Casa Malpais

Two miles north of Springerville, on a black terrace of hardened lava above the Little Colorado, stand the ruins of one of the last great houses the Mogollon people built. Casa Malpais — Spanish for house of the badlands — went up around 1260 and was lived in until roughly 1400, which makes it one of the latest-dated Mogollon sites anywhere, occupied right up to the region-wide unraveling that emptied the Southwest's pueblos by the fifteenth century. Fifty to sixty rooms climb the terraces, and a great kiva laid up in volcanic stone anchors the center, its walls fitted with openings that let solstice light fall on carved rock inside — a working solar calendar built into a building. Stone stairways raised by hand lead to the rim of the old shield volcano that supplied every block: the builders were standing on their own quarry, in the Springerville volcanic field, four hundred–odd vents scattered across fifty miles, the third-largest such field in the continental United States.

What sets the place apart is also underfoot. Below the pueblo, the builders used the deep fissures in the lava as burial chambers — the only prehistoric catacombs known in the American West. In the 1990s, after the burials drew national attention, the town and archaeologists agreed to seal them again, with prayers and offerings led by Hopi and Zuni religious leaders, because the Hopi and Zuni are here still and trace their own ancestors to this ground.

That living connection is the whole frame of a visit now. The site can be seen only on a guided walk from the museum in Springerville, and the catacombs are not on it — closed out of respect for the dead and their descendants. The people who built Casa Malpais did not vanish, whatever the old textbooks said about a lost race; they moved north and west to the mesas and the pueblos, and their descendants came back to bless this ground and shut it. The same volcanic high country that raised these walls climbs west to the headwaters on Mount Baldy, the sacred White Mountain, where the Little Colorado that once watered Casa Malpais's fields still gathers its first cold water.