This site, one of my favorites for native ruins, is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are numerous pueblos located in the park, and the largest one pictured is actually missing a few rooms due to a rockslide from the cliff above. These great houses were several stories tall, including storerooms for trade and many ceremonial kivas. Due to the well preserved nature of the site, it’s easier to get a sense of the scale of human activity a thousand years or so ago. At other more degraded sites, you’re really looking at the small basement room foundations. Here, you can see that some of the rooms above were much larger with windows and wider passages. The road out here is miles of washboard dirt, which helps reduce human impact.

There’s an interesting display at the visitor center showing several of the other great builder civilizations around the world at the time Chaco thrived. For me the comparison that comes to mind is Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. They were also a civilization of great travelers and explorers who build large stone markers and then move on to other locations. Manmade ecological collapse contributed to the rapid population declines at these sites. Chaco no doubt boomed when it improved its agricultural yields by building a vast network of canals, but natural systems have natural limits that can break when pushed too far. Obviously, when the natural limits are pushed too far globally, the problem is that there will be nowhere to move that’s unaffected. And the crisis part of climate change is that we won’t have enough time to respond. For those unable to think more than a year or two into the future, it’s worth looking back over centuries since Chaco’s population collapsed due to over exploitation. We may think of ourselves as advanced, but we’re not (and won’t be) if we can’t avoid the coming climate catastrophe we created.