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Road Trip: Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon was a busy place 1,000 years ago. Early great houses (large public buildings) began being built around 800 AD, and construction continued for about 300 years. Today the ruins of the Chacoan great houses stand as a testament to their builders’ culture, brilliant architectural and astrological knowledge, and remarkable ability to thrive in the harsh conditions of the desert southwest. Enjoy your visit.

Where is it?

Chaco Canyon lies in the Four Corners region of the US in northwestern New Mexico. (Four Corners is where the corners of the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet.) A town called Nageezi is the closest map dot to the park, but it doesn’t offer much more than a turn off for the road to the canyon, which involves another 24-mile trek, and part of the road is very bumpy gravel. But getting there is half the fun, right?

On the (smooth) road to Chaco Canyon.

Besides being a national park unit, Chaco Culture National Historical Park is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a designated International Dark Sky Park. Features of the park include:

  • Visitor center, museum, park film
  • Bookstore/gift shop
  • Nine-mile-long Canyon Loop Drive – open to motor vehicles and bicycles.
  • Three additional bike trails.
  • Four backcountry trails – permit required.
  • Gallo Campground, featuring 32 individual and two group sites which can be reserved through www.recreation.gov. RV, tent, and car camping is available with some restrictions and no hook ups.
  • Periodic night sky events, and the park also features an observatory.
  • Periodic ranger led tours or talks.
  • Seasonal hours apply.
  • Admission fee applies.

Access the park’s website here.

Chaco Canyon Visitor Center

Many Roads Led to Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon was a regional center for trade, and an elaborate road system covering hundreds of miles connected the area’s great houses. The map below shows the great houses and the roads. Chaco Culture National Historical Park, formerly Chaco Canyon National Monument, protects the 16 great houses in and around the canyon. The park’s great houses are the best preserved prehistoric architectural structures in North America. Additionally, archaeological and anthropological studies of the site have resulted in the discovery of over 1.5 million artifacts, most of which are in the care of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

A glimpse inside the park’s museum.

The new Chaco Canyon Visitor Center and museum opened in 2017 after years of planning and construction. Artifacts from the park’s collection as well as some borrowed from other museums were to be displayed in the park’s museum. Unfortunately, the heating and air conditioning system does not provide the proper climate controls needed to preserve the artifacts. Now, several years later with no resolution to the climate control issues in sight, empty display cases line the walls of the museum.

Some of the display cases feature reproduction pottery such as the jar shown above.

Despite the fact that the museum didn’t have original artifacts, it did provide us with a lot of interesting information about the canyon, its inhabitants, and the great houses.

The Great Houses

Builders of the great houses quarried stone and carried timber from many miles away. They also constructed dams, waterways, and stairways. Chaco Canyon’s great houses are sacred to many Native American tribes.

Hungo Pavi was occupied from AD 1000 – 1250s and remains unexcavated.

Hungo Pavi

Chetro Ketl is the second largest great house in Chaco Canyon and was occupied from AD 950 – 1250s. With 400 rooms, it covers 5.5 acres (2.3 hectares) which actually makes it the largest in terms of surface area.

Chetro Ketl practically blends into its surroundings.
Chetro Ketl’s back wall.
Petroglyphs on the mesa wall between Chetro Ketl and its closest neighbor Pueblo Bonito.

Pueblo Del Arroyo was occupied from AD 1075 – 1250s. Unlike other Chacoan great houses, Pueblo Del Arroyo does not have a great kiva (communal meeting place or possible ritual site). Perhaps its people shared Pueblo Bonito’s great kivas, as the two great houses sit just a few hundred yards apart.

Pueblo Del Arroyo
Archaeologists who excavated Pueblo Del Arroyo in the mid 1920s uncovered only about half of the great house.

Pueblo Bonito

The largest of all great houses, was occupied from AD 850 – 1250s and was the first Chacoan great house to be excavated.

Pueblo Bonito as seen from the trail.

Archaeologists believe that Pueblo Bonito was the convergence point of the roads leading to Chaco Canyon. The four story, D-shaped structure featured about 800 rooms, 32 kivas, and four great kivas. Its number of occupants remains debatable due to the lack of trash piles and burial sites. Some theorize that the huge great house was used primarily as a ritual site, thus the four great kivas.

In 1941, 30,000 tons of rock slid off of the mesa’s face and destroyed about 30 of the pueblo’s rooms. The Chacoan builders of the great house knew a rockslide was possible and had built supporting masonry walls just in case. Remarkably, Threatening Rock as it was called, held stable for centuries before it finally gave way.

View of the pueblo and the rockslide.
It is hard to tell how big the pueblo is from ground level.

For size and scale purposes, the aerial photo below shows the great house and the rockslide debris. Credit for the photo goes to Bob Adams of Albuquerque, New Mexico via Wikipedia.

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Aerial view of Pueblo Bonito.

More Canyon Highlights

Casa Rinconada Community was occupied from AD 1075 – 1250s and is considered a village rather than a great house. The village features the largest great kiva in the canyon.

Casa Rinconada Community’s great kiva.

From wayside information: Unlike the monumental Chacoan great houses, the villages along this trail are more modest. Yet both the great houses and the villages were built and occupied during the same period. Hundreds of these small villages and communities have been discovered clustered around Chacoan great houses. The role of the great houses isn’t clear. Perhaps they served a central purpose: ceremonial, economic, and administrative, and the small village communities supported those efforts.

Ruins of the Casa Rinconada Community.

Una Vida is another of Chaco Canyon’s great houses and was occupied from AD 850 – 1250s. Basically untouched, Una Vida has had little excavation.

Ruins at Una Vida

According to archaeologists, Una Vida was two to three stories tall and had 100 ground floor rooms and kivas. Additional rooms surrounded the plaza. Interestingly, a jewelry workshop was found at Una Vida along with pottery from Mesa Verde which is now Mesa Verde National Park.

Petroglyph panel at Una Vida.

Desert sand and vegetation preserve most of Una Vida and its great kiva, so it looks much like it did when it was discovered in 1849. Una Vida is reached via a 1-mile out and back trail that starts at the visitor center.

Wetherill Cemetery

A lonely patch of sandy scrubland is the final resting place of Richard Wetherill, his wife, Marietta, and several others.

Wetherill Cemetery

Richard Wetherill was a Colorado rancher, but he had a passion for ancient puebloan culture and was an amateur archaeologist. He is credited with coining the word Anasazi to describe the ancient ones who occupied the ancestral pueblo dwellings of the southwestern US and is also credited with rediscovering and excavating some of the dwellings at what is now Mesa Verde National Park.

Richard Wetherill

Wetherill established a homestead in Chaco Canyon where he assisted in excavating Pueblo Bonito under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History. He ran a trading post in the canyon until his death. Click here to learn more about Mr. Wetherill and his mysterious murder.

Fajada Butte

Rising approximately 440 feet (135 meters) from the canyon floor, Fajada Butte is the predominant natural landmark in Chaco Canyon. It is also sacred to the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo peoples, and it is home to the most significant petroglyph in the canyon: the Sun Dagger.

According to the park: Atop Fajada Butte Chacoan skywatchers commemorated the movement of the sun and the seasons. Sunlight passed between three boulder slabs onto a spiral petroglyph to mark the sun’s position on summer solstice, winter solstice, and the equinoxes. 

In recent years, scientists have noticed a change in the light pattern on the spiral due to slipping of the boulder slabs. They suspect that the slipping could be from human-caused erosion to the base of the rocks, and as a result access to Fajada Butte is prohibited.

See a photo of the Sun Dagger here.

Wildflowers

We were fortunate to visit Chaco Canyon when many wildflowers were blooming. We hope that we have identified them correctly. Click on any image in the gallery below to view as a slideshow.

Thank you so much for joining us on our Chaco Canyon road trip! We appreciate you more than we can express. We’re closing the post with one of the friends we made on our visit to the park.

Common blotch-sided lizard

Want to see more in New Mexico? Check out these great destinations:

New Mexico’s Salinas Pueblo Missions

Pecos National Historical Park

Albuquerque to Taos Road Trip: Things to Do

Safe travels, y’all!

Mike and Kellye

As always, we strive to be as accurate with our information as possible. If we made a mistake, it was unintentional. (Hey, we’re only human!) Our opinions are our own.

©2023

 

 

 

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Casa Grande Ruins

Casa Grande might have been a family home, or it could have been a trade center. Perhaps it was a religious complex or an astrological observatory. The truth is that nobody knows, but a trip to this intriguing national park site will leave visitors with an admiration for the ingenuity of the Ancient Sonoran Desert People as well as a lot to wonder about.

Where is it?

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument is located at 1100 W. Ruins Drive in  Coolidge, Arizona, which is about a 1-hour drive from either Phoenix or Tucson. The park features:

  • Visitor center
  • Museum
  • Introductory film
  • Self-guided tours of the site
  • Periodic guided tours – check with the park for dates and times
  • Covered picnic tables
  • Free admission

Access the park’s website here.

Casa Grande

Why is Casa Grande Significant?

Occupied from 450 AD to 1450 AD, Casa Grande is part of what was once a community of Hohokam (pronounced: hoho-kahm) people near the Gila River in south-central Arizona. In fact, archaeologists have found evidence of several similar communities in the area, though none have a structure like Casa Grande. Considered one of the largest prehistoric structures in North America, Casa Grande was built sometime between 1300 AD and 1350 AD. The site’s first recorded history comes from the journals of Jesuit priest Father Eusebio Kino, who arrived in 1694 and gave the Great House its name. Although, by that time the site had been abandoned for almost 250 years.

The people who lived in the Casa Grande community were farmers who grew gourds, corn, beans, tobacco, and cotton. Interestingly, an elaborate system of irrigation canals provided water for the crops and the people. The park also features a mound that is believed to have been a sports arena or some type of ball field used for the same type of games that are known to have been played by the Aztec people of Mexico. These unique sports fields have also been found in other area villages. Since the people who lived at Casa Grande left no evidence of a written language, little is known about them or where they went when they left the site.

Wooden beams and iron bars were used to stabilize the walls of the structure when the first repair efforts began in the 1890s.

The Great House

Casa Grande is built of caliche (kuh-leechee) which is a hard clay like substance made up of mud, sand and calcium carbonate and is found underneath the topsoil in dry areas such as the Sonoran Desert. Dry caliche can be as hard as concrete which is probably why the structure has survived for so many centuries.

Perhaps the Ancient Sonoran Desert People dug up the caliche while digging their irrigation canals, and then carried it to the construction site in baskets. 

Detail of the caliche.

The Community

Other remains of the Casa Grande village.

Archaeological evidence suggests that in addition to farming, Casa Grande’s people also made pottery, implements, and arrowheads. Archaeologists also know that the Hohokam people were traders. Known trade items include small copper bells, parrots, and crop seed that came from Mexico. Shells from California, which were used to make jewelry, have also been found. As cotton farmers, the residents of the Casa Grande community were also weavers. Woven cotton items likely would have been a prime commodity for trade.

Undated historical photo showing the village.

The park’s visitor center has a wonderful museum with exhibits showing some of the pottery and implements found at Casa Grande. Between 1860 and 1880, the village was on a stagecoach route originating from a railway station about 20 miles away. Unfortunately, stage passengers who stopped at the site not only vandalized the structures, but they also collected souvenirs and scratched graffiti into the walls. We can only imagine how many priceless artifacts were pilfered before the government stepped in to protect the site.

TheFlorence stage at the south side of the Casa Grande between 1888-1899. (CG-5030)
National Park Service photo of a stagecoach at Casa Grande circa 1888-1889.

Establishment of a Park

Archaeologists and anthropologists who visited Casa Grande in the late 1800s urged the government to repair and protect the site’s structures. Their convincing worked, and in 1889, congress voted to protect the site from further vandalism and erosion and began some repairs such as the rods and beams we mentioned previously.

West wall of the Casa Grande c.1880
West wall of Casa Grande, 1880. National Forest Service photo.

Three years later, President Benjamin Harrison set aside one square mile of land surrounding the Great House as the first federally protected prehistoric and cultural preserve in the U.S. and called it Casa Grande Reservation.

West wall of Casa Grande, 2023.

President Woodrow Wilson designated Casa Grande Ruins as a national monument in 1918. An electrical powerplant, the visitor center, paved park road, and paved parking lot, as well as a new steel shelter for the Great House were all completed in 1932.

Casa Grande’s 1932 steel shelter is still in great condition today.

We were fortunate to have been able to join a ranger talk during our visit to the park. One of the most fascinating parts of the presentation was the history of the steel shelter. Designed by renowned architect Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., the structure can withstand hurricane force winds and allows airflow around the structure while not obstructing visibility of the ruins. Its four slanted legs are actually drainpipes that allow water from the roof drain into underground pipes and away from the Great House. Now, that’s ingenious!

We will close the post with one more historic photo of the Great House, courtesy of the National Forest Service.

The east side of the Casa Grande c.1900
Casa Grande circa 1900.

Thank you for taking the time to visit Casa Grande Ruins National Monument with us!

While you’re here, you might want to check out these other great national monuments:

Fort Union National Monument

Devils Tower Road Trip: Things to Do

Craters of the Moon National Monument

Safe travels, y’all!

Mike and Kellye

As always, we strive to be as accurate with our information as possible. If we made a mistake, it was unintentional. (Hey, we’re only human!) Our suggestions are for places that we’ve heard good things about but haven’t visited personally, and our opinions are our own.

©2023