Return to Chaco Canyon: A geopoetical excursion

By Mike Nardacci

The term “geopoetry” seems to have been coined by Scottish poet Kenneth White to describe geologic writing that shows “the relationship of the Earth and the opening of a world.”  The idea is that the few known facts of a situation are combined with intelligent speculation to evoke its mystery and wonder — but not necessarily to provide definitive answers.

I have always believed that anyone who aspires to an understanding of geology needs to have a vivid imagination: To stand, for example, on Route 156 between Voorheesville and Altamont and look at the Helderberg escarpment rising above you and envision it 20,000 years ago buried under the mile-plus-thick continental glacier.  Or to project your mind farther back into the Devonian Period 400 million years ago when this part of New York lay under a warm shallow sea dotted with low coralline islands that, through the fantastic processes of plate tectonics, would rise up into the looming, fossil-rich plateau we see there today.

Over the past decade, I have made several trips to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, a spectacular preserve about a hundred miles northwest of Albuquerque off of Route 550, but often described by visitors as being “a hundred miles west of Nowhere.”

The highway passes through some of the bleakest terrain in the United States, though some of it is starkly beautiful, as arid landscapes tend to be, bordered by miles of desert plants: sagebrush, cactuses, and cholla, towered over by angular mesas and buttes formed of dusty, pastel-colored rock.

Chaco is then accessed by a truly horrendous 13-mile-long washboard-surface dirt road, which surely is intended to discourage all but the most determined of visitors.   Although designated as a National Historical Park, Chaco has no facilities beyond a campground that offers rather primitive camping (though it does feature flush toilets), and a visitor center, which is, as they say, “under renovation.”

It is air-conditioned and has a small shop selling a variety of books that theorize about Chaco’s human history, but had — as of this past June — no exhibits at all, which is a shame considering that a few years back it had a museum featuring fascinating displays and presenting information about Chaco’s spectacular Anasazi ruins and the ancient people’s stunning architecture and pottery.

Mystery and miracle of water

In June of this year, I was again hiking in Chaco with a friend, Mike Whalen, who is a filmmaker living in Boulder, Colorado. The temperatures were somewhat lower than we had expected: mid-80s in the late afternoons but relatively cool and dry early in the days, and so we chose one particularly clear morning for a hike to a pueblo ruin known as “Penasco Blanco,” the most remote in the immediate vicinity of Chaco and one that we had never managed to visit on previous trips.

It lies atop a mesa at the end of a relatively flat three-and-a-half mile trail that leads out over the dusty floor of Chaco Canyon through vast stretches of sagebrush and cactuses, some of which were late blooming in exuberant shades of red and yellow and orange in the wake of the spring rains.  The path at first follows the base of the canyon’s North Mesa and has some shady stretches, but the last mile-and-a-half or so are out in the open.

Frequent examples of honeycomb weathering may be found in the boulders at the base of the cliffs.  This phenomenon — fairly common in extremely arid environments — seems to occur when salts within the rock migrate toward the surface and form crystals that shatter it.  The shady recesses undoubtedly provide respite from the blistering sun for desert birds and reptiles. Though the temperature was still in the 70s, the high sun shining through a cloudless sky soon became oppressive and we found ourselves gulping down our water faster than we had planned.   

And it is true that, among the great mysteries of Chaco Canyon, one of the most perplexing revolves around the subject of water.

The people of many ancient cultures thought of water as something spiritual — even sacred. Temples were built over springs, which must have been regarded as connection points between the world of the gods and that of humans.

It is not hard to see why and it is on the subject of water that this essay ventures into geopoetry. Consider the appearance of the landscape on the road from Albuquerque to Chaco: Much of it consists of plateaus and mesas composed largely of shale and siltstone but capped by hard sandstone forming steep escarpments above the crumbly talus slopes.

The situation is rather comparable to the stratigraphy of the Helderberg plateau, where the shale- and soft-sandstone talus slopes towering above Voorheesville and Altamont are capped by the hard Manlius and Coeymans limestone layers that form the vertical cliffs of Thacher Park.  But the Helderberg area is a very wet climate and the slopes — and indeed, every fissure and hollow in the cliffs — are green with massive amounts of vegetation.  As the song says, “The hills are alive….”

The New Mexican talus slopes show signs of the occasional turbulent movement of water — but then, so does the surface of dry and dusty Mars.  Yet, aside from pinyon pines and junipers on the valley floor that somehow manage to find enough moisture to thrive, the slopes in the New Mexican scene are nearly devoid of life, whether plant or animal, and the changes brought by abundant water verge on the miraculous.

Doors to nowhere

The trail to Penasco Blanco crosses a small dry wash just before it makes the final steep ascent of the mesa, and in a sheltered alcove above the trail is an ancient pictograph — one of the most remarkable ever discovered.  It seems to record the appearance of a crescent moon and next to it a supernova that was observed in other parts of the world as well in 1054 A.D.

Clearly, the ancient inhabitants of Chaco Canyon took a keen interest in the stars and one of them made the effort to record the stellar explosion; the handprint may well be that of the artist.

On this mid-June day, the wash was indeed very dry and probably had not had any flow since the sparse spring rains following the melting of whatever light snow cover had fallen on the canyon. Beyond the wash a series of exposed switchbacks led to the top of the mesa, and, as we climbed up to the crest, we were presented with a view of the Penasco Blanco ruin a thousand or so feet away.

The ruin is immense; ovular and greater in area than a football field, it was subdivided into hundreds of rooms and passages and courtyards — home, it is believed, to perhaps many hundreds of puebloan people.

A dozen or more of the sunken, circular pits known as kivas — which served as places of worship and socialization — are scattered about it.  The ruin is mostly unexcavated, so the tumbled-down walls and doors to nowhere stand picturesquely on the windy mesa as they have for centuries, and in places the ground is littered with fragments of the Anasazi people’s beautifully decorated pottery.

The low hills around it reveal the partially exposed walls of other, smaller “satellite” pueblos that were built as Penasco Blanco grew and expanded.

Questions persist

Surveying the ruins, built so deftly from millions of rock fragments, we were confounded by a number of questions. The first had arisen a year ago when Mike and I hiked to another ruin called Pueblo Alto, remotely situated on Chaco’s North Mesa: What was the source of all the rock fragments from which the ancient pueblos were constructed?

The landscape around the ruins is covered with shattered rock, though it is likely that the vast majority of these have weathered from the walls of the ruins themselves.  Undoubtedly many more lie buried in the dry soil, but excavating them in that sometimes scorching heat would have been agonizing.

The bases of the various mesas are littered with innumerable fragments of the needed sizes — but transporting them up the cliffs to the building site in the thousands of tons needed would be an appalling task even with modern technology.  From all evidence, the ancients had nothing to rely on but arm- and leg-muscle power — and this fact is one of the major aspects of the Chaco Canyon mysteries.

But, as we stood there draining our canteens under the glaring New Mexican noon sun, another even more provocative question arose in our minds: How did the ancient people supply the builders with water?

We tried to envision great teams of workers engaged in construction activities that in some ways must have posed many of the same challenges that faced the builders of the Egyptian pyramids. But the pyramid builders had the Nile River at their feet — an endless supply of water for drinking, cooking, washing, and probably bathing when the heat became unbearable.

Southwestern museums often display hollowed-out gourds and huge ceramic pots that are believed to have been used by the ancient people for water storage.  But to store water, one must first obtain it, and, here in the vast dry stretches of Chaco Canyon, the only source of water other than rare precipitation is the Chaco Wash — a narrow streambed incised into the compacted soil of the canyon floor that, except for brief periods in spring and the occasional August gulley-washer, is never more than a sluggish, muddy trickle, and it is over a mile from Penasco Blanco.

Clearly, it could never have provided enough water for this pueblo’s builders let alone the construction teams raising the other pueblos of Chaco Canyon.

And that fact raises another major question: How were the workers and the inhabitants of the pueblos fed?

The builders of the great Egyptian monuments had the well-watered and incredibly fertile fields of the Nile Valley to provide their food.  But, although for millennia the inhabitants of the Southwest have been expert at what is called “dry farming” to raise the “three sisters” crops of corn, beans, and squash, one can only wonder how the ancients managed to produce enough food for the teams of workers building Penasco Blanco as well its inhabitants — and one must keep in mind that Chaco Canyon holds over a dozen other large pueblos and innumerable smaller ones.

But even “dry farming” requires essential amounts of water, so once again the question arises: What was its source?  And how was it transported to the top of the mesa in sufficient quantities to allow Penasco Blanco to expand and flourish?

A survey of the literature both popular and more technical on the subject of Chaco Canyon shows researchers with wildly differing interpretations of the reasons for the construction of the pueblos of Chaco Canyon, of estimates of its population, and of the enormous problems that revolve around the source and quantities of food and water.

But one fact is critical: Water is life.

Hence, scientists today are excited by the discovery that, in the far reaches of our solar system, the moon Europa, orbiting Jupiter, and the smaller satellite Enceladus, orbiting Saturn, show evidence of being the repositories of gigantic quantities of water in both liquid and solid states: beckoning targets for future exploration.

And yet here in one of the most hostile environments in the United States, a thousand years ago a great culture grew and flourished, reaching startling technical and artistic heights that evoke admiration and even awe today.

What made it possible was water.  But where that water came from and how the ancient people obtained and transported it are questions that science is nowhere near answering.  “Geopoetry” indeed!