El Morro National Monument
National Monument · Ramah, New Mexico
A sandstone headland stands out of the plain on the old route between Zuni and Acoma, and at its base is a pool that holds about 200,000 gallons of rainwater and snowmelt. In country this dry, a reliable pool decides where people travel, and everyone who passed stopped here. Ancestral Puebloans left petroglyphs. In 1605 Juan de Onate cut an inscription recording his return from the Gulf of California, fifteen years before the Mayflower. Spanish governors, soldiers and priests followed, then American soldiers, surveyors, camel-corps officers and emigrants, until the railroad went elsewhere in 1882 and the traffic stopped. More than two thousand signatures and inscriptions are cut into the soft rock along a half-mile paved trail. Above them, on top of the headland, reached by a two-mile loop with 200 feet of climb, sit the unexcavated ruins of Atsinna pueblo. Entry is free, the campground is free, and the inscription trail is paved - which for a site of this significance is close to unheard of.
HC 61 Box 43, Ramah, New Mexico, 87321, United States
Visitor center open 9 AM - 5 PM. Trails close 1 hour before sunset.
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