Chaco Canyon and Saturn

Candy: Hot. Rough road. Amazing structures. Milky Way in full glory.

These are all indicative of the Chaco Canyon national park. What an amazing area.

Tim and I decided to drive to Farmington, New Mexico, around 8:30pm on Monday. Thirty minutes later we were in the car and 6.5 hours later, we were climbing into bed at a hotel about 40 minutes north of Chaco Canyon.
Our impulsive departure, which was originally intended for Tuesday, turned out to be a great idea. We arrived at Chaco Canyon around 2pm on Tuesday, and after a quick stop at the visitor's center to get a camping site for the night and a map, we claimed site #18 in the campground and proceeded to drive the 9-mile loop around the canyon, stopping to explore the various "great houses," dwellings, and petroglyphs.

Here's our temporary petroglyph. I call it "guy with trail guide reads while girl with camera looks for pictures."

I should mention for those of you who haven't been to Chaco Canyon that it is a collection of ruins of "great houses" and villages built and inhabited by the Chacoan people between 800 and 1200 A.D. They were quite advanced in their engineering, building thoroughfares 30 feet wide connecting all of their villages and aligning all of their dwellings to take advantage of the rising and setting of the sun and moon.

The Chacoans were very concerned about the shape of their villages, and they took great care to build each one in a similar fashion with a long, rear wall, a plaza with several circular structures, and three to four stories of living quarters.

They also had a great, generational knowledge of engineering and also of the rising and setting patterns of both the moon and the sun.

They built numerous circular structures that had roofs of timber supported by huge beams. These were called kivas, and were apparently where the Chacoans worshipped. Most were sunken, and some were elevated in tower structures. It was really amazing to see the perfect circular walls they built out of stone. Here's an unexcavated three-walled circular structure at Pueblo del Arroyo.Quite impressive. Below is a photo of part of one of the largest kivas that has been excavated, which was apparently a communal kiva located at Casa Rinconada. Nearly every kiva featured the keyhole-shaped entry that you can see in the photo below.
The park contains only some of the ruins left by the Chacoans (many more are located outside the park), and we visited those that were accessible from the paved "loop road" in the park. There were four or five other sites that could be reached by hiking into the back country. Since we had Chase with us, we did not hike to those.

Views like this were visible from nearly every nook and cranny of each site.

There are two or three ways to reach the park, and each route consists of pavement until approximately 15-30 miles from the park. Those last miles are very rough dirt roads, which a park ranger later mentioned had shredded a tire on her vehicle. We unwittingly managed to choose the best of the three routes and encountered a 16-mile washboard gravel road.

Still pretty rough, but manageable.

It was really hot when we arrived and so we explored Hungo Pavi, Chetro Ketl (below), and Pueblo Bonito (panorama below) for a couple hours before deciding to rest in the El at the campsite while the sun traversed the canyon and cooled the temperatures. We ventured back out at 7pm and explored the Pueblo del Arroyo and Casa Rinconada ruins. It was easily 10 degrees cooler, and we watched the sunset from the walls of Pueblo del Arroyo (pictured below). Don't worry, we weren't sitting on the walls of the ruin. This trail actually led down a series of steps through the site and we sat there totally alone as the sun went down.

It was quite a moving experience to sit there and imagine what the Chacoans' lives were like and to simultaneously realize that we were seeing the exact same terrain and setting of the sun that they had seen a thousand years before. This is what we saw.
As it turned out, the park rangers hold night sky programs on Tuesdays (& Fridays & Saturdays), so at 9pm we joined several other park visitors lined up to peer through three separate telescopes pointed at Jupiter (and its 4 moons), Mars, and Saturn. I was especially impressed by the sight of Saturn's rings. It was pretty cool.

By then it was very dark, and with no lights in the park other than those of the visitors' vehicles, the sky was a veritable Milky Way display. Growing up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota, I'd seen the white band of the Milky Way several times, but I don't believe I've ever seen such a display of stars in my life.

The enormous number of stars visible in the darkness combined with the bigness of the sky to create an awe-inspiring moment from our prone position on the picnic table.

We slept in the car overnight and made our way back to Pueblo today. It was an inspirational trip, and we highly recommend visiting the area if you're ever near Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Gallup, or the Four Corners area.

I took a bunch of photos, as you can see from the number of images included in this post. Here is my failed attempt to capture the canyon's Fajada Butte in complete darkness (I managed to figure out what went wrong). The streaks are from airplanes passing high overhead.

Although it's not what I hoped to capture, maybe it'll give you some idea of the night sky at Chaco Canyon.

Enjoy the rest of your week. I'll leave you with a quote by Maya Angelou.

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."