The America YOU'VE NEVER SEEN! 🇺🇸 Ancient Native American Ruins in Utah with a Navajo Guide

[Music] to be honest i made this video for selfish reasons i've been fascinated by native american culture and history for as long as i can remember when i knew i was heading to southern utah for that hidden gems video i made a special request for a native connection you see down by the four corners where utah arizona new mexico and colorado come together there's a history of this country that's rarely shown off the vast picturesque highways often reserved for long-haul truckers and retired rvers sits a forgotten land that once told many stories and i connect with lewis a native navajo to try and understand just a few of them so with the uh originally what i'm not sure i want to ask the right way is it what tribe you're from is that the best way to ask exactly because there's so many tribes out here i would say i'm navajo okay and the navajo tribe is located right next to the ute tribe okay the hopi tribe the zuni tribe so you would definitely have to be specific and you were raised in this area or i was raised in monument valley okay so that's not far from here you know we drive south 20 some miles we're in monument valley and on was it on the reservation right yep okay grew up on the navajo reservation grew up with uh no electricity no water it wasn't rough it was that's taught me to be active yeah you know it taught me to appreciate water and you know grandma and grandpa always told us to wake up with the sun navajo culture pretty awesome pretty unique we live by it daily so as soon as the sun comes up we're supposed to run to the east the sun comes up over the horizon and we we give thanks we pray then we run back home so in the navajo culture our navajo hogans are doorways every doorway faces to the east okay so so you can get out in the morning exactly so in the mornings all we do is open our hog on doors yeah we run towards the east until the sun comes up every day then we give our thanks then we what we run home yeah and it was running you had to run and my grandma did that daily so my grandparents lived fairly old age they were like were they fast they were healthy 105. no way yeah it was pretty awesome because to this day i asked grandma i said grandma why don't you have electricity and running water at home she just says why i don't need it you know that that means they're going to build roads out here to my home yeah there's going to be power lines running out here because out there the nearest home you see is way in the distance about five miles away yeah you know so the navajos live pretty sparse you know out in their country so that's what she wants to to be serene like we're right now yeah it's kind of like that back home like how it used to be right yeah exactly this is sagebrush and this uh this has a really strong aroma so what we do is when when i pass by sagebrush i always tend to do like i did and then we what we do is we bless ourselves put it all over bless our limbs and always our heart and our legs and this is what we do we bless ourselves and we give thanks to the plant and which trickles down to the earth and then up upstairs you know the sky we call it is the term in the navajo culture which means the interconnectedness between nature the sky spirituality physicalness and animals wildlife the birds which all can interconnectedness means like at that equilibrium yeah so it's that's what we try to achieve is out here y'all out here remember we're going to see an archaeological site right man out here the archaeology is all over guys so out here i've seen so we just walked through right here not too many people notice they just walk looks like a trail right yeah but here if you notice you come down a little base there's a lot of this is an old fire pit right here we're walking through so we're talking maybe like 500 there was a pro there's a home underneath all the sediment so right here this is the outer perimeter you know they're living creek side right here you know the best spot around so this is the outer perimeter of a home which we can't even see that y'all you know so but i see that walking like hey man there's an old fire pit right here and i look around i can easily tell you know this is fresh sediment y'all so geogeologists come out here and they say this is a from a probably like a thousand years ago flood came in deposited this sediment and just covered everything and you know these these trees are fresh you know they're not even a thousand years old yeah so these grown you know now it's all totally covered it's like yeah yeah people walk by but we're going to uh 1300 a.d site these are 500 bc and a.d so it's a lot of history just hidden underneath the ground no way yeah so out here you got to you know you got to be careful you know but out here we we're digging all of a sudden oh wow there's something right here yeah the next note we got to call the archaeologist yeah wow you guys found a nice sight you're all over you know so sometimes you want to keep do you want to call the archaeologist or do you want to just remain them or is it is it positive to tell the story or would you rather keep it to yourselves does that make sense yeah as a as an as a navajo yeah you know i i'm out here i gotta be careful you know navajos we got a lot of taboos man big time so you know i'm i just got to be careful which means i'm not about to go hey y'all hey y'all you know because that's these are ceremonial sites spiritual so you know if anything i see stuff like that i'm like okay i gotta back up you know because it's protected that's the protection because one cool discovery could lead it to arches or zion or something that's so you know this place right here could turn into you know a national park disney world yeah it's turned into a parking area so i could see that it would be a difficult thing where you have this incredible history do you share it and do you because you can tell the story of the history or do you keep it quiet to remain sacred true so it doesn't all turn into a parking lot right yeah i can see how it's difficult yeah so that's that's part of preservation is to just leave it as leave it as it is yeah there's plenty of other sites you know to see a lot of these tribes come out here they just they want to leave it there yeah because that's where their their grandpa and grandma live and possibly are buried you know so definitely when they left they just said let's leave it and but they pray for it so we're doing our part as part of that prayer you know we're just we're leaving it man we're leaving it as is so that's all we can do cryptobiotic soil yep that we call it cryptobiotics oil it's hundreds of years to grow so that's the reason other reason they're studying it yeah because it's beneficial they know because if it gets busted it just gets loosened up and it's unable to be stable it's unable to this is extracting nitrogen oxygen carbon you know all these um nutrients and feeding it it really soaks up water too because it's so aired out here any sprinkle man it soaks it up and it just takes it in and it's nourishing the soil and it's uh mother mother nature taking care of yourself that's all it is man so we gotta be careful that's why we tell people stay on the trail yeah because so people veered off and once you bust the crust man it's gonna take hundreds more years you know to grow to get stable again unbelievable yep we've made it to house on fire house on fire is a great home um setting they literally weren't living in these dwellings i would see a lot of stuff going on here you know as i look down this is actually an old wall so it's not just the dwelling you gotta look around and say oh my goodness there's something here this is the old wall here if i wanted to further investigate you know i just gotta look around and i say okay definitely there's no doorway there's a window but that's an access to where to the granary okay so what we're looking at is storage rooms oh really yeah so i put all this work in for storage huh yeah definitely very important place that's restored food mainly food probably weapons okay tools you know they were making pottery so um many of these could be possibly kilns okay and where they made um pottery they finished their pottery here so this is a big uh factory that we see here and the reason why it's blocking is before they store their food they want to cleanse the walls they want them purified make it clean sanitize obviously sand with fire feel a fire kill off any organisms that's growing no way and then once they have their food prepped and sealed up in some pottery yeah they would put it inside the granary the last final process would be to seal it and light another fire light a fire close it up that feels it right yeah the fire's gonna consume all that oxygen and just like a seal type so there's no oxygen in these um granaries and if you ask many of archaeologists that have found granaries they find them still and when they do they find them still with food and many of the food that we purchase at the store the anasazi beans a lot of the squash that we have at the store yeah came from granaries and the tribe is it is this navajo these are related to the the pueblo group and the pueblo there's many pueblos okay so it's hard to really pinpoint which tribe because there's pueblo jimez there's a zuni okay there's hopi okay and they all come here and to really pinpoint that you gotta look at the petroglyphs and the pictographs and that tells you the clan symbols okay and this architecture has evolved over time no this architecture we're looking at it's influenced by other other cities you know choco canyon is located in new mexico and that's a huge city with i mean it's like a it occupied well over 500 people yeah and from that scientists study that area from choco there's roads that run geometric from choco in all directions yeah and they lead to other cities and one one road leads to here you get influence from the mesa verde because it's right here see these tiny rocks that are embedded this is a form of chinking chinking is done at several cities like over in um hovenweep is another city hoping we've heard of that yeah yeah hovindweep's not far we see stuff like this on a daily basis they came from their granary which is here and they pass through this nice i mean tunnel area and this is a an area where it's little sun so they could have it no they're probably building i mean their factory was probably back here you know if you want to do work during the day you want to be working out of the sun and this is a an area where most people don't see i mean they come in here and you still gotta look around and just notice you know sometimes you see milky steps so that's why we don't crawl on all these rocks yeah without a ladder they needed to make steps so they would ship in a place where they would put a toilet so this is all natural all steps yeah points of to get up huh yep take a look around y'all and see if you see anything oh nice yeah yeah brother no way like look above you no i missed that one awesome buddy those are big hands exactly bro yep you think in here you think they're smaller they're moving around right yeah you see their doorways they're just tiny especially you know hundreds and hundreds of years ago this is paint here who knows what it was and what what year do you set it again with every thirteen hundred thirteen hundreds paint that sherman williams would be impressed by from house on fire we moved to the cave towers of mule canyon and the hidden dwellings that still remain within the steep cliff walls if you were just hiking through this area on your own there's a good chance you would completely miss these historic structures take a look over and cross see under the ledge uh-huh you guys see anything over there she under the overhang there's a in the shade this is incredible house is built within the canyon walls steps carved into the rocks look at that this is the entryway carved in to the rocks that allows them to get down to their homes this is a huge spring right here so we're talking the the most prized real estate area in this whole area why because we got this fresh water coming out of the rock here that's so hence why this was all set up like this yep if we didn't have that breeze and blended with leaves around we could hear that trickle really yeah so there's still water flowing just slowing pretty good actually cold water these were homes right this one these are homes okay so we actually a lot of these are circular structures which are towers okay towers are located over in hoven wheat and all those major cities that were talking about earlier so hoban wheat mesa verde are in that area okay is literally in that area so these vantage points are where there were lookouts you know these people are living in caves and up in these high protected areas so these caves are for storage gathering water there's towers for lookout wood that was actually carried up here by the people and it's still intact the roof you can actually see the roof so those are the roof beams you can actually see the door look at her that's awesome i see the wood that was put there so this is a different type of style that we saw from over there which tells me different clan different different mentality different techniques again we're just missing that outer adobe layer this would have looked like a solid rock so that was that's what made it so camouflaged back in the day people that aren't familiar with these areas they walk by these stuff real quick yeah as our day with louis comes to an end i tell him that i hope this is only the beginning of my native american education and experience my first interaction is a simple one the subject is about the land i purposefully limit the questions about suffering social issues casinos appropriation i keep it simple hopefully these stories will unfold over time as i learn more about the original keepers of the country that i call home i've only scratched the surface on the layered and complex history of these people and i can't wait to learn more in the meantime after saying goodbye it's an interesting feeling and juxtaposition checking into the beautiful newly built bluff dwellings resort nearby look at this place bluff dwellings resort what take a look at this room 124. look at that cool kiva right there fire pits on beautiful is that and then based on lewis's recommendation we finished the day with some navajo tacos so we're with luis and he told us if you want something traditionally semi-traditional you gotta go get a navajo taco so we're at twin rocks cafe this is traditional nominal fry look at bread oh it's got a pulso too danny got blue corn pancakes as well all right let's get this novel taco i have no idea how to eat this this one is with carnitas you're doing good well thank you i'm trying to figure it out we'll take it one step at a time you'll enjoy it oh good have a good day thank you all right this i don't want that cross section i can't eat do i eat i don't even like hey you know how to do it that's that's actually the perfect size for your bites all right here we go whoa we are carnitas shredded lettuce jalapenos pickled onions diced up tomatoes on this it's like an unsweetened fried dough and even has a little bit more of a pull and chewy consistency [Music] wow that is good it's aggressive but that is delicious and he's carnivores oh that's good [Applause] man more of a pizza for you what do you think it's a mix in between a pizza and a taco but he's beautiful that bread is good right and i could i think that's a chili it's like a type of chili it's sweet it tastes like home or does it taste like something foreign oh good question guys barry even my truth betrayed me a little bit about yeah a little bit about all right you guys thank you so much for watching that does it for another episode i am very full right now that navajo taco was delicious but i am stuffed we're gonna head back to bluff dwellings resort and relax for a little bit listen the biggest takeaway i want for you to have from this video is respect uh one of the most difficult things about showing off these lesser-known places these hidden gems and and these ancient ruins is that inevitably people are going to want to go there and i just hope that because you're watching this video and you're following this channel that means that you have more of appreciation you you give a [ __ ] about the places that you're going to and i just hope that you respect the places that you go and discover and you don't make me regret showing off these places um i would highly recommend if you do go to house on fire if you go to the cave towers or anything like that you call lewis you set up a tour he is the best obviously he knows so much about the land to the common eye you walk through you see that land and it just seems honestly like a desolate place like there's nothing going on there and as i said at the beginning of this video there's so many stories to be told from this place every little looking cranny has a purpose i mean from the the cryptobiotic soil that you would just walk over and not think twice about that takes hundreds of years to form to these rock formations to the ruins to everything in between again just please please i struggle with making these videos because i know inevitably it'll bring more people so please show respect to the places that you go please understand and be considerate don't leave anything behind take everything out with you if you go i'm begging you otherwise if you liked the video give it a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already hit that notifications bell i hope this is just the tip of the iceberg for my experience and interaction with native americans in my own country that's it i'll see you guys next week travel deeper i believe it's chamomile if this makes the video that means it's chamomile if it doesn't you never a lot saw this said the same thing daniel this is as far as i go see you on the other side inside the rattlesnake farm no you first then begin and the adventure begins right now let's go and the adventure begin sorry oh you're good i [ __ ] that up do i have my heat seated god lazy my heat seated it feels like it yeah mine too what the hell

Channel: Gareth Leonard

Views: 364,995

Keywords: gareth leonard, travel deeper, travel deeper with gareth leonard, #traveldeeper, navajo, navajo nation, utah, utah travel, utah usa, utah road trip, southern utah travel, use road trip, usa travel, visit utah, things to do in utah, bluff utah, house on fire, cave towers, mule canyon, native american history, native american, ancient wayves, native american guide, navajo tour, utah hiking, hiking in utah, moab, zion, bryce canyon, national parks, hiking national parks, Gareth

Id: ep2E2e59xec

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021