The ability to appreciate the beauty and mystery of a giant buzzing pre-Columbian capital in Chaco is enhanced by the isolation and minimal development. It is quietly exhilarating to wander in the sunshine among the glorious remnants of such an elaborate and alien city, with just a scattered handful of other visitors. You can almost hear the barking dogs, the calls of a bevy of children and the gobbling of turkeys that once wandered here.

As I walked I noticed a distant storm and a trail in the sky of lace-like virga, or shafts of rain that hang from a cloud, never making it to the ground.

At night here, with the lights of cities far away, the sky is a midnight fabric stitched with glowing glass beads.

Archaeoastronomers — those who study how ancient people related to the sky — tell us that many of the walls and windows at Chaco are aligned with cardinal points, the sun and other stars, and the buildings functioned as an observatory and calendar. Then there’s the famous sun dagger. On the summer solstice a sharp beam of light shines through slabs of fallen rock and pierces the exact center of a spiral petroglyph.

Despite what is known here, what exactly this fantastic city was remains unknown, and the mystery endures. “It was built to be impressive,” said Mr. Taylor. “A big beautiful city like Manhattan. It may well have been an area of transcendental significance like Mecca. The canyon itself could have been a sipapu,” a sacred opening in the Earth that are symbolically represented in kivas around the Southwest.

The characters who were entranced by the mystery of these ruins and the vanished people, and who excavated and explored these places, have their own interesting stories. Richard Wetherill is the most well known, the son of a rancher, who, when he first spied treasures in the ground, leapt off his horse and began digging. He never stopped.

An accomplished amateur archaeologist, Wetherill led an expedition here in 1896, funded by two wealthy young brothers, Talbot and Frederic Hyde. The first year Wetherill unearthed a boxcar full of artifacts, Mr. Taylor told me. “They shipped them back East and they are housed in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History.”