Katzimo

Part 1 is here.

When Europeans first arrived at The Enchanted Mesa, they found ancient hand- and footholds carved into the sandstone cliff, eroded smooth by the years. The ladder ascends to a 30 foot long crack, where removable sticks were once set horizontally to form a ladder. Inquisitive as to whether the legends of an ancient pueblo atop Katzimo were true, archaeologists and adventures managed to ascend to the mesa top, despite Adolph Bandelier's pronouncement that the summit of the imposing cliffs were "utterly beyond reach."

Prof. William Libby.

The earliest summits found no sign of the Keres Pueblo, though Harvard professor William Libby used a highly unconventional (and in today's world, frowned upon) method to reach the top. He used a small canon to fire a metal ring completely over the mesa. The ring was attached to miles of rope; once attached securely on the opposite side, a chair and pulley were rigged up to carry the professor up in comfort!

Acoma Pueblo in 1900.

Eventually F.W. Hodge of the US Bureau of Ethnology was able to find artifacts after a thorough search, including bracelets, axe-heads and pottery shards. They also came upon a crude monument made of stone slabs that they determined to be man-made. It seems the Acoma's ancestors may really have inhabited the summit of Katzimo in the distant past, as their tales would indicate.For some time, the sheer cliff faces of the Enchanted Mesa made the area popular with climbers in New Mexico, but is now closed off completely from the public by the Acoma who hold Katzimo to be sacred ground.

Despite its name, Katzimo is not technically a mesa, but rather a butte. A butte, like a mesa is an elevated area of land with a flat top and steep sides, but buttes are smaller landforms than mesas. The word "butte"(pronounced like "beaut") comes from the French for "small hill," and indicates a top that is narrower than the sides. The butte is 430 ft high and 1,250 ft long, but only 400 ft at its widest. At the summit, the elevation is over 6,600 ft of wind-carved sandstone.

'Mesa Encantada' by William Henry Holmes, 1914.

In 1974, a UFO was reported over Enchanted Mesa by an Acoma police officer. Several other officers reported strange lights over the next few days as well, but no evidence was found, despite helicopter searches sweeping the area.