Rising 200 feet above a brush-filled valley, El Morro has been a symbol to travelers for years.
The sandstone bluff, now a national monument southeast of Gallup, was a stopping place for Spanish conquistadors and priests in the 1500s and 1600s and American soldiers, emigrants and adventurers who came later.Visible for miles, it drew these travelers, who wanted to take advantage of its natural protection as well as the pool at the base that was fed by summer rains and melting snows.
The travelers left their mark: Inscriptions in the rock tell the history and culture of the site.
These words are what El Morro is known for. Precursors to graffiti, they are said to have been inspired by petroglyphs left several hundred years earlier by the Anasazi Indians who inhabited the area.
"Paso por aqui el adelantado Don Juan de Onate del descru-bri-mi-en-to de la mar del sur a 16 de abril de 1605."
(Passed by here Governor Don Juan de Onate from the discovery of the Sea of the South on April 16, 1605.)
Nearly 400 years later, this first inscription, with its words run together, still can be seen in the sandstone. It was etched 15 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
Onate, who discovered the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortes), was followed by other notable Spaniards, among them Gen. Don Diego de Vargas, one of New Mexico's frontier governors, in 1692, and the bishop of Durango, Don Martin de Elizacochea, in 1737.
In the mid-1800s, during the Mexican War, New Mexico became part of the United States, and Army expeditions traveled by El Morro. One such party was a camel caravan led by P. Gilmer Breckinridge, who chiseled his name in the stone. The U.S. government, prompted by a lack of water along the route west, was testing whether camels could withstand the trip.
El Morro, which means "the Bluff" in Spanish, became a national monument in 1906, and federal law prohibits further carving in the stone.
A half-mile trail leads to the inscriptions, as well as to the watering hole. A longer trail, which is two miles, leads through a series of hogbacks to the top of the bluff and two Anasazi ruins called A'ts`ina.
The pueblo, first inhabited about 1275, housed between 1,000 and 1,500 people, was two to three stories high and had 800 rooms. No one knows why the Anasazi abandoned the site, the ruins of which are much smaller now. To get water, some would climb down the cliffs to the pool. If you look closely, the footholds that were cut into the sandstone still can be seen.
A few years ago, the longer trail was poorly marked. Rudimentary etchings in the surface supposedly showed the trail, but the wind had carved other lines, making it hard to guess which ones to follow. At least one visitor, albeit a novice hiker, followed the "trail" to the edge of the cliff three times.
The feeling of being 200 feet high on a sandstone shelf, where the Anasazi had lived 700 years before, should have been exhilarating. Instead, the uneasiness made one feel like crawling on the stone.
Now, stone pilings help delineate trail markings when they become hard to see. Directional arrows help even more.