The Dolores Diaries

I woke up with the sun this morning and went on a nice sunrise hike. It was about 6 miles and pretty uneventful though I did listen to a podcast about cricket farming and now I want to try it. Eating crickets is the way of the future. Anyway then I went to Tuzigoot NM which was yet another ruin. This one was cool because it was a Pueblo on a hill and not a cliff dwelling. It's really well preserved and they fixed up the top part so that you can go in it and stand at the look out area. It's huge. 110 rooms in all. Again it's the same story. We don't really know who these people were, they built it roughly 700 years ago and then kind of disappeared. Then I drove to Arcosanti which I found in the Atlas Obscura. Super interesting. This arcitect guy Paolo Soleri thought the way we designed cities were all wrong. He thought that suburbs were a waste of space and resources that cars were terrible and roads and parking lots took up unnecessary space and rescourses and that nothing worked with nature at all. So he decided to make his own city. He started in the 70s with an experimental permit so nothing is up to code but then eventually they lost the permit and then had to make everything up to code which was super expensive and slowed construction way down. He also refused money from anyone​ because he wanted to do his own thing. So now it's basically this huge (though only 3% completed ) communal living space where like 60 people live and work trying to eventually complete this crazy project. They don't have money so they make artsy bells out of bronze or ceramics and sell them to sustain the project. It's a really interesting place. The vision is that this complex will eventually be its own city housing 5000 people in like 15 acres in the middle of the desert. The arcitecture is really cool. He tried to make the sun work with the building best he could so he used a lot of the same principles as the Native American ruins did. There's a lot of circular shapes and half dome things. So yeah. Interesting day.

More adventures tomorrow!Läs mer