Canyon de Chelly National Monument

Where it sits. Canyon de Chelly cuts into the Defiance Plateau in north-eastern Arizona, just east of the town of Chinle, entirely within the Navajo Nation. The monument protects about 340 square kilometres and two main canyon systems that meet near the mouth: Canyon de Chelly itself, running east, and Canyon del Muerto, running north-east. At the mouth the walls are only a few metres high; 40 km upstream they stand over 300 m. The name is a chain of mistranslations - Navajo Tseyi, meaning rock canyon, became Spanish de Chelly, and is pronounced roughly duh-SHAY.

A living canyon, not a ruin. This is the crucial thing to understand before arriving. The monument was established in 1931, but the land beneath it is Navajo trust land, not federal property, and it is co-managed by the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation. Around forty Navajo families still hold grazing and farming rights on the canyon floor, run sheep there and keep peach orchards and corn plots exactly as their families have for generations. Visitors are guests on inhabited private land. That is why, with a single exception, access below the rim requires an authorised Navajo guide - a rule that is about residents' privacy and safety as much as archaeology.

Ten centuries of occupation. People have lived here more or less continuously for around 5,000 years, longer than at any other point on the Colorado Plateau. Archaic hunters were followed by Basketmaker farmers, then by Ancestral Puebloan builders who raised masonry villages in the alcoves between roughly 750 and 1300 CE. White House Ruin, tucked beneath a 150 m wall, was built between about 1060 and 1275 and takes its name from a room finished in white plaster. Hopi farmers used the canyon seasonally afterwards, and Navajo families settled here by the 1700s. The rock walls carry a continuous record: Ancestral Puebloan pictographs, Navajo paintings of Spanish cavalry in the Canyon del Muerto, and later scenes of horses and herds.

Hard history. In 1805 a Spanish force under Lieutenant Antonio Narbona trapped a group of Navajo, mostly women, children and the elderly, in a high alcove in Canyon del Muerto and killed around 115 of them; the site is Massacre Cave, visible from the north rim overlook, and the canyon's Spanish name - canyon of the dead - dates from that period. In January 1864 Colonel Kit Carson's troops moved through the canyon in winter, destroying hogans, killing livestock and cutting down thousands of peach trees to starve the Navajo out. What followed was the Long Walk: some 8,000 Navajo forcibly marched over 500 km to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, where hundreds died before the treaty of 1868 permitted the survivors to return.

What you actually see today. Two free rim drives leave Chinle. The South Rim Drive runs 60 km return past seven overlooks and ends at Spider Rock, twin sandstone spires rising about 230 m from the canyon floor, the taller of which Navajo tradition names as the home of Spider Woman, who gave the people weaving. The North Rim Drive follows Canyon del Muerto to the Antelope House, Mummy Cave and Massacre Cave overlooks. The one walk visitors may take alone is the White House Ruin Trail, 4 km return, descending about 180 m by a switchbacked ledge path and a short tunnel to the canyon floor opposite the ruin - a superb, sobering hour. Everything else, including the jeep tours up the wash and horseback trips, is arranged through Navajo guides based in Chinle.

Practical notes and timing. There is no entrance fee, which is rare among headline sites in the Southwest, though guide services are charged separately and are worth it. Chinle has motels, a supermarket and fuel; the Cottonwood Campground near the monument entrance is basic and inexpensive. Alcohol is prohibited on the Navajo Nation, drones are not permitted, and photographing residents, their homes or their livestock without permission is both prohibited and resented. The Navajo Nation observes daylight saving time while the rest of Arizona does not. April to June and September to October are the comfortable months; midsummer brings 35C on the canyon floor with flash-flood risk in the wash, and winter can leave ice on the White House descent for weeks. Chinle is about 3 hours from Flagstaff, 2 hours from Gallup and 4 from Albuquerque, and the drive in on Indian Route 7 gives no hint at all of what the plateau is hiding until the first overlook. Edward Curtis photographed Navajo riders beneath these walls in 1904, an image that shaped how the American Southwest has been pictured ever since.