The drive through Gila National Forest is twisty, narrow and mountainous and highway 15 ends at the Gila Cliff Dwellings. If you make the drive from Silver City it’s 1.5 to 2 hours drive time but we are boondocking up by Roberts Lake so it was much less.
The Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument is free to visit! We have a National Parks Pass but didn’t even need that. I guess they figure if you make the trek all the way out to the monument then you deserve to see it for free. We stopped in at the Visitor’s Center first to look around and chat with the ranger. We were looking for suitable day hikes. Turns out that the few we had our eye on are pretty treacherous right now because the Gila River is flowing so fast and there is still an incredible amount of water. He warned us there would be waist to chest high swift water crossings. Scratch that.
We have seen a lot of cliff dwellings on our time on the road in the past 5 years. In case you missed it, here are some of them:
Gila Cliff Dwellings
Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument is surrounded by the Gila National Forest and lies at the edge of the Gila Wilderness, the nation’s first designated wilderness area. The hike to see the dwellings is about a mile but there are something like 600+ stairs you’ll climb if you include the ladders that give you a peek into some of the 40+ rooms. The hike takes you to the ruins of interlinked cave dwellings built in five cliff alcoves by the Mogollon peoples between 1275 and 1300 AD. We spent time looking around and imagining how it would be to live in these caves.
The Mogollon incorporated fallen rocks into the construction of some of the rooms. You can see where thin stone slabs were connected with mortar to construct their walls. The Mogollon Culture was an Indian group that combined traditional hunting and gathering with farming. Their farms were on the mesa tops and along banks of the West Fork of the Gila River, where they raised squash, corn, and beans. In one of the pictures you can see a huge stash of corn cobs. Like other ancient civilizations, no one is sure why the dwellings were abandoned. What are people in the future going to think when they visit the houses people live in now?
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