by Craig Childs
Till had discovered this road a few years back from an airplane, flying low in morning light when he could best read the topography. When he saw it, there was no doubt in his mind what it was, a human-made stroke across a blackbrush plain. As soon as he could, he verified it on the ground, mapping the longest, straightest procession of its kind known in Utah. He planted survey flags so that he could turn around and look along four miles of little orange banners behind him.
When Till first told me of his find, I mentioned it to a few archaeologists working in the Chaco area. They assured me that no such roads existed in Utah. Although they had never been walking in Utah, these researchers authoritatively explained that Utah was too far away to have “Chaco roads.” Ancient foot trails maybe, but not roads. I saw now they were wrong. A straight clearing stretched in front of me as plain as day. It was about thirty feet wide, as big as any Anasazi road made in Chaco.
The presence of this road meant that Anasazi labor had been organized on a massive scale in southeast Utah, not only to erect great houses, as we had seen around the head of Comb Ridge, but also to cut and fill this impressive thoroughfare before us. Till told me that there were many more roads. This was no backwater. Chaco, or at least the ideology that gave rise to Chaco, had reached its long arm into this desert. The road was slightly more recent than those in northwest New Mexico, a twelfth-century development, maybe even thirteenth-century, marking a later spike in Anasazi civilization.
Ryan pulled out her camera, angled it for several pictures, and then returned it to her pack. She knelt and kneaded the sandy soil with her fingertips, contemplating the width and directness of this feature, realizing that she had never before seen such a clear road in the Southwest. Her face was full of thought as she plucked up a few pieces of chipped, sulfur yellow stone, debris from someone’s toolmaking many centuries back.
She stood and looked at Till.
“It’s a road,” she said, as if it should have been known long ago, as obvious as an ink mark ruled across white paper: a long, straight road out in the western Anasazi netherworld.
In the afternoon, as low gray clouds poured across the crest of Comb Ridge, Till walked in a halting sort of way. He kept stopping, hands hanging limp but open, as if he were feeling the air. To a stranger watching him, Till might have seemed lost, sometimes walking back on himself before turning around again, or pausing for long minutes without moving. I recognized this way of travel, the same way I get about, responding to the many glints of light, unaccountably kneeling to feel grains of ricegrass between my fingers. It is how one reads a place.
The air suddenly cracked with thunder, and all three of us stopped in the middle of the road to listen as a rumble played across the miles. It was the first thunder of the year, spring thunder. When we moved again, it was to pull on rain gear, and we continued under a light patter of drops, the air smelling like cold metal. The road kept going, though I could hardly see it anymore. Till knew where it was, and he followed it, leading us toward the only tree within miles, a gray fist of a cottonwood that was just beginning to bud. It marked a damp spring coming out from an undercut.
At this tree the road ran onto a hump of bedrock, the first time so far it was not cut into blackbrush and the gritty soil of stabilized sand dunes. Where it ran across bare rock, nothing of the road could be seen except one long groove cut into the rock, a thread meant to maintain the road’s continuity until it could resume in the soil on the other side. I crouched and swept a hand out from under my poncho. I ran a finger down this wet groove, thinking it looked exactly like grooves found in the bedrock of Chaco Canyon, a furrow carved in a straight line no more than one knuckle deep or wide. No one knows what these grooves were for, but they appear only in association with roads.
I stood and turned to look at Comb Ridge, still a couple of miles away. From this vantage it had the appearance of an ice palace—its white sandstone slick with rain—and canyons melted out of its face. Till and Ryan were already moving ahead, a long way left to go with evening on our heels and the storm growing. I picked up my pace so I would not lose them.
In the very last light, rain sheeted down my poncho, and I walked with my arms partly extended, collecting a basin of fresh water and then throwing it off so it would not drain down into my pant legs and boots. It was no use; I was amply wet. Till and Ryan also were wet. We moved swiftly.
Coming down a gully of mud, Till turned around in front of me and crouched down on his haunches, where he paused to study a rock in the ground.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Basketmaker cist,” he said.
He reached out a hand and wiped the mud away so I could see more clearly. All I saw was a rock.
Ryan came up behind me and asked, “What do we have here?”
Till said the same to her, Basketmaker cist, and she nodded sagely.
“It’s just a rock,” I said, not so much to point out the obvious, but to elicit more information.
“There will be another one here,” Till said, moving his hand over and wiping off more of the clay gumbo.
Just as he predicted, there was another rock, same shape and size as the first one. Till kept wiping his hand, smearing away the thin surface of mud, until the tip of a third and then a fourth rock appeared, beginning to outline a broad circle in the mud. I recognized it now, a storage pit, a cist lined with rock slabs, typical of the early Anasazi, known as the Basketmaker culture. This was a granary from the sixth century A.D., or maybe the eighth century. Whatever century, it long predated roads built in the Southwest. I looked around in the rainy dusk, seeing no geographic reason for a person to build a storage chamber here. According to Till, the road we were seeing, at least in its largest form, was built around the twelfth century. Certainly, the Basketmaker people did not have this landscape officially surveyed, as the later Anasazi might have. They would not have built granaries along exact lines across the land back in the sixth or eighth century, would they?
Till just shrugged in his raincoat when I asked this. He swamped mud back over his find until only the first rock was visible. Then he stood, rubbing his hands in the rain to clean them.
“I think they were using this lane of travel long before there was a road engineered through here,” he said. “The road was just a formalization of whatever was here to begin with. Don’t forget, they lived here for a long time.”
We followed the road as far as we could in the dark, although after a while we were just guessing. No moon tonight, the clouds racing over us as black as ink. We finally stopped at what Till assured us was the foot of Comb Ridge. We got out gear and heated tea over a stove. For a long time we stood sipping from our cups. We slipped on gloves and warm hats so that we could erect our tents, constructing a brief little hamlet along this nearly forgotten road. There we slept, sheltered from the rain.
In the morning coyotes howled from creases in the land, down between gullies and shields of standing bedrock. Pups yipped with their high voices, and they danced, perhaps amused at us walking with our clown suits of pants and coats, our packs, notebooks, and water bottles. We stopped and listened, somewhere around sunrise, mist hanging among the canyons of Comb Ridge. The rain had ended, broken into drifting clouds. The ridge now looked like a mountain before us, thousands of feet of raw, seamless stone angling toward the west. When the coyotes stopped their morning announcements, we continued moving. With no more road to be seen, we were now following Till’s projection, an invisible line pointing us up one of the many canyons cut through the raised back of Comb Ridge.
Usually bone-dry, Comb Ridge was inhaling the previous night’s storm, and now it slowly let water back out through its porous sandstone, dribbling from seeps and springs where maidenhair ferns grow. The canyon we were following steepened across clear pocks of water holes, finally leading us up into broken ledges where boulders were chopped all over each other and we had to climb hand over foot. Every several steps a rock would slide—nothing bone shattering, ju
st a disquieting clamor as it tumbled for one or two seconds.
As we stopped to rest midway up, Till pointed to show us a cliff dwelling tucked high over our heads. It had a single, T-shaped door facing down at us like a banner, an arcane cultural message that perhaps let people in pre-Columbian times know to whom this passage belonged. People of the T. Curious how they had even gotten up there, I pulled out my binoculars and scanned the cliff face. I saw ladder rungs carved into the rock, footings perhaps for a wooden stairway that would have accessed the site, postholes drilled into the cliff. The place looked like a guardhouse, its T-shaped eye keeping watch over all who passed below.
Small thirteenth-century cliff dwelling on Comb Ridge. REGAN CHOI
We started back up the steep planes of rock and reached a point where the curve of the planet became visible around us, high enough now that I could see Sleeping Ute Mountain in Colorado to the east, and just beyond it Mesa Verde. We were climbing a bell tower, it seemed, rising to where the wind busily cut across nude beige stone. As we cleared the top of Comb Ridge, the entire earth opened around us, gaping distances filling our senses. We saw not only the landmarks of the Northern San Juan Basin behind us but also well into Arizona to the south. To the west canyons streamed through the woodland bands of Cedar Mesa, the cliffs there alternating between salmon-colored and cream, places I knew were loaded with cliff dwellings. Beyond that my eye was drawn to a set of high twin buttes known as the Bear’s Ears. The space between the ears was the target of Till’s projected line, the destination of this road.
Till shouted in the gusting wind. He pointed at the remnants of a small masonry chamber worn almost completely away, a site that had once been a stone box. Till told us to take note of the color of the stones, pinkish, oxidized by fire. Someone had built a big firebox between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, what Till calls “late Pueblo Anasazi.”
Till was convinced that this spot, with an entirely unobscured view of most of the Anasazi world, was a fire signal. What else could it be? A fire ignited at the pinnacle of Comb Ridge in Utah could be seen deep into Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. How many other signals are out here? I wondered. At Chaco it took a century and scores of ground crews poring over the desert for archaeologists to figure out the relay system. In this part of Utah there are only a handful of dedicated archaeologists. What cunning mechanisms have yet to be discovered here?
Till never raised his voice excitedly, never demanded undue attention, but he wanted Ryan to notice certain things about the view from this fire signal. With one hand stuffed into his overalls pocket, he used the other to gesture across the horizon, pointing at the Bear’s Ears. Winston Hurst, a prominent local archaeologist with whom Till worked closely, had led him to a great kiva over there in thecanyon-cut striations north of Cedar Mesa. Seeing this isolated great kiva, Till plotted his line even farther, straight through the kiva toward the gap between the Bear’s Ears in the distance. The kiva was built there, he surmised, to lie within an important cultural and geographic alignment. He turned and pointed the other way, back toward where we had started walking on the road yesterday. He said that if you follow the road’s trajectory, it goes right down the carved stairs to the rock art we saw the day before. If you keep going, you will find a set of natural twin towers standing above the largest great house in the vicinity. The projected line ends directly between two symmetrical alcoves in the face of a cliff. Beneath these alcoves is a noteworthy boulder split right down the middle, surrounded with broken pottery, and with two holes of the same size chiseled by hand in the rock face on either side.
“Let me guess,” Ryan said. “Twins.”
“Twins are all along the road projection,” Till answered matter-of--factly as he peered into the distance. “Both human-made andnatural.”
Till envisioned a pocket of finely orchestrated civilization, great houses tethered together by ancient roads, and the slice of Comb Ridge passing straight through them. When Chaco became the Anasazi center in the eleventh century, yet another center was beginning to form in this western landscape of twins. It was more spread out than Chaco, and with smaller sites, but it had the same hallmarks of alignments, great houses, roads, and fire signals. Whatever civilization was emerging on the Colorado Plateau then, it reached clear out to Comb Ridge, and eventually this branch of the Anasazi outlasted those living in Chaco. The great houses in this part of Utah were the last of their kind to be occupied.
Ryan’s body was bunched together, arms crossed, one hand up to keep her hat from blowing away. She could see Till’s point. This road was connected to larger landscape features, lined up with geography the way people back in Chaco had aligned themselves with the heavens. Perhaps this place was the yin to Chaco’s yang, the earth to the sky. She turned slowly to take in the horizons: Hovenweep quilted with towers; the slums and citadels of the Great Sage Plain, where she had been excavating; Mesa Verde beyond that, full of secrets. The old guard centers of Aztec and Chaco lay farther off, unseen. Behind her, over a rise, lay Canyonlands, with its granaries built in the cliffs like kitchen cabinets. All of this was Anasazi. It was bigger than even Ryan had imagined, a civilization busily stretched to the horizons.
From there we turned and started down the other side. In spaces between tilted planks of sandstone, the wind died down, and Till told us that his road projection passes through here directly between two circular sites that must have been shrines of some sort. Walking among twisted juniper trees, we reached the first shrine, an extensive halo of cut and laid stones now fallen around one another.
As Ryan paced around the circle, she said, “Maybe a great kiva.”
Till nodded, seeing that she could be right. He took us to the second shrine, which Ryan also believed to be a great kiva. We stopped there for a bit, out of the wind, as the sun broke through the spring storm. Ryan draped her body over a south-leaning boulder and lounged on it as if it were a bed. Warmed by the sun, she let her fingers fiddle down into the soil. She lifted out handfuls of potsherds, then let them spill out onto the ground. She seemed to be dreaming.
“Twin great kivas,” she said, pondering.
Till found a place to sit on the other side of the boulder. “Twin great kivas,” he repeated, also to himself. “Positioned at the top of the highest place around with the road passing right between them.”
They were both seeing a larger landscape, its impressions forming in their imaginations: twins and lines, the Anasazi embroidering their geography with roads and alignments of kivas and storage chambers.
A short distance away we were faced with a harrowing palisade—the entire western flank of Comb Ridge a seamless cliff falling out below us. Till paused, rubbing his beard, his eyes studying the cliff edge. “The way down is right around here somewhere,” he said.
A colossal block of cliff was separated from the face of the ridge. Coming down behind it, we squeezed into a tight space that dropped like a rope. There was open space below, nothing but air. Till led us down to where flat stones had been wedged, forming a staircase, some of the steps now gone, fallen into oblivion. Till reminded us to be careful. He was talking not about preserving our lives, but about not dislodging any of these placed stones, protecting the route. It had been used rarely in the past eight hundred years.
The crack let us out onto the western face of Comb Ridge, a blank wall of sandstone that was nothing like the comparatively gentle eastern incline we had just ascended. All along this side of the ridge Anasazi toeholds had been chiseled like rope ladders, the only way to get up and down. Many of these toeholds were so old and weathered that they were hard to see, much less useful for survival.
We spotted toeholds below us, faint marks in the cliff where people had once chiseled their way up and down. The face of Comb Ridge felt tremendous around us, a solid stone wall extending as far as we could see north and south. We traversed a ledge—not a particularly flat or wide one, but good enough—stepping gingerly around fallen stones that barely held pu
rchase. Every now and then a stone slipped free, causing us to freeze as it skittered down the bend of the cliff and disappeared, not a sound to be heard.
We finally reached a ladder of little oval rungs the Anasazi had cut into the rock. The rungs were slim as soap dishes, hardly wide enough to feel with your fingertips, and they trailed out of sight straight below us. I could hear Ryan breathing deeply. Till wiped his palms on his overalls, drying the sweat.
I was out front, so I went first, moving onto the steep exposure. The rock formation had a good, solid grain to it, a sturdy grip for my fingers as I lowered myself down the face. Ryan followed, and Till after her, the three of us forming a string down the wall. I reached the spine of a jutting cliff flake, where toeholds were carved as if along a steep little bridge in a Japanese garden. I followed the toeholds, step by step, until the bridge came to a sudden end.
The rock below me had broken away, and the last step led straight into empty space. There had been an accident, a catastrophe long ago, when the remainder of the steps had collapsed. I shot a look up through Ryan’s hands and legs, spotting Till above her.
“This is it?” I asked, startled by the abrupt end, the bridge out.
Till did not respond, focused on his own descent, patting at the holds, his face flat against the rock. I looked back down, thinking this break looked old, weathered, something that must have happened under the Anasazi’s watch. If it was such an important route, tied into a great road, they must have repaired it. I glanced to the side and saw a fainter set of toeholds carved horizontally for a short distance, then down. They were not as well crafted as the originals, made more quickly and with less care, not quite so deeply cut.