Canyons of the Ancients: Colorado’s newest monument

by Anne O’Brien ©2000

Even the most casual glance at a topographical map of the extreme southwestern corner of Colorado reveals few rivers or creeks and even fewer roads. Desert canyons prevail: lots of canyons, mapped in pale wavy lines that penetrate light green areas indicating piñon-juniper woodlands. Contour intervals intersect the wavering canyon tracery, their layers sculpting images of mesas, points, and ridges that separate canyon after canyon. Names in this land evoke classic features of the West: Littlewater; Alkali; Cottonwood; Mocassin; Burro; Coyote; Wildhorse.

Above: one of two McLean Basin towers. These 1,000-year-old stone towers with unique bands of glazed stones are perched in a lonely setting overlooking the Colorado-Utah border.

164,000 acres of this landscape recently became our newest national monument. With this designation came a new name: “Canyons of the Ancients,” a tribute to the innumerable signs of prehistoric human habitation barely distinguishable from caves and ledges weathered into the canyons’ sandstone walls. The new monument shelters one of the highest concentrations of archeological sites in the world and the highest in our country: 5,000 areas already recorded and an estimated 50,000 hidden from time by sand, sagebrush, and weather.

Those who, like Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, want things to be the same fifty years from now, celebrate the protection of this hot, dry country as a climate-controlled, living museum of Southwest history. Located nine miles southwest of Mesa Verde, it will offer its guests an experience very different from visiting a national park. Its structures (please don’t say “ruins!”) can be experienced in their natural settings, like wild animals seen on the savannah rather than at the zoo.

 “Although most people prefer pavement, amenities, and coke machines, some seek solitude,” says Victoria Atkins, archeologist at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colorado. “Our goal is to preserve a total landscape that shows human activity on the land,” she explains, differentiating between the monument’s new approach to protection and the more traditional one. “National monuments are meant to offer visible architecture set among fields, check dams, rock art, ceremonial sites, and water sources. Visitors come away with a more holistic understanding of the past rather than seeing it a piece at a time.”

Above: a granary in Cross Canyon: a perfect, untouched 1,000+-year old grainery in Cross Canyon Wilderness Study Area, part of the new monument.

But what about the possibility of destruction from the increased visitation that publicizing such areas attracts? After all, tourist activity at Escalante Grand Staircase in Utah increased by 250 percent in the first four years after President Clinton designated it as a national monument.

Atkins thinks that organizations such as the Colorado Mountain Club can play an important part in what she describes as the opportunity to find ways to make these places last. “It is an exciting time to ask, ‘How do we do it?’ she declares. “It will take community ownership. It’s a challenge for all of us, not just the land managers. People who value backcountry experience will have to work together to find common ground with ranchers, school groups, local businesses and government agencies. No BLM budget can ever cover the cost of total protection.”

Still, Roger Alexander, Public Affairs Specialist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), hopes that budget increases will be approved by Congress as part of the protection plan. “[Colorado Representative] Scott McInnis has gone on record as saying that the worst thing Congress could do is not to maintain the national monuments the administration has created,” he says. Although Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell and others have expressed fear that protection of wild lands by executive order sets a dangerous “top down” precedent, such action is hardly a new phenomenon. All except three U.S. presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to set aside protected lands.

The proclamation that declares Canyons of the Ancients as a monument explains how the system works. “Section 2 of the Act of June 8, 1906 … authorizes the President, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the U.S. to be national monuments, and to reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which … shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

It goes on to specify how the protection works. “All Federal lands and interests ... within the boundaries of this monument are … appropriated and withdrawn from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, or other disposition under the public land laws, including withdrawal from … patent under the mining laws, and from disposition under all laws relating to mineral leasing … except for oil and gas leasing as prescribed herein.

“For the purpose of protecting the objects identified..., the Secretary of the Interior shall prohibit all motorized and mechanized vehicle use off road....”

Alexander explains in practical terms what these provisions will mean in Canyons of the Ancients, since the monument contains sixty-two pumping oil wells, a major gas field, and accompanying pipelines, feed lines, and access roads. “Oil and gas production will continue,” he says, “even though it means a lot of areas are not pristine.”

Other BLM staff members say that the area’s greatest vulnerability does not come from commercial interests but from recreational users who go off road to create trails that may cross sensitive areas they don’t recognize. However, no mining or other commercial activity will be allowed that might disturb natural or cultural resources, including removal of sand and gravel or (believe it or not) prehistoric building materials. As is common in these areas, properly managed livestock grazing will continue on the 13,000 private acres within the monument as well as on permitted public lands.

As interested as CMC members are in land issues, we are more likely as a group to be considering how we can go to see it. Mark Pearson, Durango-based chairman of the Sierra Club’s national wildlands committee, has a few suggestions, beginning with timing your visit for fall or spring.

“There is an interpreted area at Lowry Pueblo nine miles from Pleasantview,” he says, “but the only formally developed hiking trail system in the Monument is the Sand Canyon­East Rock Canyon system along McElmo Canyon Road west of Cortez. This trail winds below classic red sandstone cliffs packed with cliff dwellings, and several loop hikes are possible between the two canyons.”

A citizen-proposed wilderness area within the monument, suggests the BLM’s Alexander, might be a hiking destination for the more adventurous. “Cross Canyon and Mare’s Tail Canyon in the far northwest portion include almost thirty twisting miles of main canyon and more than twenty-five miles of tributaries. The most popular hike winds up Cross Canyon’s wide lower end. Its bottoms are lined with cottonwood trees framing a cool stream that in some areas features inviting pools and waterfalls. Slopes and mesas above are dominated by piñon-juniper woodlands, and wildlife in the area includes mule deer, mountain lions, and even black bear.”

As if beauty were not enough, Pearson adds that there are also “numerous archeological sites within the first few miles, including one large community draped around and atop a prominent outcrop in the middle of the canyon.” When you’re ready to go, he directs you to travel via Hovenweep National Monument headquarters near the Colorado-Utah state line.

No matter where you might decide to venture in this rough and rugged landscape, it will not take you long to find evidence of the unique “landmarks, structures, and objects of scientific and historical interest” that led to its designation as a national monument. The first thing you will notice is that most of the shallow, twisting canyons cut into Dakota Sandstone are punctuated with the dwellings, towers, and other evidence of human habitation that gave the area the name Montezuma County and caused its seat to be called Cortez. Those who chose these exotic names erroneously assumed that only mysterious golden cultures to the south could create such complexity.

We now know that these canyons once were home to the ancestors of today’s Pueblo people. Before the thirteenth century the population of the county exceeded today’s. The marks they left—potsherds, grinding stones, rocky rubble, here and there a corn cob or the remains of a basket or sandal—first caught the imagination of curious people at home and abroad when in 1888 the story broke that two ranchers had come upon a most spectacular structure that appeared to be a prehistoric city. Today it is called Cliff Palace, still a most impressive building preserved at Mesa Verde.

The ranchers, who like their counterparts today struggled to live off the dry, dry land, augmented their standard of living by leading tourists, scientists, and anyone else who took an interest to the site. While this led to voracious artifact collecting, the attention these visitors focused on the well-­preserved remnants of life in the ancient Southwest inspired a new way of studying lost civilizations. Once observers got beyond the idea that Aztecs and Mayans from Mexico were the only people who could have built there, archeologists began to see parallels with contemporary Pueblo customs. Yet, they wondered, what evidence was there that early Pueblo people could have constructed the multi-story archeo-astronomical towers unique to the Four Corners area?

Anthropologists and ethnologists were called in to join the excavators, and a new dimension was added to science. Indeed, their combined studies suggested that the cliff dwellers who populated the canyons from between a.d. 450 and 1300 were ancestors of the Hopi, Zuñi, and other tribes who live today in Arizona and New Mexico. Often called Anasazi, today’s native people now prefer to refer to them as pre-Puebloans. “Anasazi,” although a euphonious Navajo word, reflects badly on their Pueblo neighbors: it means “enemies of our ancestors.”

Leaving prehistory within Canyons of the Ancients, you may want to visit another asset inside its boundaries, a place where our natural heritage is protected alongside our cultural heritage. On the southwest edge of the monument lies a 480-acre research natural area. There, among rattlesnakes, scorpions, and piñon gnats typical of life on the Colorado Plateau live surviving members of at-risk species that include the Mesa Verde night snake, the long-nosed leopard lizard, and the twin-spotted spiny lizard; as well as eagles, kestrels, hawks, and harriers. You’ll want to pay them your respects.

Finding ways for people and the land to survive in harmony reflects a long tradition within the Colorado Mountain Club. National Monument designation represents a fresh approach, and Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients offer us all an opportunity to be part of the evolving process whose goal is to enjoy our resources while allowing them to endure. “There is room in the national value system,” says Victoria Atkins of the Anasazi Heritage Center, “for landscape monuments to serve as a new system of managing public lands.”

Management planning will be ongoing during the next two years. Why not lend your ideas to a community of supporters? To see how, visit http://www.co.blm.gov/.