Southwest, U.S.: Listening to the desert’s story
Exploring the Four Corners area, at the intersection of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah
The mesas loom above us as our raft drifts down the San Juan River. Sheer cliffs of crumbly sandstone and shale rise hundreds of feet into the air, eating into the blue sky. On the rocky shore, a bighorn ram looks up from grazing to take us in.
We’re in the middle of the Navajo Nation, in the heart of the Four Corners area, the intersection of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah.
For years, I’d driven through this arid, haunting part of the country, wanting to explore it, but overwhelmed by its vastness and rugged beauty, not knowing where or how to begin.
Then I found out about a working archaeological research facility in Cortez, Colorado. The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center is a nonprofit organization that funds its research in part by guiding people like me on trips led by archaeologists who have spent their careers in the area, digging into the past.
What could be a better way to see the country?
This is the last day of our five-day trip, and I’m amazed at how much I’ve seen and learned. My archaeological guides, Mark Varien and Ricky Lightfoot, are true experts on the region. They’ve revealed this country to me in a new light.
Four days earlier, I walked into a meeting room at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel in Farmington, New Mexico. There were nine others in the room: Mark and Ricky, two drivers and five other intrepid explorers. We civilians had all taken the recommended packing list way too seriously and looked as if we were about to explore the jungles of Borneo.
Mark and Ricky were dressed more or less as cowboys might be: bluejeans, snap shirts and cowboy boots. They wouldn’t stray from this clothing choice for the remainder of the trip.
Mark turned out the lights and showed us some slides and gave us view of the region and told us what we were going to see.
The next morning, we head for Chaco Canyon. This is a place that looks like something you’d expect to find in the deserts of North Africa. Yet here, for 400 years, from the 9th to the 13th centuries, the complex civilization of the Ancestral Pueblo, or Anasazi, once thrived.
Our very own Timbuktu.
Getting to Chaco is no easy task. We drive on small farm roads, cross from Colorado into New Mexico, turn off onto a hardpan dirt road, hen drive for 20 more excruciating miles. Our two vans vibrate as if they’re going to crumble to death, as dust swirls in the air. Mark and Ricky use the van’s intercom to explain everything that we’d be seeing if we weren’t driving through a dust cloud.
For a brief moment, the dust clouds part, and I point off to the right at an octagonal structure residing next to a trailer home and two red pickup trucks.
“Is that a hogan?” I ask. I’m already starting to pick up the lingo. Yesterday I would have seen just a trailer home. Now I know a hogan to be a traditional Navajo dwelling, the door to which always points east.
“That’s a female hogan,” Mark says, staring off into the distance like a poker player. “You don’t see too many male hogans any more.”
We get out of the van and walk to Pueblo Bonito, the most impressive of Chaco Canyon’s ruins. D-shaped and five stories tall, with 650 rooms, it was the largest of what archaeologists call great houses, and it was majestic in its time: Until the mid-19th century, it was one of the largest structures in the United States. It stands at the bottom of a cliff wall, part of which has since toppled onto it. It was built over the course of 300 years, using wooden support beams made from ponderosa pines and masonry that’s three feet thick in places.
“Welcome to downtown Chaco,” announces Mark. He believes Chaco supported a population of about 4,000 at one point.
As we walk through the rooms, we duck through small square doorways, trying not to bump our heads on 1,200-year-old wooden beams, and listen as Mark and Ricky go into great detail about what was found in each room, what each room was used for and what a typical day in a pueblo was like. Archaeologists , some professional and some not, have excavated thousands of turquoise pendants and beads here, along with macaw skeletons, copper bells, and seashells from Mexico, hinting at sophisticated and far-reaching trade.
Most impressive in Pueblo Bonito are the Great Kivas, giant circular communal chambers or religious amphitheatres cut into solid rock. They are perfectly round.
Chaco Canyon is a revelation. It’s as intriguing as Stonehenge and as magnificent as the works of the Aztecs.
Chaco is a tough place to live. The temperatures can drop well below zero in the winter and routinely hover in the triple digits in the summer. Food and water is scarce. When we sit down at a picnic table to eat lunch, crowds of curious and intrepid squirrels and woodchucks gather. Mark tells me that male hogans, now out of style, were round, with a cone-shaped roof. Female hogans are octagonal and do not have a cone.
There’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun is beating down on the back of my head. We can see evidence of a wildfire in the distance. Skeletal trees litter the horizon. Occasional gusts of wind blow red desert dust.
It’s Day Two of our trip. We’re in the heart of Ute Mountain Tribal Park, part of the Ute reservation. We’re visiting a cliff dwelling called Eagle’s Nest. Around 800 years ago, during a period of disappearing resources and increased conflict, the Anasazi, for their own survival, moved north to the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado and began building their homes beneath the lips of canyons. From below, they resemble oversize hornets’ nests. From above, where I am, perching precariously on a sheer precipice, they look like death traps.
To get to Eagle’s Nest, I climb two sets of old wooden ladders and squat-walk along a slight indentation in the rock beneath the cliff. It’s narrow, and the Anasazi weren’t big on railings. I hug the rock wall to my right and pretend that the left doesn’t exist.
As I sit in Eagle’s Nest, my mind is never far from my perilous location. Mark, who made the climb rather effortlessly in his old cowboy boots, stands carelessly inches from the edge and points out aspects of the masonry and its significance. He indicates places where you can still see thousand-year-old fingerprints in the mortar.
All around us, just lying about, are bits and pieces of ancient history: pot shards of various types, arrowheads, the shiny skulls of long dead animals.
I look out at the canyon below and try to imagine what people must have done to obtain the daily necessities of food and water and think about how dangerous life must have been to make living in cliffs seem like a good idea.
According to Mark and Ricky, the Four Corners area is littered with sites like this. Because of the desert climate, a sparse population, and miles and miles of undeveloped government land, there are more archaeological sites in this condensed area than anywhere else in the United States and all but a few places in the world. Most are only partially excavated or not excavated at all.
The last day of the trip starts with a cold, beautiful dawn, with stars in the night sky so numerous they seem to merge with the horizon.
Floating down the San Juan River takes you through the kind of scenery John Ford made famous. The cabin used as the home of John Wayne’s character in The Searchers is nestled along one bank.
We’re on our way to Butler Wash, a great panel of petroglyphs, some of which date back more than 4,000 years.
As we come around a bend in the river, we can see vague pecked-out shapes against a dark cliff wall on our right. Our Navajo river guides, Marcus and Greg, pull the rafts ashore, and we hike up to the panel. There are representations of bighorn sheep; snake; atlatls, which were a cross between a slingshot and a hand-held catapult, used for hunting, and figures that appear to have antennae growing out of their heads.
The oldest petroglyphs are high up on the wall and sport long legs and trapezoidal torsos. The drawings are more recent as you work your way down. Some of the more memorable are human representations that resemble lizards with claw-like hands and feet.
This part of the world was inhabited long before Christopher Columbus ever set sail.
Back on the river, Ricky gives us a lesson in geology, 300 million years of it: Navajo sandstone, Mancos shale, Permian shale, anticlines, synclines and monoclines. All of it crumbly and crumbling, all of it slowly being eaten away by the brown-green ribbon of water in the middle.
Thanks to the geologist from Northern California who’s part of our group, I’m now armed with my newest geological word: hoodoo. A hoodoo is a rock formation in which a large piece of rock is balanced on top of a much smaller piece. I start looking for them.
The best example is Mexican Hat. It looks like a red rock sombrero sitting atop a giant red rock person’s neck.
We’re high above Monument Valley, on top of the world. To get here, we drove up a precarious dirt road full of switchbacks, past a handful of cars and trucks that never made it.
Mesas and buttes and the tiny San Juan River far below are lit up in dramatic hues of oranges and yellows and dark reds. My shadow trails behind me for more than a hundred feet.
As I look at many of the sights I’ve driven past for years. Instead of some unknown pile of rock, I now see Jackson Butte. I now see either dark gray Mancos shale or ochre-red Navajo sandstone. I see where inland seas have created buttes and mesas. The desert is showing me things I couldn’t see before.
With the help of our guides, the desert is sharing its story.
Chaco Canyon shows civilization that predates Columbus to be urban in nature
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