Mesa Verde National Park To The Four Corners National Monument?

By Author: slowlyhound
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Since Albuquerque is home to an international airport (Albuquerque International Sunport, or ABQ), it makes sense to begin your trip there. The Trail of the Ancients driving directions Byway in New Mexico is to the west of the airport, in the territory of the Navajo people.

Grants is a community to the southwest of El Morro National Monument, where you may see petroglyphs and other signs left by ancient Puebloans. Alternatively, you might go north to the less visited Casamero Pueblo, the partly excavated site of an Ancestral Puebloan settlement that dates back to the 11th century. The latter is the easiest option and will take you to the center of New Mexico's Trail of the Ancients Byway, the vast Puebloan ruin at Chaco Culture National Historical Park (also known as Chaco Canyon).

Backtrack to the highway and continue north to Farmington, where the Aztec Ruins National Monument and the Salmon Ruins Museum are only a short drive away. Once you've seen everything there is to see in Farmington, go west to the Four Corners Monument, marking the points where Colorado, New ...
... Mexico, Arizona, and Utah all meet.

Leave the Four Corners Monument and go east to join the Trail of the Ancients in Colorado. Mesa Verde National Park is a world-famous park just outside Cortez, Colorado, that is home to the Cliff Palace, a well-preserved Ancestral Puebloan cliff palace.

After spending the better part of a day exploring Mesa Verde, go north to the Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center & Museum to learn about the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, a 174,000-acre area with an estimated 30,000 known and undiscovered sites.

Hovenweep National Monument, which is protected along Colorado's Trail of the Ancients Byway, is the site of many prehistoric settlements that together originally housed over 2,500 people.