NPS Website
WHAT IS IT?A series of 1,000-year old Ancestral Pueblo ruins noted by an assortment of multi-shaped stone towers.
BEAUTY (6/10)
The Square Tower ruins (the only easily accessible ruins) line the rims of the shallow Little Ruin Canyon. The stone ruins towers have square, circular and even ovule bases. Their designs inspired archeologists and pioneers to name them Hovenweep Castle, Round Tower, Square Tower, Twin Towers and Stronghold House. The towers are impressive but hardly awe inspiring.
HISTORICAL INTEREST (4/10)
Hovenweep NM marked a return to the unsolvable mystery theme that pervades Ancestral Puebloan park sites. What were this odd towers used for, defense, storage, astronomical observatories or signal stations? Why were they built with such intriguing shapes and locations? Your guess is as good as ours. The towers look cool but get your historical info at the nearby Mesa Verde NP.
CROWDS (7/10)
Large Utah families allow a Site to go from staid and boring to crowded and lively almost instantaneously. Four visitors (an elderly, confused and loud French couple and us) blossomed when a family of nine arrived. Four more visitors showed up and it was a party. A Ranger emerged and decided to give a musical talk and performance. Fun all around.
EASE OF USE/ACCESS (1/5)
Hovenweep NM’s ruins are located about 30 miles due north of the Four Corners marker, the cartographic anomaly where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona all meet. The ruins are located primarily in Colorado but some are in Utah. You would expect this barren area to have straight north south, east west roads. It doesn’t. The roads wind at diagonals and traversing them always takes longer than you had imagined.
Hovenweep NM is doubly frustrating if you are using a Rand McNally state-by-state road atlas. Its border location requires innumerable page flipping and taxing memory tests. Which road turns into which when you cross the borders? Routes 160, 666 (aaaah!), 41, or 262? If you come here be sure to pick up the tremendous AAA Indian Country map. If you are not a AAA member, do not worry, just join … or buy the map at an area National Park Site. They all carry it
Only one of Hovenweep’s six ruin groups, the Square Tower Ruin, are accessible via paved roads. The other entrance roads vary in off-roading difficulty from moderate to only come here if you have a safari tested Range Rover. As we left, a parade of 4x4’s passed us on their way to some of the Site’s more challenging backcountry roads.The standard Park Brochure’s map is poor and does not identify the locations of the ruins. Use your AAA map if you plan further explanation. A paved pathway to the Square Tower Ruin and Little Ruin Canyon provides the Site’s only easy access and designates the standard Hovenweep trip to all but the most hardcore, i.e. 4x4 clubs.
CONCESSIONS/BOOKSTORE (3/5)
There was not a lot here but we were tempted by a few books detailing the role of Hollywood film on our notion of the American west. They were Cinema Southwest: An Illustrated Guide to the Movies and Their Locations; Where God Put the West: Movie Making in the Desert: A Moab - Monument Valley Movie History and Moviemaking: Canyon Country Chronicles.
We first saw these titles at Hovenweep NM but later found them at all bookstores also run by the Canyonlands Natural History Association: Arches NP, Canyonlands NP and Natural Bridges NM and a few other parks to boot. Their online bookstore is impressive; did they really have all those books for sale?
COSTS (3/5)
Entry is $6 per car or free with the National Parks Pass. If you are the family of nine that somehow managed to pile into the same minivan, $6 is not such a bad deal.
RANGER/GUIDE TO TOURIST RATIO (3/5)
Actual conversation with NPS volunteer:
Do you have any Ranger talks? No, only in the summer. And even then they are a rarity. But we do have a video. I’ll start it if you’d like. OK, that would be great.
Five minutes later: Everybody, we are going to be having a Ranger talk out front in five minutes if anyone is interested. Huh?
The Ranger talk turned out to be well attended and a lot of fun. We learned about the evolution of Ancestral Puebloan flutes and their sacred music. The Ranger played all the flutes and even brought together an impromptu band of pre-teens to serenade us. He emphasized how he loves giving Ranger talks and does it as much as he can.
TOURS/CLASSES (6/10)
This rating comes on the strength of our musical Ranger and the good Little Ruin Canyon self-guided tour pamphlet. Outdoor panels help explain the area’s unique architecture. The panels are new, well done and shaded from the sun.
The introductory video is also new and shown on a snazzy flat screen JVC 16:9 plasma TV. It is too bad that the viewing room is adjacent to bookstore with no door or barrier to block sound. We could not concentrate on the film; instead we intently listened to the French couple laughingly discuss the nearby town of Bullfrog with a Park volunteer in heavily broken English. No one can make stuff like that up.
FUN (6/10)
A visit to Hovenweep NM is hit or miss. We happened to hit the Site the same time a lively bunch of visitors did. Between the chatter of the kids and the banter of the Frenchies, the atmosphere was animated. We had fun.
We nearly missed the highlight of the day, the Ranger Talk, since the volunteer told us they didn’t exist. We missed out on seeing the other ruins since the Altima is reluctant to off roading. We also missed having the solid explanations and architectural evidence we found at other Puebloan ruin sites.
WOULD WE RECOMMEND? (4/10)To the untrained eye, Hovenweep’s towers do not seem unique. We are sure we saw similar stuff at Mesa Verde NP and Chaco Culture NHP. Go to those places before you take the circuitous trip to Hovenweep.
TOTAL 43/80
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