How a Glamping Adventure Revealed the Secrets of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon

It was a trip ordained by the heavens. I arrived in Santa Fe—for the umpteenth time since I first saw the Land of Enchantment as a teenager—on the eve of the new moon, one of the darkest nights in the lunar calendar, to join a spring stargazing adventure. Destination: Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a vast Ancestral Puebloan complex located in the state’s northwestern quadrant, a region noted for its dark skies.

Taos-based tour company Heritage Inspirations organized the trip in collaboration with Santa Fe’s storied Inn of the Five Graces. It promised archaeology by day and deluxe tented accommodations and astronomy by night—plus three nights in town to explore what’s new in the country’s oldest capital.

Chaco is mysterious. Chaco is magical. Chaco is a pain to get to. I’d been wanting to see it for years, but the UNESCO World Heritage site is about a three-hour drive from Santa Fe, the last stretch on unpaved roads, and the campsites are DIY. Plus, I never could have arranged the speakers and guides brought in by Heritage Inspirations to instruct—or perhaps I should say enlighten—me and my fellow stargazers on the secrets of Chaco Canyon.

Our group of 13 spent the first night at the Inn of the Five Graces, across the street from the iconic San Miguel Chapel in Barrio de Analco, a neighborhood where the oldest house dates back to 1646. I checked in to my ornately decorated suite and joined other early birds for drinks on a sun-dappled patio. None of us had been to Chaco before, but we all felt its pull. A trio of silver-haired sisters had convened from around the country in remembrance of their late father, while a couple from Massachusetts were well versed in alternative theories about ancient aliens and lost civilizations.

The remaining trip participants—two sons, one daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren of the hotel’s founders—joined us for dinner in the Pink Adobe, the classic New Mexican restaurant opened in 1944 and now owned by the Inn of the Five Graces. Our Chaco education began with lectures by G. B. Cornucopia, a retired Chaco park ranger, and Isabel Hawkins, a research astronomer and former NASA advisor.

Steeped in a lifetime of scholarship and on-site study, the pair summarized what’s currently known about Chacoan culture. The society inhabited this place from about 850 to 1250 A.D. and left behind structures that are immense, built on the scale of ancient Aztec cities. And yet some things have never added up. Why has Chaco yielded so few cooking hearths, trash heaps, and burial sites—the typical signs of life left by a busy settlement?

The “sun dagger” theory offers one explanation. In 1977, a young American artist named Anna Sofaer found a spiral petroglyph near the top of Fajada Butte, one of the highest points in the park. At high noon during the summer solstice—the middle of the day in the middle of the year, or “the center of time,” as Cornucopia said—a dagger-shaped ray of sunlight crossed the spiral. Further study proved the petroglyph to be an accurate solar calendar, and it unlocked for Sofaer an entirely new way to understand Chaco. Perhaps it was not a city of residents but rather a ceremonial site built to align with both solar and lunar pathways. Seen this way, Chaco is a bit like the remains of a carefully calibrated celestial timepiece. As Cornucopia put it, “The perfect order of the heavens recreated on the imperfect earth.”

The next day, a bluebird sky promised ideal stargazing weather. As we rattled across washboard roads toward Fajada Butte, guide Lewis Bailey offered some advice. “Rather than trying to figure it out,” he said, “just be there and embrace the fact that this place has a special energy.” Archaeology can’t explain why Chaco was created, Bailey said, and the Ancestral Puebloans left no written records to explain their purpose. We know next to nothing about their emotional, intellectual, and religious life—only that their gods, myths, and heroes were unlike ours.

First we stopped to visit petroglyphs near the park entrance and have a picnic lunch—lamb-pastrami sandwiches and seared-tuna niçoise salads—with postcard views of Fajada Butte. Then we explored Pueblo Bonito, the four-story stone “great house” of around 700 rooms at the heart of the Chaco complex. I tried to imagine the social organization and sheer human energy required to build such a structure, but it was impossible to understand—especially given that they had no metal tools, wheeled carts, or beasts of burden to bring thousands of roof timbers from forests 50 miles away.

Bailey told us that archaeologists had excavated traces of a walkway that once connected Pueblo Bonito to Chetro Ketl, another great house. The discovery brought the everyday world of the Chacoans vividly back to life for him. Imagine, he said, a group of teenagers loafing in its shade nearly a thousand years ago, hanging out and flirting like undergraduates on a modern college campus.

The sky had turned overcast by the time we reached camp. Heritage Inspirations founder Angelisa Murray hurried us into a spacious welcome tent for cups of cacao—a nod to one of the products, along with macaw feathers, the ancient Chacoans imported along trade routes from Mesoamerica.

I fretted about the clouds, but Heritage Inspiration’s master sky watcher, astronomer Danielle Adams, brushed my worries aside. “It will burn off,” she said. And sure enough, the sky was again clear by dusk, when we lined up at her telescope to view the celestial bodies. Adams also turned our attention to the eastern horizon, where a band of color known as the Belt of Venus glowed in the “anti-twilight”: the stretch of sky opposite the sunset.

We broke for a dinner of cedar-plank salmon and zingy New Mexican white wines served in the lantern-lit dining tent. Over dessert, Adams explained her specialty, cultural astronomy. Every group of humans in the world, she said, has studied the skies and sought to explain the cosmos. Adams, who wrote her doctoral thesis on ancient Arabic astronomy, quoted lines of classical poetry describing phases of the constellation we call the Pleiades. One rhyming couplet instructs a young man to get an adze, or ax, when the Pleiades are overhead. As Adams explained, the Pleiades reach their apex during January’s midwinter chill, when it’s time to cut firewood.

We stepped back out into the windy night. Adams used a laser pointer to draw lions on the sky, tracing the constellation Leo—which, like other signs of the Western zodiac, comes from Greek astronomy—then the Great Arabian Lion, a vast constellation that seemed to cover half the cosmos. Two traditions, two visions of the night. “In my field we speak of cultural astronomies,” Adams said. “There’s no one astronomy.”

I slipped away to my spacious tent and slid into bed, snug beneath handwoven blankets. At 4 a.m., as the Milky Way peaked overhead, my alarm went off: it was time to join Adams outside. For the next 20 minutes, as my eyes adjusted to the moonless dark, astonishing starlight revealed the landscape. I made out not just the profile of Fajada Butte in the distance, but also the shapes of rock formations around the camp. The Milky Way glowed against the deeper black of the cosmos, and I easily picked out man-made satellites moving in straight-line trajectories. Every few minutes a meteor slashed across the firmament—gone in a flash, like celestial lightning.

A bunch of dried chiles hanging under a sign labeled Silverleaf and a dog sitting in a motorcycle sidecar in a desert setting From left: Dried-chili décor outside a suite at the Inn of the Five Graces; an adventurous dog in a sidecar outside the Chaco Canyon visitors’ center. Kevin West By 5 a.m., dawn began to glow in the east and the stars slipped back into obscurity. Less than an hour later, Adams and Bailey were leading us all across a mesa top to witness the moment that sunlight hit Fajada Butte.

The rest of the day seemed never-ending. Even after hours outside, a leisurely breakfast, and another robust hike to view Pueblo Bonito from above, it was still only noon when we departed for Santa Fe. Unloading the SUVs three hours later, someone joked that we’d been on a 24-hour, 10-day trip.

After glimpses into the ancient world and the eternal cosmos, I woke up the next morning ready to see what was timely and new in New Mexico’s beloved cultural capital. I started right outside my hotel room, because the Inn of the Five Graces is currently in the midst of a generational renewal.

The Relais & Châteaux property was opened in 1996 by Ira and Sylvia Seret, former New Yorkers who moved to Afghanistan in the groovy 1960s, then relocated to Santa Fe in 1978 to open a shop, Seret & Sons, where they still sell antique textiles and décor from around the world. As they step back from day-to-day operations of the hotel, their sons, Ajna, Isaiah, and Sharif, have brought in new managing director Kevin Geanides, formerly of Little Palm Island, in the Florida Keys, to steward the family’s crown jewel through a careful handover.

Ajna Seret led me on an end-to-end property tour and explained the brothers’ focus on continuity. His parents’ distinctive design DNA still shows in the new spa and suites—with their intricate mosaic bathrooms, layered antique textiles, and hand-carved wooden screens—but the vibe is lighter, airier, and more modern.

That afternoon, I peeled away from downtown’s tourist zone. Santa Fe skeptics may dismiss the city as a backdrop for turquoise-bedecked weekenders, but La Mama, an all-day café and natural wine bar on Marcy Street, was started by and for residents who crave big leafy salads and skin-contact wines. In Midtown Santa Fe, the creative conclave along Lena Street is anchored by the Bread Shop, which offers spectacular sourdough loaves and pastries.

But the handsomest new restaurant in the land of green and red chiles comes from chefs and co-owners Jonathan Boyd and Zak Pelaccio (of Corner Office, in Taos, formerly of Fish & Game, in upstate New York). It is set to open this summer in a renovated service station and will serve knockout Thai food, of all things. And after my night among the leonine constellations, its name—Leo’s—was hard to forget.

Sorry, wrong camera. It was my D80, well before the D750 was available. the visit was in February of 2009. I took 789 photographs during the walk around. I am going to re-visit today...

A sample of the stonework...

C:\Users\jbdve\OneDrive\Desktop\Chaco Canyon Feb 2009\Chaco_Canyon_-49.JPG

The term “Anasazi” is a Navajo word = means “ancient enemy.”

The Apache and Navajo are from northwestern Canada and eastern Alaska.. Their Athabascan ancestors migrated south when the Spanish were moving north from new Spain / old Mexico..

Hopi call their ancestors: Hisatsinom

Another theory is that the Dene native people of the NWT in Canada may be descendants of the Anasazi people who dispersed around 1200 AD from some combination of drought, and warfare with other groups. In the Dene language their name simply means “the people” and it is oddly similar to the name used by the Navajo people (Dineh) which has a similar meaning.

Why would the Anasazi migrate that far from the desert southwest? Possibly they encountered more hostile and settled tribes in Montana and Alberta and kept going north until they found vacant land.

This theory has proponents and critics, I don’t have that much expertise in the subject that I would want to say either way.

I visited Chaco Canyon in August 2018 and yes the road in is a shocker alright, but it’s worth a visit and quite impressive. The people there apparently hauled in logs from a mountain range (Chuska Mountains) about 150 miles to the west. As people have commented Chaco “canyon” is not really a canyon, it’s surrounded by rather low cliffs but it’s not a canyon and the stream running through (a tributary of the San Juan) is intermittent and I can certainly understand that if the climate turned drier as research suggests it did after about 1160 AD, the kind of agriculture the people practiced there would be very difficult with few water sources around.

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