Tuesday – April 11 – Today was a gorgeous day, a far cry from yesterday. Steve & Cheryl picked us up about 9 and we headed south to Motezuma Well, which is a national site and very unusual. It is a sink hole which is about 55 feet deep, has a constant year round temperature of 75 degrees and is fed from springs in the bottom.and a small 150 foot cave at pond level allows water to drain out at the rate of 1100 gallons per minute. Montezuma Well provides a unique aquatic environment for plant and animal life and because of high concentrations of carbon dioxide there are no fish found at the well. We saw many very large turtles lying on rocks around the water and quite a few ducks. Apparently it is the end of the season for ducks but in March there are many different species stop at the well.

We left Montezuma Well and went on to Motezuma Castle which is a five-story, 20 room cliff dwelling nestled into a limestone recess high above Beaver Creek. It served as a "high-rise apartment building" for prehistoric Sinagua Indians over 600 years ago and is amazing. They used ladders to access the dwelling and also to move from level to level in the dwelling. It's not a castle and Montezuma was never there, nevertheless that is its name.

We then went on to Jerome, the old mining town built on Cleopatra Hill. When we were there last week we were too late to visit the shops, but we were earlier today so had a late lunch then wandered through the stores. It is a very artistic community and there are a lot of locally made items which were very interesting. We got home about 7:15 so another long day.

On the way back we saw two large herds of elk along the side of the interstate, dusk is a bad time around here for elk so we were thankful we saw them along the side and not on the interstate.