> You have the steep drop out of the mountains where the current helps you.

Where? What waterways off the Chuska Moutains have that volume and current? What's your proposed path?

There doesn't appear to be any viable stream coming off the east side of those mountains, and a look at the map shows the arroyos which do come off meet up with the Chaco Wash/Chaco River at 36.18128218922837, -108.54422009733341 at what Google Maps calls Coyote Wash. That's about 40 miles downstream of Chaco Canyon, eyeballing it.

(To verify, use https://apps.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ , go to that point, zoom out, and see that's the most upstream point where the washes from the Chuska mountains meets the Chaco River.)

Even if there was more water in the area so those arroyos were wet more often, the topology hasn't changed. And with more water, going upstream becomes harder.

According to the link I gave, many of the trees came from north of the San Juan River (the La Plata and San Juan Mountains). Please also describe that route to Chaco Canyon. It looks like the Chaco River meets the San Juan near Shiprock, at 36.77203098974645, -108.64872995405689 , which calls for some 80 miles of upriver travel, and that's after floating them downriver. Again, use the USGS map to verify this.

(BTW, I've done some hiking in New Mexico mountains. The creeks I saw were not enough to float logs, and had plenty of snags where trees and boulders were piled up. I find it hard to believe your proposed waterway even exists.)

Why do you think water transport was easier than carrying the logs, when this paper shows that carrying logs on foot isn't so difficult? And that the relevant technology was already present in the area?

> The July 23 picture is when you would transport the logs.

How deep do you think that water was on July 23? Those are backpacks on the bank, and it looks narrow enough to step across. So, perhaps a few inches? Likely not enven a foot.

How much muck and mud do you think is on the bottom? How do people pull those logs without having them drag on the bottom?

In any case, I think it's a false path to explore. The text points out that the current entrenched state is under 150 years old, citing Lieutenant Simpson's account of it being 8 feet with a depth of 1½ feet back in 1850, so using current pictures doesn't give the right interpretation.

> The rest of the journey is over flat terrain so "upstream" isn't very hard when you have the right conditions.

Walking on a sandy arroyo bottom isn't that easy when it's dry. I've never walked on one when wet. Everyone said it was dangerous, as indeed your re-posting of my link points out how the water rose 1.5 meters overnight.

What then are "the right conditions", and did they exist during the Chaco era?

In the history of humanity, how many people have floated massive numbers of logs upstream without animal or sail power? All the examples I can think of went downriver.

A goal of experimental archeology is to test if something is feasible. Not necessarily that it happened. Just because Thor Heyerdahl sailed from South America to Polynesia on a balsa tree raft doesn't mean that's how Polynesia was populated.

What are your examples showing that your proposed transport method is at least as feasible as using tumplines?