The Four Corners Vanishing Region

In the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona meet, stand the magnificent abandoned towns of the Southwest's ancient Anasazi civilization. Leslie T. Chang explores what might have happened more than seven hundred years ago to the Pueblo society that flourished at America's own Machu Picchu.
Tankers and eighteen-wheelers rumble day and night through the streets of Bloomfield, New Mexico, bound for the country's second-largest natural-gas fields. Signs on Highway 550 offer a mix of service and salvation: "We Buy All Scrap Metal." "Jesus Christ Brings Freedom!" "Apache Nugget Casino, 51 Miles Straight Ahead." At the Best Western Hotel, paintings as earnest as Russian icons fill the lobby: workers in hard hats drilling on a platform, men unloading gas pipe off a truck. Everything feels at once new and dusty, a boomtown sprung up overnight that might be abandoned just as fast.
This newest part of America is also its oldest. In the eleventh century, a people known as the Anasazi dominated this high desert country, centered on a place called Chaco Canyon. They built in stone—monumental structures with hundreds of rooms, round subterranean chambers called kivas as beautiful and mysterious as crop circles seen from the sky. Their empire collapsed, but the Great Houses endured. Preserved by the arid climate, they have outlasted their creators by seven centuries.
Layer upon layer, the desert retains a record of all who have passed through: Anasazi, Spanish, Hopi, Navajo, us. To travel here is to explore the present and excavate the past, puzzling over how each layer relates to the last as an archaeologist might.
On a raw February morning, I drive into Chaco Canyon. The sky is the color of dull pewter, promising snow. A few miles before the park, a Native American man appears by the side of the road and waves at me. He is tall and bulky, with sloping shoulders and a handsome pockmarked face. Suddenly my car feels small.
"You need to help me jump-start my car," he says, directing me down a rutted turnoff whose surface is cloudy with ice. Alarming instructions follow. "We'll pick up my wife and dog on the way. Try to stay out of the ruts." A quarter of a mile down the road, his wife climbs in back with a miniature Doberman in her arms. The dog claws wildly at the upholstery.

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