Chaco & the Four Corners

Between about 850 and 1150, Ancestral Puebloan people raised the great houses of Chaco Canyon, multistoried buildings of shaped sandstone with hundreds of rooms, laid out against the sun and the moon and joined to distant communities by straight roads cut across the desert. The Pueblos of the Rio Grande and the Hopi count the people of Chaco among their ancestors. To the northwest the plateau belongs to the Diné, and Tsé Bitʼaʼí, the rock with wings that the maps call Shiprock, stands up out of it alone.

South along the old trade routes are two of the oldest communities in the country. The A:shiwi, the Zuni people, met the first Spanish expedition at Hawikku in 1539 and killed its guide, Esteban; Coronado came the next summer. At Haak'u, which the maps call Acoma, people have lived on top of a sandstone mesa for some nine hundred years. In 1599, after Acoma fighters killed a party of his soldiers, Juan de Oñate had the pueblo attacked, hundreds of its people killed, and every surviving man over twenty-five sentenced to lose a foot.

Oñate passed by El Morro six years later and carved his name into the sandstone above its pool, among petroglyphs far older than his. Travelers added theirs for the next two and a half centuries, Spanish governors, soldiers and, after 1849, Americans heading west. Gallup grew up on the railroad and Route 66 as the trading town for the Navajo Nation and Zuni, and still is.

What to See in Chaco & the Four Corners

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

El Malpais National Monument

Grants

The badlands south of Grants: lava 3,900 years old from McCartys Crater, a tube system at least seventeen miles long, and an old trail across four lava flows between Zuni and Acoma.

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Historic Sites

Aztec Ruins National Monument

Aztec

A Chacoan great house on the Animas River, misnamed by settlers who thought the Aztecs built it, with original roofs nine centuries old and a great kiva rebuilt whole.

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Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Nageezi

The great houses of Chaco Canyon at the end of thirteen miles of washboard dirt, an International Dark Sky Park in the middle of one of the country's busiest gas fields.

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El Morro National Monument

Ramah

A sandstone headland with a pool at its foot, where Puebloan people, Spanish governors and American soldiers all left their marks, until carving became illegal in 1906.

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Scenic Drives through Chaco & the Four Corners

Stories from Chaco & the Four Corners

Chaco & the Four Corners rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.