Reaching Keet Seel

the long version

For the better part of two decades, writer Reg Saner has been returning to the Southwest to explore and to reflect upon a landscape and the people who once called that landscape home; a people known as the Ancestral Puebloans, the Hisatsinom - the Anasazi. Here is a journey over miles of hiking trail under relentless sun, through chill nights on stark mesas; from campgrounds and kivas crowded with spiritual seekers, curious travelers, flute-playing scholars, and ersatz shamans alike, to desolate side canyons offering only the company of wind and sand, lizards and ravens. The desert Southwest and the ruins found there offer an invitation to a relationship enigmatic as it is irresistible. Poetry and philosophy reside in the most unlikely places: the petrified middens of ancient packrats; the haunting shadow of an Anasazi family's hotcakes scorched into the surface of a stone griddle at Keet Seel. And always it seems visitors leave this land with more questions than answers, impatient in their desire for understanding.