The ruins of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument get a statewide spotlight in the latest issue of Colorado Life Magazine.
The March/April 2015 issue features the photo-heavy article “Canyons of the Ancients” by Dan Leeth, who recently visited the area.
The nearby Mesa Verde National Park is more famous, but the closely related Canyons of the Ancients was a much bigger Ancestral Puebloan settlement. “Mesa Verde would have been the high-rent district, but it held just a fraction of the total population,” said David Kill, museum specialist for the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the national monument. The stone pueblos built hundreds of years before Columbus are the remnants of a culture that once supported as many as 40,000 people in Colorado’s southwest corner.
The seven-page article, featuring Leeth’s photographs of the monument’s canyons and pueblos, appears in the current issue of Colorado Life Magazine.
Colorado Life Magazine publishes six issues a year in celebration of the nature, history, wildlife and people of Colorado. The magazine is based in Estes Park.