The RedRock soars 600 feet above me, swirls etched into it like eddying sand in a windstorm. I know the cliff isn’t moving, but as each cloud crosses the stripe of blue sky above and beyond the sunlit rim, it seems to lurch toward me. Vertigo? An optical illusion? Magic, certainly. Even higher up, four ravens are playing their swoop-and-soar game along the north rim…or is it two ravens and their shadows? Across the way, past the dazzling water, the shadowed cliff on the south side rises up, a vast flat surface streaked with perfectly vertical black stripes, some wide, some narrow—like a cosmic bar code.
I have heard people confidently assert that this is the most beautiful canyon on the planet, and for all I know, they are right. When I was a little boy I used to spend a lot of time looking for what my friends and I called “neat places,” usually rock outcrops in the woods, little overhangs, or surprising springs or streams. In this Y-shaped gash in the earth, everywhere I look there’s another neat place. Canyon de Chelly, located in northeastern Arizona approximately in the middle of the Navajo Reservation (which is bigger than West Virginia), has got to be the neatest place on earth.
Chelly (pronounced “shay”) is a Spanish spelling—and mispronunciation—of the Navajo word tseyi, which means “in the rocks.” What the Anasazi people called it when they began living here a couple of thousand years ago isn’t known. Probably their word for “in the rocks.” The canyon, which is about 60 miles long, is fed by two main streams and numerous smaller ones. Navajo families, whose ancestors arrived in these parts about 500 years ago, still farm its bottomlands in summer, planting corn, squash, and melons to ripen in sandy fields, and harvesting fruit—peaches, cherries, apples, and apricots—from orchards planted long ago.
There’s plenty of history here, much of it sad. One arm of the Y is called Canyon del Muerto, the “Canyon of the Dead.” The entire length of the two main canyons is punctuated by prehistory, small villages and family residences, some quite elaborate, built from local stone and mud, usually up off the canyon floor in overhangs scoured out by wind and water during the 50 million years it took to carve this place. These dwellings of the Anasazi (Navajo for “Ancient Ones”) were abandoned about 700 years ago; no one knows exactly why. They are called ruins, which strikes me as too negative a word for structures that have endured, at least partially, for that long.
On September 20, 1884, a certain W. Ellison stood in one of the larger dwellings, a place called White House Ruins because one of the structures is covered with white plaster. Ellison achieved a tawdry immortality by scratching his name and the date into the plaster in huge letters. Fortunately, such vandalism is no longer possible. Declared a national monument in 1931, the canyon is cooperatively run by the Park Service and the Navajo Nation. Except on the mile-long trail from the south rim down to White House, you have to be accompanied by an approved Navajo guide. With your guide, you can hike, ride horses, drive your own 4x4, camp overnight, or take a motorized tour. Purists hike in, and fairly accomplished riders ride in (on Navajo horses or their own if they are so equipped), but they won’t get as far as a four-wheel-drive truck, which is the best way to see the most of the canyon in a relatively short time—four hours or eight, your choice.
Our driver introduced himself as Dave. He had grown up at the far end of Canyon del Muerto and confessed that as a boy he had snuck into every ruin in the two canyons. (Neat places—I knew it.) Just before we were to leave from Thunderbird Lodge, at the mouth of the canyon, two women approached with their $39.50 blue tickets, and Dave explained that the benchlike seats in the back of the open truck were all taken, and they would have to wait for the afternoon tour. The women, both British, said they couldn’t do that. Dave shrugged. “We’re full,” he said. The women demanded their money back and Dave explained that he didn’t have their money. “That’s not good enough,” one of the women said, Thatcher-like and heading for the boiling point, when Dave smiled and said another truck was on its way.
This was Navajo humor, but the Brits were not amused. Indeed, Navajo ways can easily be misunderstood. Navajo do not look people in the eye, for example, not out of shyness but out of courtesy: To look directly at someone’s face is considered a threatening gesture. A Navajo man enters a room ahead of a woman not out of macho superiority but to protect a more valued member of society from possible danger. But they love to laugh, usually at their own or someone else’s expense, and they may be the most patriotic people in America. Just after September 11, American flags were fluttering from the aerials of virtually every pickup we saw.
From the back of the truck we could see in all directions, including up, as we slithered through sandy ruts, sometimes six inches deep, past the brilliant foliage of cottonwoods and the swaying tamarisks. Here and there, often obscured in part by trees, were Navajo camps consisting of a hexagonal house called a hogan, a sheep corral, and a shade house made of branches. At summer’s end, the Navajo move to homes on the rim, since the canyon grows extremely cold by November (and the local schools are easier to get to from the top).
Vista after Red Rock Vista opened up as the canyon welcomed us into its depths; sunlit trees sparkled against shadowed sandstone walls that reached ever higher as we proceeded, reaching 1,000 feet at the far end. Long tunnels of interlocking cottonwood branches, shivery shade. Phantasmagorical rock formations, surely derived from some living form, crafted by a sculptor from myth time. A ledge with the tiny upside-down clay nests of cliff swallows. Ancient petroglyphs—hands, spirals (Anasazi semaphore?), along with Navajo renderings of antelopes and Spaniards on horses. Beckoning caves carved from bare walls. The black stripes called desert varnish, which scientists only recently discovered to be the result of live bacteria eating manganese and iron. Gnarled junipers growing impossibly from minuscule cracks in the walls and ledges. Huge slabs of rock, mute sentinels, having once fallen from above thanks to water sneaking into a fissure and freezing there, expanding, over and over and over through the aeons until ... boom! The truck plunges along a sandy track far into the shade of an overhang under 600 feet of rock and you’re thinking, “Is now the time?” Will some slab of rock choose this moment to go ... boom? At one spot, Dave slows down, leans out the window, and points to a curious set of tracks in the sand. “A young black bear,” he says, explaining that the Ancient Ones moved up into the rock walls to avoid predators, the regular flooding of the rivers that run through here, and raiding Ute from the north.
The quicksand in the river bottom, he says, is worse over near Spider Rock. Legendarily, entire trucks have sunk into the quicksand, to puzzle archaeologists a millennium or so from now. Spider Rock, an 800-foot pinnacle near the middle of Canyon de Chelly, is the home of Spider Woman, a major deity in the Southwest who spun the world into existence for the nearby Hopi and taught the Navajo to spin. She also is said to take miscreant youths to the top of her pinnacle for punishment, though I suspect they get only a grandmotherly sort of scolding. To arrive at the Spider Rock overlook before dawn and watch the sunlight strike the top and slowly descend, the world in silence, is to sense that this canyon is not unlike a Nepalese temple, where the sacred and the secular comfortably coexist.
This refuge has seen plenty of troubles. In 1805, a Spaniard named Narbona arrived with soldiers to put an end to Navajo raiding (which began as efforts to take back their own people whom the Spanish had carried off into slavery). Some 115 Navajo were killed near Massacre Cave, mostly warriors but some women and children, according to contemporary Spanish accounts. The Navajo say the warriors were off somewhere else except for ten men—the rest, they say, were women and children and the elderly.
By 1863, the Americans were in charge of the raiding. General James H. Carleton sent local hero Kit Carson at the head of 700 volunteers to round up all the Navajo, finally breaking their spirit by destroying the fields, homes, livestock, and orchards in this, their last and safest place. A few escaped into Utah, but most surrendered and were sent on foot to a prison camp in eastern New Mexico to be “civilized.” Some 8,000 Navajo from around the region underwent the Long Walk. A congressional peace commission was formed in 1867 to look into conditions at the camp. Negotiations with Native American leaders followed, leading to the signing of the Treaty of 1868 and the return of more than 3 million acres. By then, how ever, thousands had died of disease and despair. The survivors returned home. In Canyon de Chelly they rebuilt their hogans, planted new orchards, and started life anew. The Navajo emerged from this experience as a unified group rather than the loosely affiliated bands they had been before, and they were eventually to become the Navajo Nation, the largest reservation-based tribe in the United States, with some 250,000 people.
About 50 Navajo families are lucky enough to live in the canyon, a lodestar for people from around the world who want a glimpse of Indian country, some Anasazi outposts, and a breathtaking piece of the natural creation.
I keep coming back to this canyon, drawn by its beauty, of course, and by the quiet. I avoid the Massacre Cave overlook (it just seems so sad) and revel in little things, such as the glittering silica in some of the rocks that dances in the early-morning sun like miniature stars. And I also come for what strikes me as a timeless peace, where the past and the present seem one, the eternal rocks imperceptibly taking on new shapes, people doing the same simple things for countless generations. The ravens, playing their ancient game along the rimrock.
Making Reservations
Where to Stay
The classic Thunderbird Lodge (800-679-2473) is on the site of a 19th-century trading post. The Park Service maintains a free campground next door. The rooms at the Holiday Inn (800-465-4329)—half a mile from the canyon entrance on Route 7—are new, but the offices, gift shop, and restaurant are in the original buildings, once the site of the first trading post on the reservation. The Best Western (800-327-0354), about three miles from the canyon entrance, has an indoor pool.
Tours can be arranged in advance or on the spot at these motels and at the Park Service’s visitor center (928-674-5500).
Where to Eat
People don’t come to Canyon de Chelly for the food. Thunderbird Lodge has a cafeteria (928-674-5841) where you simply have to surrender to sturdy 1950s fare (lots of thick gravy, 11 kinds of Jell-O). You’ll find the best Navajo-style food (such as mutton stew and fry bread) at flea markets that pop up in the town of Chinle, or at the Best Western’s Junction Restaurant (928-674-8443), where daring non-Indians try a Navajo taco and the Navajo seem to prefer pizza. And then there’s Garcia’s Restaurant (928-674-5000), in the Holiday Inn, where they take a stab at southwestern cookery such as trout dusted with blue cornmeal.
Nearby Attractions
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is about three hours from Canyon de Chelly. Its red rock pinnacles and buttes were made famous by the western movies of the 1930s and, more recently, by automobile advertisements. It is a place of supernal beauty, and if you’ve traveled that far you should press on to the aptly named Valley of the Gods, in Utah. Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site, is in Ganado on Route 264, south of Chinle. Looking much as it did a century or more ago, it has the best collection of Navajo rugs anywhere. There’s a beautiful four-hour round-trip drive from the canyon to Tsaile and north to Lukachukai, a trim and prosperous Navajo town with a superb and sincere trading post, and then up the winding Navajo Route 13, through rocks carved by some cosmic Henry Moore, to Buffalo Pass among spruce and ponderosa with the forest floor covered with ferns. Here, you can see for milesto the east and west, including the central Navajo symbol, Shiprock, rising from the New Mexico desert. Rough side roads take you into high mountain meadows and astonishing vistas.
Inside Tips
The most scenic approach to Canyon de Chelly is north on Route 12 from Window Rock, the Navajo capital, past beautiful red rock ramparts and through high montane forests to Tsaile, then west to Chinle and the canyon.
This is the arid Southwest, so take water along if you are going to be out for more than an hour. The canyon rim varies in elevation from about 5,500 to 7,000 feet—take it easy until you’ve acclimated. Watch out for wandering livestock on all Navajo roads, especially after dark.
The only cellphone network that seems to function in the Canyon de Chelly area is Cellular One (and that’s only when the antenna isn’t overloaded). Alcoholic beverages are barred by law on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. –J.P.