Saturday – April 8 – Today was another beautiful day weather wise and another interesting day touring wise. We started out by visiting Walnut Canyon which is a National Park and contains cliff dwellings built by the Sinagua over 900 years ago.

As the park ranger said, to see the cliff dwellings you have to descend into the canyon and it is 244 steps down, and also 244 steps up! Off we went and the walk down wasn’t too bad, there are a few spots where there are benches if you need a rest, but I didn’t need to use them on the way down.

The Sinagua people used the overhangs on the cliffs to build their pueblos and built walls to divide these overhangs into separate rooms. The walk was along the cliff ledge and you traveled from Canada to Mexico on the walk in terms of climate and vegetation, from large pine trees to desert areas. We also saw a number of large eagles flying over the canyon. Having a large fear of heights I found the walk very nerve racking as well as very interesting and just can’t imagine these people hundreds of years ago traversing up and down the sides of the canyons. The walk up was okay and we stopped to rest a few times so made it up and down quite easily. I thought I had had my exercise for at least the next 5 days. Not quite!

After Walnut Canyon we went to Sunset Crater. Sunset Crater was created by a volcano over 900 years ago and is 1000 feet high and looks something like a perpetual sunset. It was interesting to see the sides of the crater all black from the lava and there were extremely large pieces of lava rock from the volcano. We did a .5 km walk to look at the lava rock and the side of the crater. The side of the crater is basically bare as very little grows on the lava.

There is a 34 mile loop drive from Sunset Crater to Wupatki which is another pueblo ruin built during the 11th and 13th centuries. Along this drive there were wonderful views of the Painted Desert, it is just unbelievable the different landscapes we can see in one day. The Wupatki pueblo was totally different from Walnut Canyon but very interesting also. To get there was a bit of a walk but at least it wasn’t down the side of a canyon! At this point I decided I had had my exercise for the next week.

We got home after 7, had dinner and were in bed early as we were very tired.