28MAR09 - Gila Cliff Dwellings & Silver City, NM (we've been here before)

Bright and early Saturday morning we headed to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument north of Silver City, NM, in the middle of the Gila Wilderness Area (nation’s first wilderness area). If you check out the Monument’s website below you will see there are two ways to get there; but both ways end up on state road 15 coming into the Visitor Center. You will note also that if you take the entire state road 15 from Silver City the website cautions that it is a very bad road, not to take any trailer longer than 25 feet, AND it will take two hours to go 44 miles!!! Dan didn’t really believe that it could be that bad, especially just being in the Toad not the RV, but decided we would drive up on the alternate route and come back on the “bad” road and site see in Silver City at the end of the day.

We made it to the Visitor Center with plenty of time to spare to catch the daily Ranger led tour of the Cliff Dwellings. (NOTE: almost all National Parks, Monuments, etc, have one or two daily tours that are free. We check out the website for the time of the tour(s) and almost always take them. Highly Recommended!) These cliff dwellings are one of the few that you can actually enter and view from the inside. They were only occupied for thirty years around 1300, by the Mogollon people. Mogollon is not a Native American term, but the Mogollon were named after some Spaniard because there was no trace of them when the Europeans arrived. In addition, none of the surviving Native Americans (Apache, Zuni, Acoma, etc) “claim” them or know what happened to them.

The dwellings themselves consist of about fifty rooms in seven caves, and you can enter five of the caves. We learned from the Docent that even the experts can not agree on exactly what the rooms were used for. One theory is that the caves were used by about seven or eight families; another theory is that the entire site was for special and/or religious ceremonies, with only a few special tribe members living on site and everyone else living outside the caves. What makes it almost impossible to determine anything, is that after the Mogollon left, the site was picked over by other tribes, Europeans and then cowboys before finally gaining Federal protection. What was very interesting was the range of their trading. Archeologists have found parrot feathers from Central America and shells from the Pacific Ocean on this site. The big mystery is why they left a canyon with abundant water and food after only thirty years?

http://www.nps.gov/gicl/

http://fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_RU4?ss=110306&navtype=forestBean&navid=091000000000000&pnavid=null&cid=null&ttype=main&pname=Gila%20National%20Forest%20-%20Home

After a fascinating and informative day at the National Monument we headed to Silver City via different route, we have also been here before (see below BLOG link). When we got on the last 20 miles of state road 15 going into Silver City we soon discovered why the National Monument website cautions you about this road and recommends two hours to go forty-four miles. This portion of the road is barely one and one/half lanes wide with no center stripe. It is constantly going up and down, with hairpin turns and switchbacks. Anytime you meet another vehicle, you come almost to a stop and half drive on the shoulder to get by each other. Because there was no traffic, we made the drive in one hour, but could see how it could take two if there was constant traffic in both directions. Corrie’s reward was to shop by herself in the boutiques, while Dan and Gumbo sat outside the Buffalo Bar with the other derelicts.

http://theryanrvexpress.blogspot.com/2007/10/2526oct07-deming-nm-happy-birthday.html

http://www.townofsilvercity.org/