Ancient Ruins

What do you do when Christmas break is approaching, you have a Best Western free hotel night voucher about to expire, and you're itching to get away? If you're me (and last time I checked, I am), then you look at a map to see where the closest national park units are that you haven't been to yet *AND* you price hotels for the most expensive place to cash in the voucher. That narrowed down the choices to...

San Francisco, ~375 miles or 6 hours away. We could visit Point Reyes National Seashore, Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, and Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site. The latter two have limited hours and require advance reservations, so that option was not looking too promising on such short notice.

Or...

Sedona, ~525 miles or 8 hours away. Besides the beautiful red rocks that we've heard about, we could also visit two ancient ruins, Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot. The family was up for it and a room was available, so we were set! The only caveat was that we had to be home for the majority of the break so that the 8th grader could work on his Rube Goldberg project with his buddies. School ruins everything!

So, we hit the road after R got off work late yesterday afternoon and rolled into the Phoenix area about midnight mountain time. I wasn't sure how far we could get since we were leaving so late, so instead of making advance reservations, we just called a hotel in Peoria when we were close. It helped that M and J were quite chatty in the car - they can be pretty entertaining when they aren't tuned out with their electronics!

Took this image from the internet - we weren't about
to stop on the interstate to get a picture!

After a late breakfast this morning, we were back on the road. On our way north on I-17, we passed an elaborately decorated juniper tree in the middle of nowhere. My Roadside America app called it the "Mystery Christmas Tree." Evidently someone has decorated this tree every December for the past 30 years. Pretty cool!

Our first stop was Montezuma Castle National Monument. This site preserves dwellings built by the Sinagua culture between 1100 and 1425 AD.

Early visitors to the monument could climb ladders to explore the cliff dwelling, but due to extensive damage public access was restricted in 1951. I was surprised to find out that this unit receives almost 1000 visitors a day, probably due to its proximity to the interstate and the misnomer drawing curious people - it's not a castle, and Montezuma & the Aztecs had nothing to do with this site!

A little further north from Montezuma Castle is Montezuma Well. This is a natural limestone sinkhole through which 1.5 million gallons of water flow daily from two underground springs. The water flows out of one end of the well through the limestone and emerges on the other side, running into an ancient irrigation ditch.

Cliff dwellings are perched just beneath the rim on the left

Sections of this ditch are over 1000 years old

Ollas (jars) excavated from the site

After a quick lunch at Sonic (where a nice carhop on roller skates brought out our totally messed up order!), we drove about 30 minutes northwest to visit Tuzigoot National Monument. This monument preserves an ancient 110-room pueblo also built by the Sinagua culture about 1000 AD.

Jr. Ranger booklets in hand!

View of the pueblo and Verde Valley from the top

From here, it was a beautiful drive up Route 89A to our (free!) hotel in Sedona, with the setting sun and red rocks giving us a great show...

Wow!