General information about the National Monument
The National Monument includes six unconnected areas and protects numerous ruins of various Native American sites. Holly Canyon, Hackberry Canyon, Cutthroat Castle and Goodman Point are located in Colorado, Cajon and Square Tower in Utah.
Number of visitors
Best time to visit: It is nice here all year round.
Our visits:
So far 1 visit: June 2023
Entrance fees and opening hours
- 20$/car valid for 7 days
- Covered by the Anual Pass*
- Open 24h all year round.
*The Anual Pass is so to speak the "flat rate" for all Parks managed by the National Park Service. The pass costs a one-time fee of $80 and can be purchased at the entrance to each National Park, National Monument, etc. The pass is valid for 13 months.
Hovenweep NM - Square Tower
Description: As most of the best accessible ruins are located around the park's visitor center, we opted for the Square Tower Loop Trail during our visit.
The trail starts directly at the visitor center and leads in a large circle along the rim. The very well-preserved ruins are lined up here like a string of pearls. Basically, the trail is easy to walk and more or less flat. You only have to go down into the canyon once and back up again on the other side. However, as the path is quite well developed, this is not too difficult.
Trail length: approx. 2mi roundtrip
Altitude difference: approx. 32feet
Time needed: 2 hours
Difficulty level: easy
Our rating: Howenweep has never been on our routes through the southwest in all these years. Probably also because you can see similar ruins everywhere and they are not necessarily at the top of our list of priorities. However, we were pleasantly surprised by the trail. The ruins are really impressive and you can learn many interesting things about the life of the indigenous people on the display panels. The trail was very varied and we had a lot of fun discovering all the different things here.
