Chaco Culture National Historical Monument

Chaco Culture is a United States National Historical Park in the American Southwest hosting a large concentration of pre-Columbian indigenous ruins of pueblos. The park is located in northwestern New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington, in a remote canyon cut by the Chaco Wash. Containing the most sweeping collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico, the park preserves one of the most important cultural and historical areas in the United States

The park is access through a dirt gravel road from New Mexico 371. The scenery is arid and does not represent what it may have looked like when Chaco people inhabited the area.

As you approach the park you are greeted with a spectacular view of Fajada Bute.

Between AD 900 and 1150, Chaco Canyon was a major cultural center for the Ancestral Puebloans. It consists of fifteen major complexes that remained the largest buildings ever built in North America until the 19th century. The sites are considered sacred ancestral homelands by the Hopi and Pueblo people.

Climate change is thought to have led to the emigration of Chacoans and the eventual abandonment of the canyon, beginning with a fifty-year drought commencing in 1130.

The Chacoans built their complexes along a 9-mile (14 km) stretch of canyon floor, with the walls of some structures aligned cardinally and others aligned with the 18.6-year cycle of minimum and maximum moonrise and moonset.

On our first day we visited Hungo Pavi, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo Bonito and Klin Ketso.

From Klin Ketso we hiked to the top of the mesa for views of the valley below and the many ancient buildings.

The next day we hiked the rest of the canyon passing through some petroglyphs and reaching Penasco Blanco where a pictograph of the Supernova from July 4, 1504.