Chimney Rock - Pagosa Springs, Colorado
Posted by: brwhiz
N 37° 13.882 W 107° 06.424
13S E 313079 N 4122619
This Colorado Historical Marker is located in a turnout on the northwest side of US Highway 160 on the western edge of Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
Waymark Code: WMGCWC
Location: Colorado, United States
Date Posted: 02/15/2013
Views: 6
Chimney Rock
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.
[Photograph of Ruins]
The remains of the Great House reveal living spaces equipped with storage bins, hearths, and post holes for supporting roof beams.
Colorado Historical Society
[Drawing of Chimney Rock]
This drawing of Chimney Rock was made during Capt. John Macomb’s 1859 expedition.
Colorado Historical Society
[Aerial Photograph of Chimney Rock]
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, Chimney Rock and its environs encompass over 3,000 acres. In 1939 the Civilian Conservation Corps built a fire tower near the ruins that today offers magnificent views.
Courtesy United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service
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.