Silver City, New Mexico, United StatesBlog entry Tuesday 10-15
Silver City NM and the Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument
Today we drove up to Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument.
There are two routes there from Silver City:
the “short” way, which is a 45-mile drive, much of which is on narrow VERY winding
road. The other way is a 65-mile drive
which still winds around quite a bit, but which misses the worst of the twists
and turns. We opted for the other way on
the way out and the short way on the way back.
Took about 2 hours out and an hour and a half back.
The cliff dwellings were
created by the Mogollon people (pronounced mug-ee-own) toward the end of the 13th
century. About 40-50 people lived here
for about 25 years, and then they abandoned the site permanently in the early
14th century. This is a very similar situation to that which we encountered a couple of years ago at Mesa Verde and Chaco Culture: cliff dwellings requiring enormous effort to build, which were then abandoned after a relatively few years, right at the beginning of the 1300s. This is the only site in the NPS which preserves Mogollon structures.
To get to the dwelling, you hike up a 1-mile loop trail that
rises about 180 feet in the first half.
This
rise is probably more difficult for a lot of people because you mostly achieve
it by climbing rough-hewn rock stairs.
Once at the top, however, you can spend whatever time you
like exploring the ruins, which are in quite remarkably good condition. Some of the original logs which were used to
support the ceilings survive, which is how they were able to date the
construction of the dwelling. There are 40
rooms, so I found it surprising that relatively few people lived there. It’s always amazing to view these structures
and imagine the amount of effort that went into building them, and then even
more amazing to consider that after such a relatively short time they were
abandoned.
This hike was less strenuous than yesterday’s, but on top of
yesterday’s 7.75 miles and roughly 17 and a half thousand steps, I was pretty
beat when we finished this one. We got
back to town mid-afternoon and took it easy from there. We had dinner at another very good Mexican
restaurant called Jalisco Cafe. There was a short waiting list even at 7:00 on a Tuesday;
apparently the lines are usually much longer (one guy came in on his way home
to change and drop off his dog so he could add his name to the wait list). The food was quite good; not, perhaps as good
as Guadalajara’s Mexican Grill the other night, but we did the smart thing and
did not order grilled steak fajitas to subject Jalisco to a head-to-head comparison.
We have a long day tomorrow, as a result of which we will
nab the last remote NPS site in New Mexico and save ourselves having to come
back just to get this one
2025-05-22