Forget about finding this place on a road map ever again. And don't bother looking for Cutthroat Castle nearby.
These and three other groups of tumbledown stone towers used more than 600 years ago by Anasazi Indians - the Hackberry, Horseshoe and Cajon Ruins, a few bumpy miles from here - are also set to slip beneath the cartographic sands of time.Maps have long given the traveler and armchair explorer alike a guide to a region's peaks and rivers, pinpointing cities as well as spots of historic and cultural interest. But as tourists, looters and nature lovers increasingly pour into the West, federal agencies and others are working to remove some archeological sites and other places of interest from maps in the hope that people will pass them by or be forced to register with those supervising the ruins before visiting them.
Take the case of Holly Ruins, which like neighboring sites is an unguarded, outlying part of Hovenweep National Monument, an archaeological park that straddles the border of Colorado and Utah. The number of people visiting here has doubled, to 30,000, in the last five years.
"People are loving these ruins to death," said Ellen K. Foppes, a National Park Service official and the superintendent of Hovenweep.
As a result, federal officials here asked the Automobile Club of Southern California last year to remove Holly and the four other outlying Hovenweep sites from the next edition of its "Indian Country" guide, which will will be available this summer. The road map is a popular tourist guide to the Four Corners region of the Southwest, so detailed that it is used by the fictional Navajo police heroes of the mystery novels written by Tony Hillerman.
The Hovenweep sites are not the only ones scheduled to be excised from road maps this season. Layna Browdy, a spokeswoman for the Automobile Club, based in Los Angeles, said her organization was also complying with a request to remove from the Indian Country map the location of the Awatobi ruins, which lie just east of the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona.
Soon, the motor club will also stop showing the location of two petroglyphs on its area map of San Bernardino County, Calif.