish to amphibians and dinosaurs. Members of the scientific community from all over the world come here to study these fossils.