The red rocks of America's south west had been calling me for some time, a deep instinctional knowledge that I had to get over there and experience this part of the US's fabulous past for myself.

One of the things that most intrigued me were the Anasazi people, an ancient tribe of American Indians who built incredible brick apartment homes into the side of towering mesas ... intricate dwellings that seemed to speak of their deep knowledge of star watching and the passage of the cosmos.

Most mysterious was how suddenly and seemingly without reason after 700 years the Anasazi people abandoned their homes around the late 1200s and moved away. To this day no one knows why.

I caught a flight from Auckland to Los Angeles and on to Denver to meet up with an old friend, now nursing in the States. We hired a car and spent a day exploring the eclectic little town of Boulder in Colorado, onto Colorado Springs where Jane wanted to check out job opportunities and then onto Mesa Verde and my date as an adventure and travel writer with archeological ruins that had beckoned me from half a planet away.

Mesa Verde is just one of several Anasazi sites in a part of the US called Four Corners (Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet to form a square), but it is perhaps the most formidable. Our car climbed the steep grade up to the top of the towering mountain Mesa Verde (Spanish for `green table') and from the roadside we clambered down the series of steep ladders to explore the Anasazi `cliff palace' ruins.

Though abandoned so many centuries before, the place remains eerie ... exploring it a true adventure. The dwellings had actually lain vacant for five centuries until 1874 when a member of the US Geological and Geographic Survey team had first stumbled across and subsequently photographed them. (Local Native Americans had long known about the ruins but kept well away from the homes of the people whose name means "the ancient ones".)

A few years later in 1882 local rancher brothers Al and Richard Wetherill finally made it inside the palaces and found a scene that chilled them. The Anasazi people had left so suddenly that the rooms looked as though they might return at any moment. Wrote Al: "It was so much like treading `holy ground' to go into those peaceful-looking homes of a vanished people."

The buildings were as much a mystery to me well over a hundred years later. I clambered up to the Sun Temple on top of the mesa and spent hours wandering the walls, investigating the strange D shaped dwelling and the markings carved into the walls that suggest the Anasazi's great knowledge of archeoastronomy (ancient astronomy practices).

What little was known about these people, I liked. They were peaceful, constructed their dwellings to make use of passive solar heating, were an artistic, spiritual and highly social people. They were matrilineal oriented with dwellings being passed from mother to children; they had a deep respect for the stars and the wellbeing of all.

In the following week on our adventure Jane and I found evidence of these mysterious people all over the south west with their petroglyphs of great astronomical events like the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054 (the date confirmed by US naval Observatory computer program), the ceremonial round kivas they built into the ground and the energy left in the places they abandoned. As an adventure and travel writer I was truly fascinated.

In New Mexico we drove our car down 27 miles of bumpy and rutted unsealed round to get to Chaco Canyon, another great Anasazi settlement. Artistic renderings of how the city would have looked in its heydey a millennium ago shows something akin to a 21st century space station with complex dwellings and high round towers.

Like the mysterious leyline sites in Britain, Chaco has a great network of prehistoric roads running in straight lines out from the settlements. Also at Chaco is Fajada Butte where 450 meters above the canyon floor the Anasazi built a sun watching station.

Here two rocks are engraved with spiral carvings and for just an hour or two each year the sun hits the centre of the spiral in perfect accord marking off the solstices and equinoxes.

For an ancient people so closely aligned with the land and the growth of crops, the knowledge of the passing seasons was essential. It is understood modern Native Americans keep up such sacred skywatching duties, but these rituals are steeped in secrecy.

All over the south west we found mystery and intrigue side-by-side with flourishing modern art communities like Taos and Santa Fe, vibrant with galleries, great shopping and thriving restaurants. So much of the art housed in trendy pueblo buildings was an interpretation of the haunting mystery of this desert land. It seems the whole area is pocketed with the sacred ground of old Native tribes of Anasazi, Mogollon and Hohokam and the modern Navajo, Zuni and Hopi people.

We drove by Shiprock in New Mexico. Known to the Navajo as Tse'bit'a'i or `Rock with Wings' this huge hill in the middle of flat plain abounds with legends of Monster Slayer and Spider Woman, sacred figures to the tribe.

Later, having farwelled Jane in the dusty run-down town of Gallup after a cheap meal at another inevitable Sizzlers, I drove on alone on another adventure through the desert to Monument Valley - here towering red edifices are the site of a hundred cowboy movies, fill daily with busloads of tourists come for the perennial holiday snap, but remain majestic and awesome all the same.

A day later I was in Sedona to meet up with another friend Sally and her partner. Probably the Mecca for every new age aficionado in the world, Sedona is a town supposedly built around several powerful but unseen `energy vortexes'. People who visit the power spots at Bell Rock, Boynton Canyon (sacred to Yavapai Indians), Airport Mesa and Cathedral Rock claim to have experienced everything from UFO sightings to transformational healings.

The bustling town hosts every kind of crystal and new age book shop and a daily calender event of meetings, channellings and spiritual happenings. Certainly the red crystalline rock and gorgeous river that runs through the green Oak Creek canyon leading to the town make a heady mix.

Never a meditator, I did find myself knocked out for hours at a stretch sitting beside the river that runs below Cathedral rock. Another night, in the spirit of wild woman, I joined a group who climbed high into the mountains for an adventure to drum under a full moon.

Later Sally, Tim and I drove the three hours to spend a night at Hopi Land - the three ancient and forbidding desert mesas where 10,000 Hopi Indians make their home.

From their high vantage point, these peaceful people have lived for centuries, undertaking a complex ritual of sacred dance throughout the year that they believe keeps the earth in balance. A big part of their spiritual world is the kachinas, sacred spirits they believe live for half the year in the distant San Francisco peaks and whom the Hopi interpret in the costumes of their sacred dance and their lavish kachina dolls.

Hopi have long been known for their prophetic powers and in 1970 became so concerned about the fulfillment of so many of their ancient prophecies (including two World Wars and the nuclear bomb), that they visited President Nixon to share their beliefs. Prophecy rock in their ancient village of Old Oraibi on the Third Mesa (inhabited since 1100) tells of the future path of humankind: a peaceful harmonious world lived in partnership with Great Spirit or total annihilation.

The Hopi actually believe we are living in the fourth world - the three previous ones being destroyed in turn by fire, freezing and flood.

On the Second Mesa is the Hopi Cultural Centre - a kind of combined small museum and gift/craft shop and also the one motel in Hopiland.

On a cliff outside the village that evening Sally and I clambered up a small hill strewn with tiny crystals to watch the sun set. Tim wandered off alone and rejoined us later talking about the negative atmosphere he found inside an abandoned house. Spooked in the growing darkness and scaring each other with our imaginings, we headed back to the car, only to be stunned moments later on the drive back as a huge snake of dancing lights came toward us out of the pitch black.

For long minutes the lights kept coming at us ... it was so black there was no sense of what we were seeing or how far away it was. Eventually we saw it was cars, a whole train of them, 30 cars following each other in perfect unison in the middle of a dark night in the desert. Later we found out it was some ceremony to do with a forthcoming wedding.

Marriage and mystery, ancient past and modern world, adventure and strange phenomenon, the south west had intrigued me in many ways.

Getting about:

There is so much to explore in the south west, a rented car will be your best option. Book ahead to make most of budget car deals.

Motel accommodation abounds. We always found good mid-priced accommodation available each evening without having to pre-book.

Mesa Verde is open year round during daylight hours. There is one motel on the grounds of the park, but numerous others nearby in places like picturesque Durango.

Chaco Canyon has a camping ground on site and other accommodation nearby. Tours and evening lectures are available in the summer.

If you plan to stay overnight in Hopiland, make sure you prebook accommodation.

Visitors to archeological sites are asked to be respectful, not remove any artifacts and stay on trails. Backcountry walking and bike trips can be arranged through park rangers.

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