MY WIFE SEES IT BEFORE I DO. As we mount the cerro in silence, wind hisses across the sage and rocks and into the piñon and juniper. Above, ravens and vultures play on rising thermals. Below, pinyon…
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WHILE THE SKY still just hints at dawn, people line up at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park Visitor Center, waiting for the gates to open on what, for many, will be a once-in-a-lifetime view…
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ROADS SPIDERWEB ACROSS the landscape surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park, often constructed in remarkably straight lines that are maintained over cliffs and canyon rims. Unlike “roads”…
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WE APPROACH WHITE SANDS NATIONAL PARK from Las Cruces on US 70, climbing up and over the jagged Organ Mountains. The desert is stark out here, beautiful but ominous. After passing military…
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EARLY IN The Mystery of Chaco Canyon, a petroglyph appears on-screen as narrator Robert Redford discusses the harsh living conditions found in the canyon: “Yet here, ancient people chose to construct…
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ONLY SEVEN YEARS after the Stonewall uprising in New York City, almost 100 marchers came out in the summer of 1976 to celebrate the first-ever Pride march in Albuquerque. “We have a rich history of…
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IN ENCOUNTERING ROCK ART, the initial impact is the image itself. How do we understand the meaning behind the diverse life forms and abstract designs painted and carved throughout the arid landscapes…
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“THIS WHOLE MOUNTAIN VALLEY wasn’t some wilderness nobody visited,” says Dana Dick, Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument’s lead interpretive park ranger. “It was home to people. There’s evidence of…
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IN THE 17TH CENTURY, the Four Corners region turned cruel. Chaco’s Ancestral Puebloan people had fled three centuries earlier, their elaborate social structure abandoned as the culture’s various…
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Navajo people use the name Diné to describe themselves. The Bureau of Land Management area with Navajo defensive sites is called the Dinétah by archaeologists. In the Diné language, Dinétah refers…
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