Chaco Culture

Between roughly the ninth and twelfth centuries, Chaco Canyon was the ceremonial and administrative centre of a culture that reached across the San Juan basin, and what it left is astonishing: multi-storey great houses of finely coursed sandstone, the largest of which, Pueblo Bonito, held hundreds of rooms and dozens of ceremonial kivas. Roads ran dead straight for tens of kilometres to outlying communities, and buildings and features were aligned to solstices, equinoxes and the lunar standstill cycle with a precision that took modern researchers decades to recognise. Descendant Pueblo, Hopi and Navajo communities regard it as ancestral and sacred. The isolation that has preserved it also means the darkest skies in the country, and the park is a certified dark-sky site with a small observatory.

What's there

• Pueblo Bonito - the great house of hundreds of rooms and many kivas.
• Chetro Ketl and Casa Rinconada - further great houses and a great kiva.
• The solar and lunar alignments - architecture built to the sky's cycles.
• The night sky - dark-sky observing at the park observatory.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons; summer is hot and winter cold with snow on the access road. The road in is unpaved and turns to impassable mud after rain or snowmelt, which is the single most important thing to check before setting out.

Things to know

Access is the hard part: the last stretch is a rough dirt road, badly washboarded in dry weather and genuinely impassable when wet, and there are no services, no fuel and effectively no phone signal. The campground is the only accommodation for a long way. This is a sacred ancestral place to living communities, so behave accordingly and stay off the walls.

Nearby

Aztec Ruins is a couple of hours north; Santa Fe and Albuquerque are three to four hours away.

Key facts