The Gila Cliff Dwellings — Stone Rooms in the Canyon

About forty-five miles north of Silver City, at the end of a winding mountain road through the Gila National Forest, a series of natural caves in the face of a basalt cliff contain stone rooms built by people who lived here more than seven hundred years ago. These are the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and they are one of the finest surviving examples of Mogollon architecture in the American Southwest. The people who built them were part of the broader Mogollon cultural tradition, which flourished in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona from roughly two hundred to thirteen hundred CE.

The builders of the cliff dwellings were a later branch of this tradition, and tree-ring dating of preserved wood shows the rooms were constructed between twelve seventy-six and twelve eighty-seven. At their peak, the dwellings housed perhaps ten to fifteen families in roughly forty rooms built into several caves along the cliff face. By around thirteen hundred the dwellings were abandoned.

The reason is not definitively known, with drought, resource depletion, and movement toward other communities all proposed by researchers. President Theodore Roosevelt set the site aside in nineteen oh seven, making it one of the earliest national monuments in the country. Adjacent to the monument is the Gila Wilderness, established in nineteen twenty-four on the advocacy of forester Aldo Leopold.

It was the first formally designated wilderness area in the United States.