Chaco Canyon National Historic Park, in a bottom of the San Juan Basin, lays prone and yellow against the relentless sky. Climb its cliffs and look openly toward the San Juan Mountains, the Chuska and the La Plata Mountains on the northern horizon. When you see only low puddles in the Chaco Wash below you, imagine the full muddy flow of the San Juan River, exiting this open place for points lower and more westerly, imagine people struggling with their water supply for hundreds of years in this unlikely spot.
Chaco Canyon intrigues us because people built lots of huge sandstone buildings there almost a thousand years ago. The location has little to recommend it, and everyone who visits over the years asks, “why here.” Why build big complex buildings over four centuries in a dry place with no forests, only a weak stream, and vast areas of desert in every direction. Why here? Why craft intricate rockwork and curved walls. Why not settle near wet mountains where green grass waves in mild winds?
Granted, the Chaco area may have looked different then. European livestock, managed by the later arriving Navajo people and others, overgrazed the San Juan Basin, destroying vegetation over millions of acres. Formerly green areas now are sandy and dry with few species of plants surviving the constant exotic animal onslaught.
The Chaco great houses are huge, complex buildings with exquisite masonry. The more we learn about them, the less we seem to know about the people who built them. We don’t know for sure what these buildings were for. Many show signs of little actual habitation. The environment couldn’t possibly have supported much of a population year-round. If the buildings were not residences like other Pueblos in the Southwest, why build them? Why put in the labor of hauling logs a hundred miles, building big buildings with rock that had to be hewn stone by stone to make perfectly flat walls?
Visitors focus on the buildings. We wonder what we can learn about ourselves by bending our imaginations around centuries of secrets. Yet I was struck not only by the buildings but by the dry wash and the yellow cliffs that lean over the many great houses on the canyon floor. Skeletons of cottonwoods planted by the Civilian Conservation Corp rattle in the usually dry wash. Wind whistles through junipers on the rims of the cliffs.
Our minds falter at the numbers when the ages of desert cliffs are uttered near our ears. We hear “millions”, and we think about the fleshy promises of tomorrow instead. We plan our escape, or we force our minds to climb a timeline back into the recesses of human-less landscapes, swampy tropics, and inland seas. How could these yellow cliffs have been born of swamps and big forests, saltwater lapping ripple patterns on shallow beaches as a long band of ocean covered this place intermittently and the whole continent was hung farther south?
Look at those shattered remains of Threatening Rock among Pueblo Bonito’s walls. Look at those ripple marks on some of the broken rock. Remember your barefoot shallow warm water adventures as a child on rippled sand in ankle deep water. Look across 75 million years to similar ripples now frozen by time on a rock that the cliffs have discarded.
These cliffs and the sloping sands at the base of Fajada Butte are a memorial to the deep past. They are the abandoned evidence of a deeply tropical, humid world that retreated into desert as untold ages rolled quietly across the Southwest. They are tombstones for a lost world.
We need only think of the Florida coast today, or the Louisiana swamps to imagine the world that sifted its sediments into rivers and seas, piling high over vast times, to create the solid cliffs so stony and dry in the hot afternoon.
The early Puebloans who built their city in Chaco, and built great houses across the basin, used the seafloor remains as building blocks. They left here 900 years ago and moved to the Rio Grande Valley and the high plateau at the base of the La Plata Mountains, today’s Mesa Verde National Park. Archaeologists find architectural evidence of Mesa Verde and Chacoan influence on the Pajarito Plateau at Bandelier National Monument. People moved around with ideas of how to shape rock into culture in their minds.
Sitting near a flaming red inflorescence of cactus flower, I realize curious people have made some sense of this hallway of time, this yawning hardness of rock in decay that is Chaco Canyon. We arrive at ages for passive rocks, for crumbling buildings, for our own aging bodies.
The wind gusts again as it has for millions of years. Sand blows, ravens reel and minutes grind into years.
Tom Ribe
