Solitude and mystery.
These are qualities that make a string of ancient villages along the Utah-Colorado border special, yet they are also attributes bound, down the years, to attract more and more people.In fact, Hovenweep National Monument - which is celebrating its 75th anniversary as a unit of the National Park Service - can be said to be, quite literally, on the road to discovery.
Once attainable only via backcountry dirt (and occasionally mud) roads, several approaches are now paved, notably routes from Blanding and Aneth in San Juan County, and from nearby Cortez, Colo.
And it is well-represented on the information superhighway as well, impressively so on a few World Wide Web sites.
The very name of Hovenweep stresses the hush still to be found there: The word, derived from the Ute language, is said to mean "deserted valley."
"The setting is remote, beautiful and characterized by silence," Ian Thompson wrote in his souvenir book, "The Towers of Hovenweep." "Seven-hundred fifty years ago there were farms where the sage is now and the sights and sounds of vital human communities where now there is silence."
Yet an expected jump in the number of campers and sightseers was a common point of speechmaking and discussion during an anniversary celebration observing the proclamation by President Warren G. Harding that established Hovenweep National Monument on March 2, 1923.
The occasion drew about 100 people to Hovenweep - past superintendents and other Park Service personnel, volunteers and well-wishers.
The 784-acre monument is in the middle of sloping Cajon Mesa, which itself is a portion of what was named, a century ago, the Great Sage Plain, though juniper, pinion and grasslands are just as likely to be found in the vicinity.
Today's Hovenweep encompasses a scattering of small farming villages, sites today given names like Square Tower, Hackberry, Horseshoe, Holly, Cajon and Cutthroat Castle. Sandstone walls sprout from cliff ledges and cling to the rocks. The ruins often appear deceivingly medieval - a startling impression, considering the time frame for their construction roughly coincides with the rise of castles, cathedrals and feudal fortifications in Europe.
The ranger station, at Square Tower, is about equidistant - 40 to 45 miles - from Blanding to the west, Bluff to the southwest and Cortez to the east. Elongated Sleeping Ute Mountain undergirds the dawn. The Blue or Abajo mountains help frame the sunsets. And, from certain spots on Cajon Mesa, the pinnacle of New Mexico's jagged Shiprock can be seen to the south.
A hundred visitors on a single day will cause a curious spike in the monument's documented visitation figures, Superintendent Art Hutchinson admitted during the anniversary gathering.
"We'll have to put a little footnote in there," he said afterward, for the average number of Hovenweep visitors on a winter weekday is two to five people. "On a weekend we'll get 30 to 40," he added.
Hutchinson expects those numbers to leap in the near future, because of the various paving projects improving the once-lumpy Four Corners backroads that lead to the national monument.
"Historically, every time a place like this has become publicized and accessible, the number of visitors has doubled in a very short period of time," the superintendent said. "We could see 40,000 to 50,000 visitors within four or five years or less - around the turn of the century."
And with that mini-boom will come new questions and new problems.
Even Mobil Oil, which has drilling and pumping operations in the Aneth oil field southwest of Hovenweep, understands changes are coming.
"We realize that traffic is going to increase, and once people find out more about Hovenweep and you have that discovery, it's going to be one hot spot," Roger Crawford, a Mobil representative, said at the celebration. "Yet we're concerned about preserving that, the uniqueness."
And so, on Hovenweep's anniversary, Mobil donated to the National Park Foundation $10,000, symbolized by a Bunyonesque check. The money is designated toward helping improve one of the park's few amenities: the restrooms.
The ragged stone ruins of today's Hovenweep were observed by pioneers and explorers well before those of the more famous Mesa Verde complex in Colorado to the east. W.D. Huntington, a Mormon settler, reported upon them in 1854. William Henry Jackson, a photographer and explorer, visited in 1874 and is credited with applying the name "Hovenweep" to them.
The man behind their preservation, though, was J.W. Fewkes, Hutchinson said. Fewkes headed an archaeological survey in 1917-18 for the Smithsonian Institution and recommended that they be protected. "He said, `These are so amazing, they deserve to be preserved,' " the superintendent noted.
What sets the Hovenweep hamlets apart from hundreds of others atop and along the Four Corners region's plains and plateaus is their placement at a sequence of canyon heads on the Cajon Mesa and their distinctive architecture: several multistory "towers" are sprinkled among the ancient buildings, and sometimes they are peculiarly placed atop huge boulders.
Some towers are square, like the one that gave its name to the principal Hovenweep complex, the Square Tower Group. The paved rural roads lead to this location, which includes the monument's ranger station and campground. Not all of the towers take this form, however.
"Others are D-shaped, circular or oval," reads a trail guide outlining the Square Tower ruins. "Some are in the canyon bottoms near a spring, some are built into room blocks and others are connected to ceremonial chambers.
"No one is certain what their function was. Archaeologists suggest that the towers were used for astronomical observations, for signaling or for watching for enemies" - after all, water may have been scarce. "Some may simply have been homes."
Even Hovenweep's walls exhibit unique building techniques, Ranger Don Whyte told a group of visitors examining the section's Hovenweep Castle, looming just above Square Tower itself: most of the sandstone rocks used were carefully pecked and shaped into rectangular blocks. The craftsmanship shown at Hovenweep is among its distinguishing characteristics.
A people who planted and harvested corn, beans and squash lived at Hovenweep toward the end of what is often referred to as the Anasazi, or ancestral Puebloan, era in the Four Corners region, in the 12th and 13th centuries. Up to 500 may have lived in and around the Square Tower canyon settlement alone, in structures that have descriptive modern names like Eroded Boulder House, the Twin Towers, Stronghold House and Stronghold Tower.
"This would have been during the last occupation of the mesa," Kathy Fiero, a Park Service stabilization archaeologist, noted while standing near the base of Square Tower. "The latest dates we have at Mesa Verde are from 1287," a year arrived at through dendrochronology, the comparison of tree rings.
In his illustrated Hovenweep book, Ian Thompson envisioned the cultivated Cajon landscape of 700 years ago:
Fields covering an area the size of three hundred city blocks spread across the mesa top in all directions from the Square Tower complex. Garden terraces stairstepped up the slopes from canyon bottom to cliffs. . . . The people of Square Tower Community were dryland farmers, who depended on winter snow and summer rain to replenish soil moisture. They built check dams and reservoirs to modify the landscape and to alter the natural flow of precious runoff water to meet agricultural needs. In a dry year, the water of the reservoirs would not have gone far. The farmers of Square Tower Community must have glanced often at the western horizon, hoping to see the summer rainclouds advancing toward their crops just as dryland farmers on the Great Sage Plain do today.
Few major archaeological digs have been conducted at Hovenweep, in part to preserve the sites for future study. There has been some preservation work done, however, to shore up the 700-year-old structures still standing. (Stones litter many middens and talus slopes - evidence of walls that toppled long ago.)
Three-story-tall Square Tower presents examples of the kinds of stabilization being undertaken. It sits atop a gargantuan boulder at the head of a small canyon, near a perpetual spring.
"This tower is in really good shape," Fiero said - "but the boulder is deteriorating."
Runoff and the small creek flowing from the spring have undercut the boulder. In 1960, the Park Service built a small supportive wall and set stones in Portland cement. The cement grouting is harder than the stone, so water is not draining away properly. It pools or percolates through the more porous rock via capillary action; as a result, the surface of the soft-stone boulder upon which Square Tower sits is flaking away; salts seep from it. Eventually this erosion could undermine the tower's walls.
After consulting with a conservator, Fiero and her colleagues decided to see if drains might help move water away from the tower. Excavation on one side uncovered an ancient kiva beside the building, so that option was only partially implemented. After some documentation work, the kiva site was refilled and put back in order for possible future study. A few tubes and drains were put in place, however, and sensors installed to monitor movement, moisture and temperature in the tower walls.
"Now, the question is, should we take out this underwall?" Fiero said.
In the 1970s, fewer than 10,000 people visited Hovenweep National Monument over the course of a year, Hutchinson said. Then the numbers began to climb. By 1996, the peak year to date, 27,000 sightseers were dropping by.
And this was before so many roads into the area were paved.
San Juan County upgraded the road from Aneth a couple of years ago, and has only a small segment, through a wash near Hatch Trading Post, remaining to pave on the route that comes in from Blanding on the west. Colorado authorities finished paving the road to the Utah-Colorado border from Cortez about a year ago. Another route northeast of Hovenweep into Colorado has yet to be improved, but there are plans to do so, Hutchinson said.
The better roads and the thought that new hordes may be coming down the pike "bring up the question: How do you handle that many people?" Hutchinson admitted.
The parking lots seem adequate for now, but the septic system needs upgrading, he said.
Many travelers expect slide shows and other up-to-date presentations, yet Hovenweep has only a tiny ranger station and no audio-visual facilities. Federal funding for expansion may be possible someday, "but we have to get in line for that," he noted.
Although the monument is open year round, Hovenweep's staff includes only two rangers. "For two people to take care of 30,000 people (a year) is pretty good," Hutchinson said. "But we have to close up the visitor center to do a tour."
Protecting Hovenweep's fragile and scattered ruins is another challenge, and one that won't be going away. The ancient ruins are vulnerable and need to be monitored, he said.
But Hutchinson is optimistic. Volunteers have had a major impact. "Last year we had over 4,000 volunteer hours here," he said, with people acting as campground hosts, working on cleanup crews and participating in other ways.
And, he added, Utah's congressional representatives say they consider improvements there to be a priority.
During Hovenweep's anniversary celebration, John Cook, the National Park Service's regional director, noted that the 75-year-old monument is one of more than 380 such units in the NPS system, many of them historic sites worthy of preservation.
He called national parks "probably the second best idea the United States ever had. The first," he noted, "is freedom and the concept of democracy. But the concept of national parks is truly American; it originated here. There were parks in other parts of the world, but they were the kings' parks - they were for royalty. Our national parks are for everyone."
Hovenweep, Cook said, "is a special place; it's part of our national heritage. We, in fact, are preserving for today, tomorrow and forever those things that are important to us as a people. And it matters not what your cultural background is, your gender, your age or anything else. It's a part of you and a part of us."
Among those drawn to Hovenweep today are descendants of those who lived in the Four Corners area hundreds of years ago.
When Hovenweep, Mesa Verde and other northern settlements were deserted circa 1300 A.D., possibly as a result of an extended drought, overpopulation or other pressures on the land, the peoples of the area apparently migrated south to join or establish other Puebloan villages, such as those of the Hopi and Zuni, according to Don Whyte, a Park Service ranger who happens to be a Ute raised nearby in southwestern Colorado.
Occasionally, Whyte said, rangers get a chance to talk to these contemporary Pueblo visitors - and they indicate that they may actually know something about places like Hovenweep, from tales handed down over the generations.
"They will say, `We have a story about this place,' " or at least one very like it, he said. " `We want to remind you that we never abandoned this place.
"They have shown us that they still have a tie here," Whyte said.
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Additional Information
Going? Be prepared with water, food, gas
Of the six Hovenweep National Monument sites, only Square Tower, the largest and best preserved, is easily accessible via paved roads. The outlying ruins - Holly, Hackberry, Horseshoe, Cajon and Cutthroat Castle - are not pinpointed on most maps and may require four-wheel-drive vehicles.
The Park Service prefers that visitors stop by the ranger station at Square Tower to check in and ask directions.
The area's dirt roads can become muddy or impassable during or following storms. Administrators suggest that visitors check on the weather and road conditions during inclement weather.
There is a modern campground at Square Tower; otherwise, motels are available 40 or more miles away, in such communities as Blanding and Bluff, Utah, and Cortez, Colo. Services are also scarce; gas up before you go, and take along food and water. There are two trading posts within striking distance, at Hatch (16 miles away) and Ismay (14 miles). For more information, contact the Superintendent, Hovenweep National Monument, McElmo Route, Cortez, CO 81321.