Hovenweep at vacation's end

Five days on the road two solid days of desolate country began to burn me out. Satellite radio could only replace conversation for so long.  

Ancient ruins and features carved over millions of years still excited me. I had the bandwidth for one last spot. If time allowed, I might squeeze in another. 

After the Bear Ears and even more canyons, passes and winding roads, I came to the last stop in the region, yet another ancestral Puebloan civilization, but one far different than those I already experience on this southwestern swing. 

Friendly local. 

I seemed to come into a farming region, but that faded into more twisty roads and open range once I turned into another series of canyonlands. Despite the name sounding somewhat Dutch – I assumed it was named for some homesteader or archaeologist – it comes from the Ute/Paiute word for deserted valley.

 That certainly fits the area today, with open range to the west and BLM-administered Canyon of the Ancients to the east. I did have a friendly encounter with a lone horse on those twisting roads, but people were rare. 

The Square Tower Community of the Little Ruin Canyon encompasses a different setting for civilization in the Four Corners region. While smaller than Mesa Verde’s massive cliff dwellings, Hovenweep allow visitors to step close to them on a 1.5-mile loop around the canyon rim. 

These cultures lived a stone’s throw from Mesa Verde; you could easily see Ute Mountain to the south near Cortez, both a short distance from the world-famous cliff dwellings. Trading would have been easy. But the Hovenweep culture built differently, placing towers on the canyon’s edge, some right on large rocks. They built little dams to ease the impact of flooding rains and to prepare cropland in the springtime. 

It felt as if the architects of these structures were confident enough in their plans to place them on such precarious ledges. Others fell centuries later after wooden bridges connecting separate structures rotted away. I have seen ancestral Puebloan structures across the Southwest - Aztec Ruins, the still-inhabited Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Nation, the pueblo atop El Morro, the cliff dwellings of Bandelier, and many more. 

The one I should not have skipped on the path out of Canyon of the Ancients was the Lowry Pueblo, an 40-room, 1,000-year-old habitat not far from the farm road I took back to the highway. But it was another victim of an overstuffed day. Thoughts about a Mesa Verde visit ended similarly. There would have to be another Four Corners trip at some point. 

But at the moment, I looked to the people behind these creative structures dotting the region. As we approach a dry age, I think about those people often, as their climate dried out to where the land became unviable for crops. Maybe they overfarmed. Maybe their land grew too populous. One wooden beam has been carbon-dated to 1289, a late time for tcivilizations in the San Juan region. 

These ancient peoples moved on when Europe still struggled with the Dark Ages and had the Black Death on the horizon. We probably won’t be as fortunate to have our structures seen as marvel when the next millennium dawns. 

Last look into Utah.