Shiprock

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From the flat floor of the San Juan Basin, west of Farmington, a single jagged spine of black rock breaks a horizon otherwise given over to sage and sky. It stands alone, close to a third of a mile high, and long low walls of dark stone run out from its base across the desert like the spokes of a half-buried wheel. The men who carried the United States surveys through this country in the nineteenth century looked at the serrated silhouette and saw a great clipper ship under full sail; the name they wrote on their maps — Shiprock — has clung to the formation, and to the town beyond it, ever since. To the Diné, whose country this is, the rock keeps an older name and a different shape. It is Tsé Bitʼaʼí, the rock with wings. And no one is allowed to climb it.

Two names on one rock

The formation reaches the written record under two names that belong to two different orders of knowing, and the gap between them is the first thing to understand about the place. In the documentary and scientific frame the rock is Shiprock, a name the survey era fixed to it for the plainest of reasons: seen from a distance across the level basin, the tall broken pinnacle with its outrigger of dark rock reads, to a mariner’s eye, like a nineteenth-century sailing vessel heeled over in a stiff wind. The reference record sets the peak in San Juan County, in the far northwestern corner of New Mexico, some 10.75 miles southwest of the modern Navajo Nation town that carries the anglicized name as well. The rock rises about 1,583 feet — roughly 482 meters — above the desert plain at its foot, and its summit stands at about 7,177 feet above the sea.

Geology reads the spire as a monadnock, a lone hard remnant left standing when the softer country around it wore away, and more exactly as a volcanic neck: the fractured throat of a volcano whose cone has long since vanished. The rock of the pinnacle is a jumble of volcanic breccia — shattered fragments welded back together — laced and buttressed by the black, wall-like dikes of minette that radiate outward from the base, one of them running for miles to the south across the flats. Minette is a variety of lamprophyre, a dark, potassium-rich igneous rock, and the New Mexico Bureau of Geology places Shiprock and its dikes within the Navajo Volcanic Field, the scatter of eroded necks and diatremes that studs the Four Corners country. Radiometric dating puts the solidification of the minette at roughly twenty-seven million years ago. What makes the figure striking is where the rock hardened: not at the surface but deep underground, some 2,500 to 3,000 feet below the land as it then stood, inside a diatreme — a carrot-shaped pipe blasted upward by gas-charged magma. Everything that once lay above it has since been stripped off by erosion, so that the spire a visitor sees today is the exhumed plumbing of a volcano, the fill of a vent standing naked where a mountain of softer sediment used to be.

Within the living Diné tradition the rock’s genealogy is not stratigraphic but sacred. Its name, Tsé Bitʼaʼí, is usually rendered rock with wings or the winged rock, and the wings are not a figure of speech: the name belongs to the age when the Holy People, the Diyin Dineʼé, were still setting this world in order, and it fixes the rock among the landmarks that anchor Dinétah, the homeland framed by the four sacred mountains. The rock is not one of those four bounding peaks — those are the turquoise mountain of the south and the shining mountain of the west among them — but it stands well inside the country the mountains enclose, out on the open plain to the east of the ancestral canyon, a dark and unmistakable sea-mark of the ordered world.

Much of what carried the winged-rock story to readers outside the tradition came through the ethnographic record, and that record has to be handled for what it is. The Army surgeon Washington Matthews set down a large body of Navajo narrative in his Navaho Legends of 1897; the anthropologist Gladys Reichard, who lived for years in a Diné household and published Navaho Religion in 1950, recorded a great deal more. Their books preserved much, but they were outsiders’ transcriptions, filtered through the assumptions of their day, and they sometimes committed to print knowledge that belongs, properly, to the Diné singers — the hatáálii — and is told rightly only within the tradition and under its conditions. The account that follows is given at the public record’s distance, in the shape the Diné themselves make public, and it leaves the rest where it lives.

Tsé Bitʼaʼí, the winged rock, on the floor of the San Juan Basin. Bowie Snodgrass, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The winged rock and the monster birds

In Diné sacred history Tsé Bitʼaʼí belongs to the great work of making this world safe for the people who were to live in it — the clearing of the monsters, the naayééʼ, that once preyed on the Earth-Surface People. That work fell to the Hero Twins, Naayééʼ Neizghání, Monster Slayer, and his brother Tóbájíshchíní, Born-for-Water, the sons of Changing Woman and the Sun. In the telling the brothers make a dangerous journey to the house of their father, Johonaaʼéí, the Sun who carries the day across the sky; there they are tested, proved to be his sons, and armed — given the lightning and the flint with which the monsters can be killed — and then they turn back to rid Dinétah of the things that were devouring its people.

One of those things nested on the rock. In the account the Native Memory Project records for Tsé Bitʼaʼí, a pair of great predatory birds — the Tsé nináhálééh, the rock-monster eagles — had their eyrie at the summit of the pinnacle, and they hunted the People below, carrying them up in their talons to feed to the young in the nest. Monster Slayer went out against them. He let himself be seized and borne aloft, and when the great bird dropped him against the rock to break him, the lightning and flint his father had given him turned the fall; he came to his feet on the ledge alive. There he killed the two grown monsters. But he did not kill what he found in the nest. The tradition holds that he took the two nestlings and, rather than destroy them, changed them — one into the eagle and one into the owl, the birds from which the eagles and owls of the present world descend, and whose feathers the Diné have used in ceremony ever since. The act is not incidental. It is the pattern of the whole monster-slaying age: the world is not simply cleared by force but reordered, the destroyer’s power turned to the making of creatures that belong in a world at peace. The Diné name that condition hózhǫ́ — the beauty, order, and right balance the whole religion labors to keep and, when it slips, to restore — and the sparing of the young birds is a small, exact model of what hózhǫ́ means.

The monster birds of Tsé Bitʼaʼí are not the only such foe in the tradition, and the rock is not the only landmark left behind by the clearing of the world. The Hero Twins’ campaign against the naayééʼ runs across the whole of Dinétah, and the slain monsters are said to have become features of the country — their blood congealed into black lava flows, their bones and bodies fixed as hills and ridges and stones. The land the Diné live in is, on this reading, the record of that war: a geography in which the shapes of the earth are the remains of the things that had to be killed before people could live. Tsé Bitʼaʼí is one of the most legible entries in that record, a nest turned battlefield turned landmark, and its dark radiating dikes and its lone black spire read, within the tradition, as the mark of what happened there rather than as the plumbing of a vent.

There is more than one thing the rock is said to be. Alongside the battlefield of the monster birds runs another strand of the tradition in which the wings are the rock’s own: Tsé Bitʼaʼí once bore the People on its back, and flew, carrying the ancestral Diné to this land and setting them down within the four mountains before it settled to the earth and grew fast where it now stands. In that telling the rock is not the scene of a killing but a vessel of arrival — the wing that brought the Diné home. The two accounts are not rivals to be reconciled; they are two truths the rock carries at once, a place where the world was made safe and a place by which a people came to their country. Either way the wings are real, and either way the rock is a presence rather than scenery.

That is why the rock is not a summit to be conquered. In a landscape charged the way this one is, a place of the monster-slaying age and of the People’s arrival is approached with respect, not with rope and hardware, and the Navajo Nation has made the point in law: climbing and hiking on the formation are forbidden. The prohibition rests on religious concern and on plain safety together, and it is one the Nation has held to without give. The deeper reasons — what the rock is to the singers, and how it figures in ceremony — are not laid out here, because they are not the outsider’s to lay out. It is enough for the record to say that the rock is sacred to the Diné, that the sacredness is current and not antiquarian, and that the closure follows from it. The tradition keeps its own counsel about the rest; the same law that closes the rock to the climber closes its inner reaches to the page.

The clipper ship and the closure

In the documentary record Shiprock became, in the twentieth century, exactly the kind of prize the tradition forbids. Its tower of black rock was one of the last great unclimbed pinnacles in North America, and by the 1930s it had turned back several serious attempts and gathered the reputation of an impossible summit. On a Sierra Club expedition in 1939 a four-man party — Raffi Bedayn, Bestor Robinson, John Dyer, and David Brower, who would later become the Sierra Club’s first executive director — reached the top, driving expansion bolts into the bare rock where no crack would take a piton. The ascent was a landmark in the early history of American technical climbing — an early and much-noted use of the expansion bolt on a big desert wall — and it opened the era the tradition had never wanted: for three decades the rock drew climbers to its faces, a coveted tick on the list of hard desert spires, with new routes worked out on the pinnacle’s dark and rotten stone by parties who reckoned the summit a private prize rather than someone’s holy place.

That era closed. After a run of climbing accidents on the formation, the Navajo Nation prohibited climbing on Tsé Bitʼaʼí in 1970, and it has extended and held the ban ever since — not only against roped ascents but against hiking, camping, and travel on the access roads to the base. The Nation has described the closure, in its own words, as “absolute, final and unconditional,” a formula that leaves no room for the permit-seeking and quiet trespass that have worn down other sacred-site closures in the West. What began as a matter chiefly of safety has been understood, increasingly, as a matter of respect for a living people’s authority over its own holy ground, and the mainstream climbing community now honors the closure as a settled thing rather than a rule to be gamed — one of the more widely cited cases in which an unclimbed summit was left unclimbed because the people whose sacred landscape it is asked that it be.

The volcanic neck and one of its radiating dikes, the dark walls that run for miles across the basin. Dave Bunnell, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The formation’s standing in the documentary world was fixed a few years after the closure. In 1975 Shiprock was designated a National Natural Landmark, recognized as a textbook example of an eroded volcanic neck and of the diatreme volcanism of the Navajo Volcanic Field — and it remains a working locality for that geology, studied for what its exhumed dikes and breccia reveal about how such vents form and fill at depth. It is, at the same time, one of the defining images of the Four Corners: photographed endlessly from Navajo Route 13 and from the line of the great southern dike, printed on stamps and posters, an emblem of the high desert. By the Nation’s policy it is an image to be honored from a distance — looked at, not trodden — and the two facts sit together without strain. The rock can be a landmark of the eye and a sacred presence at once; what it cannot be, in the Nation’s reckoning, is a plaything.

The scholarship on the place lives at the meeting of these registers. On one side is the geology — the neck, the minette, the twenty-seven-million-year date, the diatreme far below a vanished surface — which is scholarly-consensus and holds regardless of who is looking. On the other is the sacred history — the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer and Born-for-Water, the Tsé nináhálééh and the wings — which is the Diné account of the rock, carried by the singers and belonging to the Diné themselves. Between the two lies the older ethnographic corpus, the writings of Matthews and Reichard and others, that first carried the winged-rock and monster-bird narratives to a wider public; that corpus is read now alongside — and corrected by — Diné voices who hold the stories not as collectible folklore but as sacred history, true in the way a people’s own account of its world is true. The heavier chapters of Diné history that touch this country — the 1864 removal and the return within the four mountains — belong with the people and with the ancestral canyon that bore the worst of that campaign; Tsé Bitʼaʼí keeps a quieter record. What it holds is the closure and the wings. The surveyors saw a ship and named it for a thing that passes and is gone. The Diné see a rock that flew, and left it where the People could stand within their mountains, and asked that it be let alone. Of the two readings, only one carries a law, and the law says: look, and do not climb.

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