Hiking Through Canyon de Chelly's History

AT CANYON DE CHELLY, the Southwest's history is written on reddish-tan sandstone walls. Once the home of the ancestral Puebloan people and their ancestors before them, Canyon de Chelly today is the heart of Navajo Country, Diné Bikéyah. Here, the old ways live on in summer sheep camps and orchard-shaded hogans.

And it's where we've come to hike through a scenic and historic land. The name “de Chelly” first appeared in 18th-century Spanish reports, an attempt to transcribe the Navajo word for a rocky canyon, tségi. But this is not just one canyon. It is a union of two main canyons—de Chelly and del Muerto—and a dozen tributaries that drain the western slope of the Defiance Plateau, a sprawling monocline edged by the 9,400-foot Chuska Mountains along the Arizona-New Mexico border.

The plateau began forming 240 million years ago when Permian seas laid down mud later covered by hundreds of feet of windblown sand. Still later, Mesozoic streams deposited gravel and sediment, forming hard rimrock. For eons, the plateau shifted and rose, creating vertical fractures and joints. Water carved out fissures, ravines, even entire canyons.

OUR JOURNEY, a four-day trek from the heart of Canyon de Chelly to its mouth, begins at Bat Canyon. Photographer Larry Lindahl and I hope to learn more about the area's rock art and extensive trail system. Our guide, James Yazzie, leads hikes, four-wheel-drive tours and horse trips with his brothers and nephews—a family tradition that goes back 20 years.

We set out the day after an autumn storm. Dampness scents the air as we descend through pock-ets of pine and fir to a secret valley of grasses and massive cot-tonwood trees. The mouth of 4-mile-long Bat Canyon opens to the sight of 800-foot Spider Rock, guarding the intersection with de Chelly and Monument canyons.

On a shoulder of Spider Rock, a chest-high masonry wall stands like a castle turret. Here, sentries once watched Bat Trail for slavers, as Spanish colonists turned tribe against tribe to capture labor for their ranches and farms to the east. Rumors of a vast Navajo fortress circulated through the centuries. Dur-ing an 1849 expedition into Canyon de Chelly, Lt. James H. Simpson wrote, "Not yet having seen the famous fort, we began to believe that in all probability, it would turn out to be a fable."

The fabled fort was the land itself. During trouble, people fled to the rocky stronghold from a hundred miles away. Invaders might find a hauntingly empty canyon, or suffer a storm of stones, arrows and insults hurled from above. Dozens of trails led to outcroppings and alcoves, perfect hiding places. Today, at least a hundred stock trails and footpaths are still in use, and each tells a story.

We camp in an orchard belonging to one of Yazzie's aunts. Sheer cliffs rise a thousand feet above the orchard, pasture and field, creating a cove of earth and stone. Cool air settles into the canyon after sunset, and Yazzie builds a small fire. Above us, three sheep scramble up a sandstone buttress to a shallow cave, their nighttime haven. A full moon rises, the walls turn silver, and silence descends, broken only by the occasional clatter of hooves or the sounds of our voices.

Fireside conversation turns to the Yazzie family's long rela-tionship with the canyon. He explains that whenever he approaches the canyon, he introduces himself to show respect. "Everything is alive, even the canyon is alive," he explains. His name for it, in Navajo, means "home."

Yazzie grew up at his grandfather's place in Black Rock, a tributary between del Muerto and de Chelly, and spent summers exploring. He has learned to blend old and new, the traditions taught to him by his grandfather and the lessons he learned after leaving for boarding school.

The next morning, he takes us to the Window, a natural stone arch rising high above the canyon floor. A small American flag flutters from the pocket of his backpack as Yazzie leads the way up a steep talus slope bristling with prickly pear. The Window overlooks a landscape quilt, stitched by the wavy line of creekside cottonwoods, patched with orchards and fallow cornfields.

The orchards standing here today replaced the 5,000 trees cut down before the harvest of 1864 by Col. Kit Carson's troops, a tactic used to starve out Navajo families sheltering here at the time of the infamous and deadly Long Walk to New Mexico. For months, the army marched groups of Navajo people east to Bosque Redondo. More than 8,000 survived the 400-mile journey, only to face four long years of captivity in the confines of a tiny reservation marked by bad water, diseases and enemy raids. The peaceful view below, like looking through a window in time, underlines the safety and sustenance the Navajos were forced to leave behind.

Farther downcanyon, near Lightning Rock, I am enchanted by a planetarium or star ceiling in a rocky alcove, one of a dozen in Canyon de Chelly. The cross-shaped stars were made with paint-dipped yucca leaves attached to arrows or poles, then shot or stamped onto the alcove's ceiling. Some say only the Navajos' ceremonial singers practiced star lore. Others say travelers created planetariums to symbolize the smoke hole of a hogan, or to "nail" the alcove's ceiling to prevent it from collapse.

A nearby tributary hides an alcove painted in a riot of color green, brown, white, yellow and red handprints, geometrics and bold humanlike figures. One of the anthropomorphs, made with a vivid green that might be crushed malachite, measures 4 feet tall. Another little green man is dotted with red, and nearby a red zigzag slashes across the torso of a female figure in white.

These dazzling images date from the Basket Maker era, 200 B.C. to A.D. 400, when seminomadic people first adopted agriculture, to the Developmental Pueblo period, when they began constructing masonry dwellings. At the base of the alcove stands a sheep corral, from which the panel gets its Navajo name, Tséyaa Dibé Bighan. The corral and nearby home are empty. The owners, who have granted Yazzie's request to show us this site, have herded their stock up to the rim for the winter.

We meet few people as we hike the track along the canyon's meandering stream. Our closest brush with civilization is at White House Ruins, the only canyon site that can be visited without a guide, via a 1.5-mile trail that leads from rim to floor. The dozen or so visitors today would be easily outnumbered by the people who once called the site home. Archaeologists have counted 80 rooms in the upper and lower pueblos. Residents raised families, made pottery and cloth and stored corn harvested from their floodplain fields.A mile downcanyon, two ravens chase their shadows above cross-bedded sandstone dunes weathered into lines and whorls. Their flight draws my attention to a series of handholds and footholds carved into the cliffs. We ascend partway, using a steel cable across one particularly steep stretch. Yazzie says this route, the Yei Bichei Trail, is traveled often by canyon residents. He points out two other trails across the canyon, used to evade the cavalry during the time of the Long Walk.

Below, a lively colt gallops across a pasture that belongs to another of Yazzie's aunts. The cliff bordering the pasture is layered with petroglyphs and pictographs, including a beautiful tableta or head-dress in a stepped cloud design, similar to those worn in pueblo ceremonies today. Perhaps it was painted during the early 1700s, the time of the Spanish reconquest, when Hopi and Jemez refugees sought shelter here.

We camp that night below Dog Rock, also known as Junction Rock for its location at the confluence of de Chelly and del Muerto canyons. Junction Ruin, a cliff dwelling of 15 rooms, is visible through the Yazzie family's orchard. A large walnut tree was planted here generations ago for the family's rug weavers, who used the shells to make a rich brown dye.

The next morning, Yazzie leads us in a circle around Junction Rock, pointing out worn metates and petroglyphs so old they have repatinated almost to invisibility. We stop to enjoy the upcanyon view from Yazzie's favorite perch. Overhead, a large bird soars, wings outstretched. A pair of ravens give chase, dwarfed by its size. Yazzieidentifies it as a golden eagle and teaches me the Navajo word, 'atsá. From the junction, we head up Canyon del Muerto. The sandy canyon floor is jeweled with bits of pottery and flaked stone, washed from ruins upcanyon. En route, Larry stops to photograph a palmsized potsherd, decorated in intricate black-on-white. Our destination is a hidden 60-foot panel of pictographs, with handprints in red, white, yellow, even blue, and several small, finely detailed figures, conjoined like Siamese twins with reversed colors and designs. Along Bare Trail we pass smooth chutes in the sandstone that Yazzie says are children's slides. I sometimes can't tell when he's pulling my leg, but he assures me that children sit on flat stones, zip down the rock chute and leap off before reaching the cliff edge. The drop to the sandstone bench below is 30 feet or more. All too easily, I can imagine the wild ride and the sound of the stone "sled" smashing to bits. Across this narrow stretch of canyon, pole ladders mark a route once used to evade Ute raiders, perhaps the same 1850s battle commemorated in the Ute Raid Panel farther up Canyon del Muerto. Also upcanyon is the Spanish Panel, said to depict the 1805 Antonio de Narbona expedition that ended at Massacre Cave, where hundreds of bullet holes and scattered bones mark the slaughter of the more than 100 Navajo men, women and children who had taken refuge there. Our last day begins under a gray ceiling of clouds that obscures the sun and sends the temperature plummeting. We hike quickly, stopping at numerous rockart sites: Bad Canyon, where archaeologists documented 166 handprints and 39 footprints; near Sleeping Duck, where flute players dance with bean sprouts incised in stone; Navajo Panel, an exquisitely rendered hunting scene of figures on horseback; and vast Newspaper Rock, a 75-foot cliff face wallpapered with petroglyphs.

The wind turns fierce, picking up sand in gritty swirls and startling a group of half-wild ponies. I close my mouth against the grit, the better to hear what these walls and trails say about Puebloan farmers and their entreaties for rain. About Navajo horsemen chasing game or raiders. About Spanish, Mexican or American explorers and soldiers trying to claim an old landscape for a new flag. We reach the visitors center as the first raindrops fall. Books crowd the shelves, the official version of Southwest history. I pick one up and turn the page but find it hard to concentrate. My inward vision remains miles away, focused on volumes of stone and the centuries of history written there. AH Kathleen Bryant of Sedona is especially grateful to the Navajo people for sharing the beauty and serenity of Canyon de Chelly.

Larry Lindahl has traveled to Canyon de Chelly many times with his wife, Kathleen Bryant, yet camping within the sandstone stronghold made this visit the most memorable.

OAK CREEK SHOWS ITS FALL FINERY

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT G. MCDONALD I lived my childhood in central Arizona's Verde Valley, near Oak Creek. At that time, fly-fishing attracted me to the creek. Spring and summer were my seasons of choice to be there in pursuit of trophy trout. In those days, each tree looked the same as the next. Now, 50 years later, armed with a 4x5 view camera instead of a fly rod, the trees are my main attraction. Autumn is now my favorite time to visit Oak Creek Canyon and the West Fork of Oak Creek. The canyon looks its best from late October through mid-November, when the bigtooth maple trees display a showy array of colored leaves - creamy pastels to vibrant scarlets and oranges. Thousands of canyon trekkers come to witness the annual seasonal change. I come in search of eyecatching photographs. I've made many trips to Oak Creek through the years, but my reasons for coming here have changed. Now I'm here to catch images of one of nature's spectacles... and the trout are safe.