The road we've traveled.
The road ahead. We have 25 miles to go before we get to Chaco Canyon, all on road like this. Or worse.
(Not to mention the hour lost coming back when we got lost and drove around these roads in the dark.)
Deb's examining the ground here. She thought it looked like volcanic ash, but that grey dirt is actually very fine clay.
The ash/clay mountain.
More of the ash/clay mountain. Some interesting rock formations there on top.
Fajada Butte.
The Anasazi had a solar and lunar calendar thing up on top of this, just to the right of the knob near the left-center. (You should be able to see it better when you enlarge the picture.)
Due to a huge number of people tramping up there, the stones of the calendar thing have settled. The butte is now closed to traffic.
The res car. It looks cleaner than it is. For some reason, in this photo, it looks white.
The cliffs opposite the butte.
The walls of Hungo Pavi. Hard to distinguish from the dirt and the cliff behind it, isn't it?
The butte, as seen from Hungo Pavi.
Two sets of walls at Hungo Pavi. There were a lot of times when there was so little space between a set of walls. I'm not sure exactly why. Sometimes the walls were from two rooms which didn't adjoin each other.
Deb standing in a room.
A sagebrush growing amidst the ruins. The cliffs are in the background.
A different angle.
Me. Just to show you how thick these walls are. My arm doesn't quite reach across the wall.
Looking through the window. (Camera focused on the window.)
Looking through the same window. (Camera focused on the wall beyond the window.)
The wall is 3 stories tall.
The view through another window.
Another ruin. This is Chetro Ketl.
Pretty deep pit there in Chetro Ketl. Maybe a storage bin?
A weird T-shaped door in the room. At Pueblo Bonito, we got to go through the rooms and squeeze through the doors. Dunno what that cylindrical thing is. I'll have to go back sometime.
Another small door. Er, window?
The colonades are a unique feature, probably influenced by the Aztecs. (There is evidence of extensive trade between Chaco and the Aztecs.) It looks like somebody decided they didn't like the colonades after all and filled in the space between the columns.
A view of the canyon walls on the opposite side. There are some ruins there, too, but we didn't get the chance to see them.
A close-up view of the wall. Note that in the center, they used larger stones and used smaller stones decoratively on the outside.
Another view of the wall.
Chetro Ketl has a huge kiva. (A Kiva is a mostly-underground room used for ceremonial purposes.)
A view of some of the structures on the floor of the kiva.
The circular holes around the top probably were there for beams supporting the roof. Two tourists view the kiva. I included them in the photo so you can see the scale of the kiva.
The entrance to the kiva.
Another photo with tourists so you can see the scale. This time it's not a scale of how deep the kiva is, but how wide it is.
Another photo of the structures on the floor of the kiva.
Excavations under some of the rooms reveal a previous layer of rooms. This is a kiva underneath some rooms. (Chetro Ketl is built on a high man-made hill. Tons of dirt were brought in to build up the hill, but I guess other things make up the bulk, too.)
The protruding stones from this building were probably used as scaffolding to help builders climb up the wall.
Several smaller kivas.
A close-up of the stones in the wall. They are really quite small. The thin ones there are about as thick as my pinky finger.
Looking, um, I don't know where. Through a door, maybe? A gap in the wall?
The Talas rooms, behind this pueblo. (A talas is a collection of rocks from a rockfall. There's a talas right behind these rooms.) You can't see it, but the Talas room had the steps which probably formed a ladder going halfway up the cliff. From there, handholds were carved into the sandstone and steps towards the top of the cliff. A road to a diffent Great House went right over the cliff here.
The circular indentations probably supported timbers for rooms abutting this cliff.
A close-up so you can see the glyphs carved into the wall. (Can you see them?)
A view of Pueblo Bonito from here. (Imaging of the ground between Bonito and Chetro Ketl indicates that the whole area was probably covered with rooms. There were over 600 in Pueblo Bonito alone at its height.)
A window in Pueblo Bonito.
Same window, same view, with a flash. Doesn't make a difference.
Same window, I think. Different angle.
This is Threatening Rock. It's called that because it used to be threatening to fall over the pueblo. It had separated from the cliff and was just hanging there.
It came through on its threat 60 years ago, smashing dozens of rooms in the pueblo. The inhabitants of Pueblo Bonito used to put prayer sticks in the chasm between the rock and the cliff so that it wouldn't fall. I guess that worked.
A view from the top of the rubble of what used to be Threatening Rock over Pueblo Bonito.
Another view from the same place. You can see the wall buckling out and being braced in place. Some walls collapsed due to excavation.
Another view. The circular rooms are kivas.
You can see how the wall is tapered. It's intentionally built so thick at the base if they were going to add other stories to the building.
Headless Deb. Small door we went through to enter the rooms.
Smaller door we managed to crawl through.
The corner of a room. On the left side were large logs, probably spruce. To the right are smaller logs, probably willow or juniper. They were overlaid at right angles to support the floor of the next story.
Second story door. You can see the smaller logs above it to support the third floor.
A photo of a room with the cliff in the background.
Same room, same window, different angle.