Gila Archives - Mikel B. Classen On The Road

Author’s Note: Many of these pictographs are subtle and faded. The more you study the pictures, more will appear in the stone. Spend a little time looking for the buried images in the rock.

While visiting the Cliff Dwellings at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, there is another site that is also worth visiting. The “Trail to the Past” is located at the Lower Scorpion Campground and it is right along the road where most visitors drive by and never see. The site explores a Mimbres artist and his home.

There is a parking lot at the Lower Scorpion and towards the east end of the lot a hiking trail labeled “Trail to the Past,” leads to a rock wall that has prehistoric pictographs painted on it.

Only a few feet down the trail and it splits. To the left is a trail to a cliff house, more on that later. To the right is the rock wall where the pictographs are painted. There are quite a few here and many of them have faded though they are still visible. These have been painted over the last thousand years. There were several generations of rock artists living here.

Figures and designs adorn the rocks, most whose meanings have been lost to time. These messages from the past have yet to be understood. Their beauty and symetry are ever apparent.

When I stood here looking at these, I saw more and more images as I looked more intently. These are worth more than a glance and the more I looked, the more I saw. There was something painted on nearly every flat surface, some faded while others could have been created yesterday.

Many of the pictures baffle me as to what they were intended by the artist, while others stand out and are easily identified. The one above is one of those that is difficult to figure out. It appears as if it were several images upon each other.

This is one of those pictograph clusters that the more you look at it, the more you see. There are several different paintings in this picture. See how many you can find.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the “Trail to the Past” splits in two directions. To the right is the pictographs, to the left is a cliff dwelling and was undoubtably the home of the artist.

This shows a bit of the interior of the dwelling but it also shows a large red patch in the rocks above. This was likely where the painters of the pictographs got their color pigment for the pictographs. The red shade is the same as that of the rock art.

The trail to both the pictographs and the cliff house is quite short. The trail to the pictographs is handicapped accessable and is only about 50 yards from the parking lot. The trail to the cliff house is not handicapped accessable but is only about 100 yards. This place in the lower Scorpion Campground is overlooked by most visitors and it takes very little effort to spend a little time here. I was the only visitor at the time. This is well worth the minimal effort it takes to explore this ancient artist’s home and his art from prehistoric America.

Writing and photography by Mikel B. Classen.

For more information about Mikel B. Classen and his writing and photography visit his website at www.mikelclassen.com

This was sort a bucket list kind of thing for me. I’ve always wanted to see these and I finally got there. Of course it was raining the entire time, though I suppose it could be worse. It could have been snowing. I will admit that it didn’t diminish the impact of this ancient city in the mountains.

The drive there is a sometimes windy and treacherous roadway. It goes up across the Continental Divide and reaches nearly 9000 feet at one point. The scenery is breathtaking and one has to be careful to concentrate on the drive and not gawk at the scenery. Admittedly it is easier said than done. It takes approximately two hours to drive 45 miles. There are two roads that will take you there, New Mexico 15 out of Silver City which is the more difficult drive, it is paved all the way, but it has steep grades and very hairpin curves. The other way is by taking New Mexico 35 out of San Lorenzo and Mimbres. Though this is a longer route it is the easier to drive of the two.

When you arrive at the National Monument, established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, there is a visitors center where you can learn all the secrets of the Cliff dwellings. A short mile later and you are at the parking lot for the trail into the cliffs. The hike isn’t long, round trip is about a mile, and the path follows a small stream that appears to have been cutting through the rocks for millenia. Then the climb begins.

There is about a 200 foot climb up to get on the level of the cliff dwellings. It is well worth the effort. The dwellings can be seen peeking out of the cliffs above on the left. Since it was raining, it was easy to come to the realization that these rocks are very slippery when wet. The pathway follows closely to the cliff edge and watching your step can save your life or serious injury.

One of the best things about visiting here is the fact that the Cliff Dwellings are not roped off. Visitors can walk in and through the interiors of this ancient village.

One can only marvel at the effort it must have taken to build these magnificent buildings so high in the air inside these caves. It is a feat of engineering that is almost hard to comprehend.

Because of the unrestricted access, the buildings can be seen with every perspective. Inside these caves would have been fairly cozy living for these ancient times. They are well sheltered and it wouldn’t have been often that wind or weather would have penetrated these caves.

There is beauty and aestetics here. Primitive yet elegant. Walking in the footsteps of these long lost people brings a feeling of timelessness that reaches deep into the soul. There is a memory there, one from the ancestors, powerful and almost familiar. Is there an ancestral memory here? Probably or at least something close to it.

Above is the gorge the small stream had cut that the path followed on the way in. This is what they saw from their homes. This rugged wild region has likely not changed since the Cliff Dwellers occupied this place. This would have been what their world looked like.

Some of the buildings could still be lived in. They are well preserved enough that the Mogollon could come back and start over without much difficulty.

This village dates back to 1200 – 1400 AD. It was continously occupied through those years and it is believed they left because of environmental changes. In the early 1900s some mummified bodies were found and were lost by looters and collectors. There was a child mummy found and that is the only mummy to make it to the Smithsonian.

Archaeologists have Idenfied nearly 50 rooms inside of the dwellings where they believed there were 10-15 families living. They even had bathrooms.

There are five caves all filled with rooms like these. Most of them consist of three rooms and though the are quite close together, each dwelling was definitively destinct as its own seperate structure.

This was one of those things that I have done in my life that I felt was quite profound. Realizing how old this village was, and how we overlook these pre-European civilizations with our education and history, it is a moving experience to stand amongst the remnants of this overlooked culture. The Mogollon achieved much in their two centuries on these cliffs. Though they didn’t leave much of a record, what they did leave behind tells a story of art, engineering and tenacity. They were able to carve out homes in the most formidable of environments, live their lives where most would have perished, and raise generations of family in harmony with their surroundings.

For more information on Mikel B. Classen go to his website at http://www.mikelclassen.com