New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon: Photographing the Ancient City is a guide to photographing the monumental stone city, including advice on where, when, and sometimes how to photograph, with detailed information about the history of the Chaco culture with map and a collection of the author’s photographs.

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In Hiking New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, James C. Wilson wrote a guidebook for hiking and camping in Chaco Canyon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwestern New Mexico that the Zuñi, Hopi, Acoma and other Pueblos consider their ancestral homeland. New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon: Photographing the Ancient City is intended to be a guidebook for amateur photographers wanting to photograph the canyon and its spectacular ruins. The volume offers tips on where, when, and sometimes how to photograph the ruins of the ancient stone city that dates from about 860 to 1200 A.D. Wilson takes you on a tour of the Great Houses in the canyon, including Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl (with 650 and 500 rooms respectively). Photographers will discover how images of the massive stone structures vary by angle, light, and time of day. Photographers can experiment with different lenses and camera settings, including manual and automatic, as they explore the smaller Great Houses and Casa Rinconada, the largest excavated Great Kiva in the canyon. Wilson then points out the trails of Chaco’s three mesas (North, West, and South Mesa) that connect with Chaco’s ancient road system. The various overlooks on the mesa trails provide spectacular views of the ruins and the red sandstone cliffs of the canyon. The colors of the wider landscape––subtle shades of pink, yellow, and gray––make for a landscape photographer’s dream.

James C. Wilson has been hiking and photographing at Chaco Canyon for nearly fifty years. After writing for both Santa Fe newspapers in the 1970s, Wilson taught journalism at the University of Cincinnati for thirty years. He has published fourteen books, including Hiking New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon: the Trails, the Ruins, the History, the memoir Santa Fe, City of Refuge: An Improbable Memoir of the Counterculture and the Fernando Lopez Santa Fe Mystery Series: Peyote Wolf, Smokescreen, Ghost Canyon, Taos Gothic, The Dead Go Fast, Painted Skull Ranch, Taos Vendetta, Devil on Canyon Road, Santa Fe Assassin, Pecos Reckoning, and Stealing the Hopi Snake Dance. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Website: https://www.southwestwriters.com/james-c-wilson/

Softcover:
6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-63293-545-8
66 pp.,$24.95