I returned to Chaco Canyon a few weeks shy of what may have been my 20th anniversary of visiting there. Over 20 years, I’ve been back almost every year, sometimes several times in one year. Merri and I spent the start of our honeymoon there, under a Honey Moon, with friends. I celebrated my 40th birthday there with friends and ritual sacrifice. I’ve been there alone more than any other escape.

Most people will say Chaco is in the middle of nowhere. It involves a journey for which you must prepare. How much gas do you have? Food? Water? Are you ready for the extreme heat or cold — in the same day? For the sun and the wind-that-makes-crazy, the wind that flattens tents and strips tables? A couple of days will test anyone’s preparedness.

The landscape alone draws you there. Out of the vastness, the seeming flatness, following the beacon of Fajada Butte, from north or south, you descend gently into a canyon I think one can call intimate, almost human-scaled. On foot, one could traverse most of its length, from Wijiji to Peñasco Blanco, in a couple of days and its width in an hour or so. If there were no road, you’d still find your way along the Wash or the canyon walls.

Fajada Butte dominates one’s first impressions. With eponymous banding, it is a massive block on a tapered skirt capped by a jumble of boulders, including an almost comically balanced stone.

Reading the layers, it is as if a massive stream forked here, carving Fajada, with Chaco Wash, now a smaller, deeper arroyo heading towards Wijiji and Pueblo Pintado, and two other branches opening up in readiness for roads to come centuries later.

One might imagine Fajada Butte is THE reason for being here (while immediately think “it’s the entire canyon that draws us.”). But only Wijiji, Una Vida and Hungo Pavi have complete views of the Butte, and they are not the greatest of great houses.

No, downtown Chaco does not offer views of Fajada, but of South Gap, the gateway. Though there are more ways in and out of the canyon than a prairie dog town, South Gap has a unique, processional quality in shape and size.

One can stand at Kin Kletso, Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo del Arroyo or by the kiva at Casa Rinconda and wave to someone in any of the other spots (well, not between Kin Kletso and Chetro Ketl, unless by way of a third person at del Arroyo). These are each wonderful and unique great houses, not quite cheek by jowl but also nothing like the estrangement of Hungo Pavi, Una Vida and Wijiji, which one might regard as an outlier as much as a backcountry great house, if lines must be drawn.

Marching through South Gap from the outlier Kin Klizhin one would see the backcountry great house Pueblo Alto above and beyond the others. The impact is profound. This is a great place by nature in which people accomplished something nearly as great.

Mesa Verde is nothing like this. There, in one great house, you’d never know another existed. You’d have to climb up to the mesa and find your way through the scrub or across the fields to drop down to the next great house. A part of Hovenweap is more like this, neighbors in sight of each other, but like the much smaller canyons, each house seems a family home, not a great public building. Wupatki is a bit like this, great houses close with unique cosmopolitan features, but it lacks the unifying canyon walls. This was the center of the world.

Some of these structures have endured a thousand years; they will not last another thousand. The canyon, the place that drew us, will last thousands of years longer, though god and geologists know it, too, will change beyond recognition in time. There is no permanence, but our lives are short enough to allow us to ignore that. mjh