History and culture - Western Slope
Sand Canyon held a village with about three times the rooms of Cliff Palace
West of Cortez, the Sand Canyon area in Canyons of the Ancients held a 13th-century village with roughly three times the rooms of Cliff Palace, and hiking there is restricted to marked routes.
Published June 10, 2026 - Last verified June 15, 2026
Mesa Verde gets the crowds, but some of the largest ancient villages in the region sit on quieter public land west of Cortez, in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.
Sand Canyon is a good example. Around the 1200s, families gathered at the head of the canyon and built a single compact village wrapped around the canyon rim and a natural spring. It grew to around 420 rooms and dozens of kivas. That is roughly three times the room count of Cliff Palace, the famous and largest cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde, which has about 150 rooms. Within a few generations the people moved on, part of the broader migration out of this country before AD 1300.
Today the Bureau of Land Management protects the area, and you can hike here, but with a catch worth knowing. In the Sand Canyon and Rock Creek area, hiking is limited to designated routes rather than wandering freely. That rule exists because the ground is thick with fragile sites, and even walking off-trail can damage buried remains.
A nearby rim formation that William Henry Jackson photographed in 1874 as “Fortified Rock” is now called Castle Rock, a sign of how long outsiders have been documenting this landscape.
If you want to walk where a great village once stood, this is a way to do it on your own. Check the BLM Canyons of the Ancients pages for the trail map and the designated-route rules before you go.