On top of El Morro

El Morro from a distance

El Morro and me from its top

I had to wait until the gates outside El Morro National Monument swung open. Any hopes of a café or some place to stop in the neighboring town of Ramah were dashed by it being Sunday morning. 

A massive sign pointed to the monument and a campground hosted an unexpected number of visits (it’s free once the water is turned off for the winter). 

Ultimately I didn’t care about the delay for a crack at El Morro. I sat and waited, wrote out notes from the trip, photographed birds from paused long enough on nearby landmarks. A mountain bluebird paused on a post near my spot, moving just enough to blur all my pictures. The signatures could wait.

First I had to wake up my heart and head to the wonders of El Morro’s highlands. The visitor center disappeared in a little bit of forest. In a few hundred stairs mostly carved into the rock, I stood atop El Morro. The wind was slight, not the gusts I expected.

Atsinna village ruins

Box canyon views

Box canyon views

Box canyon views

 Here I met one of the most scenic settlements I had seen in the Southwest. Two pueblos once stood atop El Morro (the second has not been excavated and remains hidden except for a few exposed brick walls).

The Atsinna Village Site shows the extensiveness of the pueblo – as many as 1,500 people once lived in the 800-room pueblo. The ruins again show the engineering ingenuity of the people who built these towns. They would have grown corn on the plains, collected rain and snow in cisterns, and hunted in the juniper forests and canyons. 

Behind the rock formation, a box canyon formed a nice shelter. The people who lived here had a place to hunt, capture game in its shaded depths. There’s no access to the canyon, making it a sacred spot of sorts, where pines grow especially tall in moist soil enriched by snowmelt and long shadows. It was an entrancing, beautiful and untouchable.

In a series of trail switchbacks, I said goodbye to the box canyon and ancient settlements/ at the bottom lied the portion of the trail that did not see sun this time of year, and patches of ice and snow ran thick until I reached the first of the inscriptions.

 Along with the fainter petroglyphs along the rock base, here begin the ornate Spanish signatures and more official-looking marks from people passing West after the U.S. annexed New Mexico. Those included surveyors from the Southern Pacific railroad, who looked at placing El Morro along an east-west route (the route ended up 25 miles north, effectively ending El Morro’s centuries-long heyday as a stopover. 

When it became a national monument in 1906, any further inscriptions were considered graffiti and removed. Park rangers also planted spiky desert plants near the rock walls to dissuade any future carvings, and modern visitors must observe the inscriptions from behind a railing. 

The petroglyphs and the Spanish inscriptions really make the rock wall memorable. If you see only one Spanish inscription, it should be that of Don Juan de Onate, one of the last Spanish conquistadors, who cut a path across the Southwest in search of Cibola, the city of gold (spoiler alert - he never found it). But he made a name for himself brutal conquest of the Acoma people.

There it was, his inscription from 1605, two years before John Smith and his ship sailed into the Chesapeake Bay. Other Spanish inscriptions were just as ornate, whether bureaucratic or not. Four hundred-plus years later, the inscription looks remarkably bright.

Once American settlers caught onto El Morro’s soft rocks in the mid-19th century, the signatures become much less interesting. The petroglyphs never stop fascinating, as they likely date from the times of El Morro's pueblo, making them hundreds of years older than even Onate's mark.

The last stop comes where the inscriptions wind down. People did not come to El Morro for the soft rock, but the pool at its base. Dead reeds and cattails from the previous growing season waved in the breeze.

The watering hole was not formed by a spring. All the water at El Morro came from snowmelt. In early spring, dead reeds still stood on the edge of the little pond. Snowmelt and rainwater had stained the soaring rock walls above the pool.

What a relief it must have offered travelers moving across this dry country. I wondered why the pool water tasted like, but a fence prevented any answer. That water made El Morro the destination of the millennium in western New Mexico. One thousand years of staying power tells me it always tasted cool and sweet.

The life-saving watering hole