Before heading down to Mesa for some Merrill festivities, we decided to have a little family vacation in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona. ...I had this all written up and somehow it didn't save :( so now it has taken me a month and a half to sit and rewrite it...
We began our trip Monday night by driving to Flagstaff. We got an early start Tuesday morning and drove to Wupatki National Park. We walked through their first main ruin.
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| We couldn't find Scott's hat, so we got him this one and he kept it on! We felt like that alone made it worth the purchase |
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| We loved how they used the natural (HUGE) rocks as part of their buildings. |
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| As always, we were amazed at the skill of the builders. Such precision! |
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| Scott cutely holding onto his cool new hat |
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| Stan in front of the ruins with the Painted Desert in the background. They believe, because of what they found in the rooms during excavation, that this particular site was mostly storage and not necessarily living spaces. |
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| Neat doorway. As a side note, they know that the Basque lived here temporarily in the late 1800's, neat huh? |
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| This is a ball court. We haven't really seen these in New Mexico much, but there was one down at Casa Grande. Basically they don't fully know the function of these but believe some kind of games were played here as well as it was a possible gathering or marketplace. |
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| This was super interesting. I'm not going to pretend to be able to understand what a blowhole is well enough to explain it, so check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowhole_%28geology%29 or this blog has a picture of how strong the air coming out was http://roy-and-marilyn.blogspot.com/2014/09/wupatki-national-monument.html |
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| Scott and I waiting for Stan while he checked out a spot below |
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| Again notice the huge rock that was already there that they incorporated into their building |
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| Looking down the row of ruins |
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| Thank you to the nice lady sitting on the bench who took family this picture for us. |
We drove through the rest of Wupatki Monument and then decided we needed to get off the grid a little and have an adventure. We took our Corolla on a little off-roading trip to a spot where we stopped and parked for a hike. The road/dirt in the area was a fairly fine cinder rock that Scott got right busy and played in while we had lunch and packed up.
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| Look what I'm playing with! |
When we got all packed up, Scott was so happy to get in his carrier for which we were grateful for because of his anti carrier attitude the Saturday before.
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| Family selfie pic to start the hike |
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| Look back at the car |
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| My handsome fearless leader |
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| Scott kept pointing around and saying "Wow!" |
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| And then he promptly fell asleep |
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| We loved that as we slowly climbed there was a sea of green of junipers. |
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| A picture of the crazy cinder rock we walked through |
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| Looking out the wash below the ruin. |
As we headed up the hill, we started to see lots of pottery shards, nothing you would find at a national monument site.
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| On some of the pottery, you could see a lip that showed it was either at the base the top of the jars |
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| Stan checking our location with our Topo Tracker app. |
We loved the various designs on the pottery
And then we found the ruin.
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| A kiva |
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| Mounds of ruin |
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| They had a nice view |
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| Stan in front of the rooms |
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| This ant hill spit up a lot of shards |
We headed down into the wash and began to look along the walls to see if we could see any petroglyphs.
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| This was the first one we found, a square spiral |
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| Stan continued to walk along the wall and found this rock that looked like it had been used as a grinding stone. |
As Stan turned to tell me about the stone he saw this:
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| !!!!!! |
We saw lots more, but nothing quite as neat as the one above
We decided it was finally time to head back but first stopped for a little snack and break.
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| Scott wanted some of my apple |
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| And Stan's cookie, because the two in his hands weren't enough |
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| My Two handsome boys |
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| And we came upon what looked like a little tumbleweed farm |
We headed to the other side of Flagstaff to find the Lava Cave.
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| The forest was beautiful in this area |
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| I thought it was a longer walk to the entrance than it was, so we started with Scott in this carrier. And that is not a mouthful of teeth Scott has, he was eating a cookie, by stuffing the whole thing in his mouth. I didn't know when I took the picture... |
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| We met some guys coming out of the cave and they took a picture for us real quick |
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| Had to make sure Scott was going to be nice and warm while down in the cave |
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| Here is a map of what we hiked through. Pretty crazy what nature creates! |
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| Ice at the beginning of the tunnel |
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| Starting our descent. It was super steep right at first |
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| Then opened up and pretty much flat the rest of the way |
The next morning we got up and at it again by heading to Walnut National Monument
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| Luckily, Scott was still excited to start the day |
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| It was pretty amazing to think about these Indians living in these cliffs. |
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| Can you see their houses??? |
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| They were everywhere! |
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| And some more |
There was a trail that led down into the canyon. There was an island-esque land in the middle of the canyon that the trail went around with Indian ruins all along it.
One of our favorite memories of this trip was when Scott became more popular than a movie-star. A bus of Chinese tourists (so Stan could understand them), had arrived at the same time we had. Some of them got on the trail before we did and so they were on their way back as we were one our way down. Each of them excitedly pointed at Scott and said things like "It's a baby!". One man in particular was quite funny. He stop his friends and excitedly point at us as he passed his friends that were behind us saying there was a baby up ahead. One time, we stopped and turned to look and he motioned for us to wave as he took a picture of us from above...wish we could have gotten a copy ;)
The following pictures are from along that trail:
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| Looking out at the San Francisco Peaks from the visitors center at Walnut Canyon |
We headed back to Sunset Crater park and were a little disappointed to learn that we really couldn't get close to it, we decided that we were hot and tired and that maybe it was time to just start heading down to Mesa. We took two last pictures and made an impromptu stop at the ruin of Montezuma's Castle
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| San Francisco Peaks |
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| Sunset Crater |
It was just a short drive down to Montezuma's Castle.
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| This is probably my favorite picture of the whole trip. Cute boy with his dad |
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| There used to be a bunch of rooms built here. |
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| In front of Beaver Creek near the ruins |
And that folks, is a wrap of that little family vacation. It was so much fun! Scott was pretty good overall. We headed to Mesa to spend some time with my family and see Jeff and Jessie get married!
