Deborah and I drove the 4 hours to Chaco Canyon today - see the petroglyph in this photo, and drove the route that took us via the old road to Ojo Caliente and Abiquiu. This is the old bridge we use to cross the Rio Grande.
The ride to Chaco took us through Abiquiu, NM, famous because Georgia O'Keeffe lived here at her Ghost Ranch, and painted Pater Knoll, the flat top mesa. You can see Pater Knoll from the deck here at the Murray residence and it's in all the sunset photos if you click on the photos for a larger version. There are also gorgeous red rock canyons in the Abiquiu area, from which red "mexican" tiles are made.
Chaco Canyon is an amazing Native American community unearthed in the 1920's..... a culture that flourished in this location from 800 - 1100 A.D. - you'll see in the photos parts of the community building, known as Pueblo Bonita, that has been partially crushed/destroyed by HUGE falling boulders...... there are several photos of Deborah and another pair of hikers standing/sitting near these boulders. ENORMOUS! Pueblo Bonito was the cultural and center of commerce for this area. Trading, social events, funerals, teaching all happened here.
The hiking at Chaco was wonderful - just dangerous enough to be exciting. The first trail we took required us to climb up the rocks and then behind and through a very narrow passage inside the canyon wall to get to the top. The photo above the one of Deborah sitting on the ground in front of Pueblo Bonito is the trailhead up and into the rocks. I love that there were no "warning" signs about the danger of this trail. It's definitely a "hike at your own risk" kind of place! The remainder of the trail is a walk along the top of the canyon. Looking at a 360 degree vista of what used to be Chaco civilization, as far as we could see - beautiful. Trails were all marked by "cairns", or piles of rocks. The second trail we followed took us past beautiful petroglyphs, shown in the first photo above.
The architecture and construction of the Pueblo Bonito and other smaller pueblos was fairly incredible - each of them showcased different styles of the use of stone/bricks in the construction, representing a different time period based on the architecture.
The sunset photo was taken of Fajada Butte, located at the entrance to Chaco Canyon, as we were leaving.
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