CORTEZ, Colo. — The cliffs are the color of a sandstone rainbow. White, beige, light orange and, at the bottom, deep red. They wind through Sand Canyon like a snake. The trail snakes alongside, a pink squiggle across a brickyard.
My hiking companions this morning haven't been faithful. The jack rabbit bounded away an hour ago, and the canyon wren hid in a juniper tree, though it left the liquid notes of its descending song. So I approach the huge alcove in the cliffs, and the stone ruins that center it, alone.
Though the sun hasn't reached inside the alcove yet, I can see the ruin's remaining walls are in surprisingly good shape, especially considering the builders left 700 years ago and never came back.
The builders are called the Anasazi. It's a Navajo term with several shades of meaning, including "the ones who came before" and "ancient enemy." By the time the Navajo showed up, the prehistoric Anasazi were long gone, so we don't know what they called themselves. But we do know how they lived. There's hardly a canyon in the Four Corners area (where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet) without vestiges of their villages or cliff dwellings or terraced fields.
Sand Canyon's a great place for vestiges--there seem to be alcove ruins everywhere--but it's also a great place just to hike. On this recent warm fall morning, Sand Canyon feels like a theme park for nature lovers: Southwestland. There are sheer cliffs, pin~on-juniper forests, wild critters and panoramas, all in a seven-mile-long canyon. There's a photo opportunity around every turn, and the cliff dwellings are the best op of them all.
The front walls of the ruin, about 40 feet above me, have fallen forward. A slope of debris, filled with bits of broken pottery, reaches the trail. One gray piece, about the size of a half-dollar, catches my eye. It's made in what archeologists call the corrugated style. The Anasazi often built pots by pinching together coils of clay. They then smoothed the inside, leaving the exterior pinch marks.
The corrugations make rows of tiny shadows as I turn the shard over in my hand. Then the light catches a different pattern in one corner of the piece. It's a 700-year-old thumbprint--a pinch frozen in time.
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Cortez (population 8,000) doesn't look like the center of anything--except bean farms and alfalfa fields. But Cortez is the center of Anasazi country. Within a few hours' drive are the Big Four of Anasazi archeological sites: Mesa Verde National Park, Hovenweep National Monument, Canyon de Chelly National Monument and Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
