El Morro National Monument seems to be in the middle of nowhere in southwestern New Mexico, but actually it is located on a well-travelled route which connects the important New Mexico towns with the rest of the Western United States. It has a reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a sandstone bluff that it made it a popular campsite for hundreds of years. Ancestral Puebloans, Spanish and American travelers carved over 2,000 signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs on it. The puebloan ancestors of the Zuni people even lived on the top of the mesa in a 875-room pueblo built in the late 13th century.

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