Mount Taylor

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A great blade of flint stands driven through the mountain, point to root. In the account the Diné carry of how this world was made, First Man raised the peak to the south out of soil brought up from the worlds below, dressed it, and then pinned it fast — a stone knife thrust from the summit down through the whole body of the mountain and into the earth beneath, so that the south would hold and not come loose from the frame of things. The mountain is Tsoodził. On the survey maps it is Mount Taylor, a broad volcano north of the New Mexico town of Grants; in the tradition it is one of four peaks that fasten the corners of the world the Diné are told never to leave, and the flint through its heart is the reason the south corner stays where it was set.

Tsoodził, the turquoise mountain of the south

The name in Diné bizaad is Tsoodził, and the living tradition reads it as the turquoise mountain, the blue bead mountain — the peak whose color is the color of turquoise and whose place is the south. Reference works note that the syllables themselves can be parsed more flatly, tsoh and dził, big and mountain, a “great mountain,” and the Wikipedia account gives that literal sense alongside the turquoise reading. The two do not compete: it is a great mountain, and it is the turquoise one, and to the people who hold it the second is the name that matters. It is the sacred mountain of the south, tied to the color blue and, in the Diné reckoning, gendered female — one of the four that stand at the edges of Dinétah, the homeland, with the shining peaks of the west among its fellows.

It is not a Diné mountain alone. Tsoodził is held sacred by five living peoples at once — the Navajo Nation and the Pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni, together with the Hopi Tribe — each with its own name for the peak, its own trails up it, its own reasons to go. The mountain is one, and the regard for it is many; and that shared regard, centuries old, would in time draw five distinct nations into a single legal coalition. The Acoma, whose mesa-top town looks north across the plain to the summit, keep the mountain in view as the Laguna and the Zuni and the Hopi keep it in theirs, so that from several directions at once the same blue cone marks the same holy ground.

The four mountains are best understood together, as a single frame with a peak driven into each of its corners. In the tradition each was fastened as Tsoodził was fastened and each was given a direction, a time of day, a color, and a sacred stone — the white-shell mountain of the dawn in the east, the turquoise mountain of the blue south, the abalone mountain of the yellow west, and the jet-black mountain of the north — so that the whole homeland is boxed by four ordered points and the country between them is Dinétah, the ground the Diné are charged never to abandon. Tsoodził is the south corner of that box. Its stone is turquoise, its color the blue of the noon sky, its rain the soft female rain rather than the hard male storm; and its place in the set is not interchangeable with the others but exact, the particular corner without which the frame would be three-sided and the world unbalanced.

The settler names came late and from outside. Spanish speakers knew the lower country as Cebolleta — “tender onion,” for the wild onion on its slopes — a name that still clings to a mesa on the mountain’s northern flank and to the old land grant beneath it. Then in 1849 an American survey party attached to the summit the name of the sitting president, Zachary Taylor, and Mount Taylor is the label the peak has carried on the map ever since. The renaming changed the paper, not the mountain; the trails the five peoples climbed did not run to a president.

Mount Taylor — Tsoodził — the dormant stratovolcano northeast of Grants, New Mexico, seen from the surrounding high desert. Thomson200, 2022, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (CC0).

As geologists read it, the mountain is a dormant stratovolcano, the high point of the San Mateo Mountains and the tallest peak in the Cibola National Forest. Its summit stands at 11,305 feet — 3,446 meters — and rises with a topographic prominence of some 4,094 feet above the country around it, at 35°14′19″ north and 107°36′31″ west, in Cibola County. The cone sits at the center of a broad volcanic field, and it was built and worn down over a long span of the Pliocene and Pleistocene: most of its activity fell between roughly 4.3 and 1.5 million years ago, with the eruptions at their heaviest between about 3.0 and 2.5 million years ago. The lava is largely mafic — silica-poor, most of it a dark trachybasalt — so that what stands today is a great mass of cooled dark rock, much of the original cone since eroded, its blue distance a trick of the air over stone that is nearer black than blue. The scholarly account and the sacred one describe the same mountain from opposite ends: one reads the record the rock keeps of its own building, the other the record of who fastened it and why.

The knife, the turquoise, and the holding of the south

In the sacred history the four mountains are not scenery but structure. When the Holy People, the Diyin Diné’é, ordered this world after the emergence from the worlds below, First Man is said to have built the bounding peaks from soil he had carried up, and to have raised Tsoodził at the south from that earth and from pieces of turquoise gathered along the way. A Diné-voice account of the mountain, at navajopeople.org, sets down the essential acts: the peak was made and covered with a turquoise blanket, and a stone knife was thrust through it from top to bottom to fasten it to the earth. The mountain was then dressed as a sacred thing is dressed — wrapped in a blue cloud, adorned with turquoise, decorated with dark mist and with the gentle female rain, and given the bluebird, whose color is the mountain’s color. Every part of that dressing says the same word twice over: south, and blue, and female.

The house of the mountain is a house of Holy People. The tradition places Turquoise Boy and Turquoise Girl upon it, with Turquoise Girl told to live in the mountain of the south — she who is bound up with Changing Woman and with the ripening of the corn, watching over the mountain’s turquoise as the corn watches the season. Among the beings said to dwell there is Haashchʼééshzhiní, Black God, the bringer of fire and keeper of the stars, so that the blue mountain of gentle rain holds within it the maker of the first flame. To go up Tsoodził, in the tradition, is not to climb an empty summit; it is to enter the dwelling of the Holy People who were set there when the south was fastened down.

What the mountain does, in the wider design, is hold. The four peaks are the pillars and the boundary of Dinétah, and within the frame they make, hózhó is possible — the state of beauty, order, and right balance that the whole religion labors to keep and, when it slips, to restore. A corner that came loose would be a breach in that order; and so the flint through Tsoodził is not decoration but engineering, the fastening that keeps the southern edge of the balanced world in place. The mountain is a load-bearing member of a structure the Diné are charged to maintain. That is why one climbs it not to conquer a height but to pray, to leave an offering, and to gather the herbs, the medicine plants, and the materials that grow on its slopes and nowhere else — a working relationship with a living place, renewed each time a person makes the ascent.

Much of what the mountain means cannot be set on a page, and the tradition means to keep it so. The sacred names the peak answers to in the chants, the songs that place it in the ceremony, its part in the Blessingway and the deeper order of ceremonial knowledge — these are held within the traditions, carried by the singers, the hatáálii, and no more to be lifted onto a page than the flint could be pulled from the mountain’s root. What the public record can state plainly is the outline: that Tsoodził is the sacred mountain of the south, fastened with flint and dressed in turquoise, one of the four that bound the homeland and one of the corners on which hózhó depends. The interior of that knowledge — the operative words, the exact place of the mountain inside a given rite — is not the outsider’s to reproduce, and the telling here stops where the record stops. The reticence belongs to the mountain as much as the turquoise does.

The mountain and the mines

The modern history of Tsoodził is a long argument over whether a holy mountain can also be an ore body. From 1951 to 1989 the Mount Taylor region was mined hard for uranium and vanadium — the Grants Uranium District was among the richest in the country, and the ground around the sacred peak gave up more than thirteen million tons of uranium ore during the Cold War boom. What the boom left behind was not only tailings and shafts but a legacy of contamination across Diné and Pueblo country that the communities still carry, in their water and their bodies and their dead. When a fresh wave of uranium interest returned to the mountain in the 2000s, the five peoples who hold it did not wait to be consulted. They moved to protect Tsoodził through the machinery of the state’s own law.

The scars of that boom are not abstract. The Grants Uranium District threaded mines and mills across country the five peoples use and hold sacred, and the ore that fed the reactors and the warheads was dug, hauled, and milled by local hands — many of them Diné and Pueblo — often without the protections that would have been extended elsewhere. What remained when the market collapsed was a landscape of abandoned workings, tailings piles, and contaminated ground and water that the communities have had to live beside for decades since. Against that memory, the return of uranium prospecting to the slopes of a holy mountain in the 2000s was not an abstract land-use question. It was a proposal to open the south corner of the world to the same industry that had already poisoned the country around it, and the five peoples answered accordingly.

In 2008 the Navajo Nation and the Pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni, together with the Hopi Tribe, petitioned New Mexico’s Cultural Properties Review Committee to list the mountain as a Traditional Cultural Property. It was an unprecedented thing — five sovereign nations bringing a single joint nomination — and the committee granted an emergency listing at once, throwing a temporary state shield over the peak while the full case was heard. The nomination as first drawn reached across some 434,767 acres of the mountain and its approaches; once the private inholdings within that boundary were set aside as noncontributing, the proposed cultural property came to about 344,729 acres of contributing ground — pilgrimage trails, shrines, more than a thousand archaeological sites, plant and mineral gathering places, and the viewsheds from which the five peoples see the peak.

The blue cone of Mount Taylor on the northern horizon, viewed from the mesa-top town of Acoma Pueblo — one of the five living peoples who hold the mountain sacred. Beyond My Ken, 2012, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The fight drew national notice. In April 2009 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Mount Taylor to its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, setting the sacred mountain among the country’s most imperiled landmarks. That summer the committee held a public hearing on June 5, 2009, and voted to make the listing permanent; its final order followed on September 14, 2009, recognizing roughly 400,000 acres of public land on and around the peak as a registered Traditional Cultural Property. The designation was never a fence. It does not bar private activity on the mountain, and it does not lock the land away; what it does is require state agencies to consult with the tribes over any undertaking on the peak that needs the state’s approval — a seat at the table, enforceable in law, for peoples who had rarely been offered one where their sacred ground was concerned.

The mining, ranching, and land-grant interests that had wanted the mountain open sued, and the case climbed the New Mexico courts to the top. In Rayellen Resources, Inc. v. Lyons, decided on February 6, 2014, the New Mexico Supreme Court held the Mount Taylor listing lawful under the Cultural Properties Act and found that the proceedings before the committee had not violated the constitutional guarantee of due process — a clean affirmation of the designation itself. The court did trim its reach at one edge: it reversed the inclusion of about 19,000 acres of Cebolleta Land Grant common lands, holding that land-grant common lands are not “state land” as the statute defines it and so lay outside the committee’s authority to list. The heart of the designation stood. What the ruling settled, for New Mexico and as a marker far beyond it, was that a coalition of tribes could use a state cultural-property law to win durable protection for a sacred landscape — and make it hold up on appeal.

Through the ore boom and the lawsuits and the years of hearings, the mountain has stayed what it was before any of it. The uranium market rose and fell; the survey’s president has been dead since 1850; the litigation is filed and closed. Tsoodził is still the blue mountain of the south, still dressed in turquoise and gentle rain, still climbed each year by Diné feet and Pueblo and Hopi feet that go up to pray and to gather what grows only there. The fuller story of the Diné and their long keeping of the four mountains runs on past this one peak; but here at the south the flint is still through the mountain, driven from summit to root, and the corner it fastens has not come loose. For the world to stay in hózhó, the tradition holds, the south must hold — and the south is a mountain with a stone knife in its heart.

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