Hovenweep National Monument

This weekend I had a wonderful adventure visiting my friend Miranda in Utah/Colorado. She works/lives at Hovenweep National Monument which is on the border of Utah and Colorado. Hovenweep is the site of some very mysterious 900 year old ruins. At one point they were home to the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians who currently inhabit this region. I've been to Chaco Canyon which is a larger site with much larger and more extensive ruins but visiting Hovenweep was a memorable experience. The ruins are scattered around a small canyon, seemingly miles from anything or anywhere that a human would want to live. The most mysterious thing about these ruins is the actual placement of the buildings. Many of the buildings sit directly on the canyon edge with doorways that open into nothing but air and a 30 foot drop. There are also ruins, like the one in the picture below, which are perched a top huge boulders and look like natural extensions of the rock. Granted, it's known that the ancient pueblo Indians built their homes with defense in mind but there is something more behind the placement of the ancient buildings at Hovenweep. The construction was completed around 1230c.e. but researchers believe the site was abandoned less than one generation later. One theory is that the people that lived there used up all the local resources and were forced to leave. Juniper trees grow to be very old but there isn't one within ten miles of Hovenweep that is older than the ruins. The people there had to put so much energy into the construction of the buildings that when they were done there was nothing left to sustain them in their everyday lives. Maybe they were a little bit vain and built on top of boulders and the edges of a canyon to show off. Nine hundred years from now people will probably look at the houses we live in and the cars we drive and think the same thing. We build and buy with little regard to the resources we consume. Mostly we think about the way things look.