Salmon Pueblo & Valley of Dreams

Salmon Ruins was an Ancestral Puebloan village occupied approximately from 1088 to 1290 A.D when a fire destroyed most of the buildings and killed 21 children and four adults.
We pulled into the parking lot of its research center located near Bloomfield, NM, the first stop on our spring bucket list.
The area is extraordinarily rich in cultural diversity and history, including the Archaic people, Paleoindians, Ancestral Puebloans, Navajos, Apaches, Spanish, Utes, and Euro-American traders and homesteaders.
Timothy O’Sullivan, a famed Civil War photographer, first photographed the Salmon Ruins in 1874. A few years later, in 1877, Peter Milton Salmon homesteaded the land adjacent to the ruins.
The Salmon children grew up playing on the mounds, so when George P. Salmon, Peter’s oldest son, finally came of age, he homesteaded the acreage containing the pueblo. He and his descendants worked hard to safeguard it.
Eventually, the family sold it to Charles Dustin in 1957 who then sold it to the San Juan County Museum Association in 1969.
We toured the museum first which displayed some of the one-and-a-half million artifacts recovered from the ruins, including textile fragments, sewing tools, stone and bone tools, manos and metates, macaw and parrot feathers, pots, cooking utensils, and a tchamahia (a stone hoe), giving me a much clearer picture of the daily life and ingenuity of these ancient people.
The ruins themselves surprised us because of the obvious renovations that had taken place during their occupation.
Between 1068 and 1072 A.D., Ancestral Puebloans built a complex of four rooms, possibly aligned with astronomical events, including yearly solstices and major Lunar Standstills which occur every 18.6 years.
Between 1088 and 1090 A.D., the talented builders enlarged the complex to a three-story, 300-room village, one of the largest Chacoan outliers. The only way archaeologists knew it was three stories came from Timothy O’Sullivan’s early photographs because the top story has since collapsed.
The complex included a tower kiva and a great kiva in the plaza. However, since the original construction, the later residents, Middle San Juan people, repurposed many of the rooms, blocking off doors and building small kivas inside of square rooms.
They occupied the village even after their mother culture abandoned Chaco Canyon. However, the destructive fire finally forced them to abandon the buildings and move on.
In 1972 and 1978, archaeological field students, under the direction of Dr. Cynthia Irwin-Williams, excavated one-third of the ruin, uncovering more than one million artifacts.
In one of the rooms, a gruel, composed of corn and tumbleweed seeds, had spilled all over the floor, probably out of pots when the roof collapsed.
In the same room, the students unearthed a tchamahia, a stone hoe, which experts believe was used to raise corn for ritual use.
The next morning, we headed for our second stop, Green Lichen Valley. Part of New Mexico’s badlands, it’s full of hoodoos, petrified wood, dinosaur bones, free-range horses, and, yes, a variety of lichen that thrive in that otherworldly environment.
It’s also sometimes called the Valley of Dreams East. We were looking for the King of Wings, a hoodoo with a large, wing-shaped rock balanced on top of a sandstone pedestal.
We parked near a windmill, hiked across the desert, and down into the canyon. Using Ted’s Gaia map, we wandered through the canyon, looking for the Wing King.
We found several arching rocks we thought might be it, but finally Ted spotted the real thing. He climbed up over the ridge to reach it while Kenidee and I walked around and came up from behind.
It was only one wing, but large enough to be stunning. If it hadn’t been rock, it might have soared into the sky.
After more exploration, we decided to drive rather than hike to the actual Valley of Dreams and started back toward the Jeep.
As we came up onto the sagebrush flat, we spotted a herd of horses. I drew in a deep breath and held it, awed by their wild power.
When we stopped to photograph them, they trotted toward us until they saw or smelled our ferocious mini schnauzer and turned back. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
The hike into the Valley of Dreams was easy. Eerie formations, including the Alien Throne and the Three Wisemen, populate the valley.
Once we reached the hoodoos, Ted and Kenidee climbed up and over a hill, covered with loose red rocks. I attempted the climb, but partway up I couldn’t get traction on the slippery rocks and teetered on the edge of a rock fissure, unable to move forward of back.
Finally, I threw my water bottle across the cleft, or tried to. It landed with a thud in the bottom. When Ted heard the noise, he returned, retrieved my water bottle, and helped me cross the crevice, clamber up the slippery rocks, and finally back to level ground.
Perhaps because of my adrenal meltdown, when I looked around, the entire valley seemed full of light. It felt like we’d entered a sacred place as if the hoodoos were living guardians of the land.
When we found the Alien Throne, its slender pillar was riddled with holes and topped by the rock throne but with no aliens in sight. We also spotted the Three Wisemen and a Giant Mushroom, along with many other mysterious formations we couldn’t name.
We were loath to leave the magical place, but once we hiked back to the Jeep, we discussed our third stop, El Morro, with Spanish inscriptions dating back to 1605, but that adventure would come the following day.