by Craig Childs
At the very first glimmer of dawn we broke our camp. I snuffed out the tea stove while Colin slipped our only pot into his pack. We gathered gear snugly on our backs and began moving. Sunrise touched a long cliff above us, lighting the face of a high mesa. Below it we walked through wracks of fallen boulders and mounds where hundreds upon hundreds of potsherds were barely exposed at the surface, signs of thirteenth-century congregations. Figuring the pottery marked a route, we struck from there directly up the mesa, climbing its steep skirt, working the cold out of our bodies with hands reaching ahead and pulling on stone handholds that felt as if they were made of ice.
Water was frozen in some of the crooks, seep springs and water holes turned solid, their surfaces delicately feathered in ice. I worried about not being able to find available, unfrozen water. We could melt whatever we came upon, but that would take time. Maybe back inside this mesa we would find what we needed.
My pack felt like a beast clutching my back, where it draped its arms over my shoulders and wrapped its legs around my waist, moaning in my ear to keep going, to carry it into some vast country far away. Heavy with winter-weight gear—a rolled wool serape, many thin layers of clothing made out of petroleum, a down sleeping bag, a good pad, a tarp, fuel, and food—I wanted to drop the pack, let it sail into the fall behind me, leaving me free to move. Instead I took long, sharp breaths, heart pounding as even in the frozen dawn, sweat touched cold skin at my forehead, my wrists.
We used our fingers in the rock cracks, gloves tattered down to our knuckles, climbing through broken bedrock. A sandstone boulder the size of a desk was balanced above me, and I climbed over it, trying to match its weight with mine. It tipped and fell out from under me. Sputtering a curse, I grabbed the root of a hanging juniper tree. I caught it at the full length of my arm, scrambling on boot soles as the boulder slid off into space. It crashed into ledges of frozen soil, where it ripped up more rocks. They all smashed to pieces against a cliff below, then showered to the earth, where I could no longer hear them. I scrambled up the juniper root and stopped when I found solid footing.
I glanced up and saw Colin watching from a high edge, his body crouched a hundred feet above me. I had broken the morning’s silence. Colin nodded to me, knowing that I felt like an idiot right now, waking up the dead. We kept going and soon crossed the meridian of sunrise. An orange sheet of light came across the desert and cropped the top of the mesa. The sun was suddenly warm on our backs. We climbed a bright block of stone at the mesa’s full height and stopped there, turning to look back down into the country we had slept in the previous night.
We could see everything from this point. Above the lid of the Great Sage Plain far away in Colorado stood Sleeping Ute Mountain. Beside that lay Cedar Mesa, a cool, green scrim across Utah, and upon its head the twin buttes of the Bear’s Ears. Out of this array of landmarks Comb Ridge came over the earth like a gigantic, bony snake, dipping to let the San Juan River through, then rising again to turn west into Arizona, passing forty miles away from Chinle Wash around Monument Valley. After one hundred miles of crossing the desert, Comb Ridge finally ended below us, where the town of Kayenta glittered in the sun like broken glass.
We lingered on the rock tip for a while, admiring the country, nearly the entire Anasazi range laid before us. Chaco was barely blocked by a chain of mountains to the east—the Carrizos, Lukachukais, and Chuskas—the places Chacoans had cut their timbers. The land between here and there lay pale and barren. I could see the Anasazi pattern, where they were born from the reddish dust of the Colorado Plateau and where they once spread across the horizons with their pottery, their great houses, their jacal villages. And I could see them pulling back during a long drought, a century’s race of desert people threading through stone pillars and canyons, lurching over plains of dry earth, to return to this land of high mesas upon which we were now sitting. They paused in the country below, setting up a hundred years of pueblos and line-of-sight citadels. But they did not stop there. They teetered as long as they could upon their prayers for rain, but the climate only became drier, and they went to their fallback, taking refuge in canyons falling into the mesa behind us.
I turned to face south. The mesa was thrown open where bighearted forests draped into canyons. This is where the residents of Kayenta went. This was their stronghold, where perhaps they believed they could wait out anything, drinking from springs in the rock. I had not seen such a place since Mesa Verde, such lush secrecy standing over the desert.
I turned my gaze north and back south, then north once more to stare across the desert, as if I were unsure where to focus my attention. North was the Four Corners, familiar country, the realm of Monument Valley, Sleeping Ute Mountain, and Comb Ridge. But the future of the Anasazi lay to the south. Once they moved into the canyons behind me, they left the landscape of their birth behind.
Colin began walking in that direction. He started across a narrow flank of stone, a natural walkway between two competing canyons. Cliffs pinched beneath him, eroding from opposite sides, leaving just enough room to travel straight ahead.
Cold cliffs lay beyond him, where dense forests of pine and fir spilled into plump canyons. In there were the last fallen cliff dwellings of the Anasazi. I looked once more at the desert panorama, then shouldered my pack and quickly moved across the slender passage after him, cliffs eating at my feet.
We wandered into the earth. Canyons fell into canyons, eviscerating the mesa’s insides. In deep shade Douglas fir trunks stood as big around as palace pillars. They grew straight out of bedrock fissures. Where a canyon plunged, it left a barrel of a hole carved in bedrock at the bottom. We found water inside, a still pool somehow completely free of ice. We shrugged off our packs and dropped head-to-head, our lips touching the surface to drink.
There we set camp. In the morning we moved again, sliding down a chute of bedrock with our packs and landing along an interior ledge. Packs went down hand to hand. Finally we reached a deep gulf in the canyon below and scouted it for a while, finding no way around. I tied a rope to a tree root and lowered our gear to Colin, who had climbed down. He stood fifty feet below, hands outstretched to catch the first descending pack, then the second. He gave the rope a tug, and I untied it, then let it go. Its tail snapped on the ground as it landed. While Colin coiled the rope and stowed it in his pack, I worked my way toward him, hand under hand like descending a pole, slowly sending my body down rock-crack handholds and shelves. Halfway to the floor I noticed the light was becoming frailer. We were tumbling into a well, the inside of the mesa deepening.
That evening we spent an hour looking for a place to set camp, but few flat spaces could be found, everything crammed with toppled pine trees and boulders. Finally we came upon a clearing and in the night set a small fire to keep the freeze off.
A storm arrived before dawn, soft waves of snow, and in the first light we packed up and pushed farther. A side canyon opened above us through the clouds, and we turned into it looking for morning shelter. As we walked through fresh snow, the side canyon blossomed into a massive alcove, a natural stadium recessed into the cliff. This part of Arizona is known for its theater-headed canyons, giant alcoves containing some of the largest cliff dwellings in the Southwest, rivals of Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House back at Mesa Verde. The fortress of Kiet Siel is within the Kayenta mesas, not far from a large, precariously perched ruin known as Inscription House. Betatakin, with its racks of wooden ladders, sits in a huge rounded alcove that feels like the inside of a hollow moon.
The snow ended suddenly, as if we had stepped beneath an eave. We looked straight up and saw that we had crossed into a yawning hoop of bedrock, a natural cave with a ceiling hundreds of feet over our heads. In the back of the alcove stood an ancient masonry village built along a high ledge. It was an abandoned hamlet full of windows and doorways.
We walked across a dusty, settled bay, and there we sat among boulders and broken pottery. We stared at the ruins as if we had just come upon
a bear sleeping in its cave. Startled, but not surprised to find it here, we sat in fine wind-sand with our arms resting on our knees. The site seemed perfect, a tight package of masonry structures. One of its larger chambers, a kiva I assumed, stood out front, its roof still in perfect condition. The site seemed secured from time, untouched.
“Jesus,” Colin said.
I just sat, arms hanging across my knees, unable to look away.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” I finally said.
Colin slipped off his pack and opened a zipper. I heard him unwrapping plastic next to me, the cock of his knife opening. He reached across with a palm full of whittled cheese, and I took it, saying thanks as I looked at the fine sand around me, where potsherds poked up. I dusted one out, a red piece, and lifted it up like looking through a lens.
Here you are, I thought. The red people, the migrating Anasazi heart, hidden in these mammoth, winding canyons so no one would find you. The site across from us would be only the first settlement to explore, where we would find fragments of woven turkey feather blankets and a kiva with its ceremonial furnishings in place. In the following days we would come upon more villages built in the cliffs—spectacular masonry settlements soarting over our heads—the late-thirteenth-century sanctuary of Kayenta.
Days passed. Colin and I turned along one canyon and then the next, walking through an eroded maze of cliffs, where one afternoon we spotted a spangle of running water. When we reached it, we looked straight up and saw the largest dwelling yet. It was high in rusted bends of sandstone, where entire wooden roofs had fallen and what remained of them was caught on ledges, beams left in acrobatic disarray. We climbed past these broken timbers by the skin of our boot soles, fingers testing the holds above us. The Anasazi had erected supports to mount the cliff, pitches of wooden ladders and walkways rising over our heads. Not much was left of them, some rungs and long staffs. We did not touch their fragile remains as we climbed past them, carefully, rising along handholds carved centuries ago into a concave dome of bedrock.
A pueblo had been erected in this lofty space, enclaves and neighborhoods built on various levels. Every stab of rock above us was topped with a cherry of a ruin. This was a cliff dwelling in the truest sense, its buildings balanced on spans of timbers and rock ledges. The settlement looked like boxes put on narrow shelves, a reliquary of stonework, some of the square houses and towers fully intact, some caved in.
When we reached the main avenue of ruins along the alcove’s high midriff, we saw grain houses and dwellings, fifty or sixty rooms I guessed at first glance, many in impeccable condition. There we separated, as Colin took a route across the length of the ruin, and I climbed higher to where a patio had been constructed. I found a court of public mealing bins, boxes made from vertical slabs of rock. Around them were scattered grinding stones, left where they were once set down. The Anasazi had been on their knees in this spot, the winter work constant when dried corn needed to be ground into meal and flour.
From ethnographic studies it is believed that Anasazi women did most of the grinding work. As I stepped along a mealing bin, I thought that in this place grandmothers had once paused to rest their arms and backs, while daughters and granddaughters kept on grinding. I imagined this as a place of social exchange. Conversations would have occasionally arisen while the women worked their grain, a question asked, a story told, advice given.
Set of mealing bins in a Kayenta cliff dwelling. CRAIG CHILDS
I bent down and touched the grinding stones, where I felt the glacial wear of women keeping this place alive. I wondered if they spoke of their fears during their work. They were, after all, living high in the cliffs in a place that felt like desperation. It was the very end of the thirteenth century, a time of powerful change, of migrants fleeing this way and that. The smell of war drifted in the air from the north, from the Four Corners.
A number of researchers see these late Kayenta settlements as fortresses, their line-of-sight networks designed to warn of invasion. Threats may have come from neighbors, or from Mesa Verde refugees looking for a canyon to claim as their own. Probably a mix of people was showing up, some bringing warfare with them, others just hoping for a bit of water, a small plot of land. The strongest evidence researchers have of conflict is the way the people were living, their ascension into the cliffs, and the seemingly defensive postures of their villages and pueblos.
I envisioned women talking about their concerns as they ground back and forth on their slick, deep stones, parsing meal into bins. One day they might have stopped grinding altogether. Their conversation may have risen above the daily work as they agreed that their predicament had gone on too long. Surrounding lands had erupted into conflict and mass migrations, a diaspora of Anasazi farmers, fugitives, and warriors heading south from the Four Corners. No telling when a clan of marauders might take one of these mesas by siege. Their cliff dwelling was no longer a safe place, the springs going dry, the wood supply running out. Corn was becoming less reliable as water tables dropped in the fields. Game animals were more and more scarce.
These very mealing bins may have been where the decision was made to move again: the families must be gathered, and the men must make their laborious proclamations down in their kivas. Then, the women agreed, we will leave this place for a more secure land, some distant country of better water.
I reached down into one of the stone bins and picked up the hull of a broken vessel, one with a clay loop where it had once been hung from a ceiling rafter. I tilted the piece into the sunlight, a quarter of a jar. Are your voices recorded in this clay? I wondered. Is this where you put your final fears and your decisions to leave this place?
Colin and I spent most of the day at this cliff dwelling, hardly speaking to each other, just moving from ruin to ruin—some hardly ruins at all. I eventually made my way to a set of three kivas built at the edge of a precipice. They were sunken next to each other, each broken open, with their fine southward facings gone and their roofs fallen into the canyon below. I stepped down into the first kiva, its deflector still in place like a gravestone and one of its ceiling posts still standing. I walked to this upright timber and ran a hand down its gray and ancient surface, kneeling as I felt all the way to its base. There my fingers stopped at a change in the wood’s texture. I felt a space the size of a quarter on the post’s backside, a plug of cork used to cover a hole, a message someone had left.
To determine dates of construction for various sites, an archaeologist walked through this area in the 1970s gathering viable wood samples. Tree rings from extracted cores were read like bar codes, revealing the exact date that a tree was felled for construction. I felt the plug’s smoothness, how it was hammered in and then carefully sanded flush so it would not be obvious. I knew who put it here. Jeff Dean, head of the Tree-Ring Lab in Tucson. Now I knew where I was. This canyon previously unnamed in my mind was Waterlily Canyon. The cliff dwelling had been called Pine-Tree House by an archaeologist who had come through in 1910. To the Navajo it is Dogoszhi Biko, a remote canyon of ancient death. Few Navajo come to these places. They are too full of ghosts—someone else’s ghosts. The Navajo have closed these canyons off, as if boarding up rooms in a house where terrible things once happened, where human skeletons slowly erode out of steep graves. Dogoszhi Biko is hardly a place to be visited.
Jeff Dean had inserted this plug while roaming these canyons, taking copious notes pertaining to cliff dwellings, and drilling cores out of choice pieces of wood. He took cores back to his lab in Tucson, where he put together the most detailed prehistoric time line ever deciphered in the Southwest. Among Kayenta cliff dwellings he found two decades of steady growth through the 1260s and 1270s, followed by a final flurry of small-scale construction. The flurry ended suddenly and by 1290 it was over, the last pieces of wood cut.
Overseeing a collection of sixty thousand Southwest wood specimens that show in their tree rings not only dates but also climate fluctuations, Dean is the quintessential time and
weather keeper for the Anasazi. When I spoke with him about the abandonment of Kayenta sites, he told me that climate and social factors had been delicately balanced against each other, as was always true for the Anasazi. But there was no resisting the Great Drought of the thirteenth century. After it hit, there remained enough water to keep some meager population alive. Just as in southwest Colorado, some people could have stayed, but none did. This was simply and suddenly no longer a good place to live.
“In the Kayenta region what actually drove agricultural success was not so much rainfall as a combination of deep floodplain sediments and a high water table,” Dean told me, tilting his body back in his office chair at the lab, fingers clasped thoughtfully at his barrel chest. “That’s why they were originally able to live in as many dif-ferent places as they did. But when the water table dropped and you had erosion—like we do these days—precipitation became the dominant driver, and rain is just a lot less reliable. So it happened that you had not only the Great Drought, but you also had eroding farmlands and falling water tables. This huge environmental whammy hit just as populations were right at the carrying capacity of the land. That was when you start seeing cliff dwellings, and right after that Mesa Verde, all of the Four Corners, and finally Kayenta fell through.”
According to the tree-ring dates Dean and his colleagues assembled, the cliff dwellings just west of Comb Ridge, in Utah’s Cedar Mesa, were the first to be abandoned in the 1260s and 1270s. The next to go were the dwellings at Mesa Verde, which produced no tree-cutting dates after 1280. Finally the large Kayenta sites of Kiet Siel and Betatakin saw their last construction in 1285. The final tree-ring date found among the mesas of Kayenta is A.D. 1290. The Anasazi made their last attempts to hunker down, and finally no one was left. Ten years after Mesa Verde fell, Kayenta went down right behind it, like the successive toppling of dominoes, a wave of immigrants and abandonments heading south, pushing down walls as they went, uprooting everyone.