to figure it out and he was pacing back and forth and i could see he was going through his numbers going, okay, a lot of people came for this, am i right about this? and i thought about these fierce-looking mayan dudes who came out of chaco and the great house, the tree rings taken out of it, show it was constructed every 18.6 years. every time the moon came through the gab, they did massive construction for it. so you know it was the time and you know there was somebody pacing up there just checking whatever watch he had, looking at that gap and thinking, i hope this is the day. and it was the day. we stood there and waited and

he said first light, we all looked and we couldn't see it. he had a better eye, he had been watching this much longer than us. but then we started to see the glow. and then the orb of the moon rose into this narrow gap between two twin towers looking north into the rocky mountains. and as that happened, i turned around and as the south -- and i see out of the rocky mountains, i could see a gap where the piedro river flows south and through that gap i could see the desert of northern new mexico and just over the horizon, just about 120 miles away, is chaco canyon, the largest anastazi site in the southwest, just over the horizon. and in between these towers and chaco canyon there are fire signal stations up on top of buttes. every fire signal station is in view of two other signal stations.

each of those, four, on and on and on so that a fire would be lit at one spot and everybody would know, you could send messages for hundreds of miles. you could send messages over mountain ranges. there are fire signals all over the four corners, rows and fire signals. i talked to the guy who first discovered these signals and he was just out there mapping archeological sites with a crew in the 70's and he kept coming across these hills that had some kind of -- a little bit of architecture but they couldn't tell what they were. and they decided they are just not going to put them in the reports because they didn't have a name for these until he decided to go up to one and he dug into it and there he found a carved stone bowl with a carved stone lid set into it. and he opened it up and it was full of pieces of turquoise and that's when he looked around and thought, wait a minute, there's something going on around here. he started mapping them all, he

started marking them all on his map until he realized, these are all visual relays. there's a network, a communication network, of some sort. or maybe it was when the moon reached the gap they lit the fire so the signal went out so everybody across the colorado plateau would know the needle has been threaded. and i imagine that day people in chaco canyon all standing there, facing north, looking at a fire tower that would have delivered a message down into the canyon. i imagined people all over the four corners all facing the same direction at the same moment, maybe this didn't happen. everything is conjecture out there, but you know something was going on. how much do you want to know? when i saw that granary up in the cliff, i wanted to know what was inside of it.

i thought i could easily break the seal around this stone. i had a good knife with me. it would be very easy to cut a square around it and just pop that stone out and i would see what's inside of a granary, what these people left behind. it was something for their survival, something that they could return to, something very important. i spent years going through museum collections and opening up drawers in the basement of the peabody and the american museum of natural history where you are going through masses of artifacts, the striking black on white pottery of the anastazi, what is in this place? but the granary was not mine to open, it was left by other people, a stockpile waiting for their return. as i understand more of the

anastazi, it is hard to say they ever truly vanished. the more i track them, it more it seems they are right in front of me until i can feel body heat in their foot steps. it is not unthinkable that somebody might return to this granary, maybe a century from now, relieved to find a sign of ancestry deep in this river gorge. i climbed down to this granary and laid my hand on its stone, feeling the grit of sand and the hardness of rock. a person could be found here in a thousand years, a person kneeling in the moment of decision. i climbed out and went back to my career, the obsidian night closing around me. i climbed into the canoe and swept the paddle across the water, setting a wake across the mirror of stars.

i'd like to show you some images from this place. this place being the southwest where i have spent my entire life. i don't know how far i've walked out there. i don't know how many pairs of boots that i've gone through where i've taken needles and dental floss and sewed the leather back together. i don't know how long i've been walking out there. and miles don't matter, days don't matter. it all adds up into this, into movement, into walking through the labyrinth that's opened up into the ground. finding places, places to camp behind cliffs that have fallen, finding sanctuary, places where the wind won't touch you,

places that are eroded out of the earth like bones. everything is revealed in the desert. there are no questions out there. there's just ground, solid ground, opened layer after layer after layer. some people come back from, say, the edge of the grand canyon and they say it makes them feel small. i understand that but i think it may be a misconception. it may be that it's not a landscape that makes you feel small, it's a landscape that gets rid of your sense of scale entirely because there have been so many times out there in the deep of winter camping for week after week in the open desert where at night it gets down to 10 below or 15 below zero and there's nothing in your life but the sky and the stars. and you are looking up into the sky and you think, i could just

stand and walk into stars. i could become a giant. there are times in the desert when you are not small but you are infinite. you take up everything. there is no boundary between you and it. when i look at the artifacts that the anastazi made, especially the painted black and white, i see that landscape. i see the colorado plateau. this bowl is from american museum of natural history and that's where it is now. that's the storage place. where it was from before is pueblo bonito in chaco canyon where there were rooms filled to the ceiling with bowls stacked within each other, bowls like this. all their designs, you can kind

of get a glimpse around this. they have this flawless symmetry blending all the way around. it looks like that place. it looks like that landscape. i look into this and i see the sharp edges of the land. i see the way the earth is shaped out there. i see the routes in their vessels. i mean, to understand these, this one came out of a 13th century site in southwest colorado and i would sit with these bowls for hours and hours, drawing them into my sketch book because that was the only way i could really understand the complexity of how they got their symmetries to match up because i could never get them to match up in my drawings. i could never do a 100 percent accurate rendition of these because every line was meaningful, every line meant something about how you paint

the next line, which is what it's like walking out there, looking for those shapes, looking for water, looking for springs, looking for places where the rain has fallen. it's all the same story out there. there is a 13th century or a 14th century polychrome vessel from below the mugion rim in central arizona. and this is 100 years after the anastazi supposedly disappeared, there's that story about one day this whole civilization just vanished. but if you start following the civilization, you can find where it went. you can find this culture's movement across the land. these images inside this bowl came from vessels that were anastazi. and you can track the movement of styles across the southwest, across centuries. and i look into these and i see

people from the high desert living down in the pines of central arizona. i see the shapes of their lives still recorded, that the anastazi didn't disappear, they just moved and they carried everything with them. and when they ran into other cultures, they adjusted. they changed the colors of their vessels but they kept the same images, images of a landscape that is worn open, that is controlled by basic elements, by wind, by water, by gravity. see the shape of the world where i have spent my life, where i have been walking, looking for these stories. and just to give you a sense of scale here, that's me at the bottom of that pillar. and that pillar is just some old wall and that's all that's left of it, some memory of a canyon. every place out there is a

memory, a memory of water, a memory of humans. most of those vessels that i just showed you -- they all came from museums. here is one that i found a few years ago, a seed jar in utah underneath a ledge. and i didn't move it from the spot. in fact, the sand had just been barely swept away to show the face of it, but it's still there. it's still under that ledge. i hope. i'd like to take you on a route and show you a way down to one of these artifacts. now, a lot of people look across canyon land, say, in southeast utah where this picture is, and it's not really

clear how you get around, how you get from place to place. but if you know this place well enough you know right over this lip of white sandstone, if you go right over the ledge and hang your foot over this side, you can't see it but you can feel it with the tip of your foot, there's a little toe hold down there, then if you get on that toe hold you drop your other foot down and there's another toe hold. it happens a thousand years ago somebody carved just a series of toe holds down this rock face. and you climb down those and they lead to a ledge and the ledge wraps around underneath here and it drops down into another spot that you go through a saddle and around to the other side and through another saddle and down and around. it's this circuitous route that's constantly carrying you down deeper and deeper and this is the landscape is just covered with these. i don't take maps out there any more out into this place

because it's all memory. this place is the map. i went down with my wife, reagan, and we went down a fairly large cliff face but one that had some good ledges on it so the only reason to have rope is to lower your pack. but we didn't get all the way down before sunset, so we set a camp out on the face. and it was the most spectacular camp i think i've ever had in my life. that's my spot. and it was just this narrow ledge. i had a thermorest with me and it wasn't as wide as the thermorest so i had to put a rock under the thermorest for my head and reagan slept on top

of me. nights are so solid, you don't move all night. just to get our stuff out to that ledge, you couldn't actually go with a pack. you had to take your pack off because there is a drop. you kind of have to jump from left to right. so you come up against the wall, you put your foot around and you do that. and then we unloaded our packs piece by piece and then handed each piece across so that then we could set our camp on the ledge and in the morning, we continued down the face lowering our packs until you get down to the next level. and the next level falls out from itself. the ground constantly opening up. you can feel the wind and the water opening the earth as if there was no bottom to this, constantly finding the next route it take you from ledge to ledge to ledge, down through cracks and narrows, chimneys

leading down step by step. until you get to this arch. it's a small arch, it's only about this tall. the photograph is a little -- well, size, scale dimension, they all kind of leave out there. right inside of this arch way there is a bunch of broken pottery so you know this was a used route a thousand years ago. and the arch leads down into a canyon that opens up and you go up a side canyon into this little alcove where a piece of the ceiling has fallen just slightly. and i found this place. the first time i found this was on the 27th day of a back pack and i got up to this spot and i took my hat off and i stuck my head in the crack, which is something that i do frequently out there, because i know every once in a while you're going it see something back inside one

of these cracks. and back in this crack there was a basket about 1500 years old that had been turned upside down so it wouldn't collect anything and it was way back down in the crack so that no light or wind would touch it. and it was in perfect condition. you could put it on your kitchen table. you could put apples in it. and as far as i know, it's still there except for that piece which we went on this trip to collect a piece for radio carbon dating, a federal archeologist in southern utah had asked us to pick up one piece of it to bring out. so that part of the basket is missing. there are artifacts everywhere. they stand out.

this arrowhead here is maybe just under half an inch long, tiny little piece made out of jasper in some canyon someplace. there are larger objects. there are cliff dwellings that you find up in the alcoves. this is out on the navajo reservation in southern utah. this is part of a structure that's about, i'd say, 300 rooms running along the back side of this canyon, a little village, small city, something. artifacts everywhere. one of the walls had fallen out, revealing the floor that had been packed in there, hundreds of years of people using the same floor just pushing down the dirt so that there are pieces of woven -- of braided string sticking out of the floor everywhere and arrowheads and broken pottery and i realized when i came up

against the stack of this trash pile i put my head against it and looked along it. i could see it was covered with hair. people in that room had been combing their hair for hundreds of years and it had been landing on the floor. and then new floors are built on top of that and new floors and i ran my hand across, just barely across, the front of this and i could feel the hair of people who had been there and i was there with a navajo guy that i know who just was creeped out by this. because there's a certain heavy taboo in navaho culture about death and he said after we left this cliff dwelling, he said, i need a ceremony. too much death. you can't touch that much death, he said. but i'm from a different culture where we roll around in

death, where we fill museums with death. this skull is from about a 5-year-old. and i found it because i thought it was a goerd. i saw the back side of it and it still had scalp on it and i thought, oh, a whole goerd. i reached down and picked it up and turned it around and had this face looking at me, which is a very odd thing. maybe i need a ceremony. these routes that i am following have led me all over the place. the one i am about to tell you about didn't actually occur in house of rain. house of rain was getting too large, too many stories, but i was looking at how shells get traded. there are shell trade routes all over the southwest. shell was a primary material for making jewelry, for using in burials, and you had to walk

600 miles to get it, down to the sea of cortez, the water that's in between baja and the main land of mexico. and i tracked routes all the way down to the border over years and then across the mexican border into sonora and then it a place called penacate and then a dune, 5,000 square miles of sand dunes, a beautiful landscape, but no water out there. but pottery, broken pottery all over in certain places and pieces of shell left behind where you could see that the people were crossing these dunes to the sea and picking up shell and then crossing back and then moving it up to phoenix and then from phoenix distributing it throughout the rest of the southwest. the first trip i took out there, we hit this mountain range right at the edge of the

dunes. and we were carrying, i don't know, on that trip we were maybe carrying 80 or 90 pounds of water and moving it out to the sand and then we'd drop a cache and then go back and get more water and drop a cache. we were trying to get to the sea of cortez, that was one of the things on our mind, but this landscape, it starts turning your mind inward or outward or it gets hard to tell which way it turns it because it's a psychological place. there's no end to your horizons. the sky is infinite, the sand is infinite. it's hard to keep your focus because you are constantly using peripheral vision looking all around you. it doesn't matter which way you walk after a while, you are just wandering. and so on the first trip out there, we didn't get to the sea because we just ended up wandering. it happens out there. you have a plan but the

landscape becomes beautiful in a way that you weren't expecting and you start disappearing into it. you start forgetting why you are going in one direction. you start thinking, no, i just want to see that shadow over there and spend time there and then i want to see the next shadow and the next. it took 3 trips actually before we got to the sea. and all over at the edges of the dunes and sometimes even out in the middle of the dunes where you get into a deep hole, you will find a broken ceramic ojalla, you will find a sea shell that somebody carried in there, you will pick up the shell going what were you doing out here, why were you walking in this place, were you seeing it the same way i'm seeing it? were you floating like a ghost or were you trudging and

swimming and dragging yourself? what were you doing out here? on the last trip out, we did a lot of night walking. and we walked barefoot for the most part because it's much easier than walking in boots and it's just nice to walk barefoot for days and days at a time. on that trip in particular there were a lot of sidewinders out in the dunes which made for an interesting element because the previous trip there had been snakes but not so many. you would wake up in the morning and there would be these elegant sidewinder tracks everywhere. the guy who dropped us off has the proclivity for picking up dangerous animals. i don't recommend it. it was kind of a terrifying experience to have somebody pick up a rattlesnake and go look at it, look at it, and put it right in your face and you are going, no, no, no thanks especially when he was the one driving around and leaving you

out there to walk barefoot across the sand. out there where at times you are carrying 100 pounds of water, where you are carrying water in your hands, you are carrying water on your back, everything is about waterity there. you bury your water, you pick up your water, you strap it to your body. i remember on one of the trips carrying all this weight on my back and not sure why i had all this weight on my back. it was making me so clumsy, it was dragging me around and i started trying to unclip it and unbuckle all this stuff that i was carrying out on the dunes so i could get rid of it finally until i realized, wow, you have really put a lot of buckles on this. you didn't want this stuff off you. it's water. don't drop your water. keep carrying it. drink it. this landscape is all about water. and on the last trip you can see the sea of cortez out there

on the horizon. we walked to the edge of the dunes and even out there, just past the edge of the dunes, you would find places where there's -- there were piles of pottery, pottery scattered in the sand, and then the desert pan extended out and then you reach the sea of cortez that lies beyond. you know, i should -- i want to show you guys these next slides. i'm kind of running out of time here but i've got to show you this place. i'm not going to go into heavy detail, i want to take you down here into the sierra madre. i was following routes all over for the house of rain, trying to figure out where the anastazi went when they left house of rain. many of them made the modern

pueblos but other groups continued south. i followed pottery trails down into the sierra madre where my wife and two others went out and we came to these cliff dwellings. it seemed like every single cave we looked into had cliff dwellings. and this wasn't a place with trails. this wasn't a known location. many of these sites were pristine. they were just -- it looked as if people had just left suddenly, just like all the stories in here. little cliff dwellings, little granaries, little sites falling apart. larger sites. this site went actually 5 layers deep into this cave.

very particular to this region were these shaped storage rooms. this one is about 10 feet high. often they would have door stones sealing them on the top. and they were of all kinds of shapes and sizes, but they specific to that area. that's the smallest one we found. and then this is the largest one, about 15 feet tall. now, where these have fallen over, they have broken open and you can see that they were just full of material. there's a woven mat right up there that's fallen out of that one. these sites were just covered with corn cobs where we'd go in and find a cache of corn cobs about 4 feet deep and 12 feet long, thousands and thousands of corn cobs and woven material all over the place, pieces of

basketry, pieces of their sandals. this place is very well preserved. i mean a lot of this stuff is obviously worn, but it's been sitting there for 500 years. and what i found there that was very specific to anastazi were t-shaped doorways. you can see a large t-shape here. this is a very specific symbol that you see in chaco canyon and you see in mesa verde. there are certain sites where they are finding t-shaped alters where pieces of stone about this size had been cut into t's and are standing up inside of rooms just covered with objects, with necklaces. so