Rugged Beauty, Complex Human Legacy – New Mexico’s Southwest

 What you’re missing is that the path itself changes you.

Julien Smith

Gila Cliff Dwellings

The precipitous drive to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument takes longer than the actual visit of its famed Gila Cliff Dwellings.  From Silver City, carefully follow 40+ miles of twisty, narrow, steep, heavily forested, mountain road that easily keeps the less passionate among us, away.  After a vigorous steering and nerve workout, you’ll be happy to ultimately stretch your legs and mind at this stunning primeval location.

View from Cliff Dweller Canyon
Approaching the Gila Cliff Dwellings, middle left

The Gila Cliff Dwellings are located inside one of two supervolcano calderas that erupted 28-35 million years ago, with a force estimated at 1,000 times the power of the Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption, and created what today are called the Mogollon Mountains.  

Five naturally eroded interlinked alcoves situated 200 feet up the northwest side of Cliff Dweller Canyon contain earlier homes of the Tularosa Mogollon People. About 42 rooms were constructed from local stone. All wooden beams (vigas) seen in the dwellings are original. Their tree-ring dates range from 1276 to 1287 CE, suggesting the dwellings were constructed in a relatively short time, perhaps in, as little as, eleven years.  The Gila Cliff Dwellers departed these homes and abandoned their surrounding fields by about 1300 CE.  Dire need may have sent the families elsewhere or they were simply ready for a new location.  

Still a few wine-colored apples (tunas) left on this cactus
Local food for humans and animals alike

The Tularosa Mogollon People tilled mesa and riverside fields of squash, corn, and beans (you drive through some of them on your way here); grounded cornmeal with metate and mano, wove cotton cloth, traded with other communities and cultures, hunted wild game, and gathered wild edible plants. They were skilled potters, producing handsome brown bowls with black interiors and black-on-white decorated vessels.

 

For thousands of years, various groups of nomadic people used the caves of the Gila River as temporary shelters, but between 1260 and 1280 CE, people of the Tularosa Mogollon Culture decided it would be a good place to ‘permanently’ call home. 

 

Based on the number of hearths used for cooking found in the dwellings, and on an assumed number of four to five people per household, archeologists suggest that a total population would be between 40 and 60 people who had abandoned small pueblo settlements to take advantage of the sheltered dry cave near a year-round spring for about only one generation (20 years). 

 

The Gila Cliff Dwellings housed a relatively isolated settlement, during a time of harsh climatic straits, the well-known Great Drought of 1276-1299, when cliff dwellings in other parts of the Southwest, notably the Anasazi area (i.e. Chaco Canyon Culture), offered a haven to refugees in similar circumstances.  

The duration of occupation of the Gila Cliff Dwellings beyond 1287 is unknown.  Evidence of a relatively short duration is suggested by the lack of post-construction modifications.  There are unfinished floors and no layered, multi-level floors.  In addition, there is almost a total lack of room remodeling.  When the Tularosa Mogollon People moved on, they left these walls, a few pottery shards, and some food stashes as a glimpse into their past for us to study, interpret, and explore today.  

T-shaped doorway also found in Mexico, Ecuador, India, Peru and beyond
Often encountered in Anasazi and Maya cultures
Also seen in Tibetan sand mandalas

The true meaning of T-shaped doorways is still unknown.  Does it represent half of the plus ‘+’ sign, a doorway to the spiritual world, a shape making it easy to carry a large load on the shoulders without having to turn sideways?  Could it just represent a person with open arms, or a symbol of life force?  Overall, this T-shaped door is seen as an indication of trade, not only of goods but of ideas, beliefs, and architectural styles.  

Getting closer
Darkened with soot and still supported by original vigas (wood beams)

From below, well protected from the elements
Black traces of intermittent waterfall to the right

According to Casitas de Gila: ‘By 1878, mining was booming throughout the Silver City area, and the local Wild West was now, with much boot dragging, in the process of being tamed.  In a strategic move to avoid jury duty, mining entrepreneur Henry Ailman and four other potential jurors left the mining community of Georgetown near Silver City and headed north for the headwaters of the Gila River on what they purported to be a prospecting trip. 

 

Upon their return, they reported that they had discovered some stone ruins in caves, the first recorded visit to what later was to become known as the Gila Cliff Dwellings.  Six years later, in 1884, the site was visited by Adolph Bandelier, one of the earliest anthropologists to work in the Southwest.  Looters had already stolen many artifacts and destroyed much of the archeological record.’

 

Beginning in mountains just north of the dwellings, the three forks of the Gila River converge in this valley and ultimately flow toward the Colorado River.  A natural spring at the head of the canyon provides a small, but constant flow of water that has sustained this lush ravine oasis for centuries.  This reliable water source was probably a major factor that attracted the Tularosa Mogollon People to this canyon instead of other places. 

Two-story structure thought to be wood storage below and
an area for smoking/drying food above
enjoying great open ventilation on either side

They had children while they were there, as evidenced by several burials of infants; but only one adult burial, of a young woman, has been found.

 

One of the reasons that has been given for the Great Abandonment is a changing climate in the form of persistent drought.  One clue that drought might not have been a major factor is the fact that during their stay at the Gila Cliff Dwellings the dwellers ate very well on an apparent abundance of domestic crops.

 

Pottery recovered from the dwellings is almost all Tularosa Phase, and nearly identical to the Tularosa Phase collections reported from the Reserve, NM, area, which date from 1100-1300, corroborating the tree ring data. Tularosa and Tularosa/Reserve Phase pottery are by far the dominant pottery types recovered in the various archaeological excavations at the dwellings, suggesting limited contact with other areas.  However, a small amount of Classic Mimbres Phase pottery was also found within the dwellings.

Horticulture and farming of domesticated plants were of great importance to the Gila Cliff Dwellers.  This is based on the vast diversity and sheer volume of plant remains left behind, which included several varieties of maize (corn), three types of squashes, and several types of common beans and tepary beans.  Of the 32 species of plant remains found in the dwellings, 24 were wild.  These included wild grapes, berries, acorns, and piñon nuts.  The large volume of corn cobs left behind was so impressive that it often received a special mention in many of the early studies and reports and goes against the idea that the dwellers left due to lack of crops.

 

In the past fifteen years there has been a persistent highly, and often times hotly, debated line of research that indicated that the time period of 1150 to 1300 was marked with significant societal collapse and warfare in the Ancestral Pueblo/Mogollon world.  The evidence is in the form of retreat of villages to more defendable sites such as cliff dwellings and craggy mesa tops, plus the

discovery of large-scale massacres, mutilation of bodies, and even cannibalism at various site throughout the Southwest.  Review of this evidence, however, can certainly lead one to the plausible speculation that the Gila Cliff Dwellers lived in their caves for reasons of safety.

 

Apparently bad things were happening in the Ancestral Pueblo/Mogollon world, and as a result large groups of people were migrating away from the troubles to safer places.  Were the Gila Cliff Dwellings such a place, if only a temporary one in their migration away from these 13^th century troubles up North?  There is absolutely no indication that the Gila Cliff Dwellings were ever attacked. 

 

Convincing evidence supports the argument that the Gila Cliff Dwellers were Chacoan Nobles.  Primary evidence for this fact is the profusion of prestige-economy marine shell jewelry, 26 macaw feathers, and one macaw skull; plus the architectural evidence in the commanding presence of a T-shaped door that for all intents and purposes says, ‘We are Chacoan’.  If they were Nobles, then the evidence from Chaco also strongly suggest that they probably did not build the dwellings, farm the fields nearby, gather wild edible plants, or cook their own meals.  Chacoan Nobles didn’t do such things; they had commoners or slaves to do this work.

 

The Mogollon People didn’t disappear.  The descendants of the Puebloans of the Mogollon Area who built these cliff dwellings belonged to a larger tradition that included part of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and northern Mexico. 

 

Evidence suggest that the Apache migrated to the upper Gila River in the 1500’s, though some of their oral traditions say that it has always been their homeland.  Legendary leader Geronimo (Goyahkla) was born near the Gila River headwaters in the early 1820’s, when Mexico challenged Apache control of the region.  Thirty years later, the US asserted its authority in the area.  It built army posts, and by 1870 the federal government began to relocate the Apache to reservations.  But not until September 1886 were the last ‘Be-don-ko-he’ as Geronimo’s people were known, forced from their ancestral lands, led by Geronimo himself. 

 

They were shipped in boxcars to Florida as prisoners of war.  Suffering the ultimate betrayal, they were not allowed to see their families as agreed in their terms of surrender.  Thus ended the freedom of the Chiricahua Apache (Ndé People) in their traditional territory.  They became the LONGEST held prisoners of war in US history – 27 long years! This experience has defined the Ndé identity as one of adaptation to any environment. 

 

A very sad history envelopes this area but its beauty remains.  

View of the Catwalk Trail from above
Unfortunately, the river is very low at this time of the year

Catwalk Trail  

The name for this area refers to the original 1890’s plank-board walkway placed atop the steel pipe that used to bring water to the electric generator of the ore processing plant and to meet the needs of the 200 towns-people.  Three miles of pipe linked the town and its generator to water.    

The Catwalk Trail, now made of steel, only covers the first half mile.  Although most of the pipe is now gone, much of the modern all-access trail follows the original route.  In the mid-1930’s the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) rebuilt the Catwalk Trail.  However, mother nature likes to remind us of her strength once in a while, and a huge flood washed away most of the system in 2012. Thankfully, it is open once again. 

Suspended about twenty feet up the canyon wall, it’s a bit like walking at tree canopy height inside a vibrant riparian area with cascading water, transparent pools, huge boulders, and cool green shade below.  Tightly nestled in dry and rocky desert landscape, it’s an amazing oasis.

Water gushes beneath you, providing a steady soundtrack as it flows around huge boulders and picks up speed inside this very narrow gorge. 

Just imagine what it would look like if the river were high

Although Native Americans mined turquoise and copper long before settlers ‘discovered’ the area, the newcomers were more interested in the zinc, lead, gold and silver found here.  The silver ores were first smelted locally in crude adobe furnaces.  Heavy 100-pound silver bars, too heavy to steal easily, were sent to Silver City from where they were loaded onto freight trains and sent to the federal mint in Denver, Colorado, where they were melted into coins.  

Mogollon Ghost Town 

After driving additional winding narrow switchbacks, seemingly common in this area, I finally and gently coast down into the ghost town of Mogollon.  This place is slowly rebuilding after being devastated by several fires and floods over the years.  In its heydays, between 1876 and 1942, it had up to 6,000 residents (ranchers, farmers, traders, claim jumpers, gamblers, stagecoach robbers, miners, etc.), now only 12-15 people call it home part-time or full-time. Silver and gold were extracted here, producing up to 70-75% of New Mexico’s precious metals at the time.  Up in these mountains, it is difficult to fathom that many lived in tents or were cave dwellers (lots of caves around these canyons), especially during the very wet springs and long cold winters.

False front on older house

Today, you will not find a gas station or a convenience store here.  This place is the ‘southwest of the southwest, the last bastion for cowboys.’ 

Over 600 miles of tunnels were blasted or chipped away in 7-8 mines.  By the end of the first year they had already reached one million dollars in payroll alone! 

To get here, you followed the very winding dirt Bursum Road (built by convict labor in 1897), now paved state road 159.  As you drive into the narrow walls of Silver Creek Canyon and into Mogollon, you feel like you’ve entered a time capsule where a chapter in the history of the American West has been preserved.  

Silver City was the railhead for Mogollon's eight-team freight wagons, packed with gold and silver ore. The drivers showed great ingenuity in harnessing and driving the wagons, often with 18 horses pulling them (or slowing them down) around tricky mountain hairpin curves. 

The dirt road rises 2,000 feet in a distance of about seven miles before dropping back down about 1,200 feet to Mogollon. It has solid rock straight up one side for hundreds of feet and straight down an equal or greater distance on the other side, not for the faint of heart.

Built for the 1973 movie 'My name is nobody' with Henry Fonda
Fake 'old' General Store

It was due to its isolation that it became one of the wildest, shoot-’em-up mining towns in the West. It boasts classic Wild West stories of stagecoach robberies: in one year, the stagecoach from Mogollon to Silver City was robbed 23 times by the same person, Apache raids, and even served as temporary hideout for Butch Cassidy and Billy the Kid.

Mailboxes on front deck, interesting location

While scouting in Mineral Creek Canyon for the 8^th US Calvary, soldier James Cooney of Fort Bayard discovered deposits of gold and silver. The discovery was made just north of where Mogollon would one day exist and would eventually become the Little Fannie Mine.

His discovery occurred sometime between 1870 and the fall of 1872, during the time of the Apache Wars. Cooney could not immediately pursue his discovery, as he was still committed to duties with the army.  But he kept this secret with him, and in 1876, he returned to Mineral Creek Canyon to file claims along with his business partner, Harry McAllister.

A door to nowhere.  Old dynamite depot?

Soon after establishing their mining claims, both men were expelled from the area by the Apache. Yet again, Cooney would return two years later to continue his pursuit of mining, though this would not be the last he saw of the Apache.

Tarnished but full of stories

And the miners remained at risk from the angry Apache.  In April 1880, Chiricahua Apache, led by Chief Victorio, once again raided the area.  Three of the prospectors, including retired Sergeant James C. Cooney, were killed.  Also killed in what is called the ‘Alma Massacre’, were 35 area sheepherders.  The Chiricahua Apache knew the geography and freight trails well, something people, to their detriment, were slow to realize. 

The Silver City and Mogollon Stage Coach provided transportation and freight services to the camp, moving its ‘cargo’ some eighty miles between the two points, a distance that took 14-15 hours then, and a bit over an hour today.  

From its earliest days, Mogollon was plagued with fire and flood.  The first big fire occurred in 1894, wiping out most of the town’s buildings.  However, Mogollon’s citizens persevered, rebuilding, this time, with brick and adobe.  That same year, the mining camp also suffered from a devastating flood from the melting snows and heavy spring rains.  Other floods would follow in 1896, 1899 and 1914, all taking with them homes, mining operations, and some of the town residents as the swift waters overflowed from Silver Creek. More fires would occur in 1904, 1910, 1915, and 1942, each resulting in yet more devastation to the town. 

The Mogollon mines were located on precipitous slopes and ridges, including the Maud S, Deep Down, Confidence, Last Chance, and the biggest and most profitable, the Little Fannie. In 1909, the proud miners related that nearly 70% of the precious metal of New Mexico was produced by the mines of Mogollon amounting to $5,500,000. Over the years, Mogollon Mines produced nearly twenty million dollars in gold and silver (or $400M in today’s dollars). 

With its mines silent, Mogollon officially became a ghost town, but some of its owners remained.  Today, it is a ghost towner’s dream as nearly 100 historic buildings remains.  The entire town was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

JP Holland General Store converted into the Silver Creek Inn

One of the most impressive buildings is the Silver Creek Inn, which continues to serve customers today is an 1885 two-story adobe structure that was known as the Mogollon House.  Built by Frank Lauderbaugh and operated by Henry Johnson, the Mogollon House rented upstairs rooms and sold food and merchandise on its first floor: ‘Wild turkey and bear meat lay side by side with beef in the butcher shops, where steaks were sometimes purchased for less than five cents per pound.’

The town’s original ‘jail’, was a cottonwood tree: …  the culprit was chained to it for a misdemeanor and hung from it for a felony.

The ghost town of Mogollon is eerily secluded in the slim Silver Creek Canyon on the western edge of the Mogollon Mountains in the vast Gila Wilderness.  Well worth a visit if you feel like being back in time.

Circle of oak trees at campsite, are there druids nearby?
Autumnal colors

San Lorenzo Canyon:  Chihuahua Desert

Angular unconformity just before entering the canyon

An angular unconformity is a small, isolated mesa looking much like a tilted, sliced loaf of bread with a cap on top.  The slanted beds of sand and mudstone are about 7-10 million years old and the horizontal cap is about ½ million years old.  These drainage channels (lines) changed angle when moving plates deep beneath the surface tilted the plain. 

 

The 200-foot-high cliffs along San Lorenzo Canyon were cut by stream erosion during the last 200,000 years.

From 7-10 million (bottom) to 1/2 million years old (top)

All the faults that cross the San Lorenzo Canyon are normal faults of the Rio Grande Gorge Rift.  (see previous post on world rifts).  

Beautiful curvy rocks

Some shade while biking the canyon

Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA)

Named after the first person to discover cosmic radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in 1931, and considered founding figure of radio astronomy.

Massive radio dishes in the New Mexico high desert

From the early 1960’s at the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory), astronomers knew they needed an array of radio dishes to complement the work of our giant, single-dish telescopes. An array is a group of several radio antennas observing together, creating, in effect, a single telescope many miles across.

 

Cosmic radio waves are billions of a billion times fainter than radio waves used to broadcast information on Earth. Radio telescopes must be placed where they can collect these faint cosmic radio waves without any radio interference from humans or nature.  (cellphones need to be turned off when visiting). 

The Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico, northwest of Socorro, is a flat stretch of desert far from major cities. The Plains are ringed by mountains, which act like a natural fortress of rock that keeps out much of the radio interference from cities even hundreds of miles away. 

The desert climate of the Plains of San Agustin is critical to the success of the VLA. Humidity is a real problem in radio astronomy because water molecules distort the radio waves passing through them and also give off their own radio waves that interfere with observations at certain frequencies. Radio telescopes that collect radio waves in the same frequencies as water’s radio waves need to be in deserts to reduce this background signal from Earth-based water molecules.

 

What you see spread before you is an assemblage of huge radio dishes, 27 of them, to be exact. They may all be clustered together in the center of what was once an ancient sea, or they may be spread out along their connecting railroad tracks to a span of 26 miles across the Plains of San Agustin. If you pause to watch them, you’ll see the dishes rotate and move simultaneously as they search the sky for the focus of the current object of research. 

From the VLA website, sky view of the 'Y' tracking configuration

The dishes are 95-feet tall, 230-ton, and 82 feet in diameter.  They travel on 13 miles of train tracks in the shape of a ‘Y’. There are nine dishes on each arm of the ‘Y’ with one spare for maintenance/repair replacement.  In essence, the array acts as a single antenna with a variable diameter.  The antennas are moved every three to four months with a special tractor called a transporter.  There are five main configurations A, B, C, D, and BnA, varying in sizes.

 

Astronomers using the VLA have made key observations of galaxies, black holes, supernovas and protoplanetary disks around young stars, discovered magnetic filaments and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way's center, probed the Universe's cosmological parameters, and provided new knowledge about the physical mechanisms that produce radio emission and allowing investigations of many astronomical objects.

You can see some of the dishes from the highway
The VLA was closed due to Covid-19

The VLA has been used by more astronomers and has been mentioned in more scientific papers than any other radio telescope in the world.

VLA at night, by Alan Osterholtz, New Mexico

I would like to finish with these words I found in Townsquare Publications. 

‘An elusive essence is more than the sum of a community’s parts, its people and its past, but reflecting all of these elements is what makes a personality of a place. Southwest New Mexico has an undeniable personality from its ruggedly beautiful landscape, echoes of vanished cultures and a continuing, complex human heritage. It is a richly textured living collage, with a uniqueness only found in rural areas that are historically multi-cultural. 

There are several historic layers, some scarred by conflict, others enhanced through collaboration, each contributing something to the area today. The region’s deep Hispanic and Native American roots are reflected in the distinctive foods, architecture, family ties and community celebrations.’ 

I couldn’t have said it any better.  Hope you enjoyed my last 2020 trip.  More to come, hopefully, in 2021.