Wupatki National Monument

The road to Wukoki Pueblo
Black cinders still blanket the ground for many miles surrounding Sunset Crater Volcano.

Wukoki Pueblo
Yet only shortly after the volcano went silent around 1100AD, people settled into the area building pueblos on the rocks and cultivating corn, beans and squash below in the ash enriched soil.

View NE from Wukoki Pueblo
What a curious place to build a farming community with hot, dry summers and limited water. In this area only a few seeps and springs existed with the Little Colorado River 5-10 miles away.

Wukoki Pueblo
Yet these people shaped their lives to the land. Using the red sandstone outcroppings as a base masons mortared together natural stone blocks as bricks to shelter their families.

Metate, stones for grinding corn
It’s believed that the women built and maintained the home, made pottery, gathered wild plants and prepared food while the men tended the crops, hunted and wove textiles.

Wupatki Pueblo

An open community room may have served for public ceremonies.

Nalakihu and Citadel Pueblos
High walls on the north and west sides help protect from prevailing winds. Terraced rooms to the south and east bathed in winter sun. Flat roofs caught water.

Box Canyon Dwellings
Rooms were added as the family grew.

Lomaki Pueblo
Pueblos dotted the rocky landscape. By 1190AD, as many as 2,000 people lived within a days walk of Wupatki Pueblo, probably one of the largest pueblos in the area.

Lomaki Pueblo
Archeologists are undecided who the people of Wupatki were. Yet the Hopi tell many stories about the migration of their clans.

San Francisco Peaks from Citadel Pueblo
“...for us life is shrouded in mystery and the world defies explanation...humans do not need to know everything there is to be known. The human past, we feel, is a universal past. No one can claim it, and no one can ever know it completely.”
--Rina Swentzell, Pueblo Santa Clara

Wupatki National Monument definitely captured my heart and spirit. The energy of the ancestors surrounds. Pause and listen to the wisdom of the soul.

I floated along on today’s journey through, yes Joan the Painted Desert, and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. I’ll post these when I get a chance because tomorrow I’m off to....Oh No, I lost my connection. LOL ;-)

Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument

Serene Ponderosa Pine Forest entering the monument
The Native people living northeast of Flagstaff must have wondered what made the ground shake under their pithouses and farming fields nearly 900 years ago during the birth of a volcano.  Read more here.

Cameron Trading Post Arizona

Hello all from the Cameron Trading Post, where the sun finally shined today.

I visited Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monuments today. Took hundreds of pics.

Unfortunately, the WIFI I'm using will disapear as soon as I move across the street to camp. Oh well. I'll post it all later.

Tomorrow Kanab Utah.

Have a great weekend.

Sky Watch Friday - Parked in the Desert

When I was at Meteor Crater’s old visitor center Tuesday I parked in this lot also. At least my old rig wasn’t full of bullet holes.

For more views of skies from around the world or to share your own go to Sky Watch Friday by clicking here.

Walnut Canyon National Monument Arizona

San Francisco Peaks – west on I40 to Flagstaff Arizona
The wind continued to gust yesterday as I left Meteor Crater for Walnut Canyon NM.  Read more.

Meteor Crater Arizona

San Francisco Peaks west of Meteor Crater
50,000 years ago a vast unbroken plain stretched for miles east of Flagstaff. An iron-nickel meteorite weighing several hundred thousand tons and about 150 feet across hurtling at about 26,000 miles per hour slammed into this Arizona plain with an explosive force greater than 20 million tons of TNT. The meteorite disintegrated during impact through vaporization, melting and fragmentation leaving behind a crater 700 feet deep and over 4,000 feet across.

Meteor Crater
In the 1890s the chief geologist of the US Geological Survey concluded the crater was of volcanic origin. This idea held for two decades.

Cross section of Meteor Crater
From 1902 to 1929, Daniel Barringer, a mining engineer who believed that a meteor impact created the crater attempted to find a giant meteorite to mine the iron from. A decade later, and after Daniel’s death, the Barringer family partnered with the surrounding Bar T Bar Ranch and built facilities to provide views of the crater to the public.

Ruins of original visitor center

Raven's nest in old observatory tower
Finally in 1960, Dr. Eugene Shoemaker an astrogeologist, proved that the crater was created by a giant meteor impact. Later Shoemaker and others discovered two new minerals at the crater, coesite and stishovite. Both of these are created under extremely high pressure and had not before been identified in nature. They have now been discovered at other geological features called astroblems.

Current visitor center
Apollo astronauts trained here prior to landing on the moon because of the similar terrain. They learned that ejected material found on the rim often originated below the crater’s surface. In 1968 Meteor Crater was designated a Natural Landmark.

Visitor center courtyard and crater rim trail
Craters are clearly seen on our moon and other planets. Most impact sites on Earth have been leveled by erosion. Meteor Crater is not the largest impact site but is has sustained very little erosion.

The wind was gusting up to 45 miles per hour and the guided mile walk was cancelled. Thank goodness for hand rails on the observation areas or I might have been blown into the crater. You are not allowed to hike into the crater, or gather rocks.

From the brochure: “The vast floor of the Crater is large enough to accommodate 20 football games being played simultaneously as over two million fans watch from the sloping walls of the impact site!”

All the technical information comes from the Meteor Crater brochure, I’m no astrogeologist, yet.

Next stop Walnut Canyon National Monument.

US 89A North - Yarnell to Meteor Crater Arizona

Everything glowed today, and the photos just don’t show it.

Finally left home at 11:30am. I’m really not a morning person but had planned for a little earlier. Oh well, got to visiting with Berta and the morning flew by.

Sorry about the windshield reflection
Just a tiny bit of snow to glow on the Bradshaw Mountains south of Prescott.

Headed up over the Black Mountains... (The junipers glowed in the sun.)

...and down...

through Jerome, an adorable old mining tourist town clinging to the mountain side.

Continued down into the Verde Valley and the whole valley seemed to glow.

North through Sedona, too rich for me to stop in. Yet the red rocks had a glow all their own.

I was driving a curvy road
Followed Oak Creek winding up the canyon through some amazing rock layers.

Oak Cree Canyon
I felt surrounded by a glow.

Topped out into a Ponderosa Pine forest. They always glow for me.

East of Flagstaff the golden land stretches far.

Now here I sit at the Meteor Crater RV Park try repeatedly to post so I can start reading your blogs. This WIFI keeps knocking me around, sometimes slower than dial-up.

Tomorrow, the Crater.
I’m all aglow.

My World Tuesday - The Gypsy life of a seasonal Park Ranger at Grand Canyon National Park

Ranger Gaelyn
After hiking rim-to-rim across the Grand Canyon during training I could intelligently talk to visitors about the challenge involved. Down is optional, up is mandatory.  Read more...

Happy Easter

I caught the Easter Bunny in my yard this morning.