Their descendants are today’s Pueblo Indians, such as the Hopi and the Zuni, who live in 20 communities along the Rio Grande, in New Mexico, and in northern Arizona. The airy settlement that we explored had been built by the Anasazi, a civilization that arose as early as 1500 B.C. At last, 600 feet above the canyon floor, we arrived at the ledge. Up we scrambled toward them, gasping and sweating, careful not to dislodge boulders the size of small cars that teetered on insecure perches. “See the dwellings?” With binoculars, we could just make out the facades of a row of mud-and-stone structures. “There,” he said, pointing toward a nearly invisible wrinkle of ledge just below the canyon rim. As we rounded a bend along the trail, Greg Child, an expert climber from Castle Valley, Utah, stopped and looked upward. More than seven centuries ago, however, the last inhabitants of the canyon had made quite a different decision about where to live. Still, the place had a cozy appeal: had we wanted to pitch camp, we could have selected a grassy bank beside the creek, with clear water running under the skin of ice, dead cottonwood branches for a fire, and-beneath the 800-foot-high rock walls-shelter from the wind. It was midwinter, and the stream that ran alongside us was frozen over, forming graceful terraces of milky ice. The four of us walked slowly down the deep, narrow canyon in southern Utah.

Pueblo dragon north