the first place we visited was 'chaco cultural national historic park'. these ruins are way out in the desert at the end of a 25 mile dirt road. it took us almost 2 hours to drive the 25 miles because the road was in such bad condition that we could only drive between 5 and 10 miles an hour so that the camper didn't rattle apart, but the bumpy ride was worth every painful bump. chaco canyon is an amazing place. it has about 6 main sites that have been excavated and many canyon walls with petroglyphs and pictographs. some of the buildings in the canyon were built in perfect alignment with the moon and the sun. on certain days of the year the sun or the moon will shine into a certain window or a shaft of light will shine directly on a spiral drawn on a stone placed between two other stones. these ancient peoples were in tune with all that was around them, on earth and in the heavens.
the road in
sacred fajada butte
petroglyphs
sun window
thick walls
pueblo bonita
great house kiva
doorways
amazing stone work
from the mesa above
the great kiva from above
mesa sand waves
our camp site
sun with venus transfer
chaco canyon is a place of much mystery. not a lot is know about why the ancient pueblo people built many huge building structures here. there are more then 15 'great houses' which are very large complexes with one or two having up to 800 rooms. some of these rooms are round and are called 'kiva' which is a place for ceremony. the belief is that the ancient people came up out of mother earth through a hole in the ground and so their place of prayer and ceremony is down inside the earth to honor where they came from. the pueblo people of today still build kivas in their villages. in some of the rooms that were excavated interesting artifacts were found like 15000 turquoise beads in different sizes, in one room were 20 clay pots all in the same shape, other clay pots with cocao powder and parrot feathers. chaco canyon is believed to have been a place where many different tribes would come together mostly for ceremony, trading and that at some times the population would swell to many thousands.
no one knows why the ancient chacoans and the mesa verde people disappeared, but by about the year 1200 the buildings were left empty and the people had gone. if the native american people of today know why their ancient ancestors moved on, they are not telling us white men, this is one of the main unanswered questions of chaco canyon and mesa verde.
mesa verde cliff dwellings
spruce tree house
inside a kiva
tower house
this valley is full of cliff dwellings
cliff palace
amazing
sun house
cliff palace
paintings inside the tower
in it
the ancient people of mase verde (green table, in spanish) built directly on the sides of the cliffs, in to the rock walls in amazing ways. they had to climb up and down straight cliff walls to get anywhere. they had large gardens on top of the mesas and their water source was usually down in the valley. these people must have been in great shape from all the climbing they had to do in their every day life. they had extensive ladder systems and in some places also hand and toe holds carved directly into the stone walls. they also have kivas, round ceremony rooms. the skill of masonry is almost unbelievable if you think about how long ago these structures were build and how they are just stuck in/on the sides of towering cliffs. big time wow!!
when i was quite and not too many people were around i could hear the sounds of the ancient people still echoing through the ruins of both chaco canyon and mesa verde. the women grinding the corn on the stone matates, the men calling to one another as they went about their work, hauling stones or tree trunks, the children singing softly as they played near their mothers and the sound of the drums beating and the chanting of the ceremonies in the smoky kivas. it was very magical and beautiful.
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