Visiting Chaco Canyon has been high on my list for too long.  Since I have lived in New Mexico for seven years, that would make it seven years  too long.  So why does it take us so long sometimes to do the things we want to do?  All it took in the end was for me to put my own foot down and to look at the weather conditions for favorable conditions of no rain and easy temps.  I checked  the Chaco Canyon website to make sure there were no warnings or closures (yes, you should do this).  We packed  a picnic and lots of ice water and firmly planted ourselves in the car at 8:10 a.m. for our twelve hour Chaco Canyon road trip.  Two and one half hours after leaving Santa Fe we turned off  Hwy      and onto an unpaved road for the last 20 miles of the trip.   It seemed more like 50 miles as the road is not much better than it might have been in the Stone Age culture that lived here a thousand years ago.  The  going is slow. This is open country with no hotels or restaurants, thankfully, so when you arrive to your destination you are able to feel the genuine remoteness that was and is Chaco Canyon.  There is, however, an area for camping. (It was full when we arrived so reserve a spot).   There is a touch of regret on my part that we didn’t stay the night  to see the moon rise and the sun set and to experience what the Anazazi did in another time.  The darkest night skies in the United States are here.

At the height of their culture and between the years of 850 and 1150 AD, The Anazazi (the Ancient Ones) lived spread out over thousands of square miles in an area today called the Four Corners.  Here the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet.  The center of the Anazazi culture,  Chaco Canyon, is in a remote part of northwestern  New Mexico.  Set aside by the US Government as Chaco Culture National Historical Park, it is managed (quite wonderfully) by the National Park Service.  It is a World Heritage Site, designated as such in 1987.

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To the descendants of the Anazazi, the Pueblo people of New Mexico, the Hopi, the Navajo, Chaco is a sacred place.  Other pueblos of New Mexico, the Zuni. the Acoma, the Zia,  also feel strong connections to Chaco.  It embodies their history, their traditions.  It is still a place that the Pueblo Indians return to for prayer and to honor their ancestors.

It was the sacred and also the mystery that brought me to Chaco.   Who were these ancient people and where did they go?  Why did they choose this canyon, located in the hottest and driest part of New Mexico with a precarious water source situated more than forty miles from the timber they needed for the vigas to support the roofs of their buildings?   We looked for remains of a staircase that cuts into the side of a canyon wall.  Why would they build the road going straight up and over the mesa to continue down on the other side, digging the stairs into the rock,  rather than following a more walkable path around the hills?  If you were here today, September 22,  Equinox, you would see  how the windows in the great houses  were positioned so you could see the light of the equinox shine through.  The buildings, the kivas and the great houses, were built along an axis of north to south and east to west, so that Pueblo Pintado, although a distance of fifteen miles from Pueblo Bonito, is in straight alignment.  Strangely also, the northern Aztec ruins near Farmington are on the same meridian as Pueblo Bonito.

It took us the entire afternoon to explore the remains of the buildings.  They are reached within easy walking distance at points around a nine mile loop (each point with a parking area).  I was totally into everything we saw but at the same time with my eye on  the surrounding cliffs and mesas.  While we were at Pueblo Arroyo a woman called out Hello to me and proceeded to climb the path that takes you up the side of the canyon, steeply, through a separation in two large rocks and onto the  high mesa  where you can continue to hike several miles to other sites, petroglyphs, historic roads.  I tried not to be rude, not stare at her, even snap a picture, but I did.   I was in awe of the fact that at that late hour in the day she was taking off all by herself

I had not made any definite plans or had any preconceived notions of what the day would be.  I made sure before leaving to understand the logistics of  how to get there before we left.  Beyond that I  was happy enough to let the day unfold and surprise.   And it did, in every moment we were there.