Art Hutchinson, the superintendent of Hovenweep National Monument, was driving toward the monument’s entrance gate Friday morning when he saw the truck speeding toward him. Moments later, he heard a rapid series of pops.

"I knew I was being shot at," he said early Friday evening.

Hutchinson said he steered his white government car into the ditch and ducked. The gunman, firing an automatic rifle, sprayed the car, the road and the ditch with bullets. Hutchinson said he thought of his wife and two daughters and the handful of people at the ranger station he had just left. He asked himself if this was the end.

It wasn’t. None of the bullets touched Hutchinson. Two bullets damaged the car. He later counted dozens more on the road.

Hutchinson, 47, of Mancos, recounted the terrifying moments in a cellular telephone interview from the ranger station at Hovenweep. Just outside the monument, more than 100 police officers from four states searched for the gunmen who attacked Hutchinson, wounded two sheriff’s deputies and killed a Cortez police officer.

A dozen National Park Service law-enforcement rangers from four Four Corners-area national parks rushed to Hovenweep to help.

Hutchinson closed the park late Friday morning. He had received word that the fugitives might be heading toward the park, so he drove down Pleasant View Road to close the gate.

He was thinking he would park his car sideways across the gate and climb up on a nearby hill to watch for the flatbed truck authorities said the fugitives had stolen. About two miles west of the ranger station, he saw the truck coming toward him.

After shooting at Hutchinson, the suspects ignored the ranger station and fled into the canyon country.

"I grew up in central Colorado, where nobody shoots at each other," he said. "And here we are in the remote area of Utah, in what you think is the safest place in the world."

Hovenweep, on the Colorado-Utah border, is one of the smallest and least-used units of the National Park System. The 780-acre park houses clusters of stone towers built in the 1200s by the same ancestral Puebloan civilization that built the ruins at Mesa Verde National Park, 30 miles east. The nearest telephone line is 15 miles away.

"People come for solitude," Hutchinson said. "It’s a pretty place. Sometimes you wish the problems of society would stay away from special places."

Besides Hutchinson, the only other people in the park were a Mesa Verde crew performing archaeological work, a Kansas State University research team taking photographs for an educational CD-ROM, a couple from Alaska who had come to camp, a college student working at the monument for the summer, a retired schoolteacher who serves as the campground host and a woman who sells books at the ranger station for a nonprofit museum association. All were evacuated.

The superintendent said the attack didn’t fully sink in until hours later.

"I called my wife and kids and said `I love you,’" he said. "I was glad I was there to be able to make the call."