Travel: A road trip to ruins

A soft breeze ruffled the stillness as we leaned against a rock at the toe of a small canyon. No one else was around, yet human presence was palpable. Certainly it was in our imagination but we could distinctly hear a baby crying, a couple laughing, and the deep cough of someone fighting illness.

We were at Hovenweep National Monument in extreme Southeastern Utah. Before us were a series of ruins abandoned some 700 years ago where a town had stood for several hundred years. Lonely silence now rules but once babies had been born, people suffered joy and heartbreak, and many died in the abandoned town where we sat.

It's easy to let the mind wander while visiting Hovenweep National Monument or other ruins of the Ancestral Pueblo people. What was life like? Where did people come from? How did they find enough to eat in the sere, arid landscape and build such enduring structures? And the big question. Why did they mysteriously disappear?

We visited Hovenweep following a couple of days in Mesa Verde National Park just across the Colorado State Line. The largest archaeological unit in the National Park Service, Mesa Verde is well known to the millions of people who have visited and many more who have seen photos of its iconic cliff dwellings.

Mesa Verde is the best place to begin an antiquities tour in the American Southwest. Accessing the most spectacular ruins requires taking a tour guided by a Park Service Ranger. In various stops along the walk, our guide offered information and intriguing questions about these ancient people. Mesa Verde tours are an outstanding introduction to Ancient Pueblo sites but come with a drawback. About 40 other people shared our tour and rangers keep people moving along. There's no opportunity to just sit quietly and contemplate the lives of people who lived long ago.

After learning the basic history of Pueblos at Mesa Verde we wanted more intimate contact with the ancients. A ranger suggested we drive to Hovenweep National Monument, a little over an hour to the west. It has far fewer visitors than Mesa Verde and encourages visitors to walk unescorted amid its ruins. Hovenweep provided the opportunity we sought to enjoy solitude and muse on these ingenious people who lived and died in a hostile desert.

Once called the Anasazi Culture, the preferred term today is Ancient Pueblo People. They lived in a vast area of generally high altitude arid land covering portions of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico and centered on the Four Corners Area. Many of the ruins in various national parks and monuments are open to the public. We were on what we informally called our Fall Antiquities Tour, a giant loop from our home in Cedar Rapids.

A short visit to Mesa Verde dispels what we baby boomers were taught in grade school history. Back then, we learned that when the Pilgrims landed in what is now Massachusetts, they found scattered bands of Native Americans living in primitive conditions, mostly supporting themselves by hunting and foraging. That was true at the time. But what the books didn't disclose is that European diseases had swept through rather sophisticated native societies, killing most of the people, just a few years before the Pilgrims. Only scattered epidemic survivors remained when the Mayflower reached shore. Decades of archaeology and historical research has revealed that the New World before Columbus was populated by a much higher population of Native Americans than once believed. These people created sophisticated, flexible cultures that were in flux over the centuries as environmental and cultural conditions changed.

Glance at Mesa Verde's or Hovenweep's ruins and it's obvious that the people who built them and lived here understood principles of physics, architecture, agriculture, and other disciplines modern American often view as relatively new. Native cultures had progressed far beyond the hunter gatherers of the old history books and prospered in the rocky dry soil. No doubt they enjoyed a rich cultural history with many sacred traditions.

The Ancient Pueblo people were not alone. The Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley, for example, lived at about the same time and also formed a cooperative society with a division of labor and ability to craft amazing structures. Unfortunately, the humid climate of the Midwest and East has reduced the evidence of these people to mounds somewhat hard to excite the imagination.

That's not the case with the Ancient Pueblos. Thanks to an arid climate and the custom of building under overhanging rock ledges, structures have stood the test of time. The complexity of their society is impossible to miss.

We left Cedar Rapids on an October morning heading toward Mesa Verde with a plan to make a grand circuit of several antiquity sites. Our first Pueblo was surprisingly in Western Kansas' Scott County State Park. After setting our tent up near a pleasant lake we walked to the ruins. It was our first view of the distinctive architecture of these ancient people. As we would soon learn, this was a tiny Pueblo far removed from others. Even the name, El Quartelejo, means 'far outpost” in Spanish. It was occupied more recently than the better known sites but was a fine way to begin our tour. We soon saw much grander ruins in national parks but they shared the same construction patterns we observed in Kansas.

We next drove to Mesa Verde and camped three nights in the park service campground. This gave a chance to enjoy ranger guided tours on our first full day. It was a superb orientation. The following morning we drove to Hovenweep and enjoyed visiting Ancient Pueblos without crowds or guides. Almost adjoining Hovenweep but in Colorado, is the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and Anasazi Heritage Center. Here we actually walked through ancient structures at the Lowry Pueblo. With 40 rooms and eight kivas it was immense compared with the modest structure in Kansas. The Monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, rather than the National Park Service.

After packing up our tent we headed south from Mesa Verde to Aztec Ruins National Monument, adjoining the town of Aztec, N.M. The ruins are misnamed. The site has nothing to do with the Aztec People. We learned that this was simply the name the conquistadors assigned native populations. Aztec is an enormous Pueblo. This was not a scattered settlement but an ancient city with dozens of rooms and kivas spread across a fertile valley.

We wanted to visit the most spectacular of many sites, called Chaco Culture National Historic Park south of Aztec, but access is by a 30-plus mile primitive road. National Park Service staff warned us that recent rains had made it nearly impassible, so we headed instead to Bandelier National Monument near Las Alamos, N.M., where we pitched our tent. Far from light pollution, an amazing star studded night sky arched over our campsite as coyotes yipped in the distance. The next day we hiked up the Monument's canyon, climbing ladders to reach ancient dwellings and walking past kivas.

Like Hovenweap, Bandelier gave us the opportunity to intimately explore ancient ruins alone at our own pace. It is our favorite Ancient Pueblo site.

Why did they leave? No one is quite sure, although one park ranger speculated that there wasn't any single reason why so many ancient settlements were abandoned around the same time about 700 years ago. Perhaps people left because the soil had been depleted by hundreds of years of gardening. Maybe it was a multiyear drought. Most likely the evacuation was caused by a number of stresses that remain a mystery.

Where the people went isn't mysterious. Park rangers explained that the Ancient Pueblo people seemed to move to better watered areas not far away. They are the ancestors of many of today's Native Americans.

We took our antiquities tour in October. Although most people visit in summer it is the American southwest. Summers are broiling hot, although at higher elevations nights cool down some. Fall weather is gloriously mild. We enjoyed pleasantly warm sunny days and nights chilly enough that we enjoyed nestling in down sleeping bags. Many people were enjoying the parks and monuments but the crowds were much smaller than the massive ones of summer.

Mesa Verde is about 1,200 miles from Cedar Rapids. We took four driving days and followed a zigzagging route that took us through the flatness of Kansas, historic Santa Fe, N.M., and Colorado's towering Rockies. A more direct route would take about three driving days each way. Most national parks and monuments have a modest entry fee, but anyone over age 62 can purchase a lifetime senior pass to federal areas for $10. It grants free admission and half price on campsite rentals. They can be purchased at most federal parks, monuments, and historic sites.

Mesa Verde is near Cortez, Colo. Aztec is in the town of the same name, and Bandelier is near Los Alamos, N.M. Each town offers an array of motels and restaurants for anyone not wishing to camp. Remote Hovenweap has a small campground by no town or other facilities nearby.

Our antiquities tour was a pleasant two weeks spent in varied terrain. It merely whetted our appetite to return, and on our next trip we'll be sure to visit Chaco Canyon.