Joan and I love this time of the year for canyon country. We’ll see some well-known favorites with few people and hike to some sites new to us.
A cliff dwelling with a T-shaped door; something well-known in the Chaco area.
It also means camping vs. backpacking many times, too.
These shorter canyons lend themselves well to winter day hikes. It’s not a time for mileage spent covering distance, but rather time spent in a place overall.
Seeing what we see.
And enjoying the landscape.
And the light never fails to make some interesting landscapes this time of the year.
We have some suspicions about what might happen with this spiral in a couple of weeks.
And though we’ll never know the meaning for some of these images, some seem rather familiar even in our modern times.
We could live here twenty-years and never run out of things to see, immerse ourselves in more, and never run out of new places to learn about.
A kiva.
Want to learn more about this area and concepts? Native Power Rangers on Instagram is an account run by an NPS archeologist who is a member of the Dine’ and contributions from others. Interesting reading!
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Calling historically accepted terms racist is a bit over the top. Racism denotes some form of hatred. While re-education sounds a bit Orwellian there should be some effort especially within the NPS to let us know the deeper meaning of these terms and culture. I consider myself “re-educated”, thanks for sharing !
People used “dago” and “swarthy” to describe my ancestors not long ago as acceptable language. And we changed.