Anasazi Pueblos

Our Fall trip for 2019 takes us back five years to the Second Mesa in Arizona which was our first big post-retirement road trip.

We began, as we do, with a short visit to Palm Desert. From there we spent a night in Flagstaff and ended up on Second Mesa on the evening of September 6.

Sharon, the master logistician scheduled us for only 120 miles between Flagstaff and here and so as we traveled we were free to wander, and by pure happenstance we turned off Highway 89 at Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monuments.

Saguaro Cactus in the desert

Well, that opened us up to an entire society of farmers in this area, the structures they created, and what remains. Around the year 1100 CE there emerged here a trading community that would number in the thousands and brought together three distinct Anasazi peoples. Today there are ruins of half a dozen separate pueblos, the largest of which was made up of a hundred dwellings. Others were smaller and all of them have been carefully conserved and interpreted by the National Park Service.