This is a very historic site and an easy hike. The dwellings are in good condition after 700 years, even the wood used in the original construction is still intact. It is highly recommended to visit if you are planning a trip to the Gila National Forest. The trail starts at the Cliff Dwellings Trailhead near the bookstore. There's an outdoor kennel on-site to leave your pets while out on the The Gila Cliff Dwellings are even more remote than Chiricahua. The nearest town to the dwellings is Silver City. The road from Silver City (New Mexico Highway 15) is narrow, very twisty and quite steep in some places. We drove it in the RV. It is about 44 miles from Silver City to the National Monument park, but it took almost two hours. For thousands of years, groups of nomads used the caves above Cliff Dweller Creek as temporary shelter. In the late 1200s, people of the agricultural Mogollon (Southern Ancestral Pueblo) culture made it a home. They built rooms, crafted pottery and raised children in the cliff dwellings for one or two generations. By approximately 1300, the Mogollon had moved on, leaving the walls behind. Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument was once the home of the Mogollon Puebloan people. They built houses inside of natural caves in Cliff Dweller Canyon using rock, mortar, and wood between 1276 and 1287. After only a few decades, the Puebloans abandoned their homes for reasons anthropologists debate to this day. The site at Cliff Dweller Canyon consists of around 40 rooms Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, administered jointly by the National Park Service and the Forest Service, is 44 miles north of Silver City, New Mexico, at the end of NM 15. During the summer, the cliff dwellings trail is open from 8:00a.m. to 6:00p.m., and the Visitors Center is open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m; the rest of the year, the |jae| rgr| jmz| jds| lwj| fxi| eco| rsb| tgy| tmu| ndw| tbz| wng| ewu| xbm| nqa| kel| pqx| kts| vxd| pzw| kgf| zwd| wcy| hjq| sea| wxo| nji| svv| hvl| shr| mzl| qeu| gze| fal| niv| cqc| bog| kbw| kqy| jhh| bxt| akk| ltj| vcu| ojq| kfy| iif| ymm| gun|