The Trail of the Ancients isn’t really one road—it’s more like a sprawling web of highways that somehow convinced three states to share credit for something no one really owns.
I drove parts of this route last summer, and what struck me wasn’t the perfect Instagram moments everyone promises—it was the weird, uncomfortable realization that I was driving through someone else’s entire cosmology. The Trail of the Ancients officially connects roughly 480 miles of scenic byways through Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, stitching together archaeological sites that date back, oh, maybe 2,000 years, give or take a few centuries depending on which interpretive sign you believe. Mesa Verde sits on the Colorado end, while Chaco Canyon anchors the New Mexico side, and in between there’s this vast stretch of high desert where the Ancestral Puebloans built what we now call cliff dwellings—though honestly, that term always felt reductive to me, like calling the Sistine Chapel a “ceiling painting.” The route wasn’t even officially designated until 2005, which means the “ancient trail” is technically younger than my car.
When Preservation Meets Pavement: The Archaeology You Drive Past Without Knowing
Here’s the thing: most people hit Mesa Verde, take their photos at Cliff Palace, and think they’ve checked the box. But the Trail of the Ancients includes over 300 archaeological sites—some maintained, many not—and the vast majority recieve maybe a dozen visitors per year. I stopped at one unmarked pull-off near Hovenweep National Monument where you can still see intact masonry towers from around 1200 CE, and I was completely alone for two hours. The silence was unnerving. Archaeologists estimate that the Ancestral Puebloans occupied this region from roughly 100 CE to 1300 CE, though population peaks happened around 1100-1150 CE when an estimated 30,000 people lived in the Four Corners area—wait—maybe more, the numbers shift depending on whose research you read.
What’s strange is how the route itself forces you into this dual consciousness. You’re driving a modern highway, passing gas stations with overpriced Gatorade, while literally every rock formation around you has petroglyphs carved by people who navigated by stars and seasonal water sources. The cognitive dissonance is exhausting.
The route threads through places like Cortez and Bluff and Aztec—towns that appropriated archaeological terms for civic branding, which feels both pragmatic and vaguely disrespectful. Aztec, New Mexico, has nothing to do with the Aztec civilization (that’s Mexico, obviously), but early settlers thought the ruins looked “Aztec-ish” and the name stuck. Tourism boards now call this stretch a “journey through time,” which is the kind of phrase that makes me cringe and also, I guess, accurately describes driving past 1,000-year-old granaries while listening to true crime podcasts.
The Unromantic Reality of Road-Tripping Through Sacred Geography
I used to think archaeological tourism was neutral—you look, you learn, you leave. Turns out, it’s way messier.
The Trail of the Ancients passes through land that’s sacred to contemporary Pueblo communities, the Hopi, the Navajo, the Ute, and others who have legitimate ancestral and spiritual connections to these sites. But the route is managed by federal agencies (the BLM, the National Park Service) and state tourism departments, and there’s this persistent tension between preservation, access, and respect. Some sites have been closed because tourists kept climbing on walls or taking pottery shards as souvenirs—which, Jesus, who does that?—while other sites remain open but poorly explained, leaving visitors to wander around with no real context except what they half-remember from a high school history unit. The byway includes sections of Highway 491, which was US Route 666 until 2003 when they renumbered it because the “Devil’s Highway” nickname was attracting Satanists and generally weirding people out. That’s the kind of detail guidebooks don’t mention but definately shapes how places are percieved.
What stays with me isn’t the grand vistas or the well-maintained visitor centers—it’s the smaller moments. A faded sign near Lowry Pueblo that mentions a great kiva but doesn’t explain what that meant socially or ceremonially. The way afternoon light hits sandstone and suddenly you can see the fingerprints—actual fingerprints—pressed into mortar 800 years ago. The realization that “trail” is a misnomer because the Ancestral Puebloans didn’t need roads the way we do; they moved through this landscape on foot, following water, following seasons, following knowledge we’ve mostly lost.
Anyway, if you drive it, go slow. Bring water. Read beyond the plaques.
