Saturday, May 29, 2010

Chaco Canyon



Chaco Canyon

We got the roof trusses up on the house in Questa, with a large crew, some tool belt envy on the part of the amateurs as we had two seasoned pros up on the top plate. They walked as though they were on sidewalks, and swung hammers that Thor would have liked, and the rest of us just did the best we could. 

So away back down to Taos and then west through Tres Piedras and the lovely mountains of Carson National Forest, and then through Tierra Amarilla, the Yellow Earth.  I’m pretty sure this is the edge of the Colorado Plateau, the huge hunk of sedimentary rock in all the colors dirt can be, that got pushed up to erode into so many fantastic sights.  Towering yellow buttes are all around the lake where I stop for the night, and more and more of them appear on my drive across the dam and over 16 miles of dirt road. Wide grassy places along a creek that winds through the bluffs, and in all that way, I saw only a cow or two.

A bit of highway and then I am being bashed about by what has to be the worst dirt road ever.  It is flat, and seems to be graded regularly, but it has sections that have corduroy bumps so huge that no speed will iron them out. My tools leap about in the truck, and when I get to the park campground, a lot of things in the trailer are on the floor that normally ride just fine.  Mostly just a mess, a bottle of olive oil tipped over in the pantry, dirt and fuzz vibrated out of the back of closets, the printer was hanging by its plug.. The road and the distance and the lack of hook ups at the campground mean only the most hardy and determined folks will come out here, so the campground is pretty subdued.








Chaco Canyon is a wide mysterious place, mesas and buttes of yellow sandstone in a dry wash, and tucked against the walls, the great houses of the Chacoan culture. They are stone, laid in a masterful series of courses of large and small cut stone, some three stories tall, and the largest covering several acres of rooms, round Kivas, and the open plaza, all inside a low wall.  They were built beginning about 900 AD, reached a peak in    and by 1300, the whole complex was deserted including outlying houses over a huge area of this corner of the world.

No one really knows what they did here, a lot of pottery was found, and traded items such as turquoise, Pacific and Gulf of Mexican shells, parrot feathers and bones from the south. There are vestiges of roads, straight as compass lines connecting to outlying houses all over the 4 corners area.  The walls line up with compass points and astronomical points, and high on a small butte, sun light passes through slots in the rocks, framing and bisecting a petroglyph spiral, depending if it’s solstice or equinox.  As our ranger told us, they knew the sky’s coming and goings in a way that we no longer do, even the moon’s 18 year rise and descent in the sky.

It is a place full of questions, and wondering.  Why did they come here, where there is no reliable source of water?  Did they live here, or was it a ceremonial place, or a market center?  And most troubling of all, why did they all just leave and where did they go?  Theories abound and there are fascinating books and papers hoping to give answers, but the absolute emptiness and silence are all we can be sure of.

A difficult climb up a rocky slot in the canyon wall brings me out on top, where the ruins are visible from above, and the wide canyon beyond.  The complexity of the floor plans are only clear from up here, and looking out beyond onto the mesa top, there is nothing but sagebrush for miles.  Another hike up the floor of the canyon goes to petroglyphs on the south walls, some really old, made by the few folks here before the Chaco builders arrived, some done by the Chacoans and for me a first, some later Navajo petroglyphs.  These are not pecked deeply into the rocks, more scratched and linear, and harder to see. Lots of horses, some hardly more than a suggestion of running movement, with extra long and full tails, and a realistic head, once even with a bridle.  And more modern graffiti too, surveyers in 1910, early tourists, and more modern vandalism too alas.  I guess we humans like to make marks on things, or paint things, but I wish the old stuff had been left alone.

I’ve visited a lot of ruins, but this place casts a spell over you. The mighty remains of the great houses are powerful, but I think the isolation in the vast, empty high desert is the magic.  There are lizards of many kinds, and birds, and the last time I was here I saw a bobcat, and this time elk.  But even the huge effort that the great houses took to build is now a little lost and very silenced by the immense empty space.  It is hard not to ponder mortality and the weakness of human efforts in this place, but it also is head clearing and calming, a reminder that much of what we are busy with and about is of little consequence in the wide dry windy empty world.

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