Enchanted Mesa

Enchanted Mesa, called Katzimo or Kadzima in the Keresan language and Mesa Encantada in Spanish, is a sandstone butte in Cibola County, New Mexico, about 2.5 miles northeast of the pueblo of Acoma. It stands 430 feet tall, stretches roughly 1,250 feet in length and 400 feet at its widest, with its flat summit reaching an elevation of 6,643 feet. Its cliffs are built from Zuni Sandstone, capped at the top by a harder layer of Dakota Sandstone. According to Acoma oral tradition, the people of Acoma once lived atop this mesa, reaching the summit by a natural stone ramp on its southern side and farming the valley below, until a severe storm triggered a landslide that destroyed the only approach and forced the community to relocate to the mesa now known as Acoma. Nineteenth-century archaeological expeditions found pottery fragments, beads, stone tools and arrowheads wedged into the mesa's crevices, confirming its earlier occupation, though no ruins remain visible on its flat top today.