Spirits of Chaco Canyon

Posted by Robert Dailey Aug 19, 2007

I thought I heard voices carried on the cold wind that was whipping through Chaco Canyon.

Many people say that this is a very spiritual place, and many have reported “experiences” there.

I’m not sure if it was the disembodied voices of long gone Native Americans I heard. It may have been some tourists walking on the mesa above the ruins of the ancient Puebloan religious center. Or it may have been the wind rustling through the thousands of four-wing saltbushes growing in the valley.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t help being awed by the “presence” of the place.

Although I saw one other car in the parking lot next to the park center, there was no one visible in this stark and vast array of pre-Colombian high-rise buildings.

The dozens of kivas from which the Puebloans believe the First People emerged to inhabit the earth looked somewhat ominous in the pale afternoon sun.

A raven called from the cliffs, his “caw” echoing back and forth between the limestone and the adobe skeletons.

For a moment, I was in another world, transported in my mind back to those ancient days, where carefully placed sun daggers marked the summer solstice, and crowds of Native Americas approached from the many roads to visit their sacred canyon.

I concluded it was a spiritual place, where soul and body converge, in a nanosecond, and soar through the valley on the wings of the winter wind.