Traveling Ancient Roads in New Mexico (or Our Urination Vacation) Part 3: Heading Home and Looking Back

One of the coolest things about Chaco Culture National Historic Site is that you can enter a few of the sites and walk around at your leisure. Many sites with ancient dwellings have rules that you can look but you can't touch. At Chaco, a few of the sites have become the sacrificial sites that visitors can enter and touch and learn from.

Enter if you want... unless you see this sign

So later in the afternoon, once we'd had lunch and recovered from our 6-mile morning hike, we toured Pueblo Bonito. This one is huge and you can walk through all of it! I think we counted 27 kivas - Kivas are circular underground ceremonial meeting spaces. Most of them are small, holding 10 people or so. Chaco's Great Houses boast the biggest kivas I've ever seen, big enough to hold 60+ people. Its like little league fields vs. NFL fields.

Large kiva at Chetro Ketl - those large circular holes in the
ground held ponderosa pine trunks which held the roof up.

The National Park Service has worked pretty hard to maintain these Great Houses, sometimes rebuilding parts of them for our education, and sometimes keeping them unexcavated until future archaeological techniques are perfected. However, some of the maintenance we saw on the Great Houses were pretty funny...


a rain gutter?! Those Chacoans really
were advanced!

support beams holding up an
unprecedented 3-story 1,000 year old wall

Perspective.... the ancient Chacoans were
shorter than my 5ft, 9in self but this was pretty
short!
It is possible that they kept doorways short to
keep warmer air from escaping in the cold
winter months. - M's photo

M checking out the one room that remains dark to maintain
original murals painted on the wall.

Personally, I love petroglyphs and pictographs - rock art to the layperson. More than just graffiti, rock art panels are the enduring words carved by our ancestors, by the caretakers of many of the places that are now part of the National Park Service. I am drawn to them like Homer Simpson to donuts and beer. I photograph every thing I see, catalogue what I can, and listen to what they tell me.

M's photo: petroglyphs are pecked into rock, like this swirl above

We found rock art next to almost every single Great House we came across. Most of the art is well known to visitors of the site but I still got a thrill each time I came across some. Its like reading a book - the book has been read by others but you still read it and take away your own meaning.


The canyon itself, Chaco Canyon, had 10+ Great Houses within it's 1,000 foot rock walls. Chaco Wash runs through the middle of it and this may have played a major role in why this area was chosen for such construction.

Looking down on newer smaller Great House from the top of the canyon

The canyon served as a crossroads for travelers from the four far-flung corners of the world. To the southwest there were openings heading to Monument Valley, to the northeast the great Chaco Road headed towards the ponderosa-covered mountains of northern New Mexico and Colorado.

M's photo - the famous Fajada Butte stands
at the entrance to Chaco Canyon, welcoming travelers
for the last 1,000 years.

The canyon still serves as a crossroads of culture. People from all over the world, for all types of reasons, come to Chaco. Some are searching for answers to one of North America's mysteries (where did the Ancestral Puebloans go?), some come for a love of the southwest, and some simply come because they want to check off Chaco on their National Parks Passport book. Whatever the reason, we all leave with the same thing: more questions than answers. Isn't that what travel is really all about?

Never Stop Exploring