House on Fire

House on Fire granary

2 miles round trip, 100 feet elevation gain
Difficulty: Easy
Access: Good gravel road to trailhead, no parking fee

Carved into Cedar Mesa, an archaeological wonderland in Utah's Bears Ears National Monument, Mule Canyon holds a number of Ancestral Puebloan ruins including the House on Fire granary. Cedar Mesa was once a thriving community of Ancestral Puebloans, who built residences and storage space along the walls of the many canyons carved into the mesa. While the scale of individual ruins here are dwarfed by the cities built at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, the ruins of Cedar Mesa are a window into the everyday life of Ancestral Puebloans. This hike visits the House on Fire granary, a small set of storage structures in Mule Canyon. While the structures are small and not particularly impressive, their picturesque setting at the base of an overhanging cliff makes this a pleasant and easy hike to experience a slice of why Cedar Mesa is worth preserving. This area is not particularly developed for tourism, so signage is poor; it's important to know where you're going before heading out.

I hiked to House on Fire during a November road trip to the Utah Canyonlands with my mother. House on Fire is a bit removed from the standard tourist routes around Moab, making it a much quieter alternative than hiking near Arches or Canyonlands. From Moab, it's a bit of drive south along US Route 191 through Monticello to Blanding; after passing through the town of Blanding, we turned right onto Utah Route 95, which took us west through Butler Wash and across Comb Ridge to Cedar Mesa. After climbing onto Cedar Mesa, the road crosses Mule Canyon by a bridge; soon after this bridge and just past Milepost 101, an unmarked gravel road heads off to the right. We took this gravel road, following it briefly as it descended into Mule Canyon. The road crosses Mule Canyon on a raised ridge; this is the trailhead. We parked along the side of the road here and then descended down a path on the north side of the road that dropped us down to the floor of Mule Canyon.

The canyon was initially quite wide, its grassy floor surrounded on both sides by low sandstone walls. The grade was flat over the entire course of the hike except for brief uphills to reach the granary itself at the end and to return to the road. Juniper and pine dotted the canyon.

Mule Canyon

As we hiked through the canyon, the walls of the canyon narrowed, bringing the trail into the wash. The hike was extremely quiet: we saw no one else, our only companions being deer browsing in the canyon.

Deer in Mule Canyon

The trail was straightforward, simply following the twists and turns of the bottom of the canyon. A mile from the trailhead, the canyon made a sharp bend to the north at the foot of impressive sandstone cliffs on the north side of the trail. Looking up, we spotted the House on Fire granary at the base of the cliff.

House on Fire granary

The trail turned here and made its way up the slickrock to the granaries themselves. With just five grain storage compartments, this site is far from the scale of the most impressive cities and cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans. The granaries do not even have roofs as they're built into the space beneath a rocky overhang. The sandstone patterns leading away from the entrances of these granaries, however, glow orange in afternoon lighting, appearing almost as streaks of fire emerging from the structures: hence the name.

This is an important archaeological site that can only be visited today because generations before us have not destroyed it; do not deface or alter or remove anything from this site.

Ancestral Puebloan granaries

Ancestral Puebloans built a civilization in the Four Corners region about a thousand years ago. Their key architectural achievements are at New Mexico's Chaco Canyon and Colorado's Mesa Verde, where their impressive masonry skills helped raise cities in the desert and on the sides of the cliffs. This culture was influential on Cedar Mesa: the masonry techniques used at the larger archaeological sites were also used here, although Cedar Mesa's sites mostly consist of smaller communities. There is a great density of former Puebloan communities on Cedar Mesa, many of which consisted of living quarters, kivas in which the Puebloan people held ceremonies, granaries for storing food, and middens that served as the rubbish heaps near these communities. At House on Fire, it's only possible to see granaries, but there are many more ruins both further down Mule Canyon and above the canyon rim on Cedar Mesa.

Cedar Mesa- along with the two hearts of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon- were abandoned by their inhabitants around 800 years ago. The descendants of this civilization- the Pueblo natives of today- mainly live along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, with the Hopi and the Zuni being two of the last outposts of these people in the deserts of the Colorado Plateau. Changing climate or invaders might have been among the reason they left their Cedar Mesa homes; today, the landscape of southeast Utah is significant to the Ute, Navajo, and the Pueblos of the Hopi and the Zuni. Together, these tribes pushed the federal government to protect Cedar Mesa and the lands near the Bears Ears Buttes just west of Blanding. In 2016, President Barack Obama designated over a million acres of this landscape as Bears Ears National Monument, giving firmer federal protections to the House on Fire and thousands of other Ancestral Puebloan ruins on Cedar Mesa. After taking office, President Donald Trump's administration moved to shrink this national monument, ultimately reducing the preserved area down to about 200,000 acres. The new borders of this national monument still include House on Fire but now exclude many of the other canyons on Cedar Mesa that hold the region's archaeological treasure trove.

After retracing our steps to the trailhead, we drove just a little further west on Utah Highway 95 to the Mule Canyon ruins roadside exhibit. This Ancestral Puebloan settlement is on Cedar Mesa, just above where the House on Fire sits down below in Mule Canyon. The site consisted of a small set of apartments linked to a restored kiva; from here, there were views to the Abajo Mountains by Monticello.

Mule Canyon Ruin

On our way back to Blanding, we watched the sun set over the impressive sandstone wall of Comb Ridge, an impressive line of sandstone cliffs running just east of Cedar Mesa. Luckily, this natural feature is still protected by a national monument designation.

Comb Ridge

Comb Ridge

This is a short and easy hike to a nice Ancestral Puebloan site with no crowds. The signage is poor for reaching this trailhead, but anyone who does their homework can explore this corner of Cedar Mesa to check out this picturesque ruin. If you've been curious over the political fight over Bears Ears' future, here's a good place to start to learn about and explore this remarkable landscape.

Box Canyon and Lomaki Pueblos

San Francisco Peaks rise behind the Box Canyon Pueblo

0.5 miles round trip, 50 feet elevation gain
Difficulty: Easy
Access: Paved road to trailhead, Wupatki National Monument Entrance Fee required

This very short and very easy stroll visits three picturesque pueblos in Arizona's Wupatki National Monument. It's a good way to see structures built by the Ancestral Pueblo people of the area and has only a fraction of the visitors of the larger Wupatki Pueblo in the same national monument. Lomaki Pueblo offers a chance to wander through a pueblo, including a rare opportunity to pass through two T-shaped doors. Views of the nearby San Francisco Peaks make this an overall enjoyable way to spend a half hour or so. The park's proximity to US 89 and the Grand Canyon makes this a good stop on the way to more famous sights on the Colorado Plateau.

I visited Wupatki National Monument after a trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Whether coming from Flagstaff or the Grand Canyon, one approaches Wupatki on Highway 89 either heading north or south, respectively. About 25 miles north of Flagstaff or 12 miles south of Gray Mountain, there is a turnoff to the east for Arizona Highway 395 heading towards Wupatki; I took this turnoff and followed it east for four miles into Wupatki National Monument. I took the turnoff to the left (north) for Box Canyon and Lomaki Pueblos, which quickly came to a parking lot for this hike.

The trail is extremely straightforward: the mostly flat path winds for a quarter mile through the desert out to Lomaki Pueblo, passing two structures on either side of a small box canyon along the way. Side trails lead up to both of the small pueblos next to the canyon. All three pueblos are clearly within sight of each other. Lomaki Pueblo is the largest of the three structures, although it too is a small pueblo of just a handful of rooms. Impressively, all three of these structures have not been reconstructed; they have only been stabilized to prevent further deterioration. This means that the beautiful masonry of all three pueblos is original.

Box Canyon and Lomaki Pueblos

These pueblos lie on the southwest edge of the area inhabited by the Ancestral Puebloan culture; indeed, the societies that inhabited these structures show influences of both the Ancestral Puebloans to the north and the Sinagua to the south. Although these structures are clearly similar to and influence by the Pueblo architecture at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, there are notable differences: pueblos in Wupatki do not have kivas, circular ceremonial rooms that are a distinguishing cultural characteristic of the Ancestral Puebloans. Instead, Wupatki Pueblo, which lies some distance east of Lomaki Pueblo, has a ballcourt, which ties it by cultural influence to the Sinagua and the civilizations of Mesoamerica. However, the structures at Wupatki retain many characteristics of Ancestral Puebloan architecture: notably, Lomaki Pueblo has two T-shaped doors. As the pueblos here can be explored, Lomaki offers a rare experience to walk through the T-shaped doors and explore inner rooms of a pueblo.

Lomaki Pueblo

Like the Box Canyon Pueblo, Lomaki sits at the edge of a small box canyon. It's likely that the inhabitants of these pueblos built check dams in the canyon to store water; the wash might have been used for agriculture as well, to plant the corn, beans, and squash central to diets of pre-contact Americans.

T-shaped door in Lomaki Pueblo

The southwest horizon from Lomaki Pueblo featured the snowy summits of the San Francisco Peaks and other volcanoes of the San Francisco Volcanic Field. The San Francisco Peaks, capped by Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona, were the most dominant peaks in the scene; these mountains are actually the remnants of an ancient stratovolcano, which has since collapsed. O'Leary Peak was a separate high peak to the east of the San Francisco Peaks and Sunset Crater, a cinder cone, stood east (to the left) of O'Leary Peak. The Citadel Pueblo was visible below the silhouette of O'Leary Peak.

Sunset Crater, O'Leary Peak, and the San Francisco Peaks

In fact, a number of pueblos were visible atop nearby mesas as I surveyed the landscape. The most notable of these was undoubtedly the Citadel, a closely pueblo right off the main road in Wupatki that I visited after leaving Lomaki Pueblo. The density of pueblos in this area is remarkable, a reminder that the landscape of the Colorado Plateau was not so much a wilderness as much as it was an inhabited, human landscape during the heyday of Ancestral Puebloan civilization.

The Citadel

The Wupatki area was populated in the eleventh century; competing explanations for why people chose to settle in such a desolate location both involve nearby Sunset Crater, which erupted around that time. It is possible that the Wupatki area was settled by people escaping lands to the south that were devestated by the eruption; or it's possible that the eruption actually attracted immigrants from elsewhere, as cinders and ash from the Sunset Crater eruption improved water retention in nearby soils, improving agriculture.

The question of why the Ancestral Puebloans left their houses is asked everywhere pueblos are abandoned in the Southwest. As with the other pueblos at Chaco and Mesa Verde, it's not clear here; a changing climate or the arrival of nomadic tribes might have had an effect. While it's not clear why they left, it appears that today's Hopi are among the descendants of those who used to live in this landscape: Hopi histories hold that their ancestors migrated to their current home in the mesas of the Painted Desert from Wupatki, the Verde Valley, and other areas of abandoned pueblos.

South Mesa

Great Kiva of Casa Rinconada

4 miles loop, 500 feet elevation gain
Difficulty: Easy-moderate, a short segment of rock scrambling necessary
Access: Poor dirt road to Chaco Culture NHP; Chaco Culture NHP entrance fee required, self-issue backcountry permit required

South Mesa is perhaps the least frequented of all the backcountry trails in New Mexico's Chaco Culture National Historical Park, which preserves the landscape at the heart of the Ancestral Pueblo civilization in the American Southwest. As Chaco Canyon is already a park that's a bit off the beaten path, South Mesa sees very few hikers. This hike has fewer archaeologically important sites than the nearby hikes to Penasco Blanco, Pueblo Alto, and Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, but it has the best views of the San Juan Basin of any hike in the park and offers close up looks at an unexcavated Chaco great house and the largest kiva in Chaco Canyon. Besides visiting the great house of Tsin Kletsin and the villages and great kiva of Casa Rinconada, the hike also passes through the more traditional Southwestern scenery in the box canyons along the trail.

There's a short stretch of scrambling on this hike in which you must climb through a crevice between two rocks. Most hikers in reasonable shape and have some rock scrambling experience will find this segment of the hike to be doable.

If you plan to hike this trail, I advise that you pick up the Backcountry Trail Guide at the Chaco Culture NHP visitor center, which gives detailed descriptions of the sites of archaeological interest along this hike as well as on the Pueblo Alto, Penasco Blanco, and Wijiji Trails; it's well worth its $2 price.

I hiked to South Mesa during the second day of my two day stay at Chaco Canyon. The park is a three hour drive from Albuquerque; the easiest way to reach it is to take US 550 northwest from Bernalillo, turning left at Road 7900 just past the Red Mesa gas stop a few miles before reaching Nageezi. Signs directed me to the park from US 550, taking me first down a nice paved road (Road 7900) and then down a decent gravel road (Road 7950) that then turned into a bumpy, washboarded dirt road that required driving through a wash. During dry weather, the road is probably doable for most vehicles, though it is not an easy drive; if water in the wash is high, the park may be inaccessible. The road became paved again at the park entrance; I turned right for the Park Loop Road just past the visitor center and followed the one-way road past the turnoffs for Pueblo Bonito and Penasco Blanco to the parking lot for Casa Rinconada. I parked here, filled out a self-issue backcountry permit, and started my hike.

Two trails branch out from the parking lot, different branches of a short loop hike through Casa Rinconada. I started by taking the trail to the left, which led to a number of former villages inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo people. Unlike the other famous archaeological sites in Chaco Canyon, Casa Rinconada is not a great house: this site consists of a few villages and a massive great kiva. The great kiva lies along the return trip; on my way out, I checked out the villages. One of the most easily apparent features of these villages was that their walls were constructed to the same degree of sturdiness as the walls of the great houses: comparatively, these walls were quite thin. While contemporary scholarship on Chaco Canyon holds that the great houses of the canyon had relatively small populations and did not serve as cities, the canyon population of the Ancestral Pueblo is still estimated to have been between three and ten thousand, mostly in villages such as the ones at Casa Rinconada.

One of the villages at Casa Rinconada

Casa Rinconada

Each of the three villages contained a number of rectangular rooms; each also contained kivas. At one of the sites, it appeared that perhaps three layers of kivas had been built atop each other over time.

The third village lay at the foot of the south wall of the canyon. At this village, the South Mesa Trail branched off from the Casa Rinconada Trail; I left the wide path through Casa Rinconada and followed the South Mesa Trail as it immediately began an uphill climb. After making an initial switchback, the trail arrived at the foot of a rock wall; the trail followed a narrow crevice between two rocks to surmount this obstacle. This section required some rock scrambling; the space in the crevice is quite small so I'm not sure that everyone can make it through easily.

Scramble through rock crevice

After climbing through the crevice, the trail made another switchbacks and came to the top of a layer of sandstone. From this vantage point, I could see much of Chaco Canyon and many of the great houses in the canyon. The villages and the great kiva of Casa Rinconada were visible close by and I could see the sprawling complexes at Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, and Pueblo del Arroyo on the north side of the canyon. The walls of New Alto were visible atop the north rim of the canyon and even Kin Kletso and Casa Chiquita were faintly distinguishable from the canyon's sandstone walls.

Casa Rinconada great kiva, Pueblo Bonito, and New Alto from South Mesa

From here on, the remainder of the ascent was fairly gentle. The trail headed south, gradually climbing in elevation through the saltbrush desert covering the mesa. Views of the canyon to the north constantly improved, with views that at one point stretched as far as Penasco Blanco on West Mesa, meaning that every Chaco great house save Hungo Pavi, Una Vida, and Wijiji were in the viewshed of this hike. As I climbed higher up the mesa, I entered a landscape dotted with junipers, one of the few places in the park with any trees. At one point, I had a particularly nice view down a small box canyon cut into South Mesa down into the main trunk of Chaco Canyon.

Box canyon on the north side of South Mesa

Soon, the trail entered a flat desert landscape of saltbrush, cacti, and Mormon tea. Gazing out in all directions, I could see the Chuskas, Jemez, and snowy La Plata Mountains on three horizons. Tsin Kletsin came into view, resting atop what seemed to be the highest point on the mesa.

Tsin Kletsin

A mile and a half from the trailhead, I came to Tsin Kletsin. Tsin Kletsin is one of the smaller great houses, with only 70 rooms and three kivas. Like many of the other great houses, Tsin Kletsin is built on an elevated mound. The site remains largely buried by the desert, with just a few McElmo style walls of large sandstone brick masonry marking its presence on South Mesa.

Tsin Kletsin

The view of the Sacred Landscape of the Ancestral Puebloans from Tsin Kletsin is as impressive, if not more so, than the great house itself. Much of the San Juan Basin is visible from here: the La Plata Mountains, part of Colorado's San Juan Mountains, make up the snowy ramparts of the northern horizon. These mountains lie even further north than Mesa Verde and likely formed the northern reaches of Chaco influence. The great house of New Alto was visible in the same direction as the La Plata Mountains. To the west were the Chuska and Carrizo Mountains, which lay on Navajo land in the state of Arizona; these mountains would have separated Chaco's influence from that of the Ancestral Pueblo culture at Canyon de Chelly. To the northwest, the very tip of the spire of Shiprock poked above the horizon: Shiprock is a massive monadnock, a volcanic remnant that soars out of the flat desert of the Four Corners. The Continental Divide, and thus the eastern bound of the San Juan Basin, lay between Chaco and the Jemez Mountains, which were visible on the eastern skyline.

La Plata Mountains in the distance, New Alto faintly visible in the foreground

The Ancestral Puebloans likely took advantage of the extraordinary viewshed from Tsin Kletsin, using the great house as a signaling post. Archaeologists have suggested that a multistory kiva at Tsin Kletsin may have been used for sending fire or smoke signals to great houses many miles away; it's possible that messages could have been relayed through this method from great house to great house, allowing nearly instanteous communication between Chaco and Ancestral Puebloan settlements as far away as Chimney Rock in Colorado. Tsin Kletsin's location was chosen in part to fall on a perfect meridian with Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo Alto, part of the obsession with north-south alignments in the Ancestral Pueblo culture.

Leaving Tsin Kletsin, I chose to follow the long route, 2.5 mile route back to make a loop, heading left at the trail intersection with the South Mesa Trail. The trail began to descend gradually through the saltbrush top of the mesa and came to some beautiful views of the vast expanse of the San Juan Basin to the south as the angle of descent on the mesa steepened. I also enjoyed views of the colorful sandstone cliffs along the south side of West Mesa.

San Juan Basin

Soon, the trail came to the top of a wide box canyon. Here, the trail followed a Navajo sheepherder path as it descended from the top of the mesa to the gap separating the main body of South Mesa from the rocky fin that bound the box canyon to the west. The trail was not always well defined here, following cairns rather than an established path. Views of the San Juan Basin and both South and West Mesa were excellent throughout this segment of trail.

Box canyon on the west side of South Mesa

From the gap, the trail made a sharp switchback and dropped down to the canyon floor, exiting the box canyon from its mouth to the north. The box canyon portion of the hike was particularly scenic: sandstone cliffs hemmed in the canyon, with pretty alcoves formed by overhanging sandstone on the sides of South Mesa.

Once out of the box canyon, the single track trail from Tsin Kletsin joined a wide dirt road leading through South Gap back into Chaco Canyon. This dirt road parallels the roads that the Ancestral Puebloans built through South Gap from Pueblo Bonito. Current archaeological interpretations of Chaco Canyon's role as a regional ceremonial center might have meant that pilgrims to Chaco Canyon would have walked this same route through South Gap en route to the grandest great houses at Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl.

South Gap

As I passed through South Gap, I saw Pueblo del Arroyo in the canyon itself. The dirt road made a wide right turn around the northwest edge of South Mesa after I passed through South Gap. After making the turn, Pueblo Bonito came into sight across the Chaco Wash and the great kiva of Casa Rinconada, built on an elevated mound, rose directly in front of the trail, still a few hundred yards away. I continued on this wide dirt trail until it reached the base of the Casa Rinconada kiva and rejoined the Casa Rinconada Trail. I turned left at this junction and followed the Casa Rinconada Trail up to the edge of the kiva.

The great kiva of Casa Rinconada is the largest kiva in Chaco Canyon at about 20 meters in diameter. It's unique in that it stands alone from any great house: the canyon's other great kivas are part of larger complexes at Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl. Kivas, which are still used as ceremonial structures today by the modern Pueblo peoples, likely filled a ceremonial role for the Ancestral Puebloans as well. This kiva could have fit as many as 400 people, all under a massive roof made of wood and earth. Huge T-shaped doors bookend the kiva, with stairs leading up from the subterranean kiva's ground floor up to the elevation of the mound outside. The kiva's excellent condition is due more to reconstruction efforts than to some miracle of preservation.

Great kiva of Casa Rinconada

After circling this huge structure and appreciating the engineering knowledge and manpower necessary to construct it, I finished the last section of the Casa Rinconada Trail to return to the parking lot.

Penasco Blanco

Penasco Blanco rises above Chaco Canyon

8 miles round trip, 250 feet elevation gain
Difficulty: Moderate; potentially difficult/dangerous crossing of Chaco Wash may make trail impassable
Access: Poor dirt road to Chaco Culture NHP; Chaco Culture NHP entrance fee required, self-issue backcountry permit required

Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, New Mexico's Chaco Canyon was the heart of a civilization built by the Ancestral Pueblo people. On the floor of this sandstone canyon, the people of Chaco developed architectural and engineering techniques to build multistory masonry great houses spanning acres, recorded astronomical events on the canyon walls, and conducted trade with settlements throughout the Southwest and with cultures based as far away as Central America. While the great houses of Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl are likely the best known and most impressive of the canyon's many archaeological sites, many more great houses in various states of excavation and a pictoral record carved by the Ancestral Pueblo can be found on the trail to Penasco Blanco, the longest backcountry hike in Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The trail visits four great houses: Pueblo del Arroyo, Kin Kletso, Casa Chiquita, and Penasco Blanco. Some of the highlights of this hike, though, are the pictographs and petroglyphs: the segment along the Petroglyph Trail visits the most extensive collection of rock art in the canyon and the trail passes by the Supernova Pictograph, a depiction of the 1054 formation of the Crab Nebula.

This trail is flat for most of the way, with all of the more difficult parts of the hike near its end. The hike can be difficult or dangerous and impassable if there is any water flowing in the Chaco Wash. Although the wash is dry for much of the year, rainstorms or snowmelt can create a temporary river and make access to Penasco Blanco inadvisable.

If you plan to hike this trail, I advise that you pick up the Backcountry Trail Guide at the Chaco Culture NHP visitor center, which gives detailed descriptions of the sites of archaeological interest along this hike as well as on the Pueblo Alto, South Mesa, and Wijiji Trails; it's well worth its $2 price.

I hiked to Penasco Blanco during the first of my two days at Chaco Canyon. The park is a three hour drive from Albuquerque; the easiest way to reach it is to take US 550 northwest from Bernalillo, turning left at Road 7900 just past the Red Mesa gas stop a few miles before reaching Nageezi. Signs directed me to the park from US 550, taking me first down a nice paved road (Road 7900) and then down a decent gravel road (Road 7950) that then turned into a bumpy, washboarded dirt road that required driving through a wash. During dry weather, the road is probably doable for most vehicles, though it is not an easy drive; if water in the wash is high, the park may be inaccessible. The road became paved again at the park entrance; I turned right for the Park Loop Road just past the visitor center and followed the one-way road out to the turnoff for the Pueblo Alto/Penasco Blanco Trailhead. Here, I turned right again and followed this spur road to the parking lot at its end.

I filled out a self-issue backcountry hiking permit before leaving the trailhead. Instead of heading directly off on the trail to Penasco Blanco, I chose to first visit Pueblo del Arroyo, a great house that lies right next to the trailhead parking area. A short gravel path led to the great house, then circled around and through the structure. Pueblo del Arroyo was built in sight of two other Chaco great houses, Pueblo Bonito and Kin Kletso, and had perhaps as many as 300 rooms, making it one of the larger great houses at Chaco. Its name translates to "village on the wash," which makes sense due to the great house's location adjacent to the Chaco Wash. Similar to Pueblo Bonito, the site has been fairly thoroughly excavated, meaning that much of the remaining structure is visible. Pueblo del Arroyo was built during the 11th century, well after the construction of Pueblo Bonito and Una Vida. If you're simply looking for a great house in decently well-preserved state with most features visible, you don't need to travel far from the trailhead: there are many more cleanly excavated kivas and rooms visible at Pueblo del Arroyo than at any other of the great houses along this hike.

Pueblo del Arroyo

After doing a walkthrough of Pueblo del Arroyo, I returned to the parking area and started down the wide road trail towards Kin Kletso. In a third of a mile, I came to Kin Kletso and did a quick walk around the structure. It's not possible to enter the great house of Kin Kletso, but some of the walls and elevated kivas remain in decent shape and can be seen from the boundary of the site. Additionally, the large sandstone blocks used in this McElmo masonry style building can be appreciated without a close-up approach. The name of the house means "yellow house" in the Navajo language.

Kin Kletso

At Kin Kletso, there is a fork between the Pueblo Alto and Penasco Blanco trails. I took the left fork that led along the valley floor towards Casa Chiquita and Penasco Blanco.The trail followed the base of the cliffs along the north side of the canyon, dipping briefly into an arroyo as it crossed a small wash, and passed a precariously balanced hoodoo on the north wall of the canyon.

Hoodoo along the trail

Just beyond the hoodoo, at the point where the trail left the side canyon and reentered the main canyon, I came to Casa Chiquita, about a mile from the trailhead. This small great house was largely unexcavated and didn't have many remaining features to explore. Like Kin Kletso, Casa Chiquita was built late during the period of Ancestral Pueblo habitation at Chaco: it was built during one of the most phases of construction at Chaco, which ended not too long before the canyon's great houses were abandoned altogether. It's likely that the great houses were built along the north side of the canyon to maximize the amount of solar energy received; Casa Chiquita is built rather precariously at the very foot of the cliffs along the north wall.

Casa Chiquita

Leaving Casa Chiquita, the trail dipped into another small arroyo before returning to the main canyon. From this part of the trail, I was able to see the walls of Penasco Blanco, the destination of the hike, rising on the rim of the south side of the canyon.

Penasco Blanco viewed from floor of Chaco Canyon

The path past Casa Chiquita followed a Navajo wagon road later improved by Richard Wetherill, an amateur archaeologist who spent his later years in Chaco Canyon excavating the ruins here after earlier discovering Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. Wetherill's tendency to sell artifacts that he collected to collectors rather than preserving them for future scientific study was a contributing factor to Congress's decision to pass the 1906 Antiquites Act, which gave the president broad powers to immediately protect landscapes of historical or scientific significance through a national monument designation. In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt declared Chaco Canyon a national monument, giving a measure of federal protection to a critical piece of American heritage.

Although the Ancestral Puebloans built the great houses of Chaco, they were long gone by the time European American explorers arrived in the area. Instead, the Navajo, a nomadic people related to the Athabaskans of Canada, migrated into the region around the sixteenth century. Early European forays in the area usually included Navajo guides, who relayed to them Navajo names for the land and its people. Anasazi, which was the previously common academic name for Ancestral Puebloans, was a Navajo word that meant "ancestors of our enemies," referring to their more recent clashes with the modern Pueblo people. In the mid-1860s, it appeared for a while that the Navajo would also lose their homelands in this region: during the middle of the Civil War, Colonel Kit Carson launched a fierce scorched earth campaign against the Navajos to uproot them from their lands. When the Navajo chose to go into hiding rather than surrender to the United States, Carson rampaged through the Four Corners, burning Navajo villages and destroying whatever food supplies and agricultural fields he found. In the spring of 1864, the Navajo surrendered to Carson and were led on the Long Walk of the Navajo, a brutal forced march through the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to internment camps at Bosque Redondo, on the Great Plains in eastern New Mexico.

Conditions at Bosque Redondo were horrid, with the Navajo held on the same land as hostile Comanche and Apache peoples. By 1868, conditions were bad enough that even the US government recognized that the situation was unsustainable, and the Navajo were allotted 3.5 million acres and allowed to return to their homeland. Through this traumatic experience was born a sense of Navajo identity, an identity strong enough that the Navajo Nation today holds over 16 million acres, more than any other of the United States' indigenuous peoples.

Half a mile past Casa Chiquita, the trail branched into two parallel paths, with the Petroglyph Trail leading off to the right. I followed the Petroglyph Trail, which closely stuck to the base of the north wall for the next half mile, providing close up looks at the most extensive collection of petroglyphs in Chaco Canyon. I referred frequently to the Chaco Culture NHP Backcountry Trail Guide (available at the visitor center) to identify and learn about the rock art along this portion of trail. Many of the petroglyphs were fading into the rock, subject to centuries of weathering and erosion. One remarkably preserved petroglyph lay on the underside of an overhanging rock 35 feet above the canyon floor and showed a kachina.

Ancestral Puebloan Petroglyph

Most of the deeply-etched petroglyphs were left by the Ancestral Puebloans, who built the great houses of Chaco Canyon. However, there were also plenty of rock art left by later inhabitants and visitors. A few Navajo petroglyphs depicting battles on horseback were lightly etched into the stone with thin lines, contrasting with the more clearly imprinted Puebloan designs. One section of wall appeared to have been appropriated by European settlers as a visitor's log: here, names have been carved on the wall in English, with dates attributing them to visitors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some Navajo petroglyphs carved more recently show the influence of European expansion into the Southwest: one petroglyph appears to show train tracks.

Ancestral Puebloan Petroglyphs

The Petroglyph Trail rejoined the Penasco Blanco Trail half a mile after it started. I continued forward towards Penasco Blanco, crossing through another small arroyo. From here, the trail left its position hugging the north wall of the canyon, venturing out into the center of the canyon. About three miles from the trailhead, the trail made a turn to the left and dropped down into the Chaco Wash. Here, the trail crossed the wash itself: your ability to continue on the hike will depend entirely on the conditions of the wash itself. The Chaco Wash flows only occasionally: it's usually dry, but summer thunderstorms or winter snowmelt can cause create temporary flow. As a National Park Service sign warns here, crossing the Chaco Wash when it is flowing can be very dangerous: if there's any water flowing, you should turn back. If you're unsure prior to your hike whether the wash will be flowing, you can check from any of the bridges across the wash on the loop road. Even if you're used to fording river elsewhere, it's important to understand that the principal danger of fording Chaco Wash comes from the sticky mud and the possibility of sinking into and becoming stuck in the mud.

Here's a case of not doing as I do: the wash had low flow when I came to it, so in spite of warnings, I decided to cross anyway. After establishing that the mud in the river was much too sticky for a wading ford of the wash, I chose to jump the creek instead, making it safely across. You should really, really not do this and instead just turn back if you see water flowing here.

Safely across the wash, I found myself at the base of the south wall of the canyon. The Supernova Pictograph lay high above me, painted on the bottom of an overhanging section of cliff that has protected it from the elements for nearly a millenium. On July 4, 1054, a new light appeared in the sky from the constellation Taurus. A dying star some 6500 light years from Earth had exited its stardom with a supernova, releasing an explosion of stellar material that lit up the night sky. The supernova was visible even during the daytime for 23 days and was visible in the night sky for about two years. Astronomers in Song Dynasty China and the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, the world's most scientifically advanced civilizations at the time, made detailed note of this "guest star." The Crab Nebula, which is not visible by the naked eye, is a cloud of interstellar gas and dust that is the last reminder of that event.

Ancestral Puebloans would have seen this supernova light up the night sky as well. Archaeologists examining this pictograph have interpreted this pictograph as a record of that supernova, with the star and the crescent moon recording relative positions of the two celestial objects. The supernova occurred during the height of the Ancestral Pueblo civilization and would almost certainly have been noticed by a people who meticulously tracked the movements of the sun and the moon and built their great houses to align with the movement of heavenly bodies.

Supernova Pictograph

After passing the Supernova Pictograph, the trail began to head east along the south wall of the canyon and started climbing up the the multitiered sandstone benches. Networks of tiny caves and crevices had been eroded into the canyon's sandstone walls here, making for a landscape filled with interesting shapes.

Caves along the trail to Penasco Blanco

The trail made a sharp switchback and then became less defined than before, following cairns across the rocky benches and ledges on the south side of the canyon. After circling around a small box canyon, I finally climbed up to the flat grasslands atop West Mesa. Looking forward, I could see the many walls of Penasco Blanco; looking back, I had a view deep back through Chaco Canyon; I could spot Pueblo del Arroyo and Pueblo Bonito in the distance and the walls of New Alto rising on the north side of the canyon.

Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo visible

Ahead lay the walls of Penasco Blanco, the westernmost of the great houses of Chaco Canyon. Although Penasco Blanco is largely unexcavated, there's much more to see here than at similarly unexcavated great houses such as Pueblo Alto or Tsin Kletsin: the unique round structure of Penasco Blanco was discernable as I walked around the site. Many parts of its walls remained standing and a section of standing wall included a fairly well-preserved door. As with Una Vida and Pueblo Bonito, the construction of Penasco Blanco spanned hundreds of years: work on the great house began in the tenth century and did not end until the zenith of Ancestral Puebloan civilization in the early tweflth century. This great house shares the beautiful, finely-pieced together masonry of Pueblo Bonito rather than the coarser, large-block McElmo masonry of Casa Chiquita and Kin Kletso. Penasco Blanco also lies on a straight line with both Una Vida and Pueblo Bonito: while Bonito is the largest and grandest of the great houses in Chaco Canyon, Una Vida and Penasco Blanco form bookends at either end of the canyon.

Penasco Blanco

I wandered around the site, checking out the wide circular plaza and the masonry at the doors and windows. I caught a first quarter moon rising above the walls on the west side of the house while walking the loop around the area.

Moonrise over Penasco Blanco

From the west side of Penasco Blanco, there was a sweeping view to the west of the Chaco Wash joining the Escavada Wash with the Chuksa Mountains far in the distance delineating the worlds of Chaco Canyon and Arizona's Canyon de Chelly.

View from Penasco Blanco

After surveying the landscape and studying the beautiful Penasco Blanco, I retraced my steps to the trailhead.

Pueblo Alto

Pueblo Bonito viewed from above

5.5 miles loop, 350 feet elevation gain
Difficulty: Moderate, multiple areas of rock scrambling necessary
Access: Poor dirt road to Chaco Culture NHP; Chaco Culture NHP entrance fee required, backcountry self-issue permit required

The meticulous architectural design of the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon is nowhere more evident than when viewed from above. The geometric shapes of the great houses, the mazes of rooms and kivas, and the sheer size of the complexes is much more obvious from a bird's eye view. The Pueblo Alto loop skirts the north rim of Chaco Canyon above the two most celebrated Chaco great houses, Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, providing an astonishing view of the heart of this ancient civilization. Hikers who make it out to this corner of New Mexico for this loop will also get to visit the great houses of Kin Kletso, Pueblo Alto, and New Alto, and see a variety of alterations that the Ancestral Puebloans made to Chaco landscpe. The hike requires a few sections of rock scrambling and squeezing through narrow cracks in rock, and may be inappropriate for those uncomfortable with rock scrambling or heights. If you have time for only one backcountry hike at Chaco Canyon, make it this one; I consider this to be one of the best hikes covered on this blog.

For cultural and historical background on the great houses of Chaco Canyon, especially of the two great houses viewed from above on this hike, check out an earlier post on the short hike through Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl. The Chaco Culture NHP visitor center sells a Backcountry Trail Guide that covers interesting features of this hike, as well as the South Mesa, Penasco Blanco, and Wijiji Trails, for just $2- it's a good investment to get more out of your hikes.

I hiked this trail early in the morning, leaving the campground before first light and arriving at the gate for the Park Loop Road at its opening time, 7 AM. Once the gate was opened, I proceeded down the one way road and turned right at the turnoff for Pueblo del Arroyo and backcountry hikes parking. I parked at the end of the spur road, filled out a self-issue backcountry permit at the trailhead, and started down the wide trail behind the gate. Chaco Culture NHP is in a fairly remote area of New Mexico; it's easiest to arrive at the park from Albuquerque via US 550. Detailed directions are on the Pueblo Bonito hike description.

The first 0.3 miles of the hike were along a flat, wide unpaved road that is also open to bicycles. At the end of the 0.3 miles, the trail came to Kin Kletso, which means "Yellow House" in the Navajo language. As the Ancestral Puebloans left no written record, the original names of the great houses of Chaco are unknown; all modern names are either in the Navajo language or Spanish. When I arrived at Kin Kletso, the walls of the house were bathed in sunrise light, giving them an almost unearthly glow.

Sunrise light on Kin Kletso

Unlike many of the other great houses at Chaco where it's possible to walk into the site, at Kin Kletso it was only possible to view the great house from the outside. Kin Kletso is notably built with McElmo phase masonry, a late Chaco style from the last period of construction in the canyon that used larger stones and lacked the finesse of some of the earlier masonry; it is similar in style to the masonry at Mesa Verde.

At Kin Kletso, I took the right fork, leaving the trail that continued down the valley for the trail that circled to the back of the great house. Behind Kin Kletso, I came to a second junction: here, the Pueblo Alto Trail broke off from the path around Kin Kletso and began climbing quickly up the base of the cliffs. I followed the Pueblo Alto Trail, scrambling at times as I ascended to the foot of sheer sandstone cliffs. Here, it seemed momentarily as if the trail disappeared: the, looking to my right, I saw the path run through a narrow crevice between two massive sandstone walls. I squeezed and scrambled through the crevice, taking a little over a minute to climb through the crack and reach the rim of the canyon.

Scrambling route to reach the top of the cliffs

The trail emerged on a sandstone bench, up an initial set of cliffs from the canyon floor but still a level down from the top of the canyon. There were good views of the canyon bathed in morning light from the rim and an especially good view of Kin Kletso's layout. From here, I could make out the rectangular shape of Kin Kletso and see into its elevated kivas in a way that I was unable to from the canyon floor.

Kin Kletso's elevated kivas viewed from above

From here on, the trail was marked by cairns as it followed the canyon's north rim, making it occasionally difficult to follow. The trail generally followed the canyon rim but often made detours around box canyons of varying sizes. The hike was mostly over exposed sandstone and areas of loose sand and soil. As the trail headed eastward, Pueblo del Arroyo came into view: this great house is situated right next to the Pueblo Alto trailhead and is one of the more impressive and thoroughly-excavated great houses after Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl. From the rim here, I could see through South Gap, a cut between the South and West Mesas, to see all the way across the barren New Mexico desert to Hosta Butte, far to the south. The landscape was overwhelming quiet, the silence broken only by my own footsteeps and the howl of coyotes.

Pueblo del Arroyo and South Gap

Signs along the trail pointed out some of the interesting features along the trail: one sign atop a rock indicated that the rock below had shrimp burrows, trace fossils that date to the time of the sandstone's formation, when what is today New Mexico was once a shallow sea. This sedimentary geological history has also this part of New Mexico with layers of coal and pockets of oil and gas. Oil and gas development is steadily encroaching on the park and the narrative of the Chaco landscape: just days before my visit, the Bureau of Land Management greenlighted a $3 million oil and gas lease on land near the park.

Other signs marked a stone circle likely left by the Ancestral Pueblo and pecked basins carved into the sandstone that undoubtedly resulted from human activities. One sign indicated that I should have been able to see masonry terraces built by the Ancestral Puebloans, but despite looking everywhere I couldn't see anything that looked like artificial terraces.

A mile into the hike, I came to a four-way trail junction. Here, the Pueblo Bonito Overlook spur headed slightly downhill to a viewpoint, while the two halves of the Pueblo Alto loop split with the counterclockwise approach heading straight ahead and the clockwise approach that headed directly to Pueblo Alto branching off to the left. I took the right fork first and hiked a hundred meters slightly downhill to the Pueblo Bonito Overlook. The D-shaped layout of the great house was very apparent from this lofty viewpoint. The great house's two great kivas, wide plaza, and many smaller kivas and rooms could all be seen. At the time of its

Pueblo Bonito from the Pueblo Bonito Overlook

Returning to the junction, I decided to hike the trail counterclockwise, following the trail in the direction of the Chetro Ketl overlook. The trail went around a small box canyon and then stayed set back on a bench away from the canyon's ledge, with no views down into the canyon. The trail was at times hard to follow here, with chains of footprints often leading away from cairns. It's important to stay on trail; but at one point, while paying more attentions to the footprints before me rather than cairns, I found myself a few meters off trail at the edge of a cliff with a view down into Pueblo Bonito, where I was able to look down directly into the pueblo's many kivas.

Kivas and rooms of Pueblo Bonito

The next 0.6 miles of trail continued following the top of the bench, with few views down into the canyon. When the trail finally returned to the canyon rim, Chetro Ketl was visible below. This angle showcased the north wall of Chetro Ketl; I found a better angle after circling around a box canyon, from which I could see both the great kiva of Chetro Ketl and its interior tower kiva. The trail followed part of an ancient Chaco road while on the rim above Chetro Ketl, though it's not obvious to the untrained eye (me) how it was possible to tell the old road apart from the surrounding landscape. More easily noticeable were the remnants of a rock ramp that once led from the foot to the top of the canyon. The top and bottom of the ramp still remained at the head of the box canyon, but the middle of the ramp had collapsed in a pile of boulders at the base of the cliff.

Chetro Ketl viewed from above

A little further down the trail, the path made a sharp turn to the east and then climbed to the top of the mesa. Numerous spots here required a bit of scrambling, including a section where the trail passed through a narrow crack between two rocks. This part of the trail isn't for everyone, though most hikers who made it up through the crevice near Kin Kletso in the first place will probably be able to make it through here as well.

Scrambling route to the top of the mesa

Once atop the mesa, the trail made its way steadily northeast, generally following close to the rim of a box canyon. The views along this part of the trail were among some of the nicer views in Chaco Canyon.

Rincon along the trail

Once I reached the head of the rincon (box canyon), the trail made a turn and began to follow the western rim of the same canyon. From here, a sign marked a viewpoint where I looked across the rincon and saw a staircase made by the Chaco people. The Ancestral Pueblo built an extensive road network radiating out from Chaco; their roads were notably straight and often simply ran over obstacles rather than around them. In this particular case, the road out of this canyon led out by a staircase cut directly into the rock. These staircases are found at multiple locations throughout the canyon and can be seen from the main park road near Casa Rinconada, but the Pueblo Alto Trail is one of the better spots to see a staircase up close. The tendency of Chaco roads to run over obstacles suggested some ceremonial significance in the paths chosen: some of the paths line up exactly with cardinal directions. Use of these roads, typically constructed to widths of over 20 feet, remained practical as the Ancestral Pueblo did not transport items by wheeled vehicles or travel through the burden of domesticated animals.

Chacoan stairway

As the trail continued past the box canyon, it began a gentle climb towards the top of the flat grasslands. Looking back, I caught nice views down Chaco Canyon towards Fajada Gap and lonely Fajada Butte, home to Chaco's famous Sun Dagger Petroglyph, a spiral carved into the rock that serves as a marker for the summer and winter solstices and evidence of the advanced scientific knowledge of the Ancestral Puebloans.

Fajada Butte and Chaco Canyon

Reaching the top of the grasslands, I spotted the walls of New Alto rising off in the distance. For the next half mile, I walked through the flat high desert towards New Alto and Pueblo Alto, catching views along the way of the snowy Chuksa Mountains to the west and Hosta Butte and South Gap to the south.

New Alto, Chuksa Mountains in the distance

While New Alto's walls rose clearly above the surrounding landscape, the walls of the largely unexcavated Pueblo Alto were not immediately recognizable as a great house from a distance. Thus, I did not noticed Pueblo Alto until I was more or less right beside the site and could see some masonry sticking out of the ground. I followed the path through and around the Pueblo Alto site, which is for the most part unexcavated. Pueblo Alto is a fairly large great house with a large plaza on its south side. Compared to many of the other great houses, there's not too much to see here, although the pueblo is certainly still significant in Chaco. Pueblo Alto lies on a single meridian line with Pueblo Bonito and Tsin Kletsin on South Mesa, meaning that the three houses form a north-south line. Pueblo Alto was once a single-story great house with a small resident population that served some important ceremonial function: archaeologists have found very few hearths in the large structure, suggesting few permanent residents, but they have uncovered a remarkable amount of broken pottery in the midden (earthen pile) just east of the great house. This broken pottery is potentially from rituals involving breaking pots, mirroring customs still practiced by the modern Pueblo.

Pueblo Alto

Pueblo Alto formed the branch point for the road network heading north from Chaco. The Great North Road, a wide roadway built due north from Pueblo Alto, once stretched across the high desert for at least 40 miles and potentially reached as far as Salmon and Aztec near Farmington and Chimney Rock in Colorado. Over 400 miles of Chaco roads have been mapped; as many of these roads have more or less disappeared into the landscape, identifying them takes an extremely discerning eye. One method of identifying the roads is in changes in vegetation- soil differences between the roads and the rest of the desert leave straight lines of altered vegetation. Another is simply to identify the road traces from air: while satellites perform that job today, early attempts to map these roads included aerial surveillance by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Gazing out over the landscape of the Great North Road from Pueblo Alto, I could see as far as the La Plata and San Juan Mountains to the north and the Jemez Mountains to the east. Huerfano Mesa's peaks poked above the desert to the northeast. Nestled between these mountains was the San Juan Basin, the large flat desert valley of the San Juan River that holds Chaco Canyon at its heart.

La Plata Mountains and the landscape of the Great North Road

Leaving Pueblo Alto, I came to a trail junction where the left fork continued the loop, leading back towards the Pueblo Bonito overlook, and the right fork headed towards New Alto. I visited New Alto to see this small great house with relatively intact walls. New Alto was built at a relatively late stage in Chaco history, around 1100; the canyon was abandoned not too long after the house was completed. New Alto showcases McElmo masonry with its large sandstone blocks in its walls. There are a number of windows and doors at New Alto that have not yet collapsed as well as a small kiva that is largely unexcavated. While New Alto may not have been as significant of a site as Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, or Pueblo Alto, the good state of preservation of its walls makes the site enjoyable to explore.

Unexcavated kiva at New Alto

Walls of New Alto

Leaving New Alto, I returned to the main trail, which turned and headed directly south for the next half mile, descending back down into an intermediate level of the canyon and passing more remnants of Chaco roads along the way. The trail completed the loop at the Pueblo Bonito Overlook; from there, I retraced my steps from that moring and returned to the parking area.

This hike's points of archaeological interest and the good views of the great houses make it an essential part to any Chaco Canyon trip.