By Tom Vaughan
Aug 9, 2026
I spent decades working at remarkable sites across the National Park System, but Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico stands out.
Set aside by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, Chaco Culture NHP has since been designated a World Heritage Site, putting it in the same globally significant category as the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China. The World Heritage Site designation came in 1987, while I was the superintendent at Chaco.
Centuries ago, it was the heart of a culture that built several monumental structures, the largest in North America at the time, in Chaco Canyon and shaped the lifes for tens of thousands of people throughout the American Southwest.
The Chacoan people oriented their buildings to align with the sun and moon. The land itself was a calendar and compass. Ancient roads, some visible to this day, align with the path of celestial events and connect Chaco Canyon to scores of outlying villages and shrines dozens of miles away.
On a clear night, the stars are so thick and bright that you understand immediately why the people who built this place were so attuned with the sky. On the morning before the World Heritage Site dedication ceremony, I drove out to Pueblo Alto, a Chacoan Great House, where the ceremony was to be held.
It was dawn. The sun was rising with rays spreading across the San Juan Basin, the Chaco realm. As I watched, the golden light slowly began to gild the walls of the canyon below me. I could clearly hear a coyote calling down in the canyon a mile or more away. I cannot know how the people of Chaco understood their world. I don’t speak their languages, and I’m not a product of their times.
But at that moment, I felt I understood why they had chosen to live in that place and to create the buildings, roads, pottery and other material culture that they did. That experience drove home the importance of keeping as much of that prehistoric setting intact as we can — the look, the air, the sounds — for people today and in the future to learn and appreciate.
That experience, that feeling of being connected to something ancient, enormous and mysterious, is exactly what’s at risk today.
The Interior Department is planning to revoke protections that were put in place in 2023 to prevent new oil and gas drilling on federal lands surrounding Chaco Canyon. If that protection is stripped away, it will erode one of the most culturally significant landscapes in the entire country.
I’ve seen firsthand what’s happened throughout northwestern New Mexico over the years. Oil and gas companies have drilled more than 37,000 wells in the area, including some within a stone’s throw of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. They’ve carved 15,000 miles of roads through the desert to access drilling sites. This sprawling network has trampled fragile cultural features in once remote areas and opened them to looting and pot-hunting.
The current buffer zone limits drilling only on federal lands, and other landowners are free to use their lands however they see fit. Other federal lands in the area, about 90% of which have already been leased for drilling, are unaffected. It was a modest, reasonable step to give this irreplaceable place a little breathing room.
That view I described could become industrialized and lose the cultural authenticity that it retains to this day. The opportunity to contemplate and to learn from the evidence of how the Chacoans managed their world will rapidly fade. Ancient roads and other cultural features in the landscape surrounding Chaco Canyon would suffer, as even more roads were punched in, to be traveled by heavy fracking trucks.
I spent my career protecting places like Chaco Canyon. Now these irreplaceable parks and public lands are in crisis, with staffing cuts, shrinking budgets and energy development on the doorstep.
Chaco belongs to all of us, including the pueblo and tribal communities whose ancestors built the magnificent structures in the canyon and who hold it sacred to this day. The decision being made by the Interior Department right now will determine whether future generations can stand at Pueblo Alto as I did and get a sense of what makes Chaco such a wondrous place.
Tom Vaughan spent 30 years with the U.S. Department of the Interior, 23 with the National Park Service and seven with the Bureau of Land Management.