A Virtual Tour of Una Vida

Una Vida Sign

One of the questions we get most often at Chaco from visitors who have just arrived is whether it’s a walking or a driving thing.  It’s both, really.  For most of the sites, especially the really impressive ones, you drive a few miles from the Visitor Center then walk a few hundred yards and do a self-guided tour (or, if there is one available, a guided tour).  This is how it works for Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo del Arroyo, and the other sites in the “Downtown Chaco” area, which is about 4 miles down the loop road from the Visitor Center.

Una Vida from a Distance

There is one site, however, which is accessible by a short walking trail directly from the Visitor Center parking lot.  It isn’t the most impressive of the sites, but it has a certain charm to those who are willing to seek it out.  This site is the great house known as Una Vida.

Una Vida in the Snow

Like most of the other major great houses in Chaco Canyon, Una Vida was first documented and named by the Lt. James Simpson of the Washington Expedition in 1849.  Simpson relied heavily on one of the expedition’s guides, a Hispanic man from the nearby village of San Ysidro named Carravahal, and as a result most of the names he wrote down for the sites were Spanish.  “Una Vida” (meaning “One Life”) is one of these; the reason for the rather odd name is obscure.

Walls at Una Vida

Unlike most of the other great houses, Una Vida looks today much as it did when Simpson first saw it.  We often describe it as “unexcavated,” but this isn’t strictly true.  A few rooms in Una Vida were excavated at various times during the twentieth century, but they have all since been backfilled, so while there has been a bit of excavation it isn’t apparent from looking at the site.  As a result, Una Vida is one of the best places to see what the sites looked like before being excavated.  Basically, it looks like a huge mound of sand, covered with shrubby vegetation, with significant standing walls sticking out at various points.  It’s clear that there is a building there, and it’s clear what its overall size and shape is, but it isn’t clear how many rooms it contains or where the divisions between them are.

View from Plaza of Una Vida

Moving up to Una Vida from the parking lot and entering the plaza, one is surrounded by high mounds of sand, which obscure most of the building and the ridge upon which it is built.  It is hard to tell from here quite what the building would have looked like when it was in use, but it’s quite obvious that it was very impressive in scale.

Navajo Corral at Una Vida

Looking around the plaza, there are a few enclosures of varying sizes made out of the same sort of stone found in the walls of the great houses but with very different masonry, dry-laid without any mortar.  These were actually not present when Simpson came by in 1849, but were built later by the Navajo inhabitants of the canyon.  They weren’t here in 1849 because the Washington Expedition had been sent to fight the Navajos, who weren’t about to wait around to be attacked.  After the conclusion of the tumultuous wars between the US government and the Navajos with the return of the Navajos from the ill-fated reservation at Bosque Redondo in southeastern New Mexico in 1868, however, the canyon was reoccupied and the Navajos built a variety of structures, many of which are still standing in some form.

Navajo Hogan at Una Vida

In general the Navajos avoid ruined sites like Una Vida.  Navajo tradition involves a lot of taboos about death and places associated with it, and sites associated with the Anasazi are particularly problematic.  There is very little trace of Navajo occupation in the Downtown Chaco area around South Gap and Pueblo Bonito, for example.  In some other parts of the canyon, including the Fajada Gap area where Una Vida is, certain Navajos seem to have been less concerned about the taboos and, perhaps, more inspired by the abundant building stone from the fallen walls.  In any case, they built a few hogans (traditional Navajo dwellings) and a large corral in the plaza of Una Vida, and the remnants of these can still be seen today. In general there is little trace of the Navajo presence at Chaco within the park today, due in no small part to deliberate Park Service policy in the mid-twentieth century that involved kicking out the Navajos living in the park.  Here at Una Vida, however, some of that history is still visible in a subtle way.

Third-Story Walls with Type I Masonry at Una Vida

Moving on from the plaza to the west wing, one can see the typical row of blocked-in round rooms fronting the plaza and backed by higher stories of rectangular rooms.  This is pretty standard for Chacoan great houses, but here it’s interesting on account of the fact that this room block is made largely of early masonry.  This part of the building seems to have been constructed sometime in the 900s using Type I simple masonry.  It goes up three stories at the south end, and this seems to be the only part of Una Vida that was ever three stories.  The immense height of some other parts of the building is due largely to its being built on a natural ridge.  There’s no evidence for any other construction above two stories.  It’s pretty striking that the three-story rooms are among the best-preserved despite their early masonry.

Petroglyphs above Una Vida

Moving along the west side, one comes to the place where a spur trail leads partway up the cliff to an area of quite remarkable petroglyphs.  These are among the most impressive in publicly accessible parts of the park, and are also among the easiest to get to.  As usual with rock art, they are difficult to interpret, but some clearly seem to show animal figures which may be either highly stylized representations of real animals or images of mythical or legendary beasts.  There is also an anthropomorphic figure with two horns which has been identified by Hopi consultants as a symbol of the Two-Horn Society.

Una Vida from Petroglyph Area

From the petroglyph site, one can get a very good view of Una Vida and finally get some sense of its overall size and shape, which is particularly difficult to get a sense of from ground level because of its unexcavated nature.  It’s basically L-shaped, with an arc of plaza-enclosing rooms linking the ends of the L.  Fajada Butte, Fajada Gap, and the Visitor Center are also clearly visible from up here.

Visitor Center and Fajada Butte from Una Vida Petroglyphs

Coming back down from the petroglyphs and continuing along the trail, next comes the earliest part of Una Vida, a small block of rooms built in the 800s and later shored up with what looks like McElmo-style masonry (typical of the early 1100s).  This block is similar to the oldest part of Pueblo Bonito, which was built around the same time, and it’s likely that Peñasco Blanco, which has tree-ring dates from the same period, has a similar early block somewhere, although given its unexcavated state it’s impossible to identify it.  These three early great houses, the earliest in Chaco Canyon, are located at the three main entrance points to the canyon: Fajada Gap, South Gap, and the end of the canyon where the Escavada Wash and the Chaco Wash join together.  This is likely not a coincidence.

Earliest Part of Una Vida

Continuing along the trail, the next notable part of the site is a single room with particularly well-preserved standing walls and an intact doorway.  This part of the site, the east wing, is a later addition using Type IV core-and-veneer masonry, which is quite apparent in this room.

Doorway at Una Vida

Finally, the trail comes back to the Navajo corral and completes the loop, heading back toward the Visitor Center.  Although there is less to see at Una Vida than at, say, Pueblo Bonito, its mostly unexcavated state and unusual features offer a window into some aspects of Chaco that don’t get that much attention, and it’s definitely worth a visit.

Lizard on Type I Masonry at Una Vida