Back Road Adventure

Ledge House of the

A GOLDEN LEAF FALLS FROM A WHITE-TRUNK-ED ASPEN IN THE CANYON CALLED TSEGI on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. From my vantage point hundreds of feet above the quaking dome of autumn leaves, I know that soon all of them will flutter to the red soil, that the limbs of the trees will then remain barren until the buds of spring appear. There is a certain magic in the falling of the leaves. But no mystery; I understand the phenomenon of seasonal changes. But over there, on the other side of the canyon, beyond the trees, deep in the great alcove of red sandstone, behind the crum-bling walls and the dark sockets of peering windows, there is mystery. What I am looking at is a milestone cre-ated of rock and timber, now weathered and crumbling slowly under Nature's force, a definitive marker on the path of an ancient people. The magnificent ruins of Betatakin in the Navajo National Monument were constructed and occupied for scarcely more than 50 years. The first people to build ma-sonry structures in the sheltering overhang at Betatakin arrived about A.D. 1250. The last wooden beam in a community of perhaps 150 inhabitants was cut in A.D. 1286, ac-cording to dendrochronologists, scientists who study tree-ring dating. Then, shortly after the beginning of the next century, Betatakin was silent and empty. Where did the people of Betatakin come from? Why did they choose to build in Tsegi Canyon? Where did they go?

Ancients

This much is known for sure. Although the ruins are located on the present-day Navajo reservation, the long-abandoned structures were not built by the Navajos. They were left by the long-departed people of the region that the Navajos called Anasazi, which roughly translated means "ancient enemies."

About 12,000 years ago, people from northeastern Asia migrated to the Western Hemisphere across the Bering Strait on a land bridge. But when these people, the Navajos, reached the vast regions of the vanished Anasazi, they encountered "apartment" complexes built of mortar and stone with vertical walls, square corners, doors, windows, ceiling beams a type of architecture that had certainly not followed ancestors of the Navajos south through Canada. Where then did the Anasazi come from?

Far to the south in Mexico and Central America stand the remains of ancient structures built of stone and designed with precisely engineered corners. Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec ruins. To my layman's eye, the structures at Betatakin are more like those to the south than those in Siberia.

And what of language? The Navajos and other tribes to the north are of the Athabascan tongue. But today's Hopi Indians of the