Chimney Rock - Pagosa Springs, Colorado - Colorado Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Rising from a 90-million-year-old seabed, Chimney Rock’s twin towers stand 300 feet above the surrounding mesa. The Europeans who first saw them probably approached from due east, obscuring their view of the westernmost spire. As a result, Spanish explorers (who called the formation La Piedra Parada, or Standing Rock) and later American settlers both described this plural landform with a singular name. The smaller tower went unchristened until the 1920s (long after its presence was known), when an archaeologist finally dubbed it “Companion Rock.” That researcher, Jean Jeançon, also discovered the massive Chacoan-style pueblo at its base, but not until the 1970s did excavators fully unearth and stabilize the ruins. Painstakingly reinforced, the crumbling structures may now stand indefinitely, flanked by the eternal heights of Chimney Rock.

The largest of the pueblos at Chimney Rock was constructed in A.D. 1076, probably by migrants from Chaco Canyon (located ninety miles south of here in present-day New Mexico). Built at some distance from the area’s older settlements (some of which dated to about A.D. 750), this stone-and-timber pueblo employed typical Chacoan-style architecture. What brought the colonists so far afield? Worship, perhaps. The site may have been a religious shrine, with an all-male priestly caste attending to the mesa’s double steeples (possibly revered as War Gods). Others suggest that the Chacoans used this as a lunar observatory, or as a site to harvest timber to supplement their homeland’s depleted forest resources. Whatever its purpose, the pueblo complex didn’t last long; it burned in A.D. 1125 and was abandoned, never to be rebuilt.