Hovenweep National Monument
Coming across an ancient ruin for the first time is like spotting a wild animal. Oftentimes you’re walking a trail, and much like encountering a wild animal, you’re fully aware something could appear at any moment. You meander your way through the scrub, letting the path do the work and your thoughts go where they may. Then, something catches your eye. A change of light or tilt of the head reveals a texture that doesn’t quite fit. You squint to make sense of the scene and suddenly you see it looking back at you. Your pulse quickens as you watch the rock face you’ve been staring at transforms into a castle wall. Locking eyes with the tiny windows, it catches your breath in its stony hands. Paralyzed, as if the slightest twitch of your hand could make it disappear, you stare in utter amazement.
As I drove, pink and purple clouds streaked across the sky, marching out of the desert and into the arms of the rising sun. An old, two-lane road leads the way to Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients from the north, a patchwork of pavement crumbling worse than any ruin you’ll come to see.
It was a cool November day as I wound my way through the countryside where sparse juniper forests are separated by farm fields filled with mule deer. Soft morning light crept down the flanks of Sleeping Ute to the south. Day chased night from the land forcing it to retreat under rocks and fallen trees, into the folds of yucca plants and shady canyons where last week’s snow escaped the sun.
After driving for a while, the winding road left the farms and their irrigation monsters behind. Bluebirds flew through green sagebrush and over red soil as I looked for my turn. Nondescript signage pointed the way down rutted dirt roads. I placed the truck in 4WD and followed with anticipation, rocking my way to the trailhead.
From the trailhead broken canyons stretched out to the mountains beyond, and my gaze roamed freely across their sand blasted edges. I walked in silence, cautiously stepping over roots, moving from sand to rock and back again. The crunch of gravel like white noise to my caffeinated thoughts.
Twisted juniper trees spiraled out of the broken earth like frozen tornadoes.
Slick rock, cracked rock, hackberry, and raven.
The occasional jet liner shredded the silence until songbirds retook the airways. As I walked, I named in my head what plants and animal tracks I could identify along the trail. The list felt embarrassingly thin compared to what the people who built these ruins would have known. I envy that intimacy. The way their inner lives would have been inseparable from their environment. I wish I could feel even a fraction of that connection to the world. Instead, I feel like an outsider no matter where my feet take me.
Rock and wood. Cacti and crumbling earth.
Occasional signposts reassured me I was on the right path and from the edge of a canyon I scanned the world below, searching for a glimpse of what was to come. The pale, cloud-dampened light was not quick to reveal my destination, but eventually I spotted the anomaly and scrambled down the trail for a closer look.
There’s something about walking in the footsteps of these distant peoples’ that makes me feel alive.
Approaching the first remains along the trail I slow to a stop and breath in the scents of high desert. The ground around me is strewn with rubble. I walk as if I’m exploring a museum, stepping with respect, moving quietly as though I might wake someone inside. All the while knowing fully the last time these sites were inhabited was over 800 years ago.
If you look up the maximum age of a juniper or pinyon pine tree (the dominant trees in this region) it’s typically no more than 500 years, which means that not a single tree in this vicinity would have been alive during the final years when these buildings were occupied. In fact, from what researchers can tell, there likely weren’t many trees left at all in those final years. Studies of ancient fire pits in the area show the steady shift in fuel from juniper and pinyon to Cottonwood and eventually sage brush, suggesting the region may have been completely deforested at one point.
In the years following the departure of these people though, the trees gradually returned and ever since they have been slowly soaking up these ruins, ingraining the remains of this lost culture in their branches and leaves.
For centuries the lives of these plants have filled the cracks in this scene, rooting into the silence. Along with the wind and sun, they’ve rearranged the bricks into entirely new silhouettes, like architects themselves.
In the absence of the original architects, wind now whistles through open doorways, etching it’s tune into stone. Bird songs swirls in empty chambers. Lizards and snakes bask in the rubble of toppled walls. Rabbits and mice evade the coyotes that search the canyon while mountain lions observe from shadows and vultures trace rooflines with their wings.
What do they make of these sites?
Voices.
I can imagine them filling these walls. Laughter and disagreement bouncing against bedrock. Fire smoke and the smell of dinner rising through rooftops.
Vast and open, standing in the sun through frozen winds and broiling heat. It’s hard not to feel exposed out here, and the structures seem to match that tone. Defensive and castle-like. Protecting against others or defending a resource? There’s very little water that I can see, and I can’t help but feel like that’s what they may have been defending. The realization makes me wonder when we’ll resort to this as well. Or has it already begun?
With mega-droughts and worldwide deforestation, are we not recreating some semblance of this on a global scale?
Is this our fate? Forced to leave our homes from a catastrophe of our own making?
I imagine the last people to call this place home walking away from these incredible feats of architecture and culture, carrying their lives in their hands, never to return again.
Did they look back?
…would you?
