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Published: April 27th 2010
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Keeping with the tradition of dragging the children and half of our possessions into the wild blue yonder during the worst possible Spring weather, we pointed the truck and newly obtained pop-up camper into the 30mph headwind this weekend and headed south to new pastures. While we are well-versed in the lay of Utah, Arizona and Colorado lands, New Mexico presents a large blank area on our mental maps. Perhaps it is the less-than-inspiring visual gauntlet between our house and said destinations that has thus far deterred extensive exploration to the south, perhaps it's the easy attractiveness of the wild and beautiful spaces in every other direction. For whatever reason, we just don't get down that way very often.
So we headed for Chaco or more distinctly, the Chaco Culture National Historic Park.
While cathedrals were being erected in Europe and the industrious, rice-fed people of Angkor were constructing their huge temples, the ancestral puebloans of the SW US were busy in the 12th century building Chaco, which allegedly served as a ceremonial central meeting place for people in all directions. They had no written language and therefore the whats and whys of what happened back in the day
is left largely to conjecture and what science can glean out of what was left behind. After having visited many many Anasazi sites in the 12 years I have lived out here you can usually come up with an explanation of why certain things were built in certain places, but as we arrived in Chaco and looked around we found ourselves feeling bemused about their choice of location. OK, the climate might have been a LITTLE different back then but today the wide, desiccated canyon, dry wash, and insanely harsh continental climate...with all of the choices out there close to perennial water, narrow protected canyons, lush grazing or farming areas...WHY on earth HERE?
I'll leave that to the experts. More importantly I wondered why the hell WE were there.
The horrid wind didn't help us appreciate the place. We knew it was going to be windy so that wasn't a surprise. But man, it was BLOWING. I kept thinking that I should attach a string to wee Addy so that when the gusts came along and blew her off her feet I could fly her like a kite. We set up our camp quickly, hoped the wind wouldn't
blow over the new tenement on wheels and headed off to do some site-seeing.
The scale of the pueblos at Chaco are really quite impressive and in their excavated state you can appreciate how it might have looked when bustling with activity. Like visiting the temples of Thailand after seeing the ancient ruins of Angkor, you can try to get a grasp of what a living, breathing Chaco must have looked like when the walls were plastered and painted, commerce was happening at a clip and the canyon was filled with the voices of thousands.
The astroarchaeology of the place is always interesting. Without a whole lot else to do at night they did a thorough job of watching the stars, sun and moon and much of what is built and drawn is aligned in some way to celestial patterns. There have been books written and television programs created demonstrating the alignments in computer-generated models. Perhaps most well-known is the sun-dagger (check out
)
a solar timepiece that marked the coming of both summer and winter solstices (solsti?). A shift in the rocks means the daggers no longer align as they once did and visitors are not allowed on Fajada Butte any longer but the pictures taken of what was once the fully-functional dagger are pretty cool.
So we dragged the kids from one pueblo to another until we'd had enough of the not-decreasing wind and headed back to camp. We were all grumpy - the wind was getting under everyone's skin, we were trapped in the camper, the kids were bouncing off the walls...going outside was just frigid and the definition of unpleasant so we just hung out and snapped at each other till the sun went down. It was even too windy for a campfire. The evening program at the visitor center provided a nice respite from each other and confinement.
Saturday dawned cloudless which was a vast improvement over the cloudy freezing cold-ass skies of Friday and that relentless sun made the 30mph winds just a teensy bit more tolerable. Todd and I slept like crap; as Todd put it 'it was like sleeping on the Cornelia Marie'. All night the wind punched violently at the camper which bothered the children not at all but being the light sleeper that I am drove me friggin' insane. GAH We all know how chipper and happy
I am on no sleep.
We relocated the camper in the morning to a spot further up the canyon and positioned nose-first into the wind and then headed out for the guided tour of Pueblo Bonito, the largest pueblo in the park. Our attention spans lasted a solid minute and a half before we bolted to self-guide ourselves through the ruin. After that we headed up onto the Pueblo Alto trail which uses a natural staircase to get you to the top of what at first glance seems to be an impenetrable cliff band. Had a nice hike in the sunshine and hunkered down next to one of the ruin walls to have an almost-wind-free lunch.
I'll give Chaco props - it is the first and only park in the NPS family that I have come across so friendly to bikes and dogs! Dogs are allowed to, get this, GO ON HIKES with you. I was shocked.
By the time we got back from our hikes the wind, blessedly, was beginning to quit. We started happy hour a little early to celebrate. By dinner it was done for good and the kids put about 100 miles on
their bikes riding around the campground. After dark Maisy and Todd wandered down to look through the observatory telescopes which are always fun; Maisy came back excited to have seen Saturn's rings and a mega-zoom-in on the moon.
Sunday morning we leisurely packed up camp reveling in the total windlessness of our situation, and wandered down the Wijiji trail. It's nice to finish strong after what was a terribly trying first 24 hours but as always, it was well worth the effort and aggravation and I feel ready to face another work week as a result.
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