I drove out of Sedona the same way I had entered, winding up into the hills out of the valley, leaving the red rocks behind and passing through thickly wooded forests that felt more like New England than the Southwest. I stopped at a vista to look back down into the valley, passing through a Native American craft market, vendors packing up for the day. I realized that aside from small crystals I had bought in Sedona, and a few shells and stones I had picked up from beaches along the Pacific Ocean, I was not returning home with any objects, trinkets, items to remember the trip. While some have their collection of items purchased from each place they visit, my travels would remain only in my journal, photos, and memories. 

I hadn't booked a campsite for the night, figuring that I'd find somewhere along the route that evening. As I approached Petrified Forest National Park, I looked up the camping options and saw that there were no campgrounds, only backcountry camping, and the visitor center where I might have been able to buy a permit had closed. I continued on, deciding that I would drive all the way to Chaco Culture to stay at the campground in the park.

About an hour and a half from Chaco Canyon, the sky was beginning to fade in color. I passed two horses standing on the side of the road, on a small stretch of road that appeared to contain the town - a gas station, a few buildings spaced apart, perhaps a post office. Moments later I saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I pulled over and opened my window, my license ready for the police officer. He appeared to be of Mexican descent, which his accent confirmed. Did I know I had a headlight out? I didn't, but it made sense, given how challenging it was to see ahead of my car in the dark, in these small towns and roads without street lights. It was my driver's side low beam, he informed me, and asked where I was headed. When I told him Chaco Canyon, he responded "do you know that's more than an hour away?" There was nowhere between our location and the park to buy a new bulb, so he warned me to be careful, and to replace the bulb as soon as I could. "Out here you never know what you're going to see - did you see the horses that got out of their pen a ways back on the road?" I grinned, nodding, and promised to keep my eyes peeled for stray animals, and headed on my way. It was the nicest possible small town interaction, I thought as I drove away. I could imagine that living in this town, you know your neighbors, and look out for one another. Perhaps places like that do still exist, where small town gossip and judgement are kept at bay, and the sense of community and love are strong. 

About a half hour later, I turned on to the road that would take me into the park. By now the sun was down, and there was no light but my one single working headlight. It was a dirt road, pitted with deep potholes and ruts. I slowed to a crawl, bumping along at 5 miles per hour. This may have been the worst condition I had ever seen a road in, and I grew up on a dirt road! I laughed out loud as I bumped along in the dark, stopping for the occasional jackrabbit (they looked huge compared to the wild rabbits in Minnesota!) hopping across the road.

Suddenly the road became smooth, paved, and I saw the sign announcing the entrance to the park. I was entering on the opposite end from the campground, so I slowly followed the road through the park, able to see nothing but what the weak single beam illuminated directly in front of me. Was it safe to turn on high beams? Probably not. I didn't want to disrupt wildlife or campers when I happened upon the campground, so I left my low beam on and kept my eyes peeled for signage. 

I saw a sign for the visitor's center, but couldn't see the building itself. Shortly after, a sign for the campground. FULL. My heart sank. There was no possible way I was driving another hour back out of the park to try to find somewhere to stay. By now I had no cell service, it was past 10:00 PM, and I was ready to sleep. Just past the campground I met another terrible, rutted dirt road heading out of the park in the opposite direction I had come in. I drove along for a bit, until the road widened slightly, a bit of space creating a small shoulder. I parked, pulling as far off the road as possible without disturbing the desert plantings, put on my headlamp and turned off the car. Here, I would sleep in my car for the second time on this trip. I got out to pee on the side of the road, and miscalculated the amount of splashback that would occur from the hard, dry ground. After cleaning off my boots with a facial cleansing wipe, I laid down in the backseat to sleep in the pitch dark.

The next morning, I woke to the familiar sound of a car bumping along the rutted road. It passed my car and headed into the park. An employee? I sat up and put my pillow away. A second car went by, and I watched as they expertly navigated the road, the tires on one side of the vehicle running along the wheel-shaped rut on the far side of the road, so only one set of tires was subjected to the ruts and potholes in the middle of the road. Smart. Clearly, they had taken this route before. I tried this trick on my way into the park, wishing I had known it sooner.

I drove past the campground that had been full the night before, and realized that the visitor's center sign I had seen the night before was just yards away from the building itself, which had been completely concealed by darkness.  I made my breakfast at a picnic table near the building, brushed my teeth and washed my face in the bathroom, and chatted with the cleaner, who told me that the roads were not maintained by the county, who saw no reason to do so as they only led to the park, and the park could not afford to maintain them (and shouldn't have to, since they weren't the park's property), so this battle of "not mine" led to their current condition.

The visitor's center wouldn't be open for another half hour, so I packed up my car and walked down the trail labeled "Una Vida", straight into the past. I found a small stone structure, or what remained of it, and peered through the small window for the view that many people much shorter than I would have had centuries before. The sun was rising, and no other visitors had arrived. The place was peaceful. Quiet. A silent exhale from generations past, inviting me to linger and imagine what their lives might have looked like. 

Further up the trail, a small sign instructed me to continue onward to see petroglyphs, drawings carved into the rock. I found them at a higher elevation, fascinated by the representations of humans and animals, the symbols and shapes, and wondered what stories they told. 

The sun was up, and I had a few hours to spend in the park if I wanted to reach my next destination - Leadville, Colorado - before dark. I headed back down to the visitor's center, where I showed them my National Parks Pass to register my vehicle, and then continued further into the park.

Visiting a few Great Houses, I could imagine them bustling with people, almost as if their ghosts were still there, going about their lives, with me silently watching them. The buildings were tucked beneath the cliffs, natural fortresses rising above what might have been tall stone walls at one point in time. 

After visiting a few Great Houses, I decided to hike the Peñasco Blanco trail to see pictographs (painted images, versus the carved petroglyphs) about 3.2 miles down the trail. I should have time for a 6+ mile hike, and still leave around noon. The pictographs were said to depict a supernova (explosion of a large star) that was visible from this site in 1054. The Chacoans would suddenly have seen a bright star, one they hadn't ever seen before. The pictograph represents this new star in relation to the moon. 

This was truly desert hiking, hot and dry beneath the intense sun. I enjoyed the desert flowers and was grateful for my wide-brimmed hat for protecting me from the sun. 

I took the slightly longer route on the way there, so the path would take me along cliffs with more petroglyphs, some vandalized in the following centuries, indicating horse-drawn carriages and dates from the 1500s to the 1800s. 

To reach the pictographs, I went down a sharp decline and crossed a creek. A sign warned hikers of the dangers of this creek, which at the moment were completely unfounded, as the creek was completely dried and cracked, a small puddle the only evidence of water in sight. 

At this point I had caught up with two other hikers. I outpaced one, and visited the pictographs with the other, an older, retired man who told me his wife didn't like to travel, so he would take week-long excursions without her before returning home. We looked up at the pictographs, and marveled at how different the world must have been in 1054. The images were high up on the cliff - at the time, the ground we were standing on must have been under layers of dirt now washed away by hundreds of years of erosion. Someone had looked up at the sky and painted a map to this new star (now called the Crab Nebula) so anyone could find it simply by aligning their hand with the painting, locating the moon beneath the palm of their hand, and looking left for the star. 

I started walking back with the retired hiker, continuing our conversation. His pace was far slower than mine, and when he stopped to photograph a salamander, we bid farewell and I picked up the pace to head back to the car. On my way out of the park, (much quicker and smoother of a drive now that I knew to drive halfway in the ditch), a herd of goats ran out in front of my car. Were they from my century or the Chacoans? Had they been domesticated as part of this early culture, or brought by later settlers?

The ghosts of the Chaco Culture faded as I drove further away, but they made me wonder, what would future generations know about us, thousands of years down the road? As I had many moments already on this journey, I felt small and insignificant in comparison to the size of time and space both of years past and the years to come. If my life is just a tiny blip on this spectrum, perhaps I don't need to be remembered, don't need a child, a human legacy, someone continuing my name and my story. Future generations will see me as part of the culture I live in today, part of the collective whole. If we all are to be ghosts of the past one day, do our lives as individuals matter in the way we think they do when we are living in the present? Pondering questions I could not answer, I continued onward towards Colorado.