Chaco Canyon

Our December trip to New Mexico was not my first trip to the Land of Enchantment. We visited the southern part of that state in early 2017 and I took a solo trip there way back in 2001. The variety and complexity of the landscape and history and culture of that state is just incredible. It's amazing it's not full of tourist but it seemed from everyone I talked to about this trip that New Mexico is off the radar of most people. It's like there's Texas then Arizona and then California. I don't understand it. But I'm also happy for it to be tourist-free.

My 2001 trip to New Mexico has to have included one of the all-time schedule blunders in my vacation planning history. I don't have many, but sometimes when I blow a schedule, I blow it spectacularly. On that trip, I drove down from Denver to spend three or four nights in Santa Fe before heading back to the mile high city and beyond into Wyoming. I planned to spend one of my days in New Mexico driving to Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado with maybe a stop at either Aztec Ruins National Monument or Chaco Culture National Historical Park on the way back. 

The whole idea of that day trip itinerary is preposterous. Santa Fe is not anywhere close to Mesa Verde. How I didn't realize that those two spots are 4-1/2 hours apart by car is beyond me. There was absolutely no way I could possible have driven to Mesa Verde and back and stopped at any other spot, even without construction on the way there that restricted the road I was driving on to a single lane stuck behind a slow-moving truck. If I'm remembering right, this was one of those leave at 6 a.m. and get back at about midnight days that I occasionally used to spend on my trips around the United States. 

I've rued that day ever since. Not so much for Aztec Ruins, but for sure for Chaco Culture. When we decided on New Mexico as our December 2021 getaway, Chaco Culture was at the top of my list. 20+ years is a long time to be rueing. I wanted to stop the rue-age.

Looking east towards Pueblo Bonito from Pueblo del Arroyo.

I would imagine that most people have never heard of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Part of that may be that it's in New Mexico and therefore out of most people's ideas of what a vacation in the United States might look like. Part of it might be that it tells the story of an indigenous peoples' settlement prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World. And part of it might be that it's just absolutely in the middle of nowhere. In fact, that last part is probably the biggest deterrent. 

I thought I had been to some National Park Service properties that were in the middle of nowhere before visiting Chaco Culture but the reality of the situation is I had not. I thought we had gotten ourselves pretty remote from civilization just a day before we visited Chaco Culture by checking out the Gran Quivira portion of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument and in June of 2020 when we made the trip to Hovenweep National Monument in southeast Utah. I was wrong.

Driving to Chaco Culture from Albuquerque seems like a reasonable enough proposition. It's only 155 miles and Google Maps says you can get there in just a bit less than 2 hours and 45 minutes. Take I-25 north for a bit before exiting at Bernalillo and then spending a lot of time on Route 550 before hanging a left on New Mexico Road 7900. Take a right off 7900 onto 7950 and eventually the road will disappear. 

I don't really mean that the road disappears. More like the paving disappears. Now, lest you think I'm some citified idiot who's never driven on a dirt road before, I've spent my fair share of driving on unpaved roads in my time, let me tell you. I used to take dirt roads to work in upstate New York in winter specifically because they weren't as icy as the paved roads. I know dirt roads. 

The back wall of Chetro Ketl and a doorway with remains of floor beams above in Pueblo Bonito. 

But I've never driven on anything like the roads to Chaco Culture. When the paving ends there's a 12 to 13 mile section of dirt road that I'd categorize as your standard dirt road that you can comfortably drive 30 miles per hour or so with maybe some spots where you need to slow down a bit or find the best surface by driving on the wrong side of the road every now and then. Hey...it's not like there's anyone coming the other way. We might have passed one car coming the other way coming and going from Chaco Culture.

That's not the tough stretch. After those 12 to 13 miles there's a final stretch of non-paved road that's about three or four miles long and it's a 15 miles per hour maximum road with most parts at 10 miles per hour. The road is so rough that if you go too fast, it feels like the entire car is going to be shaken apart. Four miles at 10 miles per hour takes a long time. Keep in mind, this is after you've dropped cell service a while ago and you haven't seen another car either going your way or the other way likely for a good bit of time too. Anything happens to your car out there and you are not in a good spot. This place is super remote. I'm sure it deters visitors. A lot.

Then you reach the Park gate and everything's paved. It's crazy. Chaco Culture gets between thirty-some and fifty-some thousand visitors per year (although in 2020 when they closed the Park for a bit, they drew just 8,321 visitors). As a comparison, Great Smoky Mountain National Park hasn't drawn less than 10 million visitors in a year since 2014.

Chaco Canyon, from Casa Rinconada Community looking west to Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo.

OK, so it's remote. I think I've established that. What's the payoff? Why go? Just so you can say you have been somewhere remote? 

Not remotely.

Before Europeans "found" the New World, before the native American pueblos that still exist in New Mexico today were established, there was a thriving civilization centered around what today is the "four corners" of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. The ruins that can still be found at Mesa Verde National Park and Hovenweep National Monument were part of that civilization that existed at that time. We are talking serious large sites that were agricultural in nature and had time for things like religion and the arts. Sophisticated peoples. We are also talking like 1,000 to 1,300 years ago. Not recent history.

Of all the sites of this period, the largest by far is at Chaco Canyon. I knew that before I got here. I knew this was a fairly large canyon that had multiple, multi-family dwellings (for lack of a better term pre-visit) constructed within it. Given that size and scale, it seemed it was probably worth the drive into the middle of nowhere and over roads that shook most bolts and rivets on our rental car loose just a little bit.

I had no idea.

Window opening at Pueblo Bonito (top). Stonework at Casa Rinconada Community (bottom).

A visit to Chaco Culture National Historical Park starts at the Visitor Center. I've been to many, many National Park Service properties and have stopped at or skipped (as I believe is appropriate) the visitor center. At Chaco Culture, it's mandatory because they want to know who is there so nobody gets left behind at the end of the day. I'm not kidding. They do a sweep of the road to make sure all cars are gone by closing time. Don't want anyone stuck in the desert overnight.

After our paid admission (free thanks to our National Park Annual Pass), we were told our visit to Chaco Canyon would likely be a minimum of four hours, one hour each at the main stops of Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo del Arroyo and Casa Rinconada Community. They are joking, right? There's no way we are spending four hours in the middle of the desert within days of the shortest day of the year looking at ancient ruins. I mean, they can't be that big, I'm sure.

I was wrong. I had no idea how big these things are. Multi-family dwellings I was thinking. Umm...no. Not exactly. How about large scale condominiums. 

Pueblo Bonito.

Chaco Canyon was not the only spot in New Mexico we visited with hundreds of years old pueblo ruins in our week in December out west. We stopped at Pecos National Historical Park and the three-site Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument in the couple of days before we made our way out into the desert via those dirt roads. Both Pecos and Salinas Pueblo boasted that their pueblos in their glory days would extend three or four stories high and then left the rest to your imagination based on the foundation ruins barely poking out of the soil. It was honestly difficult to imagine such a thing and the line drawings depicting what life might have been like in the 1600s didn't really help much.

At Chaco Canyon, we didn't have to imagine because those multi-story structures described at the other sites were right there in front of us in real life. Still standing. After more than 1,000 years. It's one thing to read about it on a sign. It's another thing entirely to walk around, above and through it. There's no imagining needed at Chaco Canyon. It's all right there. The impression is honestly staggering. These ruins are huge and incredibly intact. I mentioned earlier visiting Mesa Verde and Hovenweep as contemporary sites to Chaco Canyon. They are nowhere near as massive as this place. As gorgeous as Mesa Verde is with all those ancient dwellings under the cliff edges, Chaco Culture blows it away.

It's the scale more than anything else. I mentioned large scale condominiums tongue-in-cheek as modern comparisons a few paragraphs ago. I wasn't kidding. I see a large dwelling complex with four of five story housing blocks on the outside and two massive interior courtyards with community-use kivas (large underground circular religious spaces) and I think of the condo building I used to live in with 21 stories of residential units and a gym and pool on the roof and shared green space on the ground floor. It's not a far-fetched comparison.

View of the plazas (top) and the great kiva (bottom) at Pueblo Bonito.

We spent the most time at Pueblo Bonito, the largest and most intact of the many communal dwelling structures on the site. And the guidance we received at the Visitor Center was probably right - we did spend about an hour at this property. The four stops we were advised to visit during our orientation talk (and we did visit all four), by the way, are not the only four ruins on the site. They are just the four most easily accessible by car. If you wanted to do a bit of hiking (between about a mile and three miles each way), there are other ruins in the canyon. The overall impression is large scale building after large scale building stretching out for miles. The scale is stunning. The atmosphere in the Canyon in its heyday, with people moving between all the stops in the community must have been impressive, particularly because the Canyon itself would have been far, far greener.

Pueblo Bonito likely dates back to the middle of the 800s at a time when Europe (I know, I shouldn't be bringing up Europe here) was mired in the dark ages. It is D-shaped in plan with thin layer of residential rooms around the exterior perimeter and the public rooms (mostly kivas - about 30!!) and large open spaces inside the complex. It is mostly, but not completely, excavated with a lot of the stone walls still intact, along with some of the wooden floor and roof structural members as well as a lot of the window and door openings. Amazing to think that wood has survived intact for over a millennium, most likely a product of being left out in a place with about zero moisture most months of the year.

One of the best parts about visiting Pueblo Bonito is that you can walk through the rooms. As delicate and fragile as the old walls are, there are no roped off sections of the ruin. Have at it. Go wherever you like. Just be careful of where you step for your own protection and that of the ages old masonry. It is actually such a privilege to be trusted to walk through a place like this. We walked through openings as low as four feet and it is difficult to walk through openings that small without touching the walls themselves.

Walking through is essential. You get a feeling of how someone living here might have moved through the structure. You also get a sense of how compact the floor to floor height was back in the day by measuring the top of your head against the still intact floor beams that still show up in a lot of spots. There would not have been a lot of space for someone close to six feet in height. For sure there would have been a lot of stooping or head-knocking (or both) for me, but I'm also supposing there were not many people my height living there.

Ruined wall at Pueblo Bonito showing the core and veneer in the wall construction.

You can also get a great understanding of how the place was built by walking through Pueblo Bonito. Now admittedly, most of this understanding comes from looking at half collapsed walls. The exterior of the walls were built with a regular veneer consisting of bands of large and small stones facing an irregular core that was built strictly for structural purposes. But there are also parts of Pueblo Bonito where the original floor construction was discovered intact (and likely buried in sand) that can been seen inside heavily rain-protected structures on site. It's informative, but not very visible.

For a better look at how the structure of the floors were built, I'd recommend exploring Pueblo del Arroyo, the next stop along the one way driving loop after the Visitor Center. There are two spots at that site that show this off really well and both are shown below. The traditional way of laying flooring in Chaco Canyon involved three layers: a series of heavy beams seen in most structures that we walked through, topped by a series of lighter spanning members before the flooring itself was laid on top. Incredibly there's one spot you can look down on all three layers of structure at Pueblo del Arroyo. 

A little later in the tour route, there's another spot with a series of broken heavy beams set about two feet above a layer of sand, obviously filling in a room because there's a sliver of door opening in the rear of that chamber. It's amazing how slowly things break down in the desert. These splintered wood members have probably been there in that spot for 1,000 years. 

It is likely impossible to cover all of Chaco Culture National Historical Park in a day. Not properly. And then not even on the longest day of the year. We visited close to the shortest day of the year and our relatively late arrival time combined with thoughts of getting out of the Park at a reasonable time and having to drive on that car-shaking road again had us leaving after a couple of hours. I feel we did Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo really thoroughly. We also walked from Pueblo Bonito east to Chetro Ketl on the petroglyph route and spent some time checking out the largest excavated kiva on the site at Casa Rinconada.

Casa Rinconada is a useful stop because it is not like the larger group houses like Pueblo Bonito. If Pueblo Bonito struck me as a sort of an ancient condominium, Casa Rinconada resembled a suburban neighborhood, with individual dwellings dotting the canyon adjacent a super-sized community kiva. Maybe I'm all wrong with my characterization of the site based on 20th / 21st century comparisons of how we live now, but that's how the place struck me.

I do think that we saw enough to get a really good impression of what the Canyon might have looked like back in the day and I don't know quite what exploring more would have got us. The incredible part about this whole site is that the seven or eight different parts of the Canyon that are open for visitation are that way because they have been excavated. There are likely many more ruins still out there. We can't possibly have the full picture of how significant this settlement was at one time.

I know I wrote this same thought in my Hovenweep post about 18 months or so ago but whenever I visit sites like this, particularly from a culture with no written historical record, I am struck by what the builders of this place might think about me wondering around what they erected with their hands all that time ago. I'm an architect and I've designed buildings that are maybe going to be around for a century or more and that might be on the very long end of their lifespans. The people that built in Chaco Canyon put stones together to make walls and wooden logs to make floors that have stood for maybe 1,200 years or more. And with no maintenance or real preservation (except being buried in sand). That is an extraordinary achievement. I'd love to know that something I created had that level of permanence.

The great kiva at Casa Rinconada (top) and a wall at Pueblo del Arroyo (bottom).

While the buildings they made might have lasted, human habitation in Chaco Canyon did not. In around the 1200s, drought hit the area and it was prolonged enough that it forced those who had created this grand community to leave. It's not difficult to imagine a prolonged drought in Chaco Canyon today. It's literally a desert. I don't know for sure, but when I use the term prolonged it might actually mean from the 1200s until today.

If I'm remembering correctly, when I did a little research about this place in 2001, the conventional wisdom about the people who built Pueblo Bonito and the other great houses was that they were a people called the Anasazi, who had one day just picked up and left what is now the "four corners" area and had mysteriously disappeared, although the Anasazi name was beginning to be removed from descriptions about sites in the area back in 2001. Now, the narrative is that the people who built Chaco Canyon moved south or south and east and became the Zuni, the Hopi and the peoples who built the series of pueblos along the Rio Grande. That explanation makes way more sense than a whole civilization just vanishing mysteriously. I can't imagine how that theory came together.

Our visit to Chaco Culture filled in a huge gap in my personal historical record. It shattered my impression of native American settlements being small communities like I'd seen at Hovenweep and Mesa Verde (I know there's a lot more at Mesa Verde than at Hovenweep but it's nowhere close to the scale of Chaco Canyon). It also put form to what we'd read on signs on this trip and past trips. No longer do I have to imagine what the scale of one of these communities might look like. I've walked through it.

I'm blessed with a reasonably good memory and despite all the years I've been traveling this century, I never forgot that I needed to make it to Chaco Culture someday. It was way different and way better than I ever thought it would be. This is an astonishing place, even with that drive in over the last three or four miles. I'm also glad we went in winter and that, despite the near freezing temperatures, it was a gorgeous day. It's not difficult to get gorgeous blue skies in a place as dry as New Mexico but I think the pictures we took this day turned out great, right down to the snow on the ground.

Last look at Pueblo Bonito in the distance (from Chetro Ketl).

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How We Did It

Chaco Culture National Historical Monument is open pretty much daily. When we visited the Visitor Center was open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the loop road that accesses the ruins was open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. with the last admission to the road by 4:30 p.m. All cars are cleared out at 5 p.m. so I'm not sure why you would enter the loop road that late. You can't possibly just be "in the area". I'm not sure if hours vary by season. Check the Park's website for that information. 

It's worth noting that there is no restaurant in the Park. Bring food if you will be getting hungry for a snack or a meal. It's a long way back out to get some. There's also no fuel in the Park. Make sure you have enough juice to get there and back. There's no gas stations once you get off Route 550.

It's also the desert. Bring water. 

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