Comparison Tests
You can whip out your Visa card at the entrance to Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “duh-shay”) National Monument, but unless you’re hauling it around in a four-wheel-driver, you’ll be turned away. This is 4x4 territory. And an exhilarating outing in an SUV.
Not a single canyon, as the name would suggest, but rather a confluence of canyons in northeastern Arizona, in the Navajo Nation, the monument is shaped like a mutant oak leaf; water drains in at the tips, eroding deeper and deeper through solid-red sandstone as it cuts toward a central stem and then flows out the stem in a broad sandy stream bed called the Chinle Wash.
We enter here, splashing up the wash against the rippling current of springtime runoff, four burly Detroiters locked in “four high”—a Chevy Suburban LT K2500; a GMC Yukon SLT K1500; and two Fords, the jumbo Excursion Limited and an Expedition XLT—all following in line, respectfully, warily. Our Navajo guide, Veronica T. “Ronnie” Yoe, riding shotgun in the lead truck, watches the stream for tumbling ripples, and over the two-way she talks us around the invisible holes and hollows.
“If a truck bogs down,” she warns, “don’t stop behind it. Go around. Get to high ground.” Her aunt lost a truck near here, a 1972 GMC pickup. “It just went down. Quicksand.” Nothing left but a memory. And a lesson.
Mostly the weighty machines roll easily. But now and again I feel the sand grabbing the wheels, resisting motion. “Soft here,” I tell her. “Gun it,” she says, and radios a warning to the others.
Wheels are a recent innovation in the canyon. From the first inhabitants about 2500 B.C. until the early 1600s, personal transportation relied on two feet. Then the sight of Spanish horsemen inspired the natives to tame wild mustangs. Now, not quite 400 years later, our mounts are leather-lined, climate-controlled, stereoinfused, go-anywhere machines, moccasins for the 21st century.
We’ve come to the canyon to test our moccasins, to drive them upstream as far as we can, to sites on which the “ancient ones,” the Anasazi, created their own masterpieces. By 1100 A.D., their tools and techniques had become sophisticated enough to construct large, multilevel cliff dwellings in the canyon walls, tucked under overhangs and into shallow caves. They left no written history, but the ruins of their great pueblos speak eloquently of the abilities and aspirations of these mysterious people.
Well, up to a point. Around 1300, these native farmers and builders suddenly abandoned their homes in Canyon de Chelly and other pueblo sites. Prolonged drought leading to crop failure? Overpopulation? Disease? Anthropologists have theories. But all anyone knows for sure is what the eyes can see.
So we’ve come to see for ourselves, shod in the latest off-road moccasins. New for 2000 is a pair of jumbo SUVs. GM has slipped an all-new machine under its renowned Suburban nameplate. By lore and legend, this is the Conestoga of the SUVs, a go-anywhere hauler with amazing owner loyalty.
Ford, after years of being marked absent in this class, finally countered this year with a whopper of its own, the Excursion, a machine much reviled by enviros and big-city columnists—for what? being seven inches longer than the Suburban?
Unquestionably, these are big machines. Too big for canyon questing? Just in case, we brought a model one size smaller from each maker, a GMC Yukon from GM (a Chevy Tahoe twin) and an Expedition from Ford. If size matters, let’s find out which size is the right size.
We left Phoenix on an April morning while the shadows were still long and arrived 320 miles later with enough daylight to scout the canyon floor from overlooks 900 feet up along the south rim. At Spider Rock Overlook we spotted a small ruin in a fold on the opposite side, halfway between top and bottom. For that dweller, the commute home would have been straight up or straight down, and impossible either way. Yet there were the stones set into man-made walls.
Seeing Canyon de Chelly is only a small step toward understanding.
