Travels

  

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 01, 2026   

Kayaking the Misterhult Archipelago

In an unusually spontaneous decision, Carl and I decided on a Tuesday and left town that Thursday afternoon to kayak in the Misterhult Archipelago which is about four hours south of Stockholm by car in the province of Småland.  We had read that Misterhult with its many small islands and compact area was a paddling paradise, and this proved quite true: There are thousands upon thousands of islands to explore; no long, exposed crossings; few boats and even fewer other kayaks; and it only takes a couple of hours to paddle from the mainland to the outer band of islands, to the unbroken horizon of the sea.  Large areas of the archipelago are bird and seal sanctuaries closed to human visitation in the spring and early summer which severely limits where you’re allowed to paddle and camp, but most of these open to humans after July making the timing of our August trip perfect. 

We arrived at the coast just before dark on Thursday and set up camp in an uncommonly pleasant car campground under ancient oaks.  The next morning, we woke up early, packed up camp, and drove a few miles to Klintemåla where we picked up our rental kayak and started our paddle tour.  

Leaving Klintemåla

It was a bit grey when we started out, but there was no rain and we enjoyed a lovely day exploring the archipelago’s inner islands as we weaved our way northward toward the tip of the archipelago.  We paddled through as many tight passages as we could find 

and passed by the former fishing village on the island of Älö where boathouses still line the natural, protected canal.  

We stopped several times for fika and for lunch and enjoyed the quiet, the water, the swans, the verdant island views.

Left: Break on day 1 with verdant island views.  Right: Break on day 2 in the outer band of the archipelago. 

 

The clouds parted in the afternoon giving us dramatic light for our swim and bath 

and then for our more tranquil evening activities of sitting by the waterside, sipping wine, gazing at the sparkling water, chatting, and cooking dinner.  I surprised Carl by bringing a cooler bag containing a bottle of cold bubbly—I’ve never had wine from Brazil before and this one was surprisingly tasty!  

We found a flat ledge right by the water for our tent and slept with the peaceful clucking of the water just beyond the tent door.  It was a perfect and very auspicious start to our long weekend of kayaking.

Saturday dawned with beautiful weather and after packing up camp, we paddled along the edge of the seal sanctuary which remains closed to humans year round.  We were hoping to spot some seals outside of their sanctuary, but alas, they seem to prefer their own territory.  We proceeded to paddle down the outside of the archipelago with the free horizon to our left and a succession of small, rocky skerries to our right.  

Again, we stopped frequently to explore the small islands, snack, and enjoy our tea and coffee with the incredible view.  We probably spent more time on break than we did paddling in the kayak.  

 

We had been seeing lots of jellyfish since leaving the harbor, but now we were paddling through a jellyfish soup.  It has been a while since we have paddled so late in the season, and the water in the inside of the archipelago was filled with algae.  On the outside, however, the water was clear and fresh with healthy, slime green sea grass billowing in the current.  It was in the outer band’s fresh water that we did our swimming.  Luckily the jellyfish did not sting!  

The wind was against us as we paddled southward and it picked up continually over the course of the afternoon making the paddling somewhat difficult later in the day.  We stopped a bit earlier than planned but found an incredible campsite and didn’t regret not making our goal in the slightest.  We tented on a scenic ledge in the shadow of the Strupö Ljungskär lighthouse, 

and Carl found the paddling holy grail for our evening activities—a waterside ledge facing the setting sun but completely protected from the wind.  We swam and bathed before settling in for another incredible evening of gazing into the sparkling water, watching swans paddle by, sipping wine, reading, cooking, conversing, and wholeheartedly living our best lives.  It will be a long while before I forget that enchanted ledge, the magical evening, and the fiery sunset.

On Sunday, we continued southward to the tip of the archipelago before boomeranging on the changing wind back north toward the harbor at Klintemåla.  Well planned of Carl as we hardly had to paddle all afternoon!  We had been seeing grey herons stalking and soaring as well as minks slinking all over the archipelago all weekend, and now we came across several moose on what we have now named Moose Island.  First a mother with a calf loping into the forest, then two adult males who had planned on a swim.  When they saw us glide by, however, they exited the water and ran back up into the woods.  

As always, we were sad that our beautiful adventure was ending but looked forward to snuggling with our cat at home.  We saw a lot of Misterhult on this long weekend escapade, but there are far more islands and passages to explore in the future, and we’ve scoped out another promising campsite.  Most of our kayaking trips over the last ten years have been with our friends Patrik and Ulrika and/or Johan and Jessica, and while we did enjoy this trip with just the two of us, we missed our adventure buddies who always bring our paddle adventures to the next level.  We’re already looking forward to next year’s paddling adventures!      

 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26, 2026   

Flying Boat Camping

Carl borrowed a flying boat from his job for a weekend of boat camping in July.  Last summer we did the same thing, but this time we were in the southernmost part of the Stockholm archipelago outside of Nynäshamn.  We picked up the boat from the marina on Friday afternoon and after Carl fiddled with some of the mechanics which were acting up, we puttered and then flew and then puttered again to a calm bay off the Lilla Marskär island.  There were already several boats anchored in the bay and tied up to land in the area, but we were able to find a good spot that was fairly private and with good archipelago views.   

We really didn’t do much during the weekend, we mostly relaxed on the deck of the boat.  Enjoyed the views.  Shaded ourselves from too much sun.  Read books.  Sipped wine.  Talked.  Watched the sunset colors play across the sky.  

We made simple meals on our camping stove and just hung out.  Our big big effort for the weekend was circumambulating the tiny island that we were tied up to.  

We slept in the boat’s small cabin under the front deck.  To allow for airflow but keep mosquitoes out, we draped both the doorway and the deck hatch with mosquito netting.  Despite our efforts, we did have a mosquito buzzing us all night the first night, but I slept much better the second night.

Sunday afternoon, we packed up our bags and headed back to the marina in Nynäshamn where we then caught the commuter train back into the city.  It was a very restful but beautiful weekend.  No big happenings, no big adventures, but a lovely pause from life in the city.  

  

MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2026   

Summery Gotland

Shortly after Carl and I returned to the US, we took the ferry out into the middle of the Baltic Sea to visit his parents on the island of Gotland for the weekend.  We have the pleasure of going to Gotland at least once or twice a year but never in high summer, so this was a special delight for us.  As usual, Carl’s parents treated us to a weekend of gourmet dining, and the island treated us to its gorgeous natural and cultural landscapes.

Carl and I spent most of Saturday hiking another section of the stunning Klintkustleden or Cliff Coast Trail.  The day started out moody 

but after our morning break, the clouds split and the sunshine ignited the coastline, turning the water a sparkling turquoise.  

We hiked up and down the cliffs and enjoyed the many splendid views down to the water and to the distant cliffs.  

It had been quite windy, and when we got down to a long, curving sand beach, the waves looked perfect for body surfing, something we have never done in Scandinavia.  After testing the water, we realized that it was surprisingly warm, so we changed into bathing suits and spent the next hour riding the waves.  What a spectacular ride!  

Just like previous sections of trail, this segment took us by the remains of an ancient hilltop fort and a WWII bunker.  This time, however, I was struck by how through the millennia, man has had an unceasing instinct to use these heights for military advantage and protection.  Our hike made for a truly incredible day and I look forward to hiking another section of this gorgeous trail in the future.  Thank you Anders for giving us a ride to and from the trailheads and making this hike possible for us!

Left: Part of the collapsed wall surrouding the landward side of the ancient Ire Södra hilltop fort.

On Sunday, Carl’s parents took us to Gotland Whisky for a tour and tasting.  Carl’s dad owns a few shares of Gotland Whisky stock and through the years he has treated us to tastes of a number of their whiskies, so it was fun to finally see the distillery.  The distillery is located in a former sugar beet processing plant.  

Much of the original machinery is still in place, but the whisky operation is slowly taking up more and more of the space as the operation grows.  

Gotland Whisky’s USP is that they never make the same whisky twice.  They don’t have a standard bottle and instead make a few different variations a year.  Once one variant is sold out, it is gone forever.  The flavors range from fairly smokey to fairly sweet.  

A display of all of the Gotland Whisky variants produced thus far

We enjoyed the tasting and came home with a bottle of our favorite as a birthday gift to Carl from his parents, which we plan to enjoy in front of the fire come fall.

After the whisky tasting, we stayed on site and tried gourmet hot dogs at Gotlands Korvfabrik.  Very inventive flavors and toppings and a perfect lunch after drinking so much whisky in the am.

Since Roma Kloster is basically across the street from the distillery, we stopped there for the afternoon.  

I am always a sucker for a beautiful allé.  This allé of linden trees was buzzing with so many bees enjoying the flowers that the whole area was filled with their beating hum.

Being in the middle of the island, Roma has the island’s most fertile soil and it always been an important gathering place.  In the Viking era, it was the site of a prominent market and the yearly Ting, or judicial meeting where the island’s laws were decided and legal cases were heard.  The judges also decided religious matters for the island, and it was at a Ting in Roma in the 1000’s that it was decided that the island would adopt Christianity.  Gotland’s only monastery was founded at Roma in 1164 and once consisted of a large church and a campus of monastery buildings.  

Today, the church ruins are evocative but only the monastery foundations remain.   

During the Reformation, the Crown laid claim to all church property and the monastery was closed in 1530.  Roma was thereafter used as the residence for Gotland’s governor who enforced the land’s law and reported to the Crown.  In the early 1700’s, the current governor had big ambitions and he dismantled much of the monastery and reused the stone to build a residence befitting the nobility in size and style.  A number of details from the church and monastery were incorporated into the new manner house.   

We also made a quick stop at Mästerby Church.  I have previously posted photos of the church’s famous Judgement Day murals (see All Saint's on Gotland), but there are a whole slew of other evocative murals including these.  Gotland’s myriad medieval churches are endlessly fascinating!  

Left: the man on the right is wearing quite the interesting belt.  Right: the painter has obviously never seen a lion in real life.  

 
On Monday morning, Carl and his dad boarded a double masted sailboat for a week of sailing to celebrate his dad’s 80th birthday.  I boarded the ferry back to Stockholm and enjoyed a smooth crossing home.  Thank you Ylva and Anders for yet another lovely weekend!  

Carl and Ander's sailbaot out the ferry window.

  

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2026   

Summer Vacation 2026 Part III: Celebrating Mom's 80th Birthday in Rochester  

From Albuquerque, Carl and I flew to Rochester to visit my mom.  We had timed our whole summer vacation so that we’d be in Rochester to celebrate her 80th birthday with her.  I had planned a simple birthday celebration from afar, and family and friends from near and far gathered to celebrate with us.  We lucked out with sunny weather and a cooling breeze blowing through our rented picnic pavilion at Tinker Nature Park where Mom and I have strolled together every summer since she moved to Rochester.  

Photo of Mom and Uncle Bill by phtographer Annette

Before the celebration, a photographer friend of Carol’s took beautiful family portraits and group shots of us, and the guests enjoyed going through the “photo gallery” of about 75 photos from Mom’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.  

Photos of photos by photographer Annette

Once the BBQ lunch was delivered, we celebrated with good food, stories about Mom shared by family and friends, and many of the tunes that I grew up listening to while Mom was at the wheel and in control of the music.  

 

Mom loved every minute of the celebration and being the center of everyone’s attention, even if she still can’t believe that she’s 80 years old.  It was a really good day, and I am so, so glad that we could be there to celebrate with her.  I am also so thankful to everyone that came to celebrate with us—some from nearby, a few who drove quite a distance, and one family friend that I had never even met before.  I feel so lucky to have such an amazing and supportive extended family, and I had so much fun getting to spend a bit of extra time with those that came in from other regions.    

Thank you also to everyone who sent flowers, cards, gifts, fruit trays, and cakes to Mom for her big day.  You helped to make her whole week extra special!  And I am so glad to have been reunited with my grandmother’s apple cake, a treat that I had forgotten but am now super excited to enjoy more of this coming fall.  And while I’m feeling this outpouring of thanksgiving, an extra special thank you is in order to Carol who makes everything about my mom’s life possible these days.  

Birthday breakfast of apple cake and fruit tray, pretty flowers

The day after Mom’s birthday, she, my uncle, Carl, and I went out to Albion to visit and clean the family grave, a yearly tradition.  Carl and I also climbed the Mt. Albion Cemetery tower which is a Civil War monument dedicated to fallen Union troops.  The view from the top isn’t quite as far-reaching as I remember it being as a kid, but still, it was fun to revisit this childhood memory.  

After the cemetery, we stopped at a canalside restaurant and watched as Brockport’s lift bridge was raised and lowered multiple times.  Mechanical engineer Carl spent lunch watching closely and figuring out the bridge’s mechanism.  

After all the guests and even Carl departed Rochester, Mom and I spent a lot of time just hanging out together.  We went to the beach and gazed out at Lake Ontario’s surprisingly turquoise water, we went back to Tinker Nature Park and gazed out over the flower-filled garden, 

we gazed out over Honeoye Falls and the adjacent mill buildings, 

and we gazed out over the tortoise-filled gardens in the Lamberton Conservatory.  

Mom and I also enjoyed a number of delicious ice creams to cool us down after all of that strenuous gazing.  

I was also lucky to spend a lovely morning with my childhood friend Elissa catching up on everything that’s happened over the past year while taking a brisk walk along the Lake at Hamlin Beach State Park, noshing on bagels in Brockport, and walking some of the village’s extensive tow paths along the canal.  I just love that I get to see Elissa every year when I visit my mom, our visits are always an extra high point of my summer.  

Carl and I rented a new-to-us apartment in the same neighborhood where I always stay.  As usual, I loved running the tree-lined streets and admiring the neighborhood’s diverse and beautiful houses, though I didn’t take many photos this year.   

Our Airbnb was in this house

My stays in Rochester are always intense but sweet, this year especially so.  After a little over a week in town, it was time to fly home to my husband, our cat, and our life in Stockholm.  Having vacationed so early in the summer, we now had the entire Swedish summer in front of us, which was a good antidote to the usual post-vacation depression.
 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2026   

Summer Vacation 2026 Part II: Tracing the Ancestral Puebloans Through Three of the Four Corners  

Formerly known as the Anasazi, the Ancestral Puebloan civilization has fascinated me since I first started reading National Geographic as a kid.  It goes with my general interest in ancient civilizations and especially the architectural traces of them—visiting the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde has always been about as high up on my bucket list as Machu Pichu, Angkor Wat, Tikal, and the Pyramids at Giza.  It’s interesting that a civilization native to my birth country and even to my birth state always seemed so exotic to me, which is definitely a commentary on how absent the Native American tribes were from my education and from my overall consciousness as an American citizen.  After our in-depth visit in the Four Corners area tracing this culture from about 400AD to the present, the Puebloans have lost a bit of their distancing exoticness and instead have gained a new relevance in my understanding of American history and of human ecological history.

Early this summer, Hilary dropped me off in Albuquerque and Carl flew in to meet me there.  Carl and I then road tripped and car camped through New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah for about three weeks.  Instead of trying to see it all, we decided to dive deep into three key sites (Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and Hovenweep) and to more quickly stop a few smaller sites along the drives between them.  While there’s so much we didn’t have time to see, including all of Arizona’s sites, we did manage to see one national park (Mesa Verde), one national historic park (Chaco Canyon), six national monuments (Aztec, Canyons of the Ancients, Hovenweep, El Morro, Bandelier, Petroglyph), one national recreation area (Sand Island), a number of ancient sites on one Native American reservation (Ute Mountain), one locally administrated archeological site (Solomon Ruins), two living pueblos (Acoma and Taos), two Spanish colonial towns (Taos and Albuquerque), three Spanish colonial churches (San Jose de Gracia, San Francisco de Asis, and El Santuario de Chimayo), and three museums in addition to the museums at each archeological site (Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, and Millicent Rogers Museum).  Through these visits and an enormous amount of reading both before and during the trip, we have gained a lot of insight into ancient Puebloan culture and some limited insight into today’s pueblo communities.  If there’s one lesson I learned on this trip, it’s that the Ancestral Puebloans didn’t just disappear; the culture continues to evolve and is very much alive in today’s pueblo communities.         

I’m not going to write a blow-by-blow of our trip.  Instead, I’m going to write an overview of the evolution of Puebloan society and interject pieces of our trip into the outline.  While we did plan our road trip to match the chronology of the Puebloan evolution as much as possible, we did visit a few sites out of order for more efficient driving routes.

Early Puebloan Architecture
People have been living in the Four Corners area (where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah meet) of the Colorado Plateau (mean elevation of 6350 feet (1940 meters)) for many thousands of years, but it wasn’t until about 400AD that the Puebloan culture began to coalesce.  It’s important to realize that there was no one way of being Puebloan—there  were many different tribes, languages, and ways to make a living.  Being “Puebloan” was like being “European” in that you might speak Spanish or Swedish or Polish, you might be a king or a soldier or a peasant farmer, you might prefer game or wheat, and you might have lighter or darker hair and complexion.  But despite all the differences, the various “tribes” of Europeans historically comprised one cohesive culture based on the same basic form of government (monarchy), the same basic religion (Catholicism), and the same basic lifeway (sedentary farming allowing for commerce).  It’s the same with Ancestral Puebloans: different tribes spoke languages based on wildly unrelated language roots (Keresan, Kiowa-Tanoan, Uto-Aztecan, and Zuni), there were different classes (there’s a lot of evidence for an elite class and a “regular” class), people had different occupations (farmers, potters, priests, messengers, traders, etc), the Puebloan kitchen incorporated different sources of food (cultivation, hunting, and foraging), and different tribes had different (though related) myths and religious practices.  But despite their differences, these tribes coalesced into a common culture which was eventually characterized by dry corn agriculture (dry meaning no irrigation and no canals), multi-storied masonry architecture, subterranean kivas, and black-on-white pottery. 

Somewhere around 500BC (this date is contested, could be earlier, could be later), some tribes in the Four Corners area started to cultivate corn and to encourage other naturally occurring crops.  These tribes remained seminomadic, however.  They might stay in one area for a while, but as the hunting and foraging seasons changed, they moved with the flora and fauna.  They circled back around to collect on their crops from season to season and from year to year, but the crops were a supplement to their diet, not the basis of it.  Their dwellings were moveable or natural (we see evidence of alcoves being used as temporary dwelling places) and we see few physical traces of this culture other than fire rings, tools, weapons, middens, etc.    

By about 400-600 AD, these seminomadic tribes began to settle down in the Four Corners area and started to build somewhat more permanent homes in the form of pithouses.  I write somewhat more permanent because one of the defining features of Puebloan life was migration.  A clan might live in one place for fifteen or fifty years, but there was always the expectation that the clan would move on when resources dwindled, when the climate changed, or when the shamans deemed it necessary.  Living in a desert environment, the Ancestral Puebloans were, for example, very vulnerable to small variations in rainfall and one canyon might see increased precipitation for a period of time while another canyon saw less.  Permanence was felt in cultural bonds, not in rootedness to one particular place.  However, clans did sometimes return to previous dwelling sites when conditions became more favorable again, and migration stories listing where the clan had previously lived were an important part of the clan’s lore and teachings.  It is thought that the common spiral motif in rock art symbolizes migration.     

Settlement at this time was on a family-by-family basis.  Villages were practically unheard of on the Colorado Plateau; usually one or two pithouses were built inside a fence or stockade and there was a good bit of distance to the next settlement.  The exception to this rule was at the head (Shabik’eschee) and foot of Chaco Canyon where pithouse complexes with seventy structures have been found.  These villages even had Great Kivas, which were built much like pithouses but bigger—they were probably used as gathering and ceremonial spaces.   

Pithouses were half dug into the earth which helped to regulate and keep a comfortable temperature.  Such structures were also less vulnerable to wind and could thus be built by relatively simple techniques.  Several wood posts were buried in the pithouse floor and rose up to support the roof structure which was comprised of smaller beams and posts and was covered in bark and mud.  A central fire ring on the pithouse floor vented through a hatch in the roof.  Entry into the pithouse was also through this same hatch.  Pithouses typically consisted of two rooms: a living space and a storage space.  The storage space was about the same size as the living space because Ancestral Puebloans typically stored enough food and water to get them through a three to five year drought.  Deflector stones were placed upright between the two rooms to limit drafts that would disturb the fire.

An excavated and a reconstructed pithouse at Mesa Verde

It was during the pithouse phase that Ancestral Puebloans began to make pottery.  Imagine how much easier it would be to cook with pottery as compared to coated baskets!  Pottery was not a new technique in this part of the world, but supple basketry was much more useful than fragile pottery for a nomadic people.  When the Ancestral Puebloans began to settle down, they began to make pottery.  The first Ancestral Puebloan pottery was grey and undecorated, simple designs soon followed.  Sometimes the early pottery mimics basketry with basket-like impressions.  All Ancestral Puebloan (and even modern Puebloan) pottery is made by coiling clay—throwing pottery on a wheel requires far too much water for these desert climates.  

Specimens of pithouse-era pottery on view at the Canyons of the Ancients NM museum

 
These pithouses were located just about anywhere where crops could grow and were commonly built along canyon bottoms and on mesa tops.  They have even been found in the cliffside alcoves of Mesa Verde.  While there were clusters of pithouses and even pithouse villages in the Chaco area, we saw good examples of excavated pithouses as well as a reconstructed pithouse at Mesa Verde.

By about 750AD, Ancestral Puebloans coalesced into larger communities in response to increased violence on the Colorado Plateau.  Relatively large villages rose and were deserted in quick succession during this time.

In these villages, Ancestral Puebloans started to build structures that were fully above ground.  The first above-ground buildings had upright stone foundations supporting jacal walls.  Jacal consists of a fine-grained weave of sticks covered in layers of bark and mud.  Posts inside the jacal walls supported roofs built in much the same way as pithouse roofs.  Again, both smoke venting and access was through a hatch in the roof.  Rectangular rooms were built directly adjacent to each other forming shallow crescents of about six or eight rooms framing a common outdoor space. 

Excavated stone foundations of jacal houses at Mesa Verde

A kiva could often be found in the outdoor space.  Kivas were typically round rooms dug into the earth and with a corbelled beam roof, much like the older pithouses but with a more complex roof structure.  Being above ground and drier, the jacal rooms were probably used mostly for storage while the kivas with their more regulated and comfortable temperature were probably used for everyday living.  Again, while this step was probably represented at Chaco, too, we saw good examples of excavated jacal buildings at Mesa Verde.       

Jacal needed constant reapplication of mud to remain watertight and rodentproof, so the Ancestral Puebloans soon began building with masonry instead.  At first, the buildings were one story tall and were built with one wythe of stone.  Masonry techniques soon became more advanced and two-storied buildings built with double brick walls was the next development.  We saw excavated examples of early masonry at Mesa Verde. 

Early masonry buildings at Mesa Verde.  Left: one wythe.  Right: A building with two wythes built atop an earlier building with one wythe.

At some point during the development of masonry techniques, people started to move into the above-ground buildings.  With more massive walls, these rooms were also temperature-regulated like the below-ground kivas.  They still built and used kivas, however, though their purpose eventually evolved to be more of a gathering and ceremonial space and less of an everyday living space.  The typical "house" at this time consisted of several adjacent rooms curving softly around a central common space where the kiva was buried.

An early room block at Mesa Verde

Chaco and its Great Houses
Today, Chaco Canyon is in the proverbial middle of nowhere.  It is a long drive from the nearest big road and it is reached by dirt roads which become impassable in wet weather.  But about a thousand years ago, Chaco was the center of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization.  

The road becomes paved again once you cross into the park.

 
The scale and complexity of masonry architecture quickly escalated in Chaco Canyon.  By about 850AD, Ancestral Puebloans started building enormous complexes containing up to 650 rooms in multi-storied buildings up to five stories tall using advanced core-and-veneer masonry technology.  There is no clear consensus on how or why the Chaco phenomenon started or even on the purpose of the massive building complexes.  However, my vote is with Stephen Lekson’s theory which takes into account the archeological evidence that these complexes weren’t living quarters for big populations but were instead storage and ritual facilities.  Furthermore, archeological evidence shows that peace reigned throughout the region during the early Chacoan period and Lekson posits that Chacoans were at the head of a regional food redistribution system.  As I mentioned earlier, one canyon can experience a dry spell while a nearby canyon sees abundant rain.  Call it insurance or call it socialism, but Lekson theorizes that, like the Incas, all subordinates paid in some of their surplus during favorable years and received food supplies from the central foodbank during lean years.  Because everyone had enough to eat, the Colorado Plateau experienced an unusually peaceful period.  (There is a caveat to this, which I’ll discuss later.)

It is also not known why the regional center rose up in Chaco Canyon which, while beautiful in its austere way, is hardly a lush oasis or a center of food production.  On a broad scale,  Ancestral Puebloans moved southward during the 900’s due to a cold phase.  Lekson’s theory that the “nobles” congregated in Chaco because it was remembered as the location of the Plateau’s first big villages (Shabik’eschee) seems plausible.  According to him, Shabik’eschee gave Chaco legitimacy.  I posit also that the canyon’s geology of flaking sandstone enabled building on great scale.  The first buildings were built with material readily available, no quarrying needed.     

 
These enormous building complexes in Chaco Canyon have been given the name “Great Houses” even though archeological evidence suggests that only a very few elite people lived in these buildings.  While there were few fires and cooking facilities in these complexes, excavations uncovered rooms containing nothing but macaw feathers or thousands of turquoise beads and mosaics or caches of cylindrical jars filled with chocolate residue or repositories of ceremonial objects.  Chaco is chock-a-block filled with exotic objects from Mesoamerica and from the more nearby turquoise mines.  To repeat: The Great Houses were not villages but were more like a combination of palace, temple, and bank.

It would probably be easier to explain the existence of one single Great House, but Chaco Canyon is littered with them, both in the bottom of the canyon as well as perched high above on the canyon walls.  One theory is that perhaps each clan, or each tribe, had their own Great House at the capital in Chaco.

Left: At least three Great Houses can be seen down in the Canyon.  Right: A Great House above the Canyon. 

 
The Great Houses were generally built over a span of about 200-300 years.  However, this wasn’t some by-chance amalgamation of additions and renovations.  Instead, these complexes were preplanned in their entirety as evidenced by foundation work laid out far in advance of later building phases and by narrowing masonry walls at height.  The top stories may have been built at a later date, but the lower stories were built with thicker walls to accommodate future floors above.

Sometimes the thinning of the upper walls is fairly subtle, sometimes more obvious.

 
The largest Great Houses are generally D-shaped, though some of the smaller ones have a more rectangular composition.  Some Great Houses were aligned on a north-south axis, while others were aligned to the moon’s 18-year cycle.  It is not understood what the significance of the two different axes was, but either way, the Chacoans clearly thought that celestial alignment was important.

Left: A D-shaped Great House.  Right: A rectangular Great House.

  
Great Houses comprise a collection of above-ground buildings and walls enclosing outdoor plazas which are frequently punctuated by a number of below-ground kivas and Great Kivas.  These kivas were probably ceremonial though it’s not just the kivas that were ceremonial in nature—it is also thought that the large enclosed plazas served civic and/or ceremonial purposes as well.  The enclosed plazas had cooking facilities for great numbers of people, leading archeologists to believe that public feasts were held in them.  

Left: a semicircular room block surrounded a more open plaza.  Both the room block and the plaza were punctuated with round kivas.  Right: Standing in a Great House plaza with a kiva in the foreground and the room block in the mid-distance.  The Canyon cliff is at the back and almost blends in with the structure.

   
Kivas from this era have similar features across Chaco and across the Four Corners area.  They are round with a masonry “bench” around the wall.  The bench is punctuated by wood and masonry columns which supported the wood cribbed (corbeled) roof, which also rested on four central timber columns.  The timber columns rested on large stone discs which served as a foundation, and offerings were embedded in the discs.  A fire ring was placed centrally on the floor, and a ventilation shaft provided fresh air.  The fire was protected from the ventilation shaft by a standing stone deflector.  A hole in the ground called a sipapu represented the earth’s navel through which humanity first emerged into this world.  The floor also usually featured two rectangular stone containers, the purpose of which is unknown.  Like pithouses, kivas were accessed by ladder through a hatch in the roof, though some later kivas have T-shaped doorways.  A Great Kiva is simply a large kiva which presumably fit a larger audience or congregation.  Great kivas are thought to have been community gathering spaces while the smaller kivas may have been dedicated to a specific clan or ritual or cult.  Kivas are still built and used for educational and ceremonial purposes by the Puebloans today, though their form is now more varied than during Chaco’s era. 

A kiva and a Great Kiva at Chaco

      
Chacoan masonry was an advanced core and veneer technology that continued to develop as the Great Houses were built over several hundred years.  Parts of buildings are thus dateable by the size and pattern of stones in the veneer.  Early veneers consisted of stones that were used as found, but later veneers featured faced stones with a uniform, even appearance.  

Chacoan masonry styles I, II, III, IV, and V (McElmo).  Style 1 is the earliest, 5 is the latest.

Although the veneer was beautifully engineered and constructed, it was not meant to be seen.  Both the interior and the exterior of the walls were covered in mud plaster.  The plaster was often painted, sometimes with patterns.  Beyond being decorative, the plaster also lengthened the lifespan of the masonry walls by protecting the mud mortar which was sensitive to rain.   

Floors and roofs were comprised of layers of mud and bark over a mat of thin wooden vigas which spanned over large wooden beams.  These beams and vigas were notched into the masonry walls.  A few original ceilings and floors survive in Chaco.

Left: Beam, vigas, and bark of a floor as seen from below.  While these structural elements are original, the plaster on the wall is not.  Right: Viga stumps sticking out of the masonry walls mark the floor levels.

It is worth thinking about where all of the wood for ceilings and floors came from as Chaco is not exactly a forested landscape.  The Ancestral Puebloans traveled about 40-60 miles (65-100km) to forested mountain slopes, on foot, to harvest trees, peel them, let them lie and dry for a year or two, then carried them, by hand, back to the Canyon.  The construction of all the Great Houses, kivas, and commoner housing in Chaco required hundreds of thousands of trees.

Not exactly a lot of trees in Chaco Canyon

     
Openings between rooms and windows were often spanned by several vigas which supported the weight of the masonry above.  Most openings are in the middle of rooms, but some span a corner.  The purpose of these corner windows is not known, but they must have been important because they weaken the structure, which the Chacoan masons would have been well aware of.  

Left: Vigas as the window header.  Right: A corner opening.

It is in Chaco that T-shaped doorways are first found.  Again, the purpose of these T-shaped openings is unknown, but they seem to have later been used as an identifier throughout the region, a signifier that “this structure is Chacoan.”  The T-shaped door was perhaps like painting a cross on your door in early Christian Europe—a signifier that “here we are not pagans, we are Christians.”     

T-doors at Chaco

 
While the Great Houses are Chaco Canyon’s raison d'etre, the Canyon also has contemporaneous villages where commoners lived.  Most of these are not excavated and are today low mounds on the Canyon floor.  One example has been excavated and there you can see that commoner’s buildings were generally one-story pueblo-like buildings that were renovated and expanded organically over the years.  The masonry was only one whythe thick and comprised of thick bands of mortar and stones that were not overly worked.

 
There are also bands of one- and two-story buildings, perhaps residential, lining some of the canyon walls.  Some of the buildings are still standing while others are evidenced by horizontal rows of holes in the canyon walls in which ceiling beams once rested. 

It’s not just their architecture that divided commoners from the nobles or priests that occupied the Great Houses.  Archeology shows that commoners were physically significantly shorter, had shorter lifespans, higher infant mortality, and poorer diets than the noble or priest class.  This was far from an egalitarian society, which, as Lekson points out, isn’t so surprising considering that there were many contemporaneous class-based societies both in Mexico and in America at that time.  

Most of Chaco’s Great Houses are down in the Canyon, but several of them are on the mesas above the Canyon walls.  These Great Houses have wide views to the surrounding landscape and to me suggest a contrasting expansiveness compared to the Canyon’s atmosphere of insularity.  

Great Houses on Chaco Canyon's rim

I loved hiking up to these higher Great Houses—in the breeze and under the vast sky, the world feels open and endless.  I found these big sky landscapes to be absolutely beguiling and gorgeous and akin to the expansive feelings I get above treeline in the mountains.

Open views and big sky hiking above Chaco Canyon's rim

While the Great Houses in the Canyon are mostly excavated, the Great Houses on the mesas above are unexcavated or only partially excavated.  Because of this, there are pottery shards everywhere.  This, despite the Great Houses only having limited pottery finds!  It makes me wonder how much pottery was to be found at more purely residential sites.  

Finer Chacoan pottery used for serving/eating bowls, ladles, and seed jars was very thin, white in color, and with painted black geometric decoration, often hatched.  

Chacoan black-on-white pottery displayed at the Solomon Ruins museum (Chaco's museum does not currently contain any artifacts due to defects in their environmental systems)

Cooking vessels tended to be corrugated which better distributes the heat.  This pottery is grey and unpainted, but aesthetics were articulated in how the corrugations were expressed and sometimes through appliques.

Chacoan corrugated pottery displayed at the Solomon Ruins museum.  Left: a "basic" design.  Right: A more complex corrugation.

 

Chaco Canyon’s walls are graffitied with rock art with dates spanning at least the last 1500 years.  A number of rock art sites seem to be associated with specific dwellings along the canyon walls while others are seemingly unrelated to architecture.  

Pictographs are uncommon in the Canyon, petroglyphs more common.

Spirals, hands, anthropomorphic figures, and game animals are commonly depicted.  Some of the more unusual images are stylized masks, sun and moon symbols, and geometric figures.  

On the left hand side of the left image, observe the frog/human/alien with spiky fingernails, toenails, and horns.

Symbols were often layered on top of older figures throughout the centuries.  I was here.  Now I am here.  The hunting’s good in that direction.  May the deer be abundant.  We came from over there.  This land is ours.  

From bottom to top: Left foot.  Right foot.  Pause with both feet on the ground.  Left foot.  Right foot.

We don’t really know what most of the symbols mean exactly, but many of them seem to represent universal themes.  More modern travelers have also passed through the Canyon, leaving their mark, too.

Gean I cannot get no feed.  I cannot wait for you.

    
Chaco was not an isolated phenomenon but was a regional system: direct Chacoan influence and probably allegiance extended for a 150 mile radius (250km) around the Canyon.  Great Houses were not limited to Chaco and there are about 150 of them throughout the Four Corners region, many of them featuring the same exotic objects as Chaco such as macaw feathers and copper bells from Mexico.  

Great House outlier at Pueblo Pintado, an off-site part of Chaco National Historic Park.

Outside of Chaco, the Great Houses were probably the domains of ruling priests or families that reported back to and did the work of Chaco.  Most people, however, lived in more humble circumstances such as in village pueblos on the Great Sage Plain or in cliff dwellings in the Mesa Verde area.  Once Chaco fell as a power, however, the Great Houses were often taken over by everyday people—the rooms divided up and transformed from ritual or storage functions to domestic spaces.  

 

One example of this is at Lowry Pueblo, a Great House for the local ruling class who reported to Chaco, built around 1060AD on the Great Sage Plain in Colorado.  Over time, the Great House was taken over and added to by everyday people.  By the end, the village was comprised of dwellings, storage facilities, workshops, and ceremonial spaces.  The Lowry Great House consisted of about 40 rooms, had 8 kivas and a separate Great Kiva, and was three stories high.  By 1225AD, Lowry was no longer occupied.   

Lowry Pueblo in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in Colorado

 

The regional nature of Chaco is reinforced by the network of roads radiating out from the Canyon.  These roads were probably more ceremonial than practical in nature as indicated by their extreme width—why would people without pack animals or carts need roads that were 30 feet wide?—and by their impractical straightness.  The roads followed a set compass course and did not deviate from that course even if the terrain was difficult.  Instead, ramps and stairs were built to navigate the obstacle.  And if the obstacle was too steep for those measures, ladders as well as hand- and footholds carved into the rock were used.  Fragments of these roads are visible today, and I have to say that the Ancestral Puebloans must not have had much of a fear of heights.

Sometimes these roads connected Great House to Great House, but often they led toward an important geological feature such as a wetland, a mountain peak, or a spring.  These roads were more spiritual in nature; some Pueblos today also have straight paths leading to spiritually significant features in the landscape.  I imagine that the roads also held a political meaning along the lines of “everything along this road and everything that this road points to is under the dominion of Chaco.”

Chacoan road system closest to the Canyon as depicted in one of the park trail guides

 
The Chacoan world was also connected by a system of signaling stations on high points along the roads.  With these signaling stations, messages crisscrossed the region within minutes.   

In the 1100’s, people began to migrate away from Chaco.  By 1125, building activity had all but ceased in the canyon (we know this due to dendrochronology dating).  Drought is the common answer as to why people migrated away, but Lekson points out that building activity in Chaco had stopped before the great drought of the mid 1100’s.  The answer is probably more political.  Something happened to diminish Chaco’s power.  Perhaps the Great Houses of Chaco were skimming too much off the top of the food redistribution system, causing villagers to get angry and rebellious.  Archeological evidence of violence begins to spike again between 1020 and 1180.  The large-scale and no-mercy nature of the violence points toward a centralized power exerting violence, not toward bandit marauders on a binge.  The theory is that Chaco was using organized, pointed violence to squash dissent and to try to keep control.  In the end, perhaps Chaco’s leaders felt that they needed to shed “Chaco” in order to stay in power.  So they left, and called the new hegemony something else.   

Before I leave Chaco in this discussion, I want to write a little about our experience there.  The Canyon is not beautiful in a traditional sense.  There are no peaks, no unfathomable depths, no colorful cliffs, no waterfalls.  There is, however, a beauty in the landscape’s austerity, and when you start looking more closely, you notice that there is richness and splendor in the details.  If you just look out over the landscape, you see desert scrub and sand.  But upon closer inspection, you see hundreds of flowers (at least in the late spring!).  

You see incredible fossils in the sandstone, and the wavy layers of that sandstone.  

You start to notice the expansive sky.  You start to understand how certain landscape features became the focus of Chacoan orientation.  Hiking in this landscape was so beautiful, so freeing.  I have never felt so in the moment as I felt at Chaco.   

 

I had been nervous about rattlesnakes but we didn't see any during our entire trip, whew!  In Chaco, we were, however, priviledged to see a small herd of female elk loping through a side canyon.

 

The only accommodation at Chaco is a small campground, and we tented there for five nights, giving us enough time to fully explore ALL of the archeological sites and trails in the park.  

Our campsite overlooked a small dwelling at the base of a cliff—archeology while drinking a cocktail, not bad!  

We’ve not been big car campers in the past, but we really got into it this time.  With our cooler (thank you, Hilary!), we were able to keep canned cocktails and “real” food cold for most of our stay.  We could sit in comfortable camping chairs all evening long.  We borrowed a big tent that accommodated a lot of our stuff in addition to our sleeping pads and slept in sheets and didn’t have to be confined to our mummy bags.  I slept with a feather pillow.  And last but not least, the lack of light pollution coupled with the dry desert air made for once-in-a-lifetime night skies where the Milky Way was so prominent that it looked like a bedsheet billowing across the sky.

Temperatures in Chaco were warm but doable when we arrived, but after a cool rainy day, a heat wave arrived and our last couple of days were in the 90’s F (32 C +).  Coupled with the intense sunlight and nonexistent shade, we were struggling.  It’s amazing how quickly one can go from longing-for-the-warmth-of-the-sun-on-my-skin to I’m-melting!  We hoped that our next stop which was a little further north and a little higher in elevation would be a little cooler and more comfortable for exploration.    

Chacoan Power moves to Salmon and Aztec
While most Great House outliers seem to be local outposts of the Chacoan governing system, the two sites of Salmon and Aztec (no relation to the Mexican Aztecs) seem to be more than just mere outliers.  Lekson’s theory is that as the Chacoan system began to collapse, the capital was moved north, first to Salmon (1090), then to Aztec (1110) along the Great North Road, one of Chaco’s ruler-straight roads.  Both sites have abundant water as they sit on the banks of the San Juan and Animas rivers.  The unruly San Juan proved to be Salmon’s undoing, though, and Salmon’s Great House flooded before it was even finished.  

The local population took over Salmon’s Great House and remodeled it into a village pueblo when the Chacoan power quickly moved the capital yet again to Aztec.  This new capital was built a bit farther from its river but incorporated some canals, something unheard of in the Ancestral Puebloan world but common in the lower desert communities of New Mexico and Arizona.

One clue that Aztec was a regional power and not just another outlier Great House is that there are actually several great houses at the site.  Not as many as at Chaco, but outliers generally only had one Great House.  Only one of them, however, is extensively excavated and open to the public.

  

Aztec was built much like the Chacoan Great Houses with Chacoan masonry and structural systems

and T-doors

but with a few unique features.  One example is the bands of green stone in some of the masonry, extra interesting because the masonry was meant to be covered by plaster.  Even if unseen, though, I’m sure the green bands had meaning, much like offerings buried in the foundations.  One of Aztec’s Great Kivas is also interesting in that it has three rings of walls—a feature that seems significant but is not understood today.

Today, Aztec features a reconstructed Great Kiva built in the 1930’s.  Such an insensitive intrusion in an archeological site would never be allowed today, but it does give a good feel for how the kivas would have looked and felt.  

 
Aztec was built extremely quickly and was finished in about a decade, and it faded as a regional power almost as quickly.  Very few exotic objects are found at Atzec.  Perhaps the trade networks had dissolved, and/or perhaps the Chacoans had lost a lot of their influence.  A serious regional drought affected the Colorado Plateau from 1130-1180.  Now there wasn’t enough food to go around despite the Chacoan food redistribution network.  The drought was probably the final nail in the Chacoan coffin, the straw that broke the already struggling camel’s back.  By 1270, Aztec’s rooms were subdivided and locals had converted the Great House “palace” into a village pueblo, signaling that Aztec was no longer a seat of power.  Other Great Houses in the region were similarly divided or used as burial chambers or middens.  

Later domestic occupation of Aztec is evidenced by metates for grinding corn and this screen between rooms.  I am blown away by the screen, that it still exists somewhat intact.  It looks exactly like an Asian bamboo window shade that you could buy at Target today. 

 
It is not coincidence that commoners took over the Great House palaces and that centralized power completely disappeared from the region.  In fact, until the arrival of the Spanish, the region would never again see or support a centralized power.  Centralization was a system that the Ancestral Puebloans had tried and had disliked.  They didn’t intend to make that mistake twice.  Today, Puebloans are still wary of the corrupting influence of power.  The Pubelos are governed by councils, and the council members are frequently replaced, every year in Acoma, for example.    

Mesa Verde and its Cliff Dwellings
Ancestral Puebloans had lived on Mesa Verde for centuries (see above).  Despite being farther north and higher in elevation than Chaco, growing conditions on the Mesa were actually relatively good.  The mesa slopes slightly to the south, making for warmer and sunnier cropland than could otherwise be expected—the growing season on top of the Mesa is 20 days longer than in the adjacent valleys.  There was usually just enough precipitation and the runoff could be slowed in check dams to contribute to soil moisture.  There were diverse ecosystems up and down the canyons that provided a lot of game and foraging.

Pithouses, jacal buildings, kivas, rudimentary masonry buildings, and then more complex multi-storied masonry buildings were built on top of the mesas from about 550AD to 1100AD.  But around 1200AD, many (but not all) area residents moved into the canyons.  Specifically, they moved into natural alcoves in the canyon walls.  They still farmed on top of the mesas and hunted and fished in the canyon bottoms and foraged everywhere in between, but they moved to the middle of the canyon walls and commuted up and down.

 
The politically correct park canon states that violence was basically non-existent in the area and that the move into the alcoves was not motivated by defense.  They point to the fact that the cliff dwellings are generally easily accessible from multiple directions.  Also, there is very little evidence of violence in Mesa Verde itself.  These alcoves merely made for good, secure homes that were solar collectors in the winter and shaded from the sun in the summer.  However, given the timing and the general increase in violence in the Four Corners region where villages were being sacked and bodies were being charred at the end of the Chacoan era and beyond, how could defense have nothing to do with the move to the alcoves?

This natural passage between cliff faces was blocked by the Ancestral Puebloans toward the end of their stay at Balcony House.  Now, from this direction, the cliff dwelling is only accessible through a series of very small tunnels.

  

The alcoves were an important water source for those living in Mesa Verde.  Seep springs are the driving force behind the geological process that create the alcoves in the first place—water seeps through the porous sandstone and then when it hits a harder layer of stone, it seeps out horizontally.  This horizontal seepage caused freeze-thaw cycles that eventually carved out alcoves from the cliff face.  The seep springs are generally active year-round, even when the creeks in the canyon bottoms have dried up, and they are still active today.  While crops were not irrigated on Mesa Verde, people still needed water to drink, and the move from the mesa tops to the alcoves was a move to the source of their drinking water.  If nothing else, it seems that people were “claiming” and “defending” a particular spring by moving into the alcoves.

Left: Seep spring at the back of an alcove.  Right: Channels leading to cups were carved in the bedrock leading away from the spring.  When enough water had assembled in the cups, it was ladled into storage jars.

 
The Mesa Verde park features about 5000 known archeological sites, about 600 of which are cliff dwellings.  Most of the cliff dwellings are small and housed one or two families.  

However, a few of the cliff dwellings were spectacularly large and housed whole villages with something like 100 residents.  It is these enormous and complex cliff dwellings that really capture the imagination.

The cliff dwellings were obviously based on Chacoan Great House architecture, though it was everyday working people who lived here, not princes.  The masonry techniques and structural systems are the same as at Chaco, 

Left: A typical floor construction with bark and wood fibers reinforcing the mud layers is visible on a balcony.  Right: Original vigas, beam, and painted wall plaster.

and buildings up to five stories tall were built in the alcoves.  

 

The rooms deepest back in the alcoves were generally used for storage, and the rooms toward the front with more daylight were generally used for everyday living.  Some structures are tower-like, and I was intrigued that there were both square and round towers in the alcoves; no one knows what significance the shape had.  

Kivas were dug into the alcove floor, or the alcove floor was built up to accommodate a “below-ground” kiva.  

Left: Cliff Palace is fronted by many kivas.  The alcove floor is built up in terraces to accommodate the "underground" kivas.  Right: Very clear fire hole, ventilator shaft, and deflector stone in this kiva.  Here, the "bench" does not seem to be made for sitting on.

Generally, several tiers of terraces were built to provide level floors and outdoor plazas, a construction technique that reminded me a lot of Inca sites in the steep mountains of Peru.  

Sometimes living rock was carved away to make more space, but I was fascinated by how many of the buildings incorporated boulders and protrusions of bedrock into the architecture.  

Walls were often built up to the alcove ceilings and thus had poetic sloping silhouettes.  

In some places, there were balconies overlooking public plazas at the front of the alcoves.  

Left: A very rare intact balcony.  Right: most balconies don't retain their floors; today, only the projecting beams are clues that there was once a balcony.

And, of course, there were T-shaped doorways in strategic, visible locations.  Mesa Verde was a part of the Chaco dominion.  

 
When the people moved into the cliff dwellings, they moved their food storage down with them.  The granaries were generally built on alcove ledges above the dwellings and were generally built with the same masonry techniques as the dwellings, 

though we did see one unusual example built of jacal.  

One of our tourguide rangers taught us to recognize the difference between a door used for passage and a granary door that was meant to be sealed shut for long periods of time.  Passages were typically closed off with mats, but granaries were sealed with stone slabs.  Passages typically had a “flat” header and sill, but granaries had notched headers and sills so that the stone slab had edges to rest against.  The slabs were then sealed into place with mud plaster.  In some places, the mud plaster seal is still intact, even though the door has disappeared.

Two granary openings.  On the left, you can see the vigas that the stone slab would have rested between.  On the right, you can see the intact mud seal on the inside of the granary.

Here, like at Chaco, the masonry structures were covered on the inside and on the outside with mud plaster.  Traces of paint designs on the plaster are still visible.  

Additionally, many of the alcove walls were decorated with petroglyphs, though many of these are a bit hard to make out today.  

Pictographs were also present, many hands but also a "river" or "mountain" theme at the back of one alcove above a spring. 

We hiked to one petroglyph panel which was somewhat near an alcove dwelling but didn’t seem to be associated with one dwelling in particular.  Many of the same themes that were visible in Chaco—handprints, animals, anthropomorphic figures, spirals—are visible at Mesa Verde, too.

     
While the more visited sites are picked clean of debris, we saw pottery fragments at both Mug House and at Square Tower House.  So fascinating to experience such an immediate link to the people who once lived here—I, too, love porcelain and all of the beautiful designs through history.  

Pottery in Mesa Verde followed the black-on-white Chacoan tradition, but designs in this period became more elaborate and regionally distinct.  My observation is that pottery in Mesa Verde seems to be thicker, and therefore somewhat cruder than at Chaco.  

Drinking mugs were introduced around 1100AD and were seemingly popular at Mesa Verde.  Seeing these mugs, I felt an extra close connection to the Ancestral Puebloans—these pieces of pottery felt like something you could easily find in someone's kitchen cupboard today.

Mesa Verde-era mugs displayed in the Canyons of the Ancients (left) and the Aztec Ruins (right) museums.

I’d like to emphasize that while Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings were built with Chacoan techniques, they were built by and used by commoners as evidenced by the archeological record including the recovery of countless metates, manos, and mealing bins (corn was ground on metates with a stone mano in a mealing bin which contained the mess).  

Left: A collection of metates gathered in the back of an alcove, presumably by archeologists long ago.  Right: Mealing bins are just visible through the grass.

Names like Cliff Palace are romantic but not accurate as this alcove was occupied by everyday people.  There was, however a Chacoan Great House in Mesa Verde.  Far View was unfortunately closed during our visit, but it would have had control over the area during the Chaco era.  Afterward, commoners moved in and turned it into a village pueblo, much like at Salmon, Aztec, and Lowry.

From the National Park Service website

I would have guessed that Sun Temple was also a Great House, but with a construction date of around 1250AD, it was built too late for that purpose.  While its D-shaped plan definitely echoes Chacoan Great Houses, the function of this building is unknown as it does not seem to be residential.  One theory is that it may have been an astronomical observatory, but it doesn’t seem like that theory is based on very much evidence.    

 
The large, painstakingly-built cliff dwellings are signs that farmers on Mesa Verde weren’t just surviving, they were thriving.  They had time and energy and resources left over to build masterpieces.  Despite the enormous investment in architecture, however, the cliff-dwellings would only be used for 50-100 years.  Like elsewhere in the Four Corners area, Mesa Verde was completely depopulated by 1300AD.  The migration from Mesa Verde was not sudden and did not happen all at once.  It started as a trickle early in the 1200’s as a few people began to move to greener pastures, mostly further south to the Rio Grande valley (where many Pueblo peoples still live today).  But then more and more families left as they heard reports about the favorable conditions down south from their ex-neighbors, their cousins, their friends.  Life eventually became too hard for the people who were left—once the village mason, and the doctor, and the midwife, and the village’s best hunter, and the person who made the most effective farming tools all left, there was no way to stay on the Mesa.  By about 1280AD, even the last holdouts were forced to leave.  

Why did everyone leave the Four Corners area?  It was probably a combination of factors.  The predictability of precipitation degraded starting in around 1250AD.  Resource depletion led to more violence, and despite trying, the Chacoans at Aztec could no longer enforce peace.  The Great Drought started in 1275, drying up all but a few springs.  Between mass immigration, violence, and the drought, the Ancestral Puebloan way of life was untenable in Mesa Verde by 1300.

Interestingly, the Ancestral Puebloans never turned to digging canals except for a brief (and seemingly successful?) experiment at Aztec.  Canals were widespread in both the Arizona and New Mexican deserts; we know that the Ancestral Puebloans had contact with the canal-building Hohokam and Mimbres peoples through trade networks, so the technology wasn’t inaccessible to the Puebloans.  Computer models show that canals would have solved the problem for the Ancestral Puebloans despite the Great Drought.  But the Ancestral Puebloans had long ago chosen a different way of life, a way of life that involved near-constant migration as environmental and societal conditions changed.  The years preceding 1300AD were no different—it was a conscious decision to reject a different way of life and to continue migrating as the ancestors always had.         

Before I leave Mesa Verde in this blog post, some thoughts about our experience there:  Only one of the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde is open to the public at large, and it is one of the lesser intact dwellings.  However, it is possible to visit several other cliff dwellings on pre-booked ranger-led tours, and we booked all five of the tours that were available during our stay.  

We got to go past signs like these on our ranger-led tours to cliff dwellings

Two of the tours were quite intimate—only 10 tourists—but the others accommodated quite large groups—about 45 tourists per group.  The rangers were generally knowledgeable and pieced together interesting narratives, but one ranger wove a particularly fascinating and informed history of the people and the dwelling.  

The hikes in and out of the cliff dwellings were generally exciting with good canyon views and lots of ladders and stairs carved into the cliff faces to descend and climb.  

The Balcony House tour even featured a double ladder which helped save time.

Again, we had luck and didn't stumble upon any rattlesnakes at Mesa Verde, though we did see SO many cool lizzards (lots of lizzards at our other stops, too).  One lizzard stands up to run when it gets scared!

 

Visiting these cliff dwellings was a true lifetime highlight for me.  They are so spectacularly sited, reached on such dramatic ladders, and are comprised of extraordinarily evocative architecture!  While I found all of the different parks and monuments that we visited on this trip fascinating for different reasons, Mesa Verde is the park with the most over-the-top wow-moments.  

The Mesa Verde park is very developed in some respects and there are several different driving loops with many pullouts where you can stop and look down into the canyons at different alcoves which are otherwise closed to the public.

Though our binoculars, we could spot many other cliff dwellings that most people didn’t notice. We became pretty adept at finding the tell-tale signs of a cliff dwelling and finding more obscure sites through the binoculars.

We spent a lot of time looking through our binoculars to try to figure out the ancient routes into and out of the cliff dwellings.  Many of them were seemingly completely inaccessible, though I suspect that it's more a matter of the hand- and footholds being eroded away by time and rain.  We did see one hand- and foothold route between a cliff dwelling and its granaries above.  There was also a ceremonial stair leading down into one of the more accessible cliff dwellings.

Left: Hand- and footholds between a cliff dwelling and its granaries on the ledge above.  Right: An ancient ceremonial stair leading into a cliff dwelling.

Being a national park close to civilization, Mesa Verde doesn’t just feature driving loops; there is a gigantic campground, a lodge, several restaurants, a gas station, a store, and more.  We did splurge one night on a so-so dinner at the lodge, but we otherwide ate dinner and stayed our five nights in the park at our scenic campsite.  

At Mesa Verde, we took our car camping to the next level and made a pork stew with fresh meat and vegetables.  So delicious! 

In other respects, Mesa Verde is completely undeveloped and is in fact completely inaccessible.  Aside from a few short hikes 

to beautiful vistas, there are no trails in the backcountry of the park.  

Left: The San Juan Mountains are to the east of Mesa Verde.  Right: Sleeping Ute Mountain is to the west.  Both are often visible from the mesa tops.

Without a research permit, the Mesa Verde Wilderness Area is off-limits, probably in an effort to keep many of the archeological sites as pristine as possible.  I’m sure that this is partly in deference to modern Pueblo people who view these ancestral sites as sacred, but there also seems to be an overall wariness today of disturbing archeological sites.  

Excavated sites decay rapidly and require constant maintenance which is both costly and invasive.  And beyond that, there is a realization that even the most up-to-date archeological techniques can totally erase evidence that might not mean much today, but that might be easily readable in the future.  One case in point is dendrochronology, the science of which was established long after the sites at Chaco and Mesa Verde were first excavated.  Because archeologists of the time didn’t think there was any information to be gained from the wood, they often moved fallen beams into piles, or worse, burned it as firewood.  If the beams had been left in situ, they would today enable us to date so many more structures.  As a result of this wariness, much archeology is done today without excavation and is instead accomplished with different non-invasive imaging techniques.  And if a site is excavated, today it is most often backfilled to better preserve it for future archeologists.    

A pile of logs gathered by early archeologists who didn't know that the logs would one day be dateable and that they would have been immeasurably more valuable left in their original locations.

Despite its vast wilderness area, the National Park encompasses only about half of the Mesa Verde area.  The other half is on the current-day Ute Mountain Ute Reservation.  The Utes were originally a nomadic hunting-and-gathering people who roamed in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, but they are now confined to three relatively small reservations in Colorado and Utah.  (Interesting fact: The state of Utah is named after the Utes!)  While the Utes were in contact as trading partners with the Ancestral Puebloans and moved through the Ancestral Puebloan lands during their yearly migrations, they were a distinct people with a distinct culture and their own way of life that differed drastically from the Ancestral Puebloans.  It is more-or-less coincidence that the Ute Mountain Ute reservation comprises important ancestral sites of the Puebloans.  Today, the Utes and Puebloans do have a lot of contact with each other, but they are still distinct entities with their own separate histories and cultures.   

Parts of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation outside of the Mesa Verde area

The Ute Mountain Ute reservation is generally closed to visitors, but you can visit on guided tours.  I had read that the tours go to a number of fascinating sites, so of course we had to sign up!  And I’m so glad that we did.  Not only did we get to see more captivating cliff dwellings, it was also very rewarding to speak with a Ute about his way of life and his beliefs, about his take on Puebloan history, and about his thoughts on the current state of the world.  This visit gave me a new perspective, appreciation, and respect not only for the Ancestral Puebloans, but also for living Native Americans.

Our first stop was to an unexcavated Ancestral Puebloan pithouse that came to light when a flood tore away part of an arroyo wall.  Buried in the sediment but now hanging out over the wash, you could clearly make out a pithouse doorway and a corrugated pot.  

In the wash just below the pitthouse, there were hundreds of pottery sherds.

The reservation hopes that they can get an archeology team out to the site before the next big rain washes everything away.  We also stopped at a petroglyph panel which tells the story of Ancestral Puebloan emergence into this Fourth World as the winter solstice sun lights up different figures in sequence.  

The highlight of the visit was of course visiting several different cliff dwellings.  

These were all accessible along the same trail along the middle of the canyon wall, and we were allowed to wander the trail at our own pace.  Unlike at the national park where the volume of visitors means that you can’t touch a thing, we were encouraged to pick up pottery fragments and corn cobs and discarded animal bones, 

to touch the masonry walls, to walk on original floors.  It was clear that the Utes feel a responsibility for keeping these sites in good condition, but they see the sites as living aspects of the past, not untouchable museums.  Their much more relaxed attitude toward preservation is also perrhaps partly due to the fact that these cliff dwellings are not a part of the Ute ancestral history, and also perhaps partly due to the fact that there are SO MANY cliff dwellings on their reservation that while it would be regrettable if these four sites became damaged, there are so many others that remain pristine.  

Like at the national park, the reservation trail and alcoves are reached by climbing down and up a series of scenic ladders.  One of the guides showed us a notch in the alcove floor where the Ancestral Puebloans would have leaned a one-log ladder with notches in the side to access the alcove from below.  We saw such a ladder inside one of the cliff-dwelling towers, but didn’t manage to photograph it.   

Right: The arrow points to the notch in the alcove floor which was carved to hold a one-log ladder by the Ancestral Puebloans.

 
The cliff dwellings on the Ute side of Mesa Verde are very much like the cliff dwellings that we visited in the National Park with their masonry and structural techniques, their kivas, 

Left: Wooden beams of a collapsed kiva roof.  Right: A kiva with intact ancient plaster.

their plaster, their T-shaped doors, 

their towers, their granaries.  

Left: The tower provides access to the upper ledge of this cliff dwelling with a one-log ladder inside of the tower.  Right: Granaries on a ledge above the cliff dwelling.

However, it was not the exact same experience, and the difference was twofold.  First, so much was still intact on the Ute Reservation like the ancient floors that we walked on (hard to photograph, none of my attempts turned out) and intact granary doors.  

The second big difference was in how we got to visit the cliff dwellings, to wander (respectfully, carefully) at will.  To take it in at our own pace.  For me, visiting in this way was a spiritual experience.

 
The last stop on the reservation tour was to see some relatively contemporary rock art.  While the earlier petroglyphs had been carved by Ancestral Puebloans, the newer pictographs were painted by Ute Mountain Utes and depicted more contemporary events and leaders.   

 
In a somewhat oblique way, our guide talked a lot about contemporary politics.  It was clear that he abhors Trump and all that MAGA stands for.  But at the same time, it seems that the Native view is the very long view.  Our guide knows that all of this—not just Trump, but also the United States of America as a country—is temporary.  The Utes are lasting, as their law is written in the land, in the stone.  No paper document such as the Constitution could possibly stand up to or mean more than the permanent, if changing, law of the landscape.           

It is possible to camp at the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, but that requires a four-wheel drive vehicle, so we spent two nights in the small town of Cortez in a motel where the décor was so worn and passé that it was nearly trendily vintage.  We spent the evenings dining out, first at a wonderful farm-to-table restaurant where we gorged on a yak cheeseburger and a relleno pie, then at a micro brewery with one beer named Lagom (Swedish for “moderation”) and another named Apricity (my favorite word which means “the warmth of the winter sun”.) 

Migration of Chacoan and Mesa Verde Culture to the Great Sage Plain
The Great Sage Plain is a high and dry plateau punctuated by deep canyons just to the west of the Mesa Verde area.  Many of the Plain’s archeological sites are protected within Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.  

Ancestral Puebloans had been living and farming on the Plain since about 900AD (one example is Lowry Pueblo above), but a more widespread building phase on the Plain started in about 1250AD, this time clustered around the canyons.  Is it a coincidence that the Great Sage Plain became more developed just as nearby Mesa Verde emptied out?  Probably not.  On the Great Sage Plain, newer residents carried on life in much the same way as they had at Mesa Verde—some built habitations and granaries in alcoves, 

others built compact pueblos at the base or heads of canyons.  We visited a number of examples of each at Sand Canyon.

 

We did not notice a lot of pottery fragments in Sand Canyon, but we did see a couple of pieces recovered from the canyon in the Canyons of the Ancients museum.  Much like the architecture, this pottery follows the now-ancient Chacoan traditions, but with new designs.

Official signage makes out that Sand Canyon Pueblo at the head of the canyon was not built in a defensive manner but was built around a spring and the natural geological schism of the canyon head.  However, the village of 420 rooms and 90 kivas which housed 600-725 people was surrounded by a sturdy wall, and the village had fourteen towers.  Perhaps because of my western filter it’s hard for me to not interpret this as a defensive style of building, even if the wall and towers were a natural extension of imitating Chacoan Great House architecture.  Especially considering that this was a time of resource competition and political uncertainty.  I’m thinking that there is probably more than one truth here, a combination of truths.  Perhaps the pueblo was built in the style of Chacoan Great Houses.  And perhaps that style was chosen in part because of its closed, protective nature. 

Left: Today, Sand Canyon Pueblo consists of evocative mounds of rubble.  Right: Drawing of what the village would have looked like, with walls and towers, from signage at the site.

 

At Canyons of the Ancients, there is little official acknowledgement in the (otherwise excellent) museum exhibits or on-site signage of heinous violence on the Great Sage Plain.  Yet the violence is well documented.  Not at every site.  In fact, many sites seem to have been ritually abandoned in a preordained, orderly manner like so many sites before them during the ancient wanderings of the Ancestral Puebloans.  When villages were ritually abandoned, artifacts were left in an orderly manner and roofs were intentionally burned to cave in and ceremonially “close” the buildings.  

But at other sites, including Castle Rock Pueblo at the bottom of Sand Canyon and Sand Canyon Pueblo at the same canyon’s head, evidence of well-organized terror attacks have been found.  Only 5% of the Castle Rock site has been excavated, but the remains of at least 41 people who were attacked and dismembered, in one case whose face had been removed, have been found.  At Sand Canyon Pueblo, uncountable numbers of remains were scattered throughout the site with indications of both torture while still alive and desecration after death.  At least one child had been thrown into a kiva and scalped.  Evidence of ritual cannibalism has also been found in the area—human DNA found in human feces and in cooking pots, baked skulls with the brains scooped out, human bones with the telltale markings of having been stirred in a pot.  At Castle Rock and at Sand Canyon Pueblo, there were no peaceful burials at the end of the villages’ occupancy, only the malicious scattered chaos of terror and defilement.  All of Sand Canyon’s sites were completely forsaken by the 1280’s or 1290’s.

Castle Rock Pueblo

 

At Sand Canyon, you're rarely out of sight of Sleeping Ute Mountain, also the site of grim violence at the end of the 1200's.  Hiking the canyon today, however, is a beautiful experience.  In a completely unrelated book, I recently stumbled upon this passage which seems very fitting to my experience on the Great Sage Plain:

"Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past.  But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression." 

Robert MacFarlane in Underland 

It feels important to acknowledge past violence, to understand why it happened, how it affected people, and how to avoid repeating terrible histories.  But it is also important to not dwell entirely upon it.  The dark past should not keep the brilliant beauty of today from shining brightly.

When we drove to the Great Sage Plain, we entered a much wilder west, and not just because of its dark ancient history.  The open range meant that we frequently had to slow down for cows and horses on the road.  

The Colorado-Utah border was marked not by a sign but by a cattle guard.  

We were not off the tourist trail by any means, but it’s a more dedicated kind of tourist that finds their way here.

   
Hovenweep and its Towers
At the edge of the Great Sage Plain where it peters out into the low desert of Utah, the Ancestral Puebloans built their last defiant communities before leaving the Four Corners area and migrating south.  The collection of sites comprising Hovenweep National Monument in Colorado and Utah preserves a phenomenon that is not well understood by archeologists.  

While there are some examples of earlier communities starting at around 900AD with more activity from around 1160AD, Hovenweep's sites were primarily built between 1230 and 1280AD and are generally locaated at the seeping water sources at the heads of low canyons.  Pueblo villages 

of exquisite Chacoan masonry 

with the occasional T-door 

were built on the rims and stepped down the low walls into the canyons below, and granaries occupy the small niches between sandstone layers and in the very small alcoves.  None of that is all that mystifying, but the farming communities were also punctuated by three-story tall towers of unknown function. 

If these towers only stood on canyon rims, it would be easy to interpret them as purely defensive.  But many of them stand on boulders rising out of the canyon floors, giving them a more restricted view of the surrounding countryside and making them more vulnerable to attack from above.  

Three story tower in the bottom of the canyon

While their perches upon these steep-sided boulders makes for an intimidating approach, they seem to be inaccessible in more of a spiritual than physical sense.  

The towers seem to be associated with springs and with the best farming land, and like the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, they may have been visible symbols that claimed and protected these essential resources for a restricted group of people.  It is also suggested that the towers were symbolic houses, a temple of sorts, for the springs’ spirits who needed cajoling and coddling during the Great Drought.  Perhaps the towers were even cosmic observatories.  Whatever their function, the towers rise defiantly as a last stand of Puebloan civilization on the Great Sage Plain.

It is important to note that the tower-building phenomenon wasn’t exclusive to the Hovenweep area at the edge of the Great Sage Plain.  Similar towers are also found at Mesa Verde and at Sand Canyon Pueblo.  However, Hovenweep features the largest concentration and the best-preserved towers.  It is at Hovenweep that the towers can be read today as a cultural phenomenon, not as isolated incidents.

 
There doesn’t seem to have been one prototype tower that was copied throughout the area.  Like the towers in the alcoves at Mesa Verde, some Hovenweep towers are round, some are rectilinear.  

The towers at Mesa Verde are connected by tunnels to nearby kivas, which could be interpreted to strengthen either the spiritual or the defensive theory of the tower’s purpose.  

Left: This was once a two story kiva which was connected to Right: this kiva with a 40-foot long underground tunnel.  Mesa Verde.

It is unclear if the tunnel-to-kiva connection is also prevalent at Hovenweep as park signage did not mention this phenomenon.  However, some of the Hovenweep towers have additional architecture built into the boulder beneath them, and perhaps those rooms were connected to the towers in some way?

Left: Tower on a boulder with building built under the boulder's overhang.  Right: This boulder used to have a tower on it, but today there are only stones sprinkled on top.  The building under the boulder is more or less intact.

Like the communities of Sand Canyon, the Hovenweep towers was a very short-lived phenomenon and people left soon after the towers were built.  Several Hovenweep towers were also the site of unimaginable violence.  In one tower, more than thirty infants and children were burned alive.  Another tower contained decapitated infant skulls.  In a third tower, a confusion of human bones was found.  Like other Great Sage Plain sites, occupation of Hovenweep ceased completely by 1300AD.   

It is not known exactly why such monstrous violence transpired in the shadow of Sleeping Ute Mountain and on the Great Sage Plain.  It is, however, thought that the violence was not perpetrated by outsiders, but was committed by a faction of the Ancestral Puebloans themselves.  One theory is that the violence was one last desperate reactionary grasp for power from the dying seat of control at Chacoan Aztec against rebelling villages.  However, considering the late date of the attacks, it seems more likely that Aztec had already fallen, creating more chaos within an already destabilized civilization.  Given that the collapsing society was very diverse, it is not hard to imagine that this was the Puebloan “World War II” complete with ethnic violence and genocide.  

Whatever the reasons for the brutality, Ancestral Puebloans entirely left the Great Sage Plain.  Such a clean break and such a complete abandonment is rare throughout history, but perhaps the events in the Four Corners region were so terrible that no one could possibly remain, and no one could ever go back.  The Ancestral Puebloans continued to migrate, but they never turned northward again (although it’s hard to say that that truth would have held indefinitely, as the Ancestral Puebloans’ migrating days ended with the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500’s).  When the Ancestral Puebloans moved out, the Navajos and Apaches moved into the Four Corners area. 

At a couple of the Hovenweep villages, you can just make out very faded petroglyphs and pictographs.  The most famous is called Painted Hand and is a faint handprint upon the bedrock wall inside of a building built under an overhang (Painted Hand is technically in Canyons of the Ancients but is adjacent to Hovenweep and features towers).  The faintness of the rock art seemed fitting here—the disappearing hand seemed to me to be the last ghost of a people that have long since left.   

Faint hand pictographs, positive on the left and negativ on the right.  I've added some arrows to help spot them because they are hard to make out.

 

Hovenweep has the lowest elevation of all the sites that we visited, and an unseasonable heat wave with 100+ degree temperatures (38+C) rolled through during our visit.  We started our hikes not long after dawn and spent as much time as possible in the shade, darting out to see fascinating ruins, buildings, and towers.  

siesta

We also enjoyed the shade of a slot canyon just outside of the campground and spent one late afternoon playing in the coolness, challening ourselves to get through the narrowest slots possible.

We spent our three long evenings sprawled in the shade of junipers at our campsite, admiring the view out over the low canyon to Sleeping Ute Mountain beyond while enjoying a cool cocktail.  The heat and the beating sun was hard on us nearly-Arctic people, but the relief we felt when the evening finally cooled off was that much sweeter.  At least the desert does cool off, eventually, every day.      

Campsite and cocktail hour view

   

Proto-Modern Pueblos at El Morro and Bandelier
Ancestral Puebloans moved off the Great Sage Plain and migrated southward in the late 1200’s AD.  Some moved southwest through Utah and to Arizona, and eventually into Mexico.  We did not follow that southwestern migration route on this road trip, but it’s certainly high on our list for future trips as there are a number of fascinating sites in that direction (Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, etc).  Other Ancestral Puebloans migrated southeast to the Rio Grande and surrounding areas in New Mexico, eventually forming today’s Puebloan communities.  This is the migration route that we chose to trace because in New Mexico it is possible to see the contemporary continuity of the Puebloan culture.    

Agriculture came relatively late to the Rio Grande valley and surrounding areas.  Earlier nomadic peoples had scattered corn seed and returned, when possible, to harvest whatever had happened to grow, but more organized agriculture growing corn, beans and squash accompanied by more permanent settlement didn’t occur until the 1200’s AD.

At the beginning, these settlements were small with only one or two-dozen rooms, but the villages soon grew very large.  Atsinna Pueblo in El Morro National Monument, 

 built around 1275, reached 800 rooms with 500-600 residents.  

This pueblo was built atop a formidable mesa headland 

The headland from below and from up on the mesa top

along an ancient east-west trail, and a key water source on this route is located at the base of the mesa.

People had been travelling by the mesa for millennia as evidenced by the petroglyphs on Inscription Rock at the spring pool, 

but now access to the spring was probably controlled by the pueblo.

It is interesting that the pueblo was not built directly adjacent to the spring.  In Mesa Verde and on the Great Sage Plain, people had moved to their springs in a protective if not defensive gesture.  Yet at Atsinna, the spring was left open.  Perhaps because it was such a generous spring that there was water enough for all who passed by.  Or perhaps the spring was guarded by soldiers, not buildings.  Or perhaps a defendable pueblo was more important than defense of the spring—new times called for a different way of doing things.

The location of Atsinna Pueblo atop the mesa can only be interpreted as defensive and/or as insulative.  Either way, these people clearly wanted to control access to their village.  Who could blame them after the violent events on the Great Sage Plain?  Atsinna was founded just as those terror acts were committed.

Atsinna Pueblo was only occupied for about 100 years.  In about 1400AD, the people of Atsinna left their high mesa and migrated to nearby areas in what is now Zuni Pueblo, where they remain to this day (perhaps not by choice as the Spanish put an end to all future migrations).  The reasons for their migration to Zuni are not publicly known, but, like previous migrations, probably involve changes in climate and changes in cultural practices to one degree or another.       

Interestingly, the east-west travel route by the spring at the base of the El Morro mesa continued to be used by Spanish administrators, American pioneers, and Civil War soldiers, all of whom have also left their mark upon Inscription Rock.  

Left: Spanish inscription from 1620.  Right: American inscription from 1858.

The area became the nation’s second national monument in 1906 and the CWA “improved” the park in the 1930’s.  They built the trail up, across, and down the mesa.  Park literature implies that the CWA built the trails from scratch, but after visiting so many other Ancestral Puebloan sites, I am guessing that the CWA boys improved already existing Ancestral Puebloan stairs and trails carved into the living rock.  

Bandelier National Monument’s ancient communities were built starting in about 1150 with a peak of building activity at about 1400.  These communities were also built and occupied by people leaving Mesa Verde and the Great Sage Plain.  Here, the Ancestral Puebloans again dwelled in the cliffs, but in a totally different way than they had in the alcoves of Mesa Verde and Sand Canyon.  

At Bandelier, the Pajarito Plateau is covered in tuff or hardened volcanic ash from the exploded Valles Caldera.  This tuff is quite porous and in several locations, canyon and mesa cliffs are pocked with Swiss cheese-like holes.  

The Ancestral Puebloans enlarged these holes into rooms called cavates and connected them into multi-room dwellings complete with round kivas, storage areas, workshop areas, and sleeping areas.  

The cavates were accessed by ladders from the ground and later also from the roofs of adjacent buildings.  

Natural openings that were deemed too large were partially filled in with masonry.  

Cavates are found in both Frijoles Canyon and at the Tsankawi site in the national monument.

Bandelier does also have at least one larger alcove dwelling, but there is very little architecture left today.  The alcove does, however, have beautiful views of the canyon and is reached by a series of steep and long ladders.  

These ladders are so high that I am actually a little surprised that the Park Service allows tourists to climb them without ranger supervision.  

 

The cavates began to be dug out and occupied starting in about 1150, but most building activity in the area started in about 1400.  I have read that the local population grew rapidly in the 1400’s due to the exodus from the Four Corners area but have connected my own dots as to why the predominating architecture in Bandolier changed.  It seems that with the expanding population, cavates were no longer a manageable option—even though the tuff is relatively soft, it was probably not an easy or quick endeavor to expand a small hole into a dwelling.  Plus, the number of natural holes was probably limited.  Instead, the Ancestral Puebloans began to build, well, Puebloan buildings. 

Many of the cavates were complemented by pueblo-like rooms at the base of the cliffs.  These rooms were sometimes multiple stories as evidenced by the horizonal rows of holes along the cliff faces where ceiling and roof beams used to rest.  

A small section of these cliff-base rooms was reconstructed in the 1930’s, though they would have been accessed by roof hatches, not by doors in the walls.  

Additionally, whole new and separate pueblos were built.  Near the creek within view of the cavates in Frijoles Canyon, circular Tyuonyi Pueblo was built starting in about 1400.  This pueblo was one and two stories high, consisted of about 400 rooms and housed about 100 people.  

The outer wall did not have any windows or doors, and the central plaza was reached though a single opening in the outer wall.  This is definitely a circle-up-the-wagons type of architecture; again, it is not surprising to me that the Ancestral Puebloans were building defensively after the terrors committed on the Great Sage Plain.  

There is also a mesa-top pueblo at Tsankawi, above the nearby cavates, which seems to also have been round and may have also had the same limited access as at Tyuonyi.  This pueblo’s height on the mesa also gave it a defensive edge with its clear views out over the surrounding country.

 
Masonry techniques at Bandelier were certainly inherited from Chaco via Mesa Verde and the Great Sage Plain, but here the tuff does not make for as elegant masonry as the previous sites.  Being so easily eroded, the tuff blocks are today much less smooth than they once would have been.  

I did not see any remaining plaster at Bandelier’s pueblos, but there is original plaster, and even some original painting on the plaster, inside the more protected cavates. 

  
Other art is still visible at Bandelier in the form of petroglyphs etched into the tuff walls.  Unlike the sandstone of Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Hovenweep which has a dark “varnish” on the surface, Bandelier’s tuff is the same color all the way through.  This coupled with the fact that the tuff erodes easily makes it harder to make out Bandolier’s petroglyphs, but we did see a number of spirals, faces, animals including a macaw, and anthropomorphic figures.  These petroglyphs were clearly associated with specific dwelling areas, many of them were carved from the roofs of rooms along the cliff base in Frijoles Canyon.    

We only saw Bandelier’s pottery in the museum; the archeological sites have long since been picked clean.  Even this pottery is an extension of the Chaco style, though the base was greyer than the Chaco white.  Bandelier’s pottery was even thicker than at Mesa Verde.

 
Both Frijoles Canyon and the mesa at Tsankawi were occupied until about 1550AD.  The residents then migrated to pueblos closer to the Rio Grande—those from Frijoles Canyon migrated to today’s Cochiti Pueblo while those from the Tsankawi mesa migrated to today’s San Ildefonso Pueblo.  Official reasons given by the park for the migration include the standards of resource depletion and drought, which I am sure were contributing factors, but there was also a new source of societal change: By 1550AD, the Spanish had made incursions into New Mexico, though they hadn’t yet settled.  I imagine that the disease-caused plummet in population as well as the uncertainty brought by the Spanish (the Ancestral Puebloans must have known full well about the terror occurring in Mexico) would have had significant effects on the Ancestral Puebloan society.  Surely these factors contributed to the decision to migrate.    

At Bandelier, it is more clearly stated than at El Morro that the sunken trails worn into the tuff at the Tsankawi mesa are original Ancestral Puebloan trails.  Walking these trails and steps was a surprisingly powerful experience connecting me to the ancient residents on a visceral and spiritual level.  

Walking the paved sidewalk literally through and on top of Tyuonyi pueblo, however, felt like grinding the heel of my boot on the ruins of a conquered people.  The Park Service would never build such a disrespectful trail today, but it is astonishing that this behavior was condoned and unquestioned not too long ago.  In fact, I visited Bandelier with a friend in 2005, and I don’t remember reacting to the inappropriateness of this trail at all.

  
We only spent one night at Bandelier’s campground, 

and while we did see most of the frontcountry archeological sites, we did not have nearly enough time to backpack the long backcountry trails which feature more archeological sites in addition to natural beauty.  We did do one easy dayhike, however, which took us to the peak of Cerro Grande at 10200ft (3110m).  After spending a month first in the Rockies and then on the Colorado Plateau, I didn’t even notice the high elevation, which felt amazing.  The view from the peak was just gorgeous, especially looking into the Valles Caldera, which is where Bandelier’s volcanic tuff had burst from more than a million years ago.  Valles Caldera is also a national monument, one that I am now intrigued to visit on a future trip.       

Descending Cerro Grande.  Left: Valles Caldera in the background.

 
Pre-Contact Pueblos at Acoma and Taos
Even before the pueblos of El Morro or Bandelier were built, Ancestral Puebloans had migrated to Acoma and Taos, built new settlements, and stayed, becoming today’s Acoma and Taos tribes.  These sites have been inhabited for about a millennium and are still inhabited today, giving us a rare, direct glimpse into the continuity of Puebloan culture.  The two Pueblos have very different relationships to the land and very different histories, but both fit within the wide spectrum of Puebloan culture.  They demonstrate that there has never been one way to be Puebloan and that Pubeloan society has always encompassed many different lifeways while still being a cohesive culture.

Although similar, Acoma is even earlier than Atsinna Pueblo in nearby El Morro National Monument.  Acoma translates to the “place that always was” and tribal lore has it that the Acoma people have always occupied these lands.  Certainly they were present by 650AD when an earlier version of Acoma Pueblo atop the nearby Mesa Encantada was built, 

and the Acoma Rock mesa has been inhabited since 1150AD.  

I am unsure if science says that the area has been continuously inhabited by Ancestral Puebloans or if people have migrated in and out as is generally the case elsewhere in the region, but it is probable that people have at least migrated in in several waves through the millennia.  Either way, Acoma Pueblo has claims as the oldest continuously inhabited community in all of North America.   

Today’s Pueblo sits atop a high, 370-foot (110m) sandstone bluff in a sacred valley that is peppered with other sacred stone towers.  

This was an extremely advantageous position—easily defended and easy to monitor the surrounding agricultural fields, the mesa top would have also been a good place to spot any game roaming through the area.  

View from Acoma Pueblo.  That's a horno outdoor oven in the foreground--one technology adopted from the Spanish that stuck in Puebloan culture.

The original Pueblo was compact and contained to one portion of the mesa.  Early Spanish reports say that the Pueblo was home to about 500 people and that its buildings were three to four stories tall.

Being relatively far to the south, Acoma was among the first Pueblos to have contact with the Spanish.  At first, Acoma was friendly to the Spanish, but as the Spanish became more demanding, the Acoma people rebelled against them.  In 1598, they lured an important Spanish officer and fourteen of his men up into the Pueblo and murdered them.  In early 1599, the Spanish retaliated with a huge militia that managed to force its way up onto the mesa.  The entire Pueblo was sacked and burned to the ground, and about 1500 Puebloans were killed.  The remaining Natives were forced to surrender to the Spanish, who promptly punished them by sentencing all survivors to “indentured servitude,” aka slavery, and most men lost their right hand and/or foot.  It was this sickening battle and punishment of Acoma’s survivors that made the other pueblos wary of resisting the Spanish in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s.  

In the early 1600’s, the Spanish then forced the Acoma Natives to build a church directly atop the ruins of their village.  The nave is coffin-shaped in plan, apparently to symbolically bury the Native religion—anyone caught practicing the traditional religion was killed, including children.  Additionally, tribal stories tell us that the Spanish buried the Pueblo’s medicine med and medicine women in the thick church walls.  This was strategic because these were the Pueblo’s most powerful people, both on a political and on a spiritual level.

The conditions that the laborers were forced to work under were atrocious, and many died or were killed by the Spanish during the church’s construction.  Despite this, the laborers resisted the Spanish in whatever small ways they could and managed to carve and paint many indigenous symbols into the altar pillars.  Because the church was built over their old village and because the Pueblo’s leaders were buried in its walls, the church was considered a sacred burial ground and it was not destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (more on the Revolt later).  The altar was destroyed in the revolt, but the secretly symbolic pillars were allowed to remain.  Because so many of the other early mission churches were destroyed in the revolt, Acoma’s is the oldest surviving European church in New Mexico.  

After the church, the Natives were allowed to build a new Pueblo, though this time in a more “organized,” Spanish manner.  The current Pueblo consists of three straight rows of buildings with straight streets in between.  

The buildings are one to three stories tall and originally, the doorways were on the second floor.  That way, ladders could be drawn up to keep the Spanish out.  

The Spanish eventually forced the Puebloans to make doorways on the ground floor so that they could come in an inspect that nothing was being done according to Native traditions but was being done the Spanish way.  Windows were originally small, and there is still one original window of mica!  

These buildings are today a mix of adobe and stone, though I’m not sure what the original building material would have been.  The church is built in masonry echoing the beauty of Chacoan work, though both the church and the Pueblo buildings were covered in mud plaster.

This “new” Pueblo at Acoma has kivas, but they are rectangular and above ground.  They are, however, still reached by ladder and through a roof hatch.  The ladders are white to symbolically pierce the clouds and deliver rain.  Because the practice of the traditional religion was outlawed, the kivas were built to look like any other “normal” room.  During ceremonies or meetings, sentries were stationed outside of the kivas and they whispered warnings through a special hole in the kiva wall if the Spanish walked by.   

At Acoma, it wasn’t just the wooden beams that had to be carried in.  Here, all the building materials from stones to mud and water for adobe and plaster had to be carried on the backs of the Natives.  Even though the Spanish had brought horses to the area, the Puebloans weren’t allowed to use them, and horses couldn’t climb the hand and toehold trails up to the mesa top, anyway.  

There is no spring or well on Acoma Rock.  Rainwater was traditionally collected in jars on roofs and in sunken reservoirs in the living rock.  These reservoirs were natural depressions that were enlarged by the Puebloans.  All other water for drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning, and construction was hauled up the mesa in large ceramic jars.  All food was also hauled up from the valley.  Keep in mind that the only trail up to the Pueblo consisted of hand and toeholds, making the mesa a difficult place to live—this is why it is so hard for me to dismiss defense as a main motivator for occupying the mesa top despite the current cannon.

Rainwater reservoirs atop Acoma Rock

Despite the harsh reprisals from their original revolt, Acoma participated in the coordinated Pueblo Revolt of 1680 when the Pueblos rose up against their Spanish enslavers, successfully banishing them from New Mexico for twelve years.  As noted above, the church was unharmed, but the Spanish priest and other Spanish residents of the Pueblo were killed.  I’m not sure exactly what the relationship between the Spanish and Acoma looked like when the Spanish eventually came back.      

Modernity of course encroached on Acoma Pueblo.  Through the centuries, the trails were improved with stairs carved into the rock.  

In the 1950’s, a road was blasted up the cliff face.  The community still grows corn, though game is apparently scarce.  Today, most of Acoma’s residents live in the more modern village of Acomita 15 miles away, but the Pueblo is still occupied by a few permanent residents including my tour guide.  The Pueblo comes alive when everyone returns for festivals and celebrations.  The public is invited to some of these festivals and is sometimes even invited inside some of the homes for meals.  I would absolutely love to participate some day!  Other than festival days, the public can only visit Acoma on a guided tour.  

 

I was nervous that the tour would be cheesy, but my guide was extremely knowledgeable and told us so much about Acoma’s history, both unofficial and official, and about modern life as a Pueblo member.  It was through him, for example, that I learned about Acoma’s councils and how councilmen are rotated yearly.  And that while men hold the political power, the society is matriarchal and property is passed down from mother to the youngest daughter.  The male council might make political decisions, but the women control the land.    

The Taos Pueblo has a totally different geography and thus relationship to the land than Acoma, and its history is somewhat different, too.  However, the kinship between the two Pueblos is obvious, and it was fascinating to see two different expressions of the same culture.

The Taos valley, which sits at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and feeds into the Rio Grande, has been cultivated since about 900AD.  

A pueblo was built in about 1325AD, but it was relocated just slightly to the west in about 1400.  Other than the addition of churches and continual maintenance, the Pueblo remains much the same as before the arrival of the Spanish.  Encompassed by an outer wall, the Pueblo consists of a compact five-story North House 

with some lower buildings to the side, 

a compact South House 

with some lower buildings sprawled around it, and an open plaza in between.  A creek runs through the plaza and today and some trees on the creek banks provide shade (as do a few manmade shade structures).  Hornos, the same outdoor ovens introduced by the Spanish and adopted by the Acoma, dot the grounds.

Taos’s buildings are made of sun-dried adobe bricks, a technology that predates Chacoan masonry and that was used throughout Ancestral Puebloan history.  However, without maintenance, adobe buildings disintegrate and disappear with only a faint archeological trace.  In the shadow of Chaco, it seems that masonry was the more desirable technology, probably due to social status factors but also due to environmental factors because the making of adobe bricks requires a lot of water.  However, the raw materials for masonry weren’t always easily available.  For whatever reasons, though probably at least in part due to an abundance of water due to its year-round stream, Taos was built in adobe and the structures were covered with a protective mud-plaster coating.  Because of their plaster coating, adobe pueblos and masonry pueblos look much the same.

Taos's residents seem to have less autonomy over their plaster than at Acoma as Taos's building are uniformly plastered with the traditional mixture of mud and straw.

 
Like Ancestral Puebloan structures elsewhere, floors and roofs were made up of layers of mud and bark on a structure of vigas and beams.  Originally, the rooms would have been accessed only by ladders through roof hatches, but today there are doors for easier access, though ladders are still needed to access higher rooms as most rooms are not interconnected.

According to UNESCO, there are seven underground kivas at Taos, but I did not see traces of them, nor did my tour guide mention them, probably because the Pueblo does not share information about its religious practices.  
    
The Spanish first arrived in 1540, and in 1598, the first Catholic mission at Taos was established though the first mission church wasn’t finished until 1619.  The Spanish presence was extremely repressive and the native language, religion, and customs were outlawed, enforced by corporal punishment and death.  Although illegal and highly dangerous, Native resistance grew, culminating in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.  At Taos, the priest was murdered and the church was completely destroyed. 

The Spanish were back in 1696, but this time Taos Pueblo was naturally far from welcoming.  After their harrowing defeat, the Spanish were a little hesitant, also, and were slightly more respectful of the Puebloans.  An agreement was reached that allowed the Spanish to return to the valley but not to the Pueblo.  They were to keep their distance and settled in what would become today’s town of Taos which is about three miles downstream from the pueblo.  A new mission was established and the Pueblo church was rebuilt.  The church was destroyed a second time when it was bombed by the US Calvary in 1847, killing more than 100 residents who had taken refuge in the church.  

Because the old church was now a sacred burial site after the bombing, the current church was built in a different location in 1850. 

Although things have of course changed a lot in modern times, many aspects of Pueblo life remain much the same.  The same religious rituals are observed and traditional festivals are celebrated.  Men still go off into the mountains and hunt each fall, and game as well as foraged herbs, berries, and plants make up a portion of the Pueblo diet.  Corn and other crops are still cultivated.  There is a Pueblo school with a curriculum in both Tiwa and English.  Tiwa is still spoken in many homes.  The Pueblo rooms are still owned by individual families, though they are mostly only used during festivals (only 20 people live permanently in the historic Pueblo).  The Pueblo buildings are maintained with mostly traditional materials and methods.  Modernity has crept in, but the Pueblo is focused on retaining as much of their traditional way of life and traditional identity as possible—the Pueblo walls were originally built to keep out invaders, but now they form a barrier to modernity.  Nothing like electricity or plumbing is allowed inside the Pueblo walls, though these conveniences are embraced outside of the walls.       

Taos Pueblo became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 and today visitors are allowed to wander the main Pueblo area at will and to visit the several stores selling pottery, jewelry, and other wares which are located in some of the ancient Pueblo rooms.  Visiting these stores is the only way for a visitor to enter the interior of the Pueblo.  There are also frequent guided tours which are given by Pueblo college students who are paid by tips.  I found my guide, who is studying pre-law, to be very knowledgeable and informative.  It was interesting what information she was and was not willing to share—for example, she told us that the majority of Pueblo members practice a combination of the Catholic and Native religions but that some members only practice Catholicism while some only practice the Native religion, but she said that the tribe does not give out any information about their Native religion at all.  The tribe also does not share information about its native language, and Tiwa is not written.

I had been a little worried that visiting the Pueblos was going to be uncomfortable and a bit Disney-like, but I actually found them to be an interesting, authentic experience.  Beyond my tour guides, I also talked for a while with a couple of the vendors and enjoyed learning a little bit more about life in the Pueblos from them.  In Acoma, I enjoyed an absolutely exquisite lunch of pasole with smoked beef at the excellent museum café, and in Taos, I ate a delicious lunch at a small Pueblo restaurant where I ordered frybread with shredded chicken and green chili salsa and an “Indian Tea” steeped with foraged berries and herbs.  And, of course, seeing the incredible, ancient Pueblos was a bucket-list experience for me as an architect.  

Starting in about the 1400’s AD, the different Pueblos began to develop distinct styles of pottery.  In addition to white and grey, vessels could be red, yellow, or brown.  Black pottery was introduced around 1900AD.  Paint could be white, black, red, green, or multiple colors on the same piece.  Today, Acoma is known for its complex geometrical designs in black on white pottery, directly inspired by Chaco but with a modern aesthetic.  I couldn’t help but buy a tiny specimen: the artist told me that the white base represents Mother Earth, the design at the top represents feathers, the black lines represent rain, the orange interior represent sunrise, and the orange on the base represents sunset.  

Left: Acoma pottery displayed in the Millicent Rogers Museum.  Right: The tiny pot I bought at Acoma from artist Marilyn Ray.

Taos is known for its slightly sparkling pottery made from micaceous clay.  

Taos pottery displayed in the Millicent Rogers Museum

I am dumbstruck at the beauty and diversity of the pottery that is produced in the different Pueblos today and a whole new artistic world has opened up for me.

Left: Zuni pottery.  Right: I am not sure which pueblo this piece came from.  Both displayed at the Millicent Rogers Museum.

 
Rio Grand Pueblos
While I was in Taos, I did a dayhike along the top of the Rio Grande’s canyon.  Here, the big-sky scenery was just gorgeous, but the water is fairly inaccessible.  

The Rio Grande's canyon near Taos

The river opens up, however, when it reaches the Albuquerque valley where so many of the Ancestral Puebloans settled in the 1300’s AD.  

The Rio Grande's wide river valley in Albuquerque.  The valley is framed by the Sandia Mountains to the east and a low escarpment to the west.

We did not visit any of these sites, they’re on our list for another time, but it’s not a coincidence that New Mexico’s biggest city is in this valley—the river has always made this valley an attractive place to live.  Archeology shows that the Ancestral Puebloans and their even more ancient ancestors had always travelled through here, stopping now and again for longer periods.  The migration to the river basin at the end of the 13th century wasn’t to terra incognita but to a place of ancestral story, a place where the Puebloans already belonged.  

The Rio Grande Pueblos have moved around a bit since the 1300’s, and there used to be more of them, but there are still a number of Pueblo reservations near the river corridor as well as some of its major tributaries.  

The immense amount of rock art in Petroglyph National Monument on an escarpment a bit above the river attests to the renewed presence of the Ancestral Puebloans from about 1300 to 1680AD.  Here, 25000 petroglyphs decorate the dark volcanic boulders tumbling down the escarpment, laying claim to the area.  Numerous spiral migration symbols are joined by faces, handprints, anthropomorphic figures, and flute players; sun symbols; birds and other animals; lines and geometric figures. 

Left: So many boulders, so many petroglyphs.

Left: The artist used the corner of the rock to emphasize the face's nose.

This is a bit of an aside and doesn't really fit neatly into my chronological story, but down in the Utah desert, the San Juan River corridor has also always been an important route of travel as well as source of water and foraging.  The banks of the river are incredibly lush, but just 100ft above, the landscape is red rocks and sand.  

We spent an afternoon craning our necks to admire the thousands of petroglyphs that were carved on the cliffs above the river at Sand Island in Bears Ears National Monument (there is SO much more to see in this national monument, next time!).  While the petroglyphs above Albuquerque are mostly from one 400-year block of time, the petroglyphs at Sand Island have been carved over at least 8000 years and probably longer.  Here, petroglyphs from different millennia overlap each other.  

Desert varnish consists of, and here I quote the National Park Service, “material derived from water that flows over rock surfaces, windblown dust, and microorganisms including fungi living on rock surfaces.”  This coating creates a darker patina than the rock would have on its own.  When the ancients carved petroglyphs into the cliff faces, they carved past the desert varnish and into the lighter-colored rock.  This is what makes relatively new petroglyphs “shine” brightly.  Older petroglyphs are darker because the desert varnish has begun to grow back.  It may be hard for a layperson to be able to date the petroglyphs based on stylistic differences, but desert varnish makes the relative age of different petroglyphs easy to discern.  It takes desert varnish thousands of years to grow back, so scientists can pinpoint the age of older petroglyphs relatively accurately. 

Here you can see the comparative age of the petroglyphs based on how bright or dark they are.

   
There is an orgy of petroglyphs at Sand Island.  I’ve never seen anything like these intense, crowded petroglyph panels.  I certainly don’t think I’ve ever seen 8000-year-old petroglyphs, either!  Themes here are the same as at other stops along our journey—humanoid forms, hands and feet, animals, spirals, snakes or rivers, flute players—just MORE.  Not just a deer, but a whole herd.  Not just a snake/river, but a twenty-foot-long example.  

On the right, I've marked the beginning and end of the snake/river with arrows.

Not just one flute player, but a whole orchestra.  Not just one dancer, but a whole corps de ballet.  

Spanish Towns and Missions including Taos
As I have previously mentioned, the Spanish started wandering into Mexico in the second half of the 1500’s AD.  By the turn of the century, they settled, taking over Pueblos and building their own new towns on the ruins.  Santa Fe, founded in 1610, is among the oldest surviving colonial settlements in the United States.  We skipped Santa Fe on this trip, but we did spend a couple of nights in Albuquerque, founded in 1706.  While we didn’t deeply explore, it was interesting to see the central plaza which is surrounded by colonnades and low buildings.  

Albuquerque Old Town square and historic building.

I also spend two nights in colonial Taos, founded in 1615 with the “new” downtown laid out in 1795.  Again, a central plaza is lined with low, blocky buildings with shaded colonnades facing the park.  

Taos colonnades.

Beyond the main plazas, both Albuquerque and Taos retain many historic adobe buildings.

Historic buildings in Taos.

 

I have visited a number of Spanish colonial towns in Mexico and Guatemala, but it wasn’t until this trip that I have reflected on where this ubiquitous form of urban planning with central-plaza+colonnade+blocky-buildings originated, and I’m starting to think that it is just as indigenous as Spanish in origin.  Yes, Spain has magnificent central plazas, but they were mostly mandated and built after the Spanish had colonized the Americas—the legacy of Roman forums had been mostly lost during the Middle Ages.  Interesting.  Central public plazas were a defining feature way back in the earliest of the Chacoan Great Houses and continued to be present in Ancestral Puebloan urban planning until the arrival of the Spanish.  Although European colonnades go back to Greek and Roman times and Spain had a number of exquisite arcades from the Moorish occupation, colonnades were also indigenous to pre-contact Mesoamerica and there is at least one example at Chaco, too. The blocky adobe buildings facing onto the public plazas were certainly more Puebloan than Spanish in style and building technique—no arches or domes here!  I think that what we commonly associate with Spanish colonial urban planning is actually a Europeanized, rectilinear version of Puebloan urban planning.  Considering that the labor building the early New Mexico plazas was Puebloan, it’s not really that surprising that they would build in a manner that was familiar.  The Spanish took the Puebloan ideas, enforced a rectilinearity, and then slapped a colonnade on it.      

Although Spanish colonial towns and missions were really not a focus on this roadtrip, I did make a few quick stops to see Spanish churches while driving between various Puebloan sites.  San Jose de Gracia was built in 1760 as the village church of a new Spanish farming outpost and its exterior with thick, adobe walls and wooden balcony is hardly altered.  

The construction of the mission church San Francisco de Asis in Taos began in 1772 and features massive adobe buttresses.  

I also stopped at El Santuario de Chimayo which was rebuilt in 1813.  The dirt at this site was considered to have healing properties by the Ancestral Puebloans, and that tradition was picked up by the Catholics who were all about the money that miraculous healing could bring in.  The new chapel replaced an older version in order to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims and is still a pilgrimage destination today.  

Photos weren’t allowed inside El Santuario de Chimayo, so the image of the interior is copied from the Library of Congress photo archive.

All three of these churches are National Historic Landmarks.  

National Romanticism & the Pueblo Style, the CCC & CWA, and Parkitecture
National Romanticism was a widespread western phenomenon in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.  Europe naturally turned to its now romanticized castles and medieval architecture, but as such a new country, what did the US have to turn back to?  What stylistic expression was fundamentally American?  In New England, the answer was a log-cabin pioneer aesthetic that gave expression to the Adirondak camps of the wealthy.  This pioneer-inspired style followed the railroad westward into places like Yellowstone, Glacier, and Ranier.  But in the Southwest, this timber-heavy expression wasn’t appropriate, even if a number of log cabins and wooden clapboard buildings were built in the southwestern parks in the early days.  Here, an even older history was available to exploit, and by the 1920’s, the Pueblo Style dominated much of the architecture being built both in the southwestern cities and in the southwestern parks.  This might have been the first time that Native civilizations were claimed as “American” by the white hegemony.  How convenient.     

The Pueblo Style is distinct from the Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival Styles, although I have seen all three confused into one amalgamation in various literature.  The Pueblo Style is dominant in New Mexico and is characterized by vigas, projecting roof beams, flat roofs, plastered adobe-esque facades, blocky and stepped-back volumes, and some rounded edges (no tile roofs, no arches).  The first New Mexican example is a building on the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque which was remodeled in the Pueblo Style in 1905.  The great majority of campus buildings after that date were built in the Pueblo Style, making for a very scenic and surprisingly cohesive whole; even new university buildings today are built in contemporary interpretations of the Pueblo Style.

Some of the older buildings on the University of New Mexico campus

 
The Pueblo Style became almost ubiquitous in New Mexican park and hotel architecture in the 1920’s and 30’s and was also used frequently for domestic architecture during that period.  The visitor’s center at Aztec was originally built as the house for the archeologist in 1920.  

Here, 800-year-old beams pulled out of the ruins were used; some furniture and interior details are original to the house.  

The Pueblo Style buildings of the Mesa Verde headquarters area were built starting in 1922; these buildings hover on the edge of a deep canyon.  

The CCC continued the Pueblo Style legacy in the park through the 30’s, and some interior details of the museum are original to the CCC.

I was particularly impressed with park signage at Mesa Verde, which continues the stylistic tradition today and even uses the same font established by the CCC in the 1930’s.  

Bandelier’s visitor center was built by the CCC in 1935 

and features several enclosed, scenic courtyards 

as well as a lot of original detailing.  

I sure do love picturesque Parkitecture!                     

On the hospitality front, Taos has two landmark Pueblo Style hotels, though both incorporate much older buildings that were remodeled into their current style in the 1930’s. Taos Inn is a collection of adobe buildings from 1890’s that were converted into a hotel in the 1930’s.  The lofty lobby with fountain and fireplace is from this era.  The inn’s Adobe Bar is known as Taos’s living room and that certainly seemed to be the case while I stayed there—live music every night drew locals and tourists alike to occupy every table both inside and out on the patio.  

The Hotel La Fonda de Taos has been a hotel (and mercantile and bar) since the 1820’s, but the Pueblo Style look dates to the 1930’s when the upper two stories were added and the façade was revamped.  

In my previous post, I have already written about my stay at downtown Albuquerque’s Hotel Andaluz from 1939, but it deserves another quick mention in this context. 

The Pueblo Style has not died and is probably one of the US’s more convincing regional architectures.  The Albuquerque airport by architect William E. Burk Jr. from the 1960’s is a more recent example, contemporary big box retailers in Albuquerque reference the style in their terrible architecture, and as mentioned, new interpretations are found in the University’s contemporary buildings such as the new School of Architecture by Antoine Predock from 2008.  

I was in too much of a hurry when I experienced these buildings so these photos are copied from the internet (https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/blog/post/albuquerque-international-sunport-upgrades/ and https://nmarchitectureguide.org/2021/08/06/unm-central-campus/) 

However, my observation is that much of the contemporary architecture in the region seems to be moving away from the adobe-and-plaster language of the Pueblo Style and uses unplastered Chacoan-inspired masonry instead.  The Sky City visitor's center at Acoma by Barbara Felix Architecture + Design from 2006 features both stuccoed and masonry masses 

while the new visitor’s center at Mesa Verde which was designed by AJC Architects and opened in 2012 has masonry facades.  

The End
What a trip!  This dissertation of a blog post has focused primarily on ancient societies and architecture, but I just want to quickly mention how gorgeous each of these landscapes truly was.  The drives from place to place weren't especially long, but we did experience some beautiful scenery even from the car, some of it mountainy, some of it deserty.  The places we visited are fairly remote (to different degrees) and they are not connected by interstate highways, so we were roadtripping the "old fashioned" way on US highways, state highways, and back country biways.

What could be more roadtrip-worthy than Route 66?  While Route 66 does cross through much of the territory we covered on our roadtrip, our focus on Ancestral Puebloan sites didn’t leave us with a lot of time get our kicks on Route 66.  However, we did spend our last night in a Route 66 motel in Albuquerque which seemed a fitting close to our journey.  I was impressed by the recent renovation which made the motel feel fresh, clean, and contemporary while retaining its Route 66 charm.

 
This was truly a bucket-list trip for me, and I reveled in every second of it.  I can’t wait to get out into the deserts of the Southwest again—there are so many miles of trail to hike, so many incredible landscapes and parks to devour, and so many archeological sites to explore.  The list is very, very long.  One day.      

Sources
I have read at least a dozen books on the Ancestral Puebloans and inhaled information from the more than dozen museums I visited on this trip.  Complementary information has come from various websites, particularly from the National Park Service and from the various park brochures and park signage that we read during our trip.  My “dissertation” above is a synthesis of everything that I have learned from printed sources as well as my own observations in situ.  A few key books that shaped both our roadtrip and this blog post were:
Craig Childs, House of Rain (2006) 
Sally J. Cole, Legacy on Stone (2009)
Allan & Carol Hayes, Pottery of the Southwest (2012)
Stephen H. Lekson, A History of the Ancient Southwest (2008) 

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2026   

Summer Vacation 2026 Part I: An Enchanted Road Trip from Denver to Albuquerque 

This year, I started my US vacation in Denver where I was greeted with squeals and leaps by one of my bestest friends, Hilary.  Hilary is a friend from college and we have adventured and road tripped together through the years, but it had been a while since our last in-depth visit, making this year’s adventure long overdue.  After spending the night at her house in Denver, we loaded up the car the next morning and headed up into the mountains.

When planning the trip, we debated about whether we should concentrate on one area or if we should do a more traditional road trip, bouncing from one place to the next every day.  I love both and this time we settled on a road trip.  Hilary could drop me off in Albuquerque where I’d be meeting up with Carl, and we could scope out a lot of the scenery on the western side of the Rockies for future family trips and future bestie adventures.  We saw and experienced a LOT over the trip and my conclusion, which is not exactly breaking news, is that there is a lifetime of adventure to be had in those mountains.  On this trip, we scratched the surface, and we already have several ideas for further, deeper, adventures together.  

Our first stop was Hanging Lake, a day hike outside of Glenwood Springs that is so popular (thank you Instagram) that you have to have a reservation and permit.  The trail is only about 3 miles roundtrip, but it goes up a lot, and I was a little worried about my hiking ability at 7300ft (2225m) since I had not acclimatized at all.  My breathing was a little heavier than usual, but I was happy to find that I could hike, even steeply uphill, without too much trouble.

Scenery at the bottom of the trail and on the way up to Hanging Lake.

Hanging Lake is brilliantly green from the moss and other plant life below the water’s surface.  Several waterfalls tumble into the lake, and the backdrop is a deep green forest accented by spring green deciduous trees.  

Facing away from the lake, a few Rocky tops peak out above the forest canopy.  

Thank you Hilary for this great shot!

It was just magnificent, but it turns out that there was more!  Just above the lake, the trail leads to another waterfall, but this time the water was spitting straight out of a cliff face.  I’ve only seen one other waterfall like it, in the Grand Canyon (see Grand Canyon Part II: The River).

From Glenwood Springs, we turned off the interstate and headed south, stopping at Penny Hot Springs for a dip.  Hot water gushes out of the banks of the Crystal River, and people have made small rock-lined pools to catch the warmth before it mixes with the cold river water.  Other than a widening of the road to allow for parking and these crude pools, Penny Hot Springs is completely natural and has no infrastructure.  We soaked for a while, chatting with some other soakers, before heading back on the road.  

Another great shot from Hilary

After crossing the scenic McClure pass, 

we followed the road through a sparsely settled and gorgeous valley until reaching the small town of Hotchkiss where we camped, for a small fee, in someone’s yard (there’s an app for this).  The mountain views were divine, the music and canned cocktails were heavenly, and the farm’s turkey was gobbling.  I was starting to relax into vacation mode and starting to really enjoy this luxurious car camping thing—cocktails? music? extra thick sleeping pads? sign me up!  

The next day, we drove into the Uncompahgre National Forest and up a valley following the Cimarron River, aka the Magical Valley.  Now we weren’t just viewing the mountains from afar, we were driving up into them, and the scenery was getting more gorgeous by the minute.  

We saw a VERY large cinnamon-colored black bear lope across the road and passed by several herds of elk.  Each branch of the river in the Uncompahgre Wilderness 

features beautiful trails which connect on high passes.  We chose to hike up the Middle Fork and hoped to make it up to the pass at 11200ft (3415m) before having to turn around.  Along the way, the forested trail often gave glimpses to the amphitheaters of peaks around us, but unfortunately, we never made it above treeline.

Being the middle of May, we knew that it was very early to be hiking so high up in the mountains, but with the practically non-existent snowpack last winter, we thought it might be possible anyway.  However, after crossing a couple of beautiful mountain meadows with dramatic peaky views, 

the trail began crossing small snow patches.  The small snow patches soon turned into large snow patches.  Which turned into whole mountainsides of snow.  Our shoes were quickly soaked and as the ankle-deep snow quickly turned into knee-deep and then waist-deep snow, the hiking became more and more challenging.  

Thank you Hilary for the photo on the left!

By the time we turned around at lunch, 

we were punch-holing up to our waists in snow.  We didn’t end up walking more than about 6 miles (10 km), but we sure did get a good work out and we sure did enjoy some incredible scenery.  On the hike back down the valley, we stopped for a quick snooze by the rushing river.  

There is quite a lot of gorgeous dispersed camping in the Magical Valley (note to self!), but we had booked the Jackson Guard Station cabin for the night.  Previously used by rangers, the cabin consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen/dining room with a cozy woodstove.  The weather was sunny and dry, though, so we hung out outside, listening to more tunes, enjoying our canned cocktails, catching up on life, munching on veggies and dips and tortilla chips and salsas, and gazing into the fire.  A litter of coyote pups yipped into the night.  It was another fantastic evening, and I slept incredibly well on my little cot in my little bedroom.

Jackson Guard Station actually consists of two cabins (and an outhouse).  When you rent the cabin, you have access to the cabin on the left.  The older cabin on the right was locked and seemingly abandonded.

 
It was a little heartbreaking to leave the Magical Valley, but after going over another pass on incredibly well-maintained forest service roads, we descended into yet more beautiful scenery, this time featuring the San Juan Mountains behind jealousy-inducing ranchland.  

Talk about happy cows!  We rolled in Ouray in time for a decadent second breakfast of Breakfast Bread Pudding at Cassidy’s Café & Antiques and then geared up for Ouray’s via ferrata.  We were a little concerned about the weather as it had been sprinkling on and off and via ferrataing on wet rocks is a little above my grade, but we lucked out with the weather and the rock stayed dry during our entire traverse.     

Ouray’s via ferrata was such a cool experience!  Following the side of a narrow river gorge, it is a mostly horizontal route, though there is a good bit of up and down, too.  

Thank you Hilary for the photo on the right.

It’s a great beginner’s via ferrata because the entire route is protected—there are no scary, unprotected sections as in the Dolomites (see The Dolomites: Hiking the Alta Via 4 + Via Ferrate and Hiking the Julian Alps of Slovenia).  Also, there are rungs provided just about everywhere, meaning that you don’t have to find your own hand and footholds.  However, the route was just challenging enough to be fun; there was one traversing section in particular that required a lot of upper body strength.  Two highlights of the route were crossing the river on a 3-wire bridge and then crossing again on an inclined ladder.  

Both of these photos were taken by Hilary.

It was a bit disorienting looking down on the rushing water below, but I was able to relax and enjoy the route in a way that I never have in the Dolomites.  This was Hilary’s first via ferrata experience, and she totally nailed it!  She caught on quickly, had no trouble whatsoever navigating the route’s more challenging sections, and had no fear.  I’m so impressed with her!    

In addition to the river gorge we traversed, Ouray also features the scenic Box Canyon.  Here, a river flows through a gorge, drops about 300ft (100m) through a twisting waterfall slide, 

then flows through a canyon of water-slickened stone.  

A lofty bridge at the top and a winding walkway at the bottom lets you see the whole spectacle from top to bottom.  A lighted sign marks the mouth of Box Canyon, and this sign predates the Hollywood sign in California.  

Ouray is a Victorian-era mining town that has managed to stay afloat long after the mines fizzled out largely due to its scenic location.  Known as the Switzerland of America, the town is nestled into an amphitheater of peaks and glaciers and abounds with outdoor adventure.  

Besides the via ferrata routes which were established and are maintained by the town, the town is also known for its ice climbing (many routes are sprayed and maintained by the town which also sponsors a yearly ice-climbing festival), its many hiking trails, and an abundance of ATV trails on old mining roads.  I loved the Victorian architecture of the main street.  

In Ouray, we stayed in what is probably the world’s cutest motel (it was time for a shower!) which even features its own hot spring soaking tubs.  Soaking, enjoying another canned cocktail, and having a deep philosophical converstation with my bestie—what a perfect way to relax my muscles after the via ferrata!

Thanks Hilary for the photo on the right!

When we woke up the next morning, fog enveloped the peaks.  Because the next stage of our road trip was supposed to be the most magnificent yet, we didn’t want to drive through the fog and miss out on the views.  Instead, we spent the morning at Orvis Hot Springs and waited for the fog to clear.  Because clothing is optional at Orvis, all technology including watches is banned from the soaking pools, so we couldn’t take photos.  But the property was just beautiful: there were several different pools with different water temperatures that were beautifully constructed in organic shapes and lined with stones and fine gravel, meandering paths wound through exuberantly flowering gardens, and scenic bridges crossed over the hot stream.  Fog blocked all views outward and steam billowed up from the pools, creating a perfect little universe sealed off from the real world.  Snow fell on our heads as our bodies were happily submerged in the warm water.  Holding free, bottomless mugs of hot chocolate and coffee, we chatted with some well-traveled and hard-core adventuring fellow soakers.  Soaking at Orvis was a perfect moment that has etched its way into my memory; a new happy place to return to in my mind when needed.  

photo from https://orvishotsprings.com/

The fog lifted by lunch and soon we embarked on the Million Dollar Highway which links the mining towns of Ouray and Silverton over a high pass.  

Along the way, you pass by a number of defunct mines, the evidence of which is everywhere in the form of ghost towns, 

Ironton ghost town

piles of tailings, and decrepit mining buildings and infrastructure.  

On the left, an old mining building below Red Mountain.  On the right, the road was built on stablized tailing piles.

Despite this rapacious past, the valley is today incredibly gorgeous with its constant stream of jagged peaks, glimpses of rushing rivers, and aspen groves then in their first flush of spring.  

The road is not for the faint of heart as its winding, narrow lanes have no guardrails and feature thousand foot drops. 

 
Dropping down into Silverton from Red Mountain Pass, we didn’t realize that we still had two high passes to cross before descending into the Durango area.  This was definitely a “but wait, there’s more!” road trip and these mountain passes just got more and more scenic.  My favorite was Molas Pass where in the summer, there’s a very scenic campground (note to self!).  

After climbing and descending, twisting and turning, singing and belting along to favorite country songs, we rolled into Haviland Lake Campground just north of Durango.  Here, we scored a lakeside campsite despite having no reservation.  We enjoyed cocktails by the water before returning into the trees to make a fire and dinner once the sun set.  As if the day hadn’t been overwhelmingly beautiful enough, we were treated to an incredible array of stars and planets and a setting moon.

The next day started with a spontaneous guided trail ride from the adjacent dude ranch.  We wound through the sun-warmed pine-scented forest and clopped by some mountain vistas.  My horse was very munchy and would have preferred to spend the day grazing the trail’s delicious, long grass, but we managed to get back to the ranch eventually.  We followed up the fun trail ride with a second breakfast of breakfast tacos at a surprisingly tasty restaurant, Hermosa Creek Grill, before hitting the road.  

We skipped Durango due to time constraints (next time!) and as we headed south into New Mexico, the terrain immediately flattened and dried, 

Another photo from Hilary

eventually turning red as we approached Walatowa Slot Canyon on the Pueblo of Jemez’s reservation.  We paid our entrance fee and hiked through the red slickrock landscape 

to entrance of the slot canyon.  There was some greenery in the canyon, a stark color contrast to the fiery red walls.  We twisted through the canyon until we came to the canyon’s head, then turned around.  So beautiful!

Our road trip came to a close in Albuquerque where we checked in to the newly refurbished historic Hotel Andaluz, a small splurge after “roughing it” in campgrounds and cabins.  

Andaluz was built in 1939 by Conrad Hilton (it was the world’s 4th Hilton Hotel) and was designed by architect Anton F. Korn to evoke both the mystique of Spain as well as the Spanish missions and ancient pueblos of the New Mexico.  The two-story lobby features a fountain and lots of handiwork including carved beams and evocative murals and custom elevator interiors.  

The lobby is a spectacular space and we enjoyed some fancy cocktails while listening to live music before heading to Albuquerque’s Old Town for a fabulous New Mexican dinner at Church Street Café (I HIGHLY recommend their chile rellenos with green chile sauce!) which is housed in an adobe structure with courtyard from the 1700’s.

After an incredibly deep night’s sleep, Hilary and I parted ways.  Hilary drove the direct route back to Denver and completed the trip in about six hours while I embarked on the next phase of my summer vacation.  I was sad to end this enchanted road trip.  Yes, it was enchanted because of the incredible scenery, the varied experiences, the falling-snow-while-soaking-in-a-hot-spring.  But mostly the enchantment was due to sharing it with Hilary, a dear friend whom I’ve missed!  I had SO MUCH FUN adventuring with you, Hilary, and I loved loved loved catching up on each other’s lives on a deeper level.  Thank you.  Let’s not wait 20 years for our next adventure together!

 

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