Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Chaco Culture National Historical Park, United States

The sandstone walls of Pueblo Bonito glowing orange at sunset in Chaco Canyon.

A remote canyon in the New Mexico desert, home to some of the largest ancient buildings ever raised in North America.

The place

Chaco Culture National Historical Park sits in northwestern New Mexico, in a long, dry canyon carved by the Chaco Wash. Getting there feels remote even by the standards of the American Southwest: the nearest towns are small, and the final stretch is unpaved. The park protects a dense group of ancient stone buildings built by the Ancestral Puebloan people. Several great houses stand on the canyon floor beside a loop road, each with a short trail, so the sites can be visited one after another.

The landscape is high desert: wide skies, sagebrush, sandstone cliffs and very little shade. Summers are very hot, and the rains of July and August can bring sudden storms, while temperatures can swing sharply from morning to night. The canyon is quiet in a way few visitor sites are, and that is a large part of its appeal. There is no food service inside the park, so visitors arrive with water, food and a plan.

Chaco matters deeply to Pueblo and Hopi peoples, who regard the canyon as an ancestral homeland. The sites are fragile, and the park's rules reflect that. Fajada Butte is closed to the public because visitors were eroding it, and the trails are shaped with care. Much of what stands here was built from sandstone quarried nearby and timber brought in from distant forests, which says a lot about the organisation behind the place. Most people spend a half-day on the loop, though the remote trails take longer. Visitors who take the rules seriously tend to get the most from a walk through the ruins.

Its story

Chaco Canyon's story begins long before its famous buildings, with small bands of hunter-gatherers who camped in the canyon and the wider basin thousands of years earlier. Archaeologists have recorded more than seventy campsites from this early period, many marked by stone chips and other traces of daily work. Over time these people became more settled and more skilled. They wove baskets to store wild plants, and some began tending food crops. Slab-lined storage pits show a shift away from constant movement. Those early campsites are not the spectacle most visitors expect, which makes the later great houses all the more striking.

The great building era belongs to the Ancestral Puebloans, whose stone and timber houses rose in the canyon between about 900 and 1150. Builders quarried sandstone, carried timber over long distances, and laid out large complexes with plazas and round ceremonial rooms called kivas. Chaco became a major cultural centre, and its largest buildings remained the biggest of their kind in North America for centuries.

Around 1130 a drought set in that lasted roughly fifty years. Many researchers think the dry spell, combined with pressure on land and food, encouraged people to move away, and the canyon gradually emptied. Their descendants are among the Pueblo and Hopi communities who still see the canyon as part of their own history, and their oral accounts of migration keep that link alive.

What to see

Culture

Chaco Culture is more than an archaeological park. Pueblo and Hopi peoples regard the ruins as ancestral homelands, and they keep oral accounts of migration from the canyon and of their ongoing spiritual ties to the land. Many of those traditions are private, so visitors should not treat the site as a simple display of old stone. The surrounding country is sparsely populated and very quiet, and local communities deserve the same consideration as the buildings. Alcoholic drink is prohibited on the neighbouring Navajo Nation, which lies immediately west of the park, so leave it out of your car. Fragile features are closed to protect them, and the rules you see on the trails are there for a reason. Many visitors walk in the heat without enough water, and the canyon offers almost no shade, so bring both. Do not climb on walls, take anything from the site, or photograph residents of nearby villages without asking first.

What to wear

Chaco Canyon's earliest residents made cloth and cordage from plant fibres such as yucca, and later grew cotton, so textiles have deep roots in the region. Today's Pueblo and Hopi communities keep weaving and dress traditions alive. Ceremonial clothing, often made from cotton and wool, is worn at dances and feasts in the villages, not for visitors, and it should be treated accordingly. Most people wear everyday contemporary clothes, much like anyone else in New Mexico. For your own visit, dress for dry heat and sudden cold: layers, a wide-brimmed hat, sunscreen, and sturdy closed shoes with good grip, because trails run over loose sand and sandstone. Light cotton shirts and long trousers protect against sun and scrub. Choose modest clothing if you visit nearby villages, and avoid anything that reads as costume at a sacred site.

What to eat

Plan it

Best time. June is the driest month, with April and May close behind, so late spring suits walking the trails best. July to September brings the likeliest rain and summer storms that can flood washes. Winter nights can be bitterly cold, and temperatures swing sharply in every season.

How long. 1–2

Getting there. Albuquerque has the nearest major airport, a long drive south-east, so most visitors fly there and drive north-west. Farmington has commuter flights operated in partnership with United. There is no rail or bus service to the park. The final approach is the slow part: a turn off the main highway onto county roads, with the last stretch unpaved, so allow plenty of time. A sedan can manage it carefully.

Budget. low

Tips

Etiquette

Nearby

Sources