Video of first month in USA

During our run through Mancos we stopped at the Chamber of Commerce where we were greeted by Mayor Greg Rath, Amy Wise of Sandstone Archeology, Mayor Pro Tem Michele Black, and Pam and Tom from the local newspaper. They kindly offered us bottled water, coffee and snacks after our short ceremony. It was so nice of them to come out early on a Saturday morning to see us off on the first leg of a long day.

My team ran past Mesa Verde, a large flat topped mountain. Mesa literally means ‘table’ and verde is ‘green’.

It is so huge that it takes hours to drive up the winding road to the top. It was home of Anasazi and other Native American Tribes for thousands of years and is now a National Park visited by millions each year.

We continued our run to Cortez where we were greeted by three women at the Cultural Center. We also met a local runner Roy Perales, who read about our run in the local newspaper. He originally came out just to meet us and then was so inspired that he decided to run with us. Before we left Cortez though we received some souvenirs and bottled water from the women there.

Roy ran with Eddie almost ten miles while telling him stories about his running when he was younger. He won many competitions in school and high school from 2 miles to ten miles. He was well known in the area as a great runner. He is half Native American and half Mexican. His wife Sherry, a Navajo Indian, and their daughter, Zhjade, followed along as he carried the torch for over an hour. It was very uplifting, especially for Eddie, to have Roy run with us, and his family to support him.

Our afternoon teams ran with a strong headwind, sometimes blowing up sand to make the running even more difficult. Running into Utah, we entered into the first stages of Monument Valley, an incredibly vast array of geographical wonders from millions of years of evolutionary changes. It seemed like a cross between the bottom of the ocean and Mars as we gazed up miles and miles of sandstone rock formations and sculptures carved out by water, wind and erosion.

We had a short stop at the Twin Rocks Café and gift shop in Bluff where Craig, the owner, offered us a CD of Native American music. The café is quite an oasis in the beautiful but bleak surroundings of the earth’s geographical splendours here in southeastern Utah.

Mexican Hat, a town named after one of the most curious rock formations that looks like a sombrero carefully balanced on a large rock, was our final destination of the day. We stayed at a large and well outfitted trailer house of the San Juan Inn nearby, thanks to Julie Sword. We are also grateful to Lawrence, the manager of the Inn who was so kind to us and even came by to bring us gallons of water and breakfast bars.

Banalata, our newest member, originally from Brazil, offered her account of what it is like running out here in the Southwest,

She says, “Yesterday it was a hot day with a lot of wind and sand flying into our eyes and everything else that was possibly disposed to the wind and sand. Not being able to keep the flame of the torch burning we had to run without the flame. Fascinated by the desert and the harbingers of the Monument Valley by crossing the border to Utah was an incredible experience of nature. The blue of the sky and the red of the mountain earth was breathtaking and peace giving at the same time”.

Except for the strong wind, which is always our nemesis when running into it, we look forward to an incredible day running through Monument Valley.

Arpan and Team Harmony

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