We’re staying at a commercial RV park off I-40 in Gallup. It’s not much to see and yesterday was fairly cool and windy so we decided to try the off-road app again. We made it just over the brink of this hill on a forest road in Cibola National Forest. The road ahead was steep and muddy so Bud backed into this turn-around and we decided to survey on foot.
The road was thick, sticky mud and although we could get down this hill if we had to go up a hill like this we wouldn’t make it with our tires.
Too bad, since the land ahead was inviting.
Matey enjoyed our short walk. He freaked out a bit at the mud. We walked back through the trees because the road was so thick and slippery we didn’t think we could even walk up it. Matey was happy to get out of the mud, and was delighted to find a couple of snow patches to roll in.
So we turned back, another aborted off-road attempt, but at least we know the app works well. I was running on off-line maps because we were out of cell service, but it still gave me a bread crumb trace of our route. You can see from the red dots how far we went.
Rather than give up for the day we decided to do a paved route north of Gallup. I saw a route that went up the valley between the Defiance Plateau and the Chuska Mountains. Then it went over the mountains and back down the desert on their eastern side. This is just as we turned north into the valley at Window Rock, Arizona.
I wasn’t expecting a divided four-lane highway for Indian Route 12.
The valley turned out to be pretty spectacular.
It was hard to remember to take photos as we were driving along these beautiful red rock cliffs.
We passed miles of this red rock.
Then we came to a section with green rock. This is all Navajo Nation, what a spectacular place to live.
We stopped at a gas station. Bud talked to a local who at first thought Bud was a man he was meeting. When he found we were just sightseeing he told Bud to make a right about three miles up on a paved road. This is as we drove into the bowl surrounded by cliffs that he said was there. Sorry, I could not get a shot of this without the flare of the sun, but I still thought I should include this picture.
We stopped at a little pull-out to eat our lunch.
If you play this video with sound all you will hear is a bit of wind.
What a gorgeous spot. It was so nice of that man to share this.
Not too far north of that we crossed the mountains. This was a picnic area close to the pass. We were above 8000 feet and it was closed due to the snow.
There were trees and plenty of snow…
and another huge cliff of that grey-green rock.
Coming back down on the east side you could see a huge expanse of the desert.
You could even make out the Colorado Rockies in the distance.
When we came back from our windy day attempt to go off-roading in our Ram we saw a sign in the town of Springerville for Casa Malpais. I looked it up on-line and found that it was closed for the winter. Too bad – but wait, the listing said it opened in March, weather permitting. Well Friday was March 1st so I called. Yes, if the “feels like” temperature was above 40 they would have a tour. So I signed us up for the afternoon tour, as mornings have been well below 40.
We started at the Heritage Center in Springerville. After an introductory film featuring Zuni and Hopi elders, a bus took us a few miles outside town to the site.
Happily, Bud and I were the only ones on the tour. That’s our tour guide, Beth leading the way. Besides us there was her son, who was learning how to be a tour guide. It was great, a one to one guide to participant ratio! There are definitely compensations for being out of season.
Beth explained that when excavation started here the archaeologists had built a fairly direct trail up to the ruins, we would be returning that way. But while working they figured out that this was one of the original paths the people who lived here used. It was more winding but less steep.
On one of the lower terraces the people grew crops, including this small bush. This is desert wolfberry. Beth said it doesn’t grow here on its own, the farmers had to have planted it and it doesn’t grow from seed. So these little bushes are centuries old!
This curving wall was built along the first level.
Since this was a trading center and is mostly hidden from the river plains from which travelers would approach, some think the wall was built to help guide visitors to the pueblo.
As we approached the pueblo we passed this petroglyph. This is the one Beth said was a water strider. The rocks it was on were volcanic and porous. They hold water and there might have been standing water near this petroglyph. The sign announced “safe to drink”.
We continued up and came to the Great Kiva.
This is a better view, looking down on it after we left it.
We entered and exited through this passage. Beth explained that this was for the performers, probably holy men. Around the walls you can see benches. Sitting and standing here would be the participants, up to 200 men. They would have come down a ladder from the roof. Many of the participants would have traveled from other villages, as far fewer than that lived in this pueblo.
There were plenty of shards visitors had found here. These were laid out on a flat rock, like the ones at Rattlesnake Point. Beth told us the unglazed fragments were from everyday pottery. She called them their Tupperware. The glazed pieces were from trade or ceremonial pots, the special dishes.
This is the main part of the pueblo. The town of Springerville employed an archeological firm to excavate. They consulted both the Zuni and Hopi people, who live nearby and hold this ancestral home sacred. The Zuni and Hopi representatives asked that excavation be halted after fourteen of the sixty rooms were dug up. Thousands of artifacts were found, and all agreed they had enough information to answer the basic questions of who lived here and how they lived. Many artifacts are in the museum in town. Others are being held for research. The rooms were back-filled, and now the only work done here is stabilization and preservation.
We came to another rock with petroglyphs. See the large figure that is mirrored spirals meeting in a line? An archeoastronomer spent three years at the site and this is one of several solar calendars he found.
These are his pictures back at the museum. On the summer solstice a shadow is cast that follows the line in the spirals when the sun is at its zenith (which by the way, is not at twelve noon for everyone in a time zone).
The whole site is built on the lava outflow of an ancient volcano. The basalt is fissured. At the level of the main pueblo the fissures were plugged to form the floors of the rooms. Large fissures had openings in the plugs so the space below could be accessed for storage, a cool dry basement protected from vermin. This fissure, on the face of the cliff behind the village, had been made into a staircase. Beth said we could go up the stairs if we chose. We did.
The steps were uneven, but certainly sturdy as they have been carrying people for over 700 years.
It was a narrow space. This is Bud descending. These are one of only three such ancient staircases in the southwest. Two of them are at Casa Malpais.
From the top you could get a look at the fissured surface just north of the pueblo.
After we descended the stairs Beth pointed out the tall rock column separated from the cliff. Evidence shows that a young bird, probably eagle or owl, was tethered there. Once it was raised to adulthood the bird was sacrificed for its feathers. There is no evidence of any other animal sacrifice.
As we came down from the rooms we came to another large courtyard. This was thought to be a trading place and perhaps where the women and children gathered while the men were in the Kiva. This had an elaborate opening in its western wall that also served as a solar calendar. One side of the opening would cast a shadow on a prominent rock at sunset on the winter solstice. The other side on a different rock on the summer solstice.
The people who excavated and now preserve this site have great respect and a good relationship with the native peoples nearby. That’s fortunate because Beth was able to correct this sign. Not too many years ago a woman from the Acoma Pueblo came on a tour. The guide was explaining that this point on a lower terrace may have been a lookout as it gave a perfect view of the plains to the west. “No,” she said, “we have this at our Pueblo. It is a shrine to the Sunset God. There should be another place like this on the other side of the ridge, facing east, for the Sunrise God.” And there is.
We’ve been to a lot of ruins, but never before gotten the wealth of information from a guided tour. We loved it and are grateful to Beth and the town of Springerville for making it happen.
The wind finally died down on Wednesday and we could enjoy this park. I love that it has large, well made spaces. Each site has a roofed lean-to and a grill.
And each has a nice fire pit.
Matey and I have at least started all of the trails. He sometimes refuses to go further, and I don’t make him. He’s almost fourteen, has a heart murmur from a thickened valve and consequently an enlarged heart. I try to give him opportunities to walk, but if he wants to turn around I let him. We generally manage to walk two or three miles a day.
I am so impressed with how well these trails are made. They are all cleared of rocks and the native materials are used for steps, water diversions and little bridges.
There is a trail cutting across this hillside but since it’s made by rearranging the rocks that were there you can hardly pick it out.
Once you get to it, it’s easy to see and pretty easy to walk on, considering the hilly, rocky terrain it’s crossing. The construction here reminds me of the work done years ago by the CCC, and I appreciate it.
The trails wind around the flat topped hills here and afford some nice views.
There are mountain bluebirds here that I see almost every day. What a treat.
Wednesday we hiked up the petroglyph trail again. We found we had seen most of them. We found this rock with what are probably clan signs on it. The square with diamonds and 5 protrusions is a bear track, symbol of the Bear Clan. The rounded tracks below and to the upper left of it are probably for the Badger Clan.
There were nice views from there, too.
We noticked a ledge of rock that looked like it might have petroglyphs but didn’t see a trail. This morning (Saturday) I was looking at the trail map and saw there was one, so since the wind hadn’t started up yet we walked up there. I was excited to find this petroglyph I think looks like what we learned yesterday is a water strider and was carved to show places where there was drinking water. (More on that in my next post.)
Thursday we drove to the far end of the park to the Rattlesnake Point Pueblo ruins. The flat area that Matey and Bud are standing on is all part of the structure, but only the area under the roof is excavated.
Drifting sand has built up around the partially collapsed walls, but when this was built around the 1320’s it was built on top of the ground.
Today it sits near the edge of Lyman Lake,
but this would have been a floodplain of the Little Colorado River, giving the people land for crops. They grew the three sisters here; corn, beans and squash.
There were signs to help you interpret what was there, although I could not find the stone with the design pecked in it. There were also signs asking that you not take anything you found and not dig. Otherwise you were free to wander about.
The rooms were interesting. (Notice the tumbleweeds that have blown inside. I was unhappy to learn that tumbleweed is Russian thistle, an invasive species. So much for the nostalgia of the old west.)
What I liked best were the pottery shards and bones folks had found and left lying on flat stones for us to examine.
700 year old pottery that you could pick up and examine! There’s also a part of a modern cup and handle in there, but I wasn’t going to remove it. The site is being treated with respect, that’s great.
This afternoon the wind is blowing again. There is a wind and dust advisory for today and tomorrow, and tomorrow we leave so our exploring here is done.
We arrived Sunday afternoon at Lyman Lake State Park in eastern Arizona just as the wind started blowing. It has been blowing relentlessly ever since.
This is another pretty park…
and must be very popular in the summer with a huge beach,
boat ramps, and at 6,000 feet above sea level, summer temperatures in the eighties and nineties.
We are enjoying the wide open spaces but with the wind we’ve done very little exploring so far.
There are very well made trails…
and even petroglyphs and the ruins of a pueblo, but we have only been on part of two trails so far. We walked a bit Monday morning but the wind made it hard.
We’re trying out a new app for off-roading. We found this road that seemed appropriate for our four wheel drive pickup. It was about an hour away. Unfortunately, as the app says, the best times for this trail are spring, summer and fall.
That’s because it’s up in the White Mountains. In fact, Escudilla is Arizona’s third highest peak. There’s snow in those mountains, and though there was no snow on the road when we started, the melting snow had made the road solid mud. Fifteen or twenty miles through mud did not appeal. We tried a second road back down on the high desert. That was supposed to be on Bureau of Land Management land. After a mile or two we came to a fence and a cattle guard and a sign saying “Private Road, Written Permission Required”. So that was a bust.
The wind is supposed to stop tonight, so maybe we can get back out there and explore.
On Wednesday we had some rain so we decided not to try to see any archaeological sites. Instead we drove up to the little town of Jerome, perched on the side of Cleopatra Hill just west of us. Fortunately for us the rain stopped just as we arrived, the last of it making a rainbow.
Jerome was a mining town and the hillside it sits on is so steep the road to it fits tightly against a wall on the side of the hill, while the sidewalk hangs out in the air. There are no trucks over 50 feet allowed on the section of State Route 89A that goes through town. In the 1930’s erosion and the vibrations from the explosions in the mines caused many of the buildings to slip, including the jail which slid 200 feet across 89A.
Our first stop was the Audrey Headframe Park. A headframe is a structure that sits over a mining shaft. This one is made of wood and held three sets of pulleys over which cables ran to lift cargo cages. There were three sets of pulleys because the shaft itself was in three segments. The shaft was 1900 feet deep and the three segments were joined at horizontal hubs at several levels. The shaft and headframe were built in 1918 after James S. Douglas finally found an incredibly rich copper deposit.
The park lets you walk over the westernmost segment on a glass floor.
The floor flexed when Bud stood on it, so he moved to the edge to read the information.
The glass was cloudy so I took this picture through a grate at the edge of it. That’s what it looks like to peer down 1900 feet.
Even though it’s cloudy it is still pretty spooky to stand on the glass and look down.
Just so you know what you’re dealing with, this little drawing is posted inside the shed over the shaft. The line in the middle represents the depth of the shaft.
This shaft was used for ore, but similar shafts up to 1000 feet deep were used to transport people in contraptions like this.
The Audrey Headframe was the largest built by the United Verde Extension (UVX) Company. Ore hauled through this shaft yielded 320,000 tons of copper, 190 tons of silver and 5.3 tons of gold. The company made better than a 70% profit until the 1930’s when the price of copper dropped.
As went the mine, so went the town. At its peak there were 15000 people who lived here.
After the mine shut down the population dropped to less than 100.
Then in the 1960’s the hippies moved in, setting up art studios. People began to promote tourism and the Jerome Historical Society bought up much of the old downtown to keep it intact.
The Historical Society operates a Miners’ Museum in town and the hippie influence is there. Where else would you see an unvarnished exhibit on the prostitution that was prominent in the heyday and an authentic “sanitary car” from the mines? I highly recommend it, well worth the $2 admission. And it supports the 465 people that live in Jerome today.
When I wrote about City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico I identified this plant as an agave. It’s not. I had forgotten about seeing these at Big Bend National Park a couple of years ago. This is a sotol. I corrected my blog, but most of you are unlikely to see the corrected version. Being a plant person and someone who likes to have their facts straight, I decided to do a short blog to correct this. There are three groups of desert plants that have a globe of long stiff leaves and an inflorescence on a tall stalk. In general sotol leaves are narrower than the other two. But the easiest way to identify them is that they have a long column of flowers coming directly from the stalk, so when the flowers die you’re left with a dry inflorescence that looks like a bottle brush.
This is an agave. The inflorescence on an agave is branched, so it looks like a tree. This species may be what we call a century plant because it looks like the plant died once it bloomed. The leaves on an agave are also somewhat thicker.
Sometimes very thick.
The third one is this, yucca. The inflorescence can resemble agave, but if you look closely at the base you can see that yuccas grow tall. Their leaves form a globe on the top of the stem which is clad in downturned dead leaves. When they’re young the stem is not noticeable and they can be confused with agaves. But they get quite tall, and then the difference is obvious.
Thank you, I feel better now. (I’ve been waiting to do this until I got decent pictures of each of them. I was hoping to find them all on our tour of Saguaro National Park because they all grow there, but alas, not where we were.)
I had read an on-line article about the best Native American ancestral sites in Arizona and Montezuma Castle was one of them. This is another National Monument and we visited it on Thursday.
These cliff dwellings are along Wet Beaver Creek, one of a handful of waterways that flow year round in Arizona.
The area had some huge old sycamores, I couldn’t get the whole tree in the picture.
To protect the main structure this is as close as you were allowed to approach.
I appreciated that they were also protecting the trees.
The “castle” wasn’t the only dwelling at the site, just the best preserved. These homes were built around the same time as Tuzigoot, and were also part of what is now called the Sinagua culture. Sinagua means without water, but the ruins we saw were all along valleys with water.
Since you could no longer go up into the “castle” the National Park Service created this scale model which is on display at the site. The people who lived here also moved on around 1400. The Hopi claim them as ancestors and say the migration had spiritual roots.
Not far from Montezuma Castle is Montezuma Well. I found this one of the most fascinating sites we visited. Like the castle, the well has nothing to do with Montezuma and was home to people of the Sinagua culture.
About 1.6 million gallons of water flow up through the bottom and out through a tunnel on the side each day. The water is almost constant in volume and temperature (about 74 degrees F). The water coming up into the well has been making its way from the surface of the Colorado Plateau for more than 10,000 years. It comes up with such force that divers cannot descend more than 55 feet, where they meet a false bottom of boiling sand. Researchers have been able to send instruments another 65 feet below that.
There is a trail that leads down inside the bowl…
where you could see the where the water disappears into the tunnel dissolved through the side of the caldron.
Right by that opening was a small dwelling.
There is also a larger structure up on the wall on the opposite side of the well.
One wonders if they drank the water and what effect it might have had. There are no fish or amphibians because the dissolved carbon dioxide levels are 80 times normal. Only five unique species live here, a diatom (a one-celled plant), an amphipod which eats the diatoms, and a water scorpion and fresh water leech which feed on the amphipods. There is also a tiny snail. Pondweeds grow on the edges and ducks visit. In addition to the high levels of dissolved carbon dioxide, there are high levels of arsenic in the water. Arsenic has shown up in bones of animals that lived here.
Another trail led down the outside of the bowl where there were more ruins.
This is the outlet of the tunnel.
The people who lived here diverted some of that water through very narrow but deep canals to their crops. What a mixed blessing this water was, life giving, but mildly poisonous.
The brochure we got at Montezuma Castle that had information on that site and on Montezuma Well had a map that showed another nearby site, The V Bar V Heritage Site, but had no information on it. Unlike Montezuma Castle and Montezuma Well which are managed by the National Park Service (Department of the Interior), The V Bar V Heritage Site is managed by the National Forest Service (Department of Agriculture). We asked the docent about that one and she said it had petroglyphs, so we decided to go there the next day.
About all that’s left of the ranch is this beautiful chimney, built from local materials along with the ranch house in 1932.
A short walk down a manicured trail took you to a red rock wall with more than a thousand petroglyphs! Besides the number and excellent condition of these petroglyphs the site is unusual in the number of birds depicted. It will have a new name soon, The Crane Petroglyph and V Bar B Heritage Site. Then you’ll know from the name that this place is about petroglyphs.
The site is also unusual because all of the petroglyphs are of one style, called the Beaver Creek Style.
It also has a very elaborate panel with elements that are thought to be part of a solar calendar, marking the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes. There also may be figures indicating spring planting times.
This part of Arizona has proved to be beautiful and has a wealth of archeological sites. We have loved it.
Yesterday Bud suggested we rent an ATV in town. Vortex ATV Rentals set us up with a two-seater, a map and tablet with our route, a cooler, helmets and goggles and we were off.
We set out following the route. At first we were on a dirt road headed towards those distant cliffs.
We turned onto an OHV (off highway vehicle) Trail…
and drove into more rugged country.
We were back on a dirt road as we approached the cliffs. These are the famous red rocks of Sedona.
And they are beautiful.
After almost two hours we came to the site of the Honanki Cliff Dwellings.
There are a lot of people cooperating to preserve this space.
As we approached the ruins we walked through tall trees, so there was water here.
These ancient homes were built into the base of the red rock cliff,
they stretched along the cliff,
and were themselves made from the red rocks. Beautiful.
Not only were the dwellings stunning,
we loved seeing the pictographs.
I overheard a guide explaining some of these…
and wished we had a guide ourselves.
We left as per our route, on 9551, the Outlaw Trail.
We chose not to eat lunch at the ruins because there were too many people there. Whole truckloads, in fact.
We drove out until we got to a place where we could stop and eat on the upwind side of the dusty trail.
I tried to capture just how rough this trail was in spots.
You might be able to tell a bit from this far from professional video I took. Near the end I say, “Whoa, we hit something.” To which Bud replies, “Bottomed out.” And my phone kind of flies around.
We continued to drive through the beautiful country, down across this bit of a canyon,
until we got to the Power-line Trail. I think that was the most rugged.
We even had to open and close gates along the way. In one of the roughest sections, where the trail went down into a deep gulch and then back up again, we saw an SUV at the bottom. Bud backed away from the brink of the hill to allow him to come up. When he didn’t Bud drove down. It was a BMW and had been abandoned there. The bottom of the gulch wasn’t much longer than the car, his front and back bumpers were both nearly touching the ground. Sorry I didn’t get a picture, I was too busy holding on! It’s a mystery to me how he ever got it that far.
We figure we went about a hundred miles in all. It was a fun ride through some beautiful country and an unusual day for us.
About 15 minutes from our campsite is Tuzigoot National Monument.
This is the excavated ruins of a 119 room pueblo which we visited on Monday. It was built in stages, between about 1100 and 1300 CE.
It sits atop a hill…
with a view of the river plain around it and the distant mountains. Tuzigoot loosely means river bend. Of course we don’t know what the original inhabitants called it, but Apaches who worked on the excavation in the 1930’s named it that.
At the top of the structure some rooms were partially reconstructed. Today that wouldn’t be done because in carrying out the reconstruction some archeological information was no doubt lost.
It was interesting to see the building technique,
and it did give access to that view.
The small museum had some impressive pieces of pottery. The largest of these jars was probably close to three feet in diameter.
It was an enjoyable visit to a very interesting place.
This is our new campsite for the next week, we’re at Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood, Arizona. As soon as we had the trailer set up Matey and I took off for our first park reconnaissance.
This park has a lot of little trails that meander all over. We started out on the Arroyo Nature Trail and in a few hundred feet came across this flume. The flume carries the water of the Hickey Ditch…
over the arroyo. You can see the flume in the background. The arroyo also has water in it. The Hickey Ditch has been carrying water diverted from the Verde River to irrigate nearby land since 1874.
Not much further down the trail we came to the river. I had to stop and take a video to capture the sound of the water. The last time I’d heard flowing water was in Menard, Texas, over a thousand miles ago. It sounded beautiful to me and made me realize how wonderful it would sound to folks traveling in the desert. It’s no wonder this valley has been settled and farmed for a thousand years.
And with water comes trees. In this case big cottonwoods, hence Cottonwood, Arizona.
We walked a bit further and came back to the ditch.
The area along the ditch was also treed, though these trees were smaller.
Away from the life giving water the trees are gone, the now familiar desert plants are all that can grow.
On the Roam Again 