I wouldn't build an entire trip around El Morro, but if you're on the road anywhere between Flagstaff and Albuquerque, it's surely worth a few hours, perhaps an overnight. An American in 1849 misspelled the word "inscription" and had to wedge the "r" in after the fact. One Spanish explorer called himself a gentleman, but one of his contemporaries vigorously crossed out the word. I did the Headland Trail (also known as the Mesa Top Trail) with ranger Aleksu Hillerstrom, who pointed out a tree that had been struck by lightning a month before (that's common in summer) and helped me read between the inscription lines. Hardier hikers continue up the Headland Trail, which adds 1.5 miles to the journey and climbs 200 feet to the Atsinna Pueblo on top of the rock. Visiting today, you browse the visitor center, then stroll a half-mile loop of the Inscription Trail, moving from petroglyph to signature. Lummis, the champion of Western history who founded the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. "Certainly all the other rocks in America do not, all together, hold so much of American history," wrote Charles F. In their bid to protect the past-tense graffiti from the present-day variety, rangers have put up a couple of sandstone rocks in front of the visitor center to channel the energies of scratch-happy kids. Until the 1930s, early rangers used pencils to darken a few of the oldest inscriptions. In 1906, the federal government stepped in and banned further inscriptions.
A pre-Columbian condo complex sits on top - about a dozen rooms exposed among an estimated 875 that once held 1,000 residents in the 13th and 14th centuries.īut it's not those dwellings nor the shape of the rock that makes El Morro unique. Pine and juniper congregate on and around it.
In landscape terms, it's a not a mesa but a cuesta, because it rises in a gradual slope at one end, then drops straight down at the other. This is El Morro, which translates, more or less, from Spanish as "the headland." You cross the Continental Divide, surrounded by scrub that grows thick and green during the monsoons of July and August, and then a white-orange bluff rises abruptly from the plain, its base about 7,200 feet above sea level. On the way, you climb from the high desert and red rock to the even higher desert with its forests of ponderosa and pinyon pine.
To reach it from Albuquerque, you drive 85 miles west on Interstate 40 to Grants, then take New Mexico 53 for 42 miles.
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