Acoma Pueblo is a little over an hour west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Just northeast of the peublo sits a sheer-walled, flat-topped mesa called Katzimo by the local tribes. In Spanish it was known as Mesa Encantada, the Enchanted Mesa. The Keres people once lived on the summit, according to the Acoma, and they used a natural rock ladder in order to scale the cliffs from their croplands below. Legend says that while the tribe was all at work in the fields at the foot of the mesa, a terrible storm blew in and enveloped the mountain. 3 women who were too ill to work were trapped on the mountain island when the storm destroyed the ladder along with the entire face of the mountain, leaving no way for the Keres to reach the stranded women. The women eventually died of thirst, and their spirits are said to wander the mesa top of Katzimo to this day. The tribe moved their pueblo to a nearby mesa, and became the Acoma.


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[Ethan](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enchanted_Mesa.jpg)


Other Acoma legends tell of Coyote's attempts to scale Katzimo. At first, he is tricked by the Bluebirds, who give him feathers to fly to the crest, but then take them back, leaving him stranded with no choice but to fall to the rocks below. Eventually he recovers and talks some pigeons into loaning him more feathers. Once at the top of Enchanted Mesa, Coyote's language proves to be too scandalous for the pigeons, who take back their feathers and strand Coyote once again. Coyote's cries are heard by Spider, who offers to lower Coyote to the bottom on one condition. If Coyote looks up while being lowered, the deal is off and Spider will drop him. Coyote agrees, but his curiosity gets the better of him along the way, and just like in the cartoons, Coyote is dropped off the cliff again.

In olden days, Acoma boys were sent up the mesa blindfolded as a rite. When the boy was completing their initiation into the sacred mysteries of the kiva, the last step required the trip to the summit carrying a jar of water to propitiate the spirits of the Mesa. It was said that when blindfolded, the boys could climb where a sighted person could not; once completed the initant became a full-privileged man of the tribe.

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When Europeans first arrived at The Enchanted Mesa, they found ancient hand- and footholds carved into the sandstone cliff, eroded smooth by the years. The ladder ascends to a 30 foot long crack, where removable sticks were once set horizontally to form a ladder. Inquisitive as to whether the legends of an ancient pueblo at the top were true, archaeologists and adventures managed to ascend to the mesa top, despite Adolph Bandelier's pronouncement that the summit of the imposing cliffs were "utterly beyond reach." The earliest summits found no sign of the Keres Pueblo, though Harvard professor William Libby used a highly unconventional (and in today's world, frowned upon) method to reach the top. He used a small canon to fire a metal ring completely over the mesa. The ring was attached to miles of rope; once attached securely on the opposite side, a chair and pulley were rigged up to carry the professor up in comfort!

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Old Trail at Acoma

Eventually F.W. Hodge of the US Bureau of Ethnology was able to find artifacts after a thorough search, including bracelets, axe-heads and pottery shards. They also came upon a crude monument made of stone slabs that they determined to be man-made. It seems the Acoma's ancestors may really have inhabited the summit of Katzimo in the distant past, as their tales would indicate.For some time, the sheer cliff faces of the Enchanted Mesa made the area popular with climbers in New Mexico, but is now closed off completely from the public by the Acoma who hold Katzimo to be sacred ground.

Despite its name, Katzimo is not technically a mesa, but rather a butte. A butte, like a mesa is an elevated area of land with a flat top and steep sides, but buttes are smaller landforms than mesas. The word "butte"(pronounced beaut) comes from the French for "small hill," and indicates a top that is narrower than the sides. The butte is 430 ft high and 1,250 ft long, but only 400 ft at its widest. At the summit, the elevation is over 6,600 ft of wind-carved sandstone.



In 1974, a UFO was reported over Enchanted Mesa by an Acoma police officer. Several other officers reported strange lights over the next few days as well, but no evidence was found, despite helicopter searches sweeping the area.