Scary Road

We went to Chaco Canyon on a dry, sunny, beautiful fall day. Chaco Cultural National Park is the site of ancient Indian ruins that were built beginning about 850 A.D. and then abandoned 400 years later, long before Columbus.

While the community thrived, they built stone great houses with hundreds of small rooms three and four stories high. The great houses had plazas and kivas (round rooms built underground for ceremonial purposes) and were a marvel of complex structure and complicated social arrangements.

It was fascinating and eerie and mysterious and puzzling. We drove the length of the canyon, about 9 miles around, and stopped at each ruin and climbed among the rooms and read about the inscrutable purposes of this giant complex and what excavations are uncovering about them.

As with so many iconic places, well documented pictures do not do justice to the scale and sheer scope of it. I was awed.

But getting there and back was a nightmare. It's 190 miles from Santa Fe, and 20 miles of that is unpaved road. It's out in the literal middle of nowhere. But we were completely prepared for a several hour trip and we knew we'd have to go slow on the unpaved part. The day was lovely.

Not.

There had been a monster rain storm in the area the day before. When we got to the 20 miles of unpaved road, it turned out to be a soupy, slick gumbo, with ruts up to the axles. We forded washouts with running currents, drove over the broken edge of what used to be a bridge with a waterfall cascading beside the wheels of the car and rattled over rocks that tilted the car ominously.

Jim was a marvel of steady nerves for hours as we crawled along at 5 miles an hour from low washes to high rocky ruts. Not another car in sight except for a black SUV abandoned in a ditch, half turned over. Nobody. This went on for 20 miles.

When we finally arrived at the park, there was no electricity in the visitor center. The storm had knocked it out, but the center was open. The ranger could not take our entrance fee, the films weren't showing, and the campers who were staying in the canyon were all milling about asking about road conditions.

But the paved park road through the canyon was fine and the sun was out, and we toured for the whole afternoon, dreading the fact that we had to get back in our mud caked car and return on that treacherous road.

The return was scarier. Miles outside the park we met a group of four trucks and vans with pop up campers who had stopped on either side of a raging current across the road. They couldn't get across from either direction with their heavy loads and low slung pop ups. They urged us in our SUV to try it, and cheered as we gunned through the water, slid out of control toward the ditch and fishtailed up a slope, desperately trying to regain traction.

I was frightened.

Then it got worse. At some point 10 miles down the track, our GPS got confused and sent us down even sketchier roads. Not roads, even. At two different points the muddy trail ended and we were going down wide arroyo washes of slippery clay. We finally found an opening up the river bank and bumped treacherously up to a gravel area and then across a patch of rubble back to a sand path.

I was really scared. There were no houses, no civilization in sight anywhere, no cell service. If we had gotten stuck . . .

We made it home late at night, unable to open the car doors where the goopy mud had dried into cement around the door frames.

I've been on a scary bus in Italy (yikes) and I've been on high ski lifts that were heart stopping (eep), but hours and hours of slip sliding along on a Really Scary Road with no civilization in sight for miles and miles was nerve wracking.

Still, if you can get there, the Chaco Cultural Park is well worth reading up on and then visiting. Just don't go the day after a rainstorm.