El Morro National Monument

El Morro, the headland, rises about two hundred feet out of the grassland east of Zuni, and at its foot, in a shaded pocket of the cliff, rain and snowmelt gather in a pool that does not dry up. For people traveling between Acoma and Zuni it was the one sure water for many miles.

The half-mile Inscription Trail follows the base of the cliff past petroglyphs and hundreds of carved names. The oldest dated one is Juan de Oñate's, cut on April 16, 1605, as he returned from his expedition west. It records his passage from what it calls the discovery of the South Sea; what he had reached was the head of the Gulf of California. Spanish travelers after him used his formula, pasó por aquí, passed by here, followed by a name and a date. In September 1849 Lieutenant James Simpson and the artist Richard Kern spent two days copying the inscriptions and carved their own, the first by American officials. A few years later Edward Beale's wagon-road survey came by with its army camels.

By 1906 the rock was crowded with names cut over older ones. When Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed it a national monument that December, carving became illegal, though vandals have damaged inscriptions since.

A longer loop climbs onto the top of the mesa to Atsinna, a pueblo of some 875 rooms built around 1275 by ancestors of the Zuni people, and partly excavated. Its name is usually translated as writing on rock. The full loop is about two miles, with steep steps.