Chaco Canyon

We dropped GO Guy and Mona off at the airport so they could return to their jobs back in Seattle. Bear and SewDiva continued on with their adventure. It is sad not to have them to share the adventure with.

We drove across some amazing canyons and mesas with rock of all kinds of colors to get to Chaco Canyon by way of Cuba. What a beautiful and interesting place. The canyon itself is magnificent. The current thinking is that Chaco was not a place where people lived but more like a retreat center where various groups came together for ceremonies, trade and the like. Of course there were caretaker people who lived there full time. Chaco was occupied between 800 and 1200 AD. It had a dozen or so large Great Houses, each with hundreds of rooms and multiple kivas. They don’t think people lived in the rooms – they were offices and storage rooms. A typical great house would be 4 to 6 stories high.

We got to see several different types of petroglyphs. There were the ones scratched into the rock, the ones where the rock is carved away around the picture and the paintings (which technically aren’t petroglyphs, but whatever.)

Dollars saved on this trip with Park Pass: $113.00 + 3.00= $116.00