THERE GO A COUPLE of coyotes, snouts raised to the sky. Now a trio of bighorn sheep climb a mesa. Here come some outlaws on horseback, galloping past a bank. At the Aztec Museum & Pioneer Village, colorful scenes of the Old West drift toward ever-new horizons on the Pecos West cyclorama. The hand-carved rotating tableau is a folk art masterpiece that spans 18 feet, weighs about 3,500 pounds, plays Western songs, and is just waiting for its next push-button spin, which takes about 6½ entertaining minutes. Its mythical mountains, mesas, cowboys, and Indians were fashioned from aspen, burl oak, pine, and redwood over 20 years by World War II veteran Valenty Zaharek, a disabled polio survivor who moved to Sedona, Arizona, in the 1940s. His cyclo-creation first charmed audiences at the New Mexico State Fair, where it was displayed in the mid-1960s. After Zaharek died in 1979, Pecos West rambled around East Coast storage units until it returned to the Four Corners area in 2014 as a donation to the Aztec Museum. Painstakingly reassembled by groundskeeper Jim Macaw, it has an updated soundtrack that features the Bar D Wranglers from Durango, Colorado, and now feels like it belonged there all along. Museum board secretary Jimmy Miller says, “I always tell people when they come in: ‘Make sure you see our exhibit there, the Pecos West cyclorama, because you’ve never seen one like it before, and you’ll never see one like it again.’ ”
See the cyclorama at the Aztec Museum & Pioneer Village, 125 N. Main Ave., Aztec. Open May through October.