MONUMENTS Ruins, natural wonder abound

The desert landscape includes a volcano that erupted in 1064.
By CATHY SECKMAN
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
National monuments can be as small as the local state park, or nearly as big as a national park. They don't usually have lodges and campgrounds, but there's always a gift shop.
Each monument surrounds and protects some spectacular natural wonder, presenting it to the public like a picture in a frame.
We visited half a dozen national monuments on a recent trip to Arizona and Utah. Besides natural wonders, many of them showcase pre-Columbian ruins.
North of Flagstaff are Wupakti and Sunset Crater Volcano national monuments. To the east is Walnut Canyon, and to the south, halfway between Flagstaff and Phoenix, is Montezuma's Castle.
Wupakti National Monument safeguards a collection of 800-year-old pueblos, some of them set into box canyons and some crowning widely spaced hilltops.
Walking out to the ruins is like walking into the past, into the everyday lives of the Sinagua Indians.
"Sinagua," or "without water," is the name Spanish explorers gave to the long-vanished Indians who once lived in the dry land and left their dwellings behind.
The Sinaguas are thought to be ancestors of the Hopis. "Wupakti" is Hopi for "long cut house."
Wupakti Pueblo, the biggest in the park, is a canyonside sprawl of handmade stone and clay buildings, some restored and some in partially excavated ruins.
An interpretive trail runs around the base of the ruin, and it's easy to picture a busy community filling the pueblo with conversation and laughter.
Sleeping rooms, storage spaces, play areas and ceremonial kivas are jumbled together in a pattern that must have made sense to the Sinagua, but just leaves us wondering.
Volcano crater
A few miles away is Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, containing an 8,000-foot volcano that had its center blown out just before the Battle of Hastings.
The volcano was protected from climbers, pumice miners and souvenir hunters in 1930, and today is an interesting geological feature of the desert landscape.
Some archaeologists believe the volcano's eruption in 1064 changed the ecology of the surrounding area, allowing a small population explosion as dry farming became more viable.
The volcano, topped by its perfect open crater, looms over the moon-like landscape of the Bonito Lava Flow. Several interlocking trails wind through the lava, allowing visitors a close-up look at long-ago violence.
Walnut Canyon is probably the most fascinating in the group of national monuments, because that's where the cliff dwellings are.
The Sinagua Indians tended to build at the edges of canyons for reasons that aren't clear -- perhaps for defense, or protected farmlands -- possibly to take advantage of solar heat in the winter.
In Walnut Canyon, they went to extremes with the idea, and 800 years later, we tourists can only shake our heads in amazement at their audacity.
The canyon is 350 feet from top to bottom, and the sides are a jumble of shallow limestone caves and sheer drop-offs.
The cliff-dwellers climbed down to the caves, closed them off with hand-built stone and clay walls, and lived there, inches from drop-offs that plunge hundreds of feet to the rocky floor of the canyon.
Life back then
They used wooden ladders and precipitous footpaths to get around, and archaeologists speculate that the farmers among them spent days at a time away from home because the fields were too far away to allow coming home every night.
They didn't try to excavate the shallow shelves or extend them; they just used what was available. One shelf might hold three connected rooms and a small storage area.
Along a narrow path and 15 feet up a steep slope, two more rooms fill another shelf. One, two - maybe even four or five families would have shared those rooms, spending most of their time out on the minuscule ledges or working the nearby fields.
The park service has expanded the trails the Indians used, making them safe for tourists, but has otherwise tried to protect the integrity of the cliff dwellings.
Souvenir hunters long ago carried off the contents of the caves, but enough remains to give us tantalizing hints of the Sinaguas' daily lives.
Using the nine-tenth-mile Island Trail Loop, you can descend about 180 feet into the canyon, passing dozens of cliff dwellings. Looking across the narrow canyon, you can see dozens more of the stone walls that close off the shallow caves.
There must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of people living here at one time, bringing the canyon alive as they clambered up and down their thin ladders from cave to cave.
From the bottom of the trail, there are 240 steps back up to the Visitor Center. The steps are broken at intervals by natural limestone ledges, where tourists can stop to catch their breath and feel thankful that they don't have to live in cliff dwellings.
One of the most elaborate cliff dwellings is in another national monument, Montezuma Castle. Montezuma never went there, and it isn't really a castle, but early European settlers liked to think so.
The Sinagua Indians built the five-story complex in the 12th century. It stands dramatically 100 feet above Beaver Creek in a deep limestone cliff recess.
Tourists are no longer allowed to climb up to it, but just looking is almost enough. A large diorama along the paved footpath shows the castle in its heyday, filled with farming families who climbed down the 100-foot cliff daily to tend their irrigated fields in the creek bottom.
Also in the park are the ruins of a 45-room, six-story building built against the base of the cliff. Tourists are allowed to enter these rooms, but are cautioned not to disturb the sites.