Exploring Chaco Canyon - Mysterious Ancient Ruins and the Archaeological Wonder of the USA

sunrise in New Mexico look at that it's beautiful it is absolutely breathtaking out here this morning and it's so why I can literally hear the sound of those horses footsteps well between cars anyway ah there we go out from behind the clouds at last oh man and not a moment too soon because it is literally freezing out here we're back for another random land adventure and this one should be a doozy we are going way way out off the beaten path today for a bucket list style experience which is why I got up at 5 in the morning in the snow and drove around through the darkness the long way over here to avoid some road closures but one of those journey of a lifetime types of situations our final destination is Chaco Canyon this is the place I have always wanted to go Chaco Canyon one of the greatest archaeological sites in the United States you'll see what I mean in a little bit but to get there we're gonna have to go where the sidewalk ends so far the gravel road isn't too bumpy or too crazy it's just that it's long and I mean really long it's at least 13 miles you've got to work to get to this one if you're not familiar with Chaco Canyon this is a site over a thousand years old home of what we used to call the ancient Anasazi people but now archaeologists are more and more calling them the ancestral Puebloans and it has some of the craziest most impressive structures ever built in the United States before Columbus oh yeah it's definitely getting a little bit rough for now sheesh glad I didn't bring my Mustang speaking of cars I haven't seen one other living soul out here rather than a couple of random horses I got a warning that this road might be impassable in the winter for two-wheel drive let's hope that's not the case whoa there's a few bumps and ruts but it's all right oh yes look at that pavement true that just got worse and worse as it went along but I made it and look at this we're finally here yeah Wow this is already stunning first things first though before anything else we've got your head inside the visitor center this is where you pay the entrance fees and of course there are a few displays to look at and also the gift shop I guess start redoing a visitor center so most of the artifacts aren't in here if they still have these giant models to give us an idea of what we're in for okay I'm ready now most people start by heading down the road to the biggest ruins but right behind the visitor center is a half mile trail to una vida and I want to try to see as much as I can now most people have heard of the Anasazi at some point they lived here in Chaco Canyon from about 8800 ish 900 ish to about 1050 in this whole Canyon stretching up past us was the center maybe even the capital of a vast area with hundreds of villages Hounds roads after the Chaco Canyon period they built those incredible cliff dwellings that are famous the world over archeologists are still arguing over whether they were defensive structures or whether that was just a style for the time and although someday I'd like to check out those cliff dwellings how could I not come and see this is incredible size of this imagine back then a thousand years ago in many Europeans were literally still living in hovels the Chaco people were building these there's a stereotype we have in our minds about Native Americans any sort of uncultured wandering nomadic people that is just totally false it's mainly because America was mostly settled after European diseases ravaged the native population so Europe was literally coming into contact with this post-apocalyptic society there were full-on massive cities all over America on the East Coast and in the Midwest they built their cities out of wood and earth mounds luckily for us today wood was scarce in the southwest so the ancestral Puebloans here built their cities out of stone all awesome looks like if we climb aways up we're gonna get to see some petroglyphs that's not for the faint of heart I think we're up over 6,000 feet here the air is definitely thin oh my gosh look at these petroglyphs this is amazing can you see all those up there what you think this is people from a thousand years ago speaking down through the centuries these petroglyphs is that they're often portrayed as sort of this supernatural thing these people that just vanished off the face of the earth the subject of Leonard Nimoy in search of style documentaries or even worse ancient aliens they didn't vanish as a matter of fact their descendants are still alive and well today all over the southwest and the idea that these people couldn't have built these incredible buildings on their own and needed help from aliens it's just insulting these are people just like us intelligent created complex and sophisticated the mystery here is how all of the stuff in this Canyon not fit in with early archaeologists preconceived notions of what play blow and people and what Native Americans could accomplish and it didn't seem to fit in with their understanding of the way modern play blow societies operate we now know a lot more about these sites and the people who created them but the real mystery now is what in the world were they doing out here at Chaco Canyon so desolate Sun scorching the summer freezing cold like right now in the winter little to no land suitable for farming and yet they built dozens of the most incredible structures on earth and the one we just looked at back there is nothing what comes next is insane and I've waited to see it for decades it's a World Heritage Site and I'm not kidding when I say it's one of the coolest places on earth apparently we're the only ones here today to see it I can't believe we're about to visit webelo bonito Wow look at this place it's incredible it's mind-blowing the size of this is the largest and finest of the Chaco and Great Houses it is massive there are literally hundreds of rooms here and they are ancient the first phase of construction here Pueblo Bonito is believed to have been started in the eight hundreds and it didn't grow by adding one room onto another onto another like later pueblos these were massive master plan structures of unbelievable size scale and scope in places these structures are three four maybe even five stories tall and we still don't know exactly how many rooms they have because a giant piece of the cliff fell down and destroyed a whole bunch of of this is incredible I have never seen anything like this in my whole life this giant rock that came down was called threatening rock and they've uncovered evidence that the natives used to put prayer sticks and do all kinds of stuff even built a masonry wall trying to hold it out eventually like my first marriage it all came crashing down I've come out of the ruins to follow the route recommended by this handy dandy $2 trail guide into wow I'm glad I did because look at they check out this overview of Pueblo Bonito this is amazing because of the hundreds of rooms here they originally thought that the sites like these in Chaco Canyon were all small fortified towns I can actually see a few other ones over here off in the distance well anyway the reason they settled on calling them great houses is because it turns out that so few of these rooms had hearts or fire places let's trust me you would definitely need out here it's only 23 degrees still and so little trash was found in the way of habitation if they now believe only a very few people lived here at any given time maybe only a thousand total over the centuries that it was being used look at how insanely thin its sturdy these massive walls are we are talking about some serious construction skills what we're looking at now is the massive potentially up to five story back wall of Pueblo Bonito you can't even see any doorways in it but you can see evidence of the different construction techniques look at the thicker stones there with the thinner ones in between all kinds of layers imagine living out in the sticks a thousand years ago and then coming to Chaco Canyon and seeing this Thorne five-story buildings with hundreds of rooms and the craziest part was that all these walls they believed were plastered over meaning this whole place would have been gleaming white in the sunshine there were actually tiny rooms here between these outer walls and the earlier ones from a previous phase of construction that opened only to the back people think they were used as storage areas some of the early archaeologists knocked holes in this giant back wall trying to get the treasures inside unfortunately destroying a lot of evidence before modern archaeology settings with its much more cautious and careful excavations at exploration wow this is absolutely incredible I do not have enough words in my vocabulary to express the wonder I feel looking at all of this this is crazy in the last few decades they've had to close down so many prehistoric sites too much vandalism and destruction is sometimes just the sheer amount of traffic it says damaged a lot of ancient structures beyond repair so man I cannot tell you how stoked I am even staying on the trails here you can get so up close and personal with these ruins now look in here look at this tiny little room this is the oldest section of this great house the first phase if you will built more than 1,200 years ago look at the technique in the wall building there even in its first phase there were an estimated 100 rooms constructed here here you can see kind of how they built the different stories wooden beams would go between the walls covered by sticks and then other smaller wooden beams going the other way to build the floor of the room above Wow look at this look in here you can actually really see that roof method I was talking about see the skinny little beams across those you can also see some other ancient timber and here used as a vertical supports dang that is crazy I can see some reddening on the walls over there I don't know whether or not this remnants of color meaning like paint or something like that but they did have plaster and they didn't have paint in case you couldn't tell already this was one fancy place as a matter of fact in one of these tiny little rooms back here room 33 which actually might be over there a little more I'm not sure they found the remains of multiple generations of people linked by DNA through the mother's side actually for hundreds of years clearly this was a very important and very significant place to look at that story upon story of building you can see the holes for the wooden beams and actually there's a few ancient Timbers still stuck in those walls I look around this Canyon my friends there's a few stumpy trees it would be OK for firewood but nothing like the massive straight Timbers they would have needed to go across entire room especially gigantic circular rooms like these ones known as cavas every single one of the more than quarter-million beams used in this place was hauled in from various sites of more than 50 60 sometimes 80 miles away on foot now where we're standing now is one of the two great plazas here it's sort of hard to tell from the ground but on model earlier you could see that they're divided in two by this low wall here look at this amazing massive stone Kiva that is incredible these would have been entered down through the roof via a ladder or a pole they seem to be an evolution of earlier pit house style structures that these people lived in and they still don't agree a hundred percent on exactly what these would have been used for if they think certainly some of them were lived in others were probably used as gathering places and certainly they served ceremonial purposes much like the modern Kiva's today which give them their name which these people's descendants like to hope he still use now dude look at this place look the size of it and remember how I was telling you that they figured out that only a few people ever lived here at any one time I mean food couldn't really be grown here and how'd it be brought in from miles away so knowing that only a few people lived in each of these great houses and there are several through the canyon and knowing that Chaco Canyon is at the center of a vast network of thousands of archaeological sites homes and small towns what would you assume a place this massive was used as I mean granted they were probably used for some sort of ceremonial purpose or purposes to build something like this especially in giant phases all at one time you had to have some serious wealth and or clout let's see because there's no hierarchy in more recent Puebla cultures and because all the early archaeologist and anthropologist sort of back streamed this stuff meaning they projected modern Pueblo practices and religion back on these Chaco Canyon people until very very recently the vast majority of archaeologists have just completely rejected the idea that this was a place for leaders or Noble and yet right here at Pueblo Bonito itself he found human remains surrounded by thousands of little pieces of turquoise there were metal bells unearthed here which were extremely rare there was no metal up here back then and they've even found the feathers of and the bones of scarlet macaws which are parrots from way way down south way down low down in Mexico there were jars on earth here very similar to Mayan jars that were tested with traces of chocolate inside of them and even though a lot of scholars in the early days really wanted to distinguish between what they found in America and what they found in Mexico it's become increasingly clear that not only did the people of Chaco Canyon trade with people down there but that this place may have had a similar hierarchical structure to some Mesoamerican places we'll look at this some of these doors really really have to bend over to get through I don't want to damage this very ancient roof beams there or those lintels or whatever those are called over the doorway Wow like it does ancient Timbers the dates on this place are all because of the very well-preserved tree rings here yes it's amazing imagine the thousands of hours that would have taken to construct one of these things they must have needed a lot of people to do it and remember like I said according to the experts there weren't that many people actually living here now if that doesn't tell you that this is a place for leaders or Nobles I don't know what it does and to make matters even crazier not only where the Great Houses aligned in various ways to astrological things like solstices and moon cycle the Chaco culture sites miles away were built on different north-south lines with this place and a 200-mile network of roads connected some of them oh look here you can see the main beams that would have held up another story here and then some of the smaller ones that held up the floor up above and in between would be clay and sand you can even see some of the original plaster in this room anyway clearly this place was connected to Mesoamerica it has so many different similarities they've only found a couple true but they even found balls as in the ball court style balls that could have been being used in those great plazas over there these amazing windows into other rooms and wow this have been a corner doorway our fireplace who knows wow that looks a lot like a grinding stone I wonder if that's original this place is so unbelievable oh my gosh I barely fit oh wow look at this look at this crazy corner doorway up there at that wild angle there's even some little holes that have been filled in in here it's amazing to see the different stories there's at least three stories worth of wall right here I mean this is a thousand years ago we're talking this is just totally unbelievable and I apologize for spending so much time in Pueblo Bonito but it's just so astounding goodness this is amazing look at that can you see that look at all those rooms and all those doorways I couldn't build something like this in a thousand years if I try to really shows you how ignorant some of those early European prejudices were when it came to Native Americans oh wow look at that sealed shut door way up there on the second floor now look at these windows facing inwards on the second floor there's a doorway out there I mean this is this is just nuts look some of them vindictive little ass some of them have been blocked up here there's a little tiny hole you can see through and look at this incredible room look at all of the post holes and portals and doorways at angles and gosh I am speechless I did a lot of research before coming here actually as doing a lot of research about this place anyways which is what made me decide to go crazy and come to New Mexico in the middle of February like I said it's about 27 degrees outside now that all of my neat little facts and all the information that I learned is mostly gone right out of my head this is all just blunted away speaking of a Mesoamerican connection by the way way down south I believe in Palenque look that up it's way way down there in Mesoamerica I had t-shaped doors just like this I don't think they're found anywhere else so not only did they have parrots from down there and chocolate from down there and all kinds of trade items that even some similar architecture now is it that much of a stretch to say they may have had a similar hierarchy but for those few hundred years that maybe the people that lived up here experimented with a different sort of government I don't know I'm not an archaeologist the vast majority of them say no but a few of them say possibly holding some stuff down below in the description of this video that you can check out now check this out now it's kind of dark in here but look this crawl to get inside but we are now standing in one of the last rooms in Chaco Canyon that's still open to the public that is almost fully intact was its original route look at that I know it's kind of dark maybe a little grainy but look at how amazing that is see the cross-section there see all the various layers of these long poles are these huge timber beams they track these on foot and by hand from miles and miles and miles away now this is replica plaster on the walls but it's covering up the original plaster that's still there but they wanted to stop people from scratching into it vandalizing it you know it's sealed up like this inside with the roof and everything it's actually way too warmer than it is outside in the literally freezing cold and I'm guessing like stone construction everywhere it's probably a lot cooler in the summer as well like a tree ring dating hole all right this place is freakin amazing one of the most amazing places I have ever been and now that I got a little taste of it I can 1000% guarantee you that if it's up to me this will not be our last visit to play la Bonita or Chaco Canyon but I've now spent so much time in this one site that I think it's time to be moving along I think you'll agree with me though that was one of the most amazing places I've ever seen I mean just dumbfounding I'm behind me it's Pueblo Bonito and our next place luckily isn't too far away just over there and actually sharing the same parking lot this is Chet Rowe kettle it's huge a first glance not as huge and impressive as Pablo Benito that's just because it's stubbier and it spreads out so much and it blends in so well it takes a minute to adjust especially when you realize a lot of it is unexcited I look at this structure right here a tetra kettle apparently this colonnade style architecture was being used around the same time a thousand years ago by the Toltecs in Mesoamerica and might be even more evidence that that arbitrary line we draw between Mexico and the United States didn't stop the people from down there indicating what the people up here Wow dude look at this massive great stone Kiva holy cow you can see the fire pits down there and the vols or even deflectors to reflect heat around the room they're seething I mean this is advanced civilization right here there's another great plaza here a whole grouping of smaller Kiva's and little stone rooms like I said archaeologists were so confused because they didn't know how to square this with what we know about the much more egalitarian more modern Pueblo Society they don't have a stratified society of rulers or a central state but I think of it this way if in a thousand years we were to stumble across Versailles we automatically assume that wait a minute this can't be the palace of a king the French people have a republic just food for thought whoa what do we have here Wow looks like way down on the bottom as a round Kiva and all this stuff was built up on top of it there's still a whole lot of mystery here we don't know exactly what these people believe or how their society was organized but we do know they were incredibly incredibly sophisticated the various inhabitants of the Southwest all have different legends and tales about what happened at Chaco Canyon here but one thing they all pretty much agree on is that it wasn't good the Navajo who came later have legends about a great white city controlled by gamblers I first heard that I was thinking wait a minute was Chaco Canyon like the ancient Las Vegas oh look at that you could see the remains of ancient balconies up there anyway apparently know back then gambling has sort of different significance I still don't fully understand and what I do understand is hard to explain in just a few seconds like this but sure enough apparently hundreds of ancient seemingly gambling related artifacts have been recovered in Chaco Canyon so kind of strange dude how astounding is all this I have so much in my brain I want to tell you about but so little time like the way they found all kinds of workshop with turquoise in it from miles and miles away that indicates extensive trading networks or the fact that they built roads straight up and over cliffs including this one it may have had ladders up at the top there so hand hold this is also a maze we've only seen two great houses there are more all throughout Chaco Canyon which I believe is about eight miles long something like that and there's some located on top of the mesas and there's outlier towns far away with roads connecting them and thousands and thousands of little house structures that date from this time period from this culture what I'm getting at here is that nothing about this place is random this is definitely no fluke oh wow look at that over towards Pueblo Bonito from this angle can you see that giant rock right there can sort of see the daylight there and the crafters actually people walking under there can you see him man I'm already gonna have to make this an extra long episode I swear if we come back I'll spend more time going into detail at various places I want to get to some other sites but look at this if you look very closely there at the base that cliff you could see all kinds of petroglyphs on this trail between tetro Ketel and Pueblo Bonito down there just recently discovering that there's all kinds of lower status structures connecting the various great houses and lots of tiny little individual houses across the canyons of the whole notion of no stratification in society maybe getting turned on its head whoa we're gonna that big a hole over there and some smaller holes along the wall there to wonder if those were structures as well as much as I want to see all of this probably should head back to the car my original plan was to camp out for a night here at the small campground with no one in it makes this a two-day trip it's just too darn cold not to mention there's more snow in the forecast so considering that the park closes at sundown and the long and sketchy road back to the nearest town which is over an hour and a half away we had probably better burn some rubber house up above here hop on that Mesa is a site called Pueblo Alto I'm hoping to have some time to climb up there and check it out but it's kind of a long trail considering how cold it is the Ranger said the short version is about two hours if you hurry so I think if I attempt it it'll be last that's for sure I know so far all these sites have been pretty close to parking lots and pretty level to get to you for those of you with mobility issues or bad knees or whatever I still think it's pretty doable especially if you take your time oh dude look at this look at this straight wall here I mean this is incredible I feel like I'm going down a street in a town or along the outside of a big building this great house here Pueblo Del Arroyo I believe it's just out of control amazing I guess I kind of take back what I said there are some stairs and there's some little bitty climbs here I think if you go slow though and take your time like I said pretty doable look at this key hole shaped Kiva here they have those at Mesa Verde a very famous later cliff dwelling so they think that might have been one of the later phases of construction and right here in room 12 according to the guide they dug out three macaws skeleton so imagine how many more might be around here how those birds cannot naturally survive here they were brought from down in Mexico they could have tried to breed them but they definitely wouldn't have flourished here you know a wood floor so look at that rabbit see him man he blends in a Chaco Canyon rabbit how about that Wow look at this gun dance you in three-story structure inside the ground floor which was by the way extremely hard to crawl into are the remains of thousand-year-old plastered walls look at that that is all original if taking core samples from these beams especially the ones over the doorway there in this room we're standing in now is approximately a thousand years old pretty much right on the money a thousand years of history inside a building a huge amazing stone building with look at this all kinds of insane craftsmanship like I said Chet Rowe kettle 50 million blocks of stone this stuff all had to be shaped and placed here and mortared together it really is just unbelievable now remember we don't know for sure what these great houses were for it's possible that all of Chaco Canyon was something of a mecca and that all these buildings are ceremonial in nature maybe they were seasonal pilgrimage sites and that's why they weren't super occupied there still is a lot of mystery here at Chaco Canyon oh and by the way I kind of forgot to mention this earlier all of these sites were either leveled or constructed on platforms sometimes eight to twelve feet off the ground in the case of shettrick cattle and Pueblo Bonito I think even from the earliest stages these were master-planned sites and like I said they're discovering more and more that they are aligned with the heavens of solstices and Moo phases they're incredible and there's even more of these great houses farther down the canyon here which I'm sure I've mentioned before but give me some leeway here it's freezing Wow look at that and look at these Kiva's here which reminds me all of these Kiva's so far have been really impressive Wow and sort of these circular rooms right here that's amazing but anyway there's one granddaddy of them all and I'd really like to see you before the end of the day so I'm gonna head back down the canyon now and check out the great Kiva at Casa Rinconada I do want to mention at this stage for those of you who are possibly new here maybe but sometimes well actually pretty much normally our adventures feature a lot more humor they can be a little more madcap and funny but these are quite literally sacred sites to numerous people have Puebloans of today like the Akuma the Zuni the Hopi and even like I mentioned earlier to the Navajo who were the newcomers in this area at this time definitely I want to respect their sacred sites and not just that but the homes and burial sites in some cases of their ancestors which is also why I've tried to avoid using the word Anasazi as much as possible even though that's the common archaeological term and very well known it's a Navajo word meaning ancestral enemies or the ancestors of our enemies which the Hopi for example find a little bit distasteful all right now look at this place we are up high on a mound I don't know if it's natural or not but it's entirely possible that it was actually built by the people here the Chaco ins look at this amazing stonework that's incredible in here inside of these walls we can look down into the largest Kiva at Chaco Canyon the great Kiva of Casa Rincon ah dude this is incredible this thing is massive you could park a couple of school buses inside of this thing look at that t-shaped stairwell on the other end where we just were and there's another entrance over here on the south side this whole thing was apparently built on a north-south axis from what I understand only literally one degree off of True North I mean these people knew what they were doing look at all those alcoves down there they think may have been for offerings they found some similar ones that had turquoise and all kinds of we'll stuff inside there's the fire pits down there and so stone benches and the whole structure would have had this incredible wooden room one of the unique things here is this underground entrance into the Kiva I've heard some different theories about how it could have possibly been for like a ceremonial thing where maybe a masked figure representing a deity could have come out from below there into the Kiva during a ceremony we don't really know for sure gosh is this an impressive structure I mean would you look at Kiva it's great all right oh may look that way down there you can see my car I am the only one out here now I don't see any cars allah benito which is just across the canyon over there and way up on the Mesa is Pueblo Alto it's still below 30 degrees that's below zero Celsius minds you I'm not gonna lie to you it's uncomfortable which is why I'm not hiking to some of the farther locations or camping out this time like I had originally planned but I gotta tell you the weather and the timing turned out to be a really cool benefit because I've only come across I don't know six people the entire day I mean I feel incredibly lucky and although of course you guys are seeing all the talking bits I've been spending most of the day in between an awestruck silence and contemplation just sort of mentally time-traveling and trying to soak it all in man no wonder this is considered a sacred site let's just say this was a capital and let's just say the Great Houses had noble families and their servants I guess or people's that helped out around here and of the vast majority of ancestral Pueblo or Chaco in or Anasazi culture however you want to say it was spread around for hundreds of miles and only like the priests or the nobles or whoever lived here or maybe you know it was a sacred site you had to travel here whatever we know it was bad for farming we know there's not much water here we know the weather sky it miserable in the winter and supposedly scorching hot in the summer maybe there were ceremonial reasons you know to do with the Kosmos and maybe it was just that it was a perfect trade hub I mean they found all kinds of pieces of turquoise and all that stuff I was saying personally I wouldn't be surprised if they bill here just because of the epic scenery I mean there's just something about this place I can't shake the feeling that it's beauty meant something to these people who thought did my face and hands are frozen looks like we're up to about 28 degrees now doing pretty good on time two hours to sunset two and a half maybe I think I might try for that hike I don't know if I'll make it all the way to the ruins up there and I know for a fact I don't have time to do the whole loop trail but if I can make it to the next great house and up over the trail I might just make it to the Overlook above I bow beneath mouth there's no time to Donnell because although it does look awfully bright out here at the moment there's maybe two hours of sunlight left so I suppose can cut so here this ruin at the bottom of the cliff sorry I shouldn't say ruin I should say sight you'll have to wait till my next visit to be further explored it is pretty darn amazing was game alright here we go up and over the trail goes all the way up that now this is not on everybody do this exercise obviously I probably shouldn't even be doing this alone but the Rangers know I'm here crazy that - the ancestral Puebloans the chaco ends especially the later cliff dwellers this would just be a walk in the park yet to me this is some sort of like probably shouldn't have left the flashlight down on the car Oh what the but oh man whoa the elevation really gets you quick raggedness I'll see you at the top oh nevermind I'll see you in the middle of this giant cracks he's not going up so much it's coming back down that worries me bad balderdash shenanigans Wow there are very few videos about this place especially it was where the people are actually here doing doing the thing and the ones there are totally lie about how hard that is oh look at this there's a number of stone basins on top of the Mesa up here or meza if you're super southwest from what I hear on certain parts of the chocolate in roadways that are hard rock like this they can be pretty common I doubt they were used for grinding TV it seems like a great place to catch water there's a couple of Cairns up here but otherwise no trail marquees however I see pop of adido down there and that's what I want to overlook oh I guess that's the way I go it's crazy cuz we're on top of the cliffs as seen from below but the ruins of Pueblo Alto are way up there there's even more I'm really annoyed I don't have time to get up there I'm gonna feel so incomplete until my next visit when I can finally do it up see there you go another peck down human-made Basin right there hope and there's another one right there right about the point I'm getting thirsty to see what I'm saying apparently everywhere you walked up here and all over the floor of the canyon so you used to just be vast amount of pottery shards or pot sherds as the archaeologists call them but personally I have not seen one piece actually have some Anasazi pottery that one of my Navajo friends dug up on his own property and he sells it to tourists this little broken pieces whoa oh we were given to me as a gift so I don't feel super weird about it about having them at home but anyway I thought I would have known what to be on the lookout for but I haven't seen anything look at this stone circle here mysterious stone circle down there just down there that's one of the great plaza when you add it all up you could do a day trip out here like I'm doing today and it would be totally worth it but after being here now if you could get away with two or even three days out here and camp out that would be the ticket Oh someone left here tie out here that's trash better take it Oh sick prehistoric shrimp Burroughs neat I'd be more impressed by the geology in the paleontology if I wasn't so disappointed everyone is carried off all the pottery here well there's my car way down there so we must be getting close I mean imagine thrilling it must be to come upon a piece of decorated pottery up here and I'm talking on the trail you know and be able to pick it up and go whoa a thousand years ago somebody made carried and use this piece of pottery and then leave it there for the next guy or gal or whatever okay Lucas there's probably bonito it's just so far I guess we got to go all the way to not call it anyway oh gosh oh this is not my favorite oh not my favorite no one told me there'd be cliffs up on these cliffs but the good news is I think we're just about done that appears to be in the Overlook is right over there who've almost made it I'm not a Heights guy I'm really not but that is amazed look at how humongous that is that is incredible it took so long to walk around the outside edge here I love Anita this morning it took a long time to walk across that site it's far that crazy tangle of rooms we were in at the end it's just that little front corner over there I mean this place is massive it's even more impressive from up here that can be believed if that was just a ceremonial or a religious site man what a Cathedral and if it was a palace or a house boy what a home whatever it is it's certainly one of the craziest most amazing pieces of archaeology or structures in general I have ever had the pleasure to visit it was hard to get here but it was worth it why you can see the great Kiva is across the way over there step on sort of those low mounds and then it's aligned here with Pablo Benito and then playable Alto is up here and from up there a couple miles away from here the chaco road system went 450 miles in one direction 50 miles in another direction it's straight line straight up cliffs sometimes with toe holes and ladder I mean sure we know about the Toltecs and the Maya later the Aztecs doing things like that but we don't think of Native Americans in that way I don't think in the mainstream and that's really a shame more people knew about places like this and Cahokia out there by st. Louis because it is incredible what human beings can do but we shouldn't just be patting our modern selves on the back because our ancestors they knew a thing or two as well all right gang I wish I had something mystical and wise that I could say to you right now some kind of epic ancient wisdom to pass down or something like that but I I'm just out of words though wind is picking up the Sun is going down and so am i if you're a patreon where will be a podcast about this and some extra stuff make sure to check out all the links down below all about this place and of course links to sake merch there's gonna be some really sick merch coming in March and don't worry gang I'm pretty sure one of these days we'll be back to Chaco Canyon in the meantime I just have one last thing to say you've done your duty you can go home and sleep [Music] well uh keep us all hello yeah hey hi what's up you guys don't think aliens were there at Chaco Canyon do ya no I didn't think so they're not giving me a lot of answers but I don't blame me I mean they are a little hoarse oh I need a nap bye guys let's go let's go let's go come on I'll carry you I'll carry you I know I know your legs are sore and there it goes we watch the Sun come up watch they go back down we did it [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: JustinScarred

Views: 60,826

Keywords: randomland, justin scarred, 5337, disneyland, wdw, route 66, livefastdiepoor, Chaco Canyon, Anasazi, Ancestral Pueblan, Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Chaco Culture National Historic Park, Anasazi ruins, Ancient ruins, New Mexico, Route 66, American Indians, Abandoned, Abandoned Ruins

Id: kpG2wqCMii4

Length: 41min 27sec (2487 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020