 Over a thousand years ago, Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico was the center of a thriving native community of Puebloan people. The canyon is believed to have served as a gathering place for trade and ceremony, and the scale of its building emphasizes its importance. Within the canyon, there are numerous multi-story masonry complexes dating from the 10th to the 12th centuries that include massive room blocks, quivas, and plazas. It's estimated to have taken 5,000 trees and 50 million stone blocks to build one complex alone. Today, these elements are mainly seen as archaeological features, some excavated and others undisturbed in a relatively unchanged and vast landscape of the southwest. To Pueblo people whose ancestors once lived here, they retained spiritual importance and helped to tell the stories of people's migration across the land. Because of its international importance, sites representing the Chaco culture were designated a World Heritage Site in 1987. While Chaco has been the subject of much research, there is not a definitive study of the Chaco landscape that documents the condition, significance, extent, and cultural relationship in this vast area. Garnering this information would help all parties to better manage, interpret, and protect these resources. Hundreds of miles of roads connect a system of prehistoric monumental great houses called Chaco Outliers across a 50,000 square mile swath spanning the four corners area of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The Great North Road, a basically straight line north from Pueblo Alto that intersects with other great houses, is the best documented and the longest segment known. It has a documented length of more than 20 miles but may have once gone even farther all the way to Aztec ruins. Scholars speculate about whether roads were used for ceremonial or practical purposes or both, but regardless, they are an impressive complex system still seen on the landscape a thousand years later. Twin Angels Ruin is an L-shaped great house containing around 17 rooms and perched high up on a narrow precipice overlooking Kootz Canyon Wash. Partially excavated in 1915, it remains largely untouched today. A 300-room great house called Salmon Ruins sits on the banks of the San Juan River near Bloomfield, nearly 50 miles from Chaco Canyon. Aztec Ruins National Monument has a great house with over 400 rooms as well as an enormous great quiva excavated and reconstructed in the 1930s. Chaco sits within the San Juan Basin, one of the highest producing areas for oil and gas in the entire country. The most northerly Chaco Outlier, Chimney Rock's great house, was built beneath the shadow of two rock monoliths and has a direct line of communication to Pueblo Alto via intermediate signaling stations. Following an intensive advocacy campaign led by the National Trust, President Obama designated Chimney Rock as a national monument in 2012. In recent years, oil and gas companies have drilled thousands of wells and the Federal Bureau of Land Management has leased most of the basin for oil and gas development and is considering leasing in areas within close proximity to the park. One of the last unleashed areas in the San Juan Basin. Looking back towards the canyon, one is struck by the vastness of the Chaco World and the role we must play in protecting it. Now is the time to make smart decisions about development in the area so that a thousand years of human history in the Southwest is not destroyed on our watch.