“How do we get there?” and “How did we get here?”

Had the privilege of driving this lovely vehicle all summer. Camping on Mount Taylor saddle. Photo courtesy of Cottonwood Gulch

What began as an educational theme for our trekkers became my own summer query: “Where are we?” I wanted to weave my own landscape tapestry from our disparate destinations, Weminuche to the Gila. The better part of my time, though, was navigating what roads connected these two. The most common and practical variation on this theme was, “How do we get there?”

So of the many backcountry facts I learned, those related to travel stuck with me best. For instance, take washboards, those dirt roads with jarring ripples. I was surprised to learn that they’re created when traversing vehicles move fast enough. Washboarded-ness has nothing to due with vehicle suspension, as commonly suggested, nor does it have anything to do with how the road was built.

We found the summer’s worst washboards on the way to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. What may be the most extensive archaeological site in the entire country lies beyond more than 25 miles of rough roads. I still groan at the memory of discovering that one of the two had turned into a sandy slope, impassible. Though it sounds counterintuitive, this underdevelopment is a park management strategy, albeit unofficial. The relative inaccessibility limits visitors to a lower and more sustainable number. Otherwise, they might flood the ruins and overwhelm park staff. Talking with both visitors and staff, it was also clear that the tribulations and isolation of Chaco made it even more special.

Archaeologist Bryon gives us a tour of Chaco Canyon’s Pueblo Bonito. Photo courtesy of Cottonwood Gulch

At camp atop an Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah ridge, our view stretched across the desert southward to Chaco Canyon. Around that night’s campfire, our resident archaeologist Bryon informed us that we were along side an ancient travel route, a fading highway running from Mexico into Colorado. Pointing to Fajada butte on the horizon, Bryon said that as Pueblo Bonito emptied, the Puebloans may have migrated along this meridian. Some marched northward to Mesa Verde in Colorado, steered by Huerfano Mountain on the horizon.

The idea of such a route was unpopular, Bryon explained, in part because archaeologists say that such distances were impossibly great for frequent travel. Archaeologists like neat categories as much as any other discipline, and they have labeled the Puebloans as sedentary, in contrast to the mobile hunter-gatherers. Nomadic hunter-gatherers move with the herds or other resources, while the agricultural Puebloans surely stick to one place. Chaco could not have simply uprooted and relocated their complex cultural system. Bryon said that there simply isn’t a category for such mobile agriculturalists.

Why not? Perhaps because a lifestyle in which whole families walk days and days through harsh desert is nearly unimaginable in the modern world. Maybe these people had a concept of space difficult to appreciate today. Bryon posited that these people could move. A week of walking? Two? Totally ordinary. I was reminded of another travel fact: while New Mexicans won’t hesitate to drive an hour on errand (one-way), New Yorkers find such a trip onerous. It’s all relative, Bryon seemed to say. He then read a wonderful passage from Craig Child’s House of Rain:

“…Whole schools of archaeologists have believed that migration was not something that happened here. This widely felt resistance arose, I think, from the advent of the automobile… It is only a couple of hundred miles, though, from Chaco to southwest Colorado, a long distance to drivers who sail along a highway that renders the surrounding land untouchable. Walking a couple of hundred miles is a different experience entirely, shorter in a way…”

The long drive to the Gila Wilderness. Photo courtesy of Cottonwood Gulch

This idea sounded ridiculous at first. But in my summer’s fair share of both driving and walking, I began to see what Bryon and Childs meant. When you walk, each step and tree is a known quantity; everything is rooted and palpable on foot. The transient landscape through your car window becomes impossible through its anonymity. Moreover, when you begin a hike you see a point on the horizon, and soon enough, you’ve reached that point, and when you do, you notice the next one on the horizon. You are self-assured and tell yourself, I could get there! Walking has a psychology of determination linked to rhythm and momentum.

Our expeditions reiterated the power of walking because at each corner of wilderness, on mountaintops and deep in canyons, we saw that people had reached them long ago. Humans sailed, rode, drove, and flew their way across the globe, but we walked it first.

We migrated out of our continent of origin and spread across the globe, says the Out-Of-Africa theory. When I first pictured this model, I saw tribes squeezing through the Sinai bottleneck and exploding across Eurasia, sprinting after herds of mammoth and other doomed megafauna. How else could we have reached all the edges in such an evolutionarily brief time? I was surprised to learn that for the regions we walked, the true rate of our expansion was practically glacial, just a few kilometers per year or even generation. In some areas, we traveled by saturation; the rest of the world was just a sponge whose corner was dipped into Africa’s water.

The development of the southwest, historically and contemporarily, is a testament to humans’ ability to sink into every crevice, to reach what seem the most unlikely of places. This summer we witnessed the counterpart of this triumph as well. We found graffiti on the most remote rocks and trees, hunting cabins in the center of wilderness, and even towns that felt unimaginably isolated to me, a northeasterner. For those seeking wilderness, the ambition to escape human impact is now a grail.

We spent an afternoon combating erosion on a park trail. In a bucket brigade, trekkers passed rocks to line the trail or redistribute soil.  Even an area with few visitors, where more destructive modes of travel like bikes are already banned, footsteps accumulate to great ecological wear.

Like a car creating a washboard, our velocity over the earth, however tedious, changes its surface. Our first ripples were extinct megafauna and irrigation ditches, then barbed wire and railroads, now dammed rivers and sprawl. Our mere movement over a landscape alters it. I mean that literally (think of the transportation infrastructure!) and figuratively (like extinctions, our presence entails ecological shifts). How did we get here? Our steps gradually accrued. Walking transported us across the world and it made the world what it is today.

On our five day hike in the GIla Wilderness, signs of past forest fires were everywhere. Photo courtesy of Cottonwood Gulch

This is part II of a three part series, Teaching, travel, and distance in the southwest. More on this theme and lessons from my summer in the next post: distance. Click here to check out part I, teaching. Special thanks to Bryon for his assistance and fact checking of this piece. 

Further stories:

• There’s physics research on the processes that create washboards! Here and here]
• Official directions (and warnings) to reach Chaco Canyon
• Why is the road to Chaco still unpaved?
• Craig Childs’ House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest and be sure to check out the extended context of the quote Bryon read (page 112-113).
• Bryon also read to us from Frank H. Cushings’ My Adventures in Zuni