In the half-light of dawn, the gulleys and gouges on rough dirt road CR7950 looked frightening. We’d been driving for 45 minutes from a campsite in the desert, and by now we were in a convoy of vehicles travelling along a road that barely deserved that description. The prize? To watch an annular solar eclipse – a ‘ring of fire’ – from the home of North America’s most legendary sky-watchers. The race was on.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwest New Mexico was once the centre of a culture now called Ancestral Puebloan, a large group spanning the Four Corners region of the American southwest from around AD 100 to 1600. The remains of this civilisation can be found in the remote canyons of what is nowhouses often dug into the ground. It’s at Chaco that the civilisation found its apex in a series of ‘great houses’.
