While the Grand Canyon draws the majority of visitors to Northern Arizona, other dramatic, yet less-visited landscapes in that part of the state tell epic stories of earthmoving geological events and deities that Indigenous people of the region revere.
HikesAZ, CC BY-SA 2.0
Cliff Dwelling
Chuck Place - Alamy
Pottery shards at the Keet Seel Ruins
Keet Seel
After climbing the wooden, seventy-foot ladder, standing on solid ground, legs finally still, I notice the alcove’s acoustics, which amplify every word. But we keep our voices down, subdued by the empty doorways cut from stone, pictographs daubed on the back wall, and pots as old as Europe’s cathedrals sitting on a beamed rooftop as if their owners left only yesterday. It feels pleasant in here, out of the sun. I imagine the long-ago residents. Their dwelling shaped them, as ours does us.
An extremely dry climate and the rock overhang make Keet Seel, 140 miles north of Flagstaff, one of the Southwest’s best-preserved cliff dwellings. Built around 1100 AD, it housed 150 people before being abandoned in 1300 AD. Tsegi Creek gouged the band-shell alcoves and undercuts from Keet Seel Canyon’s Navajo sandstone. Some 800 years ago, Ancestral Puebloans likely used these as shelters because they concentrated the winter sun and were so easily defended. At mile 6, look up to see cascades flowing over purplish Kayenta sandstone ledges—sweet music on sweltering days. Rewarded at your destination, you pull off the trail at a creekside Gambel oak grove to camp (first-come, first-serve; there’s room for everyone). Scan for colorful potsherds (Keet Seel means “Broken Pottery” in the Navajo language), but don’t take any, of course. Haul in all your water; drinking from the creek isn’t allowed. A Navajo ranger onsite in the afternoons gives a guided tour of the cliff dwellings. You can also do this as a long day hike or explore the Betatakin cliff dwellings closer to the trailhead. In either case, reservations are required and can be obtained from the Navajo National Monument visitor center.
For more information, visit nps.gov/nava.
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NPS - Public domain
Recreational Area Lee's Ferry
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James, George Wharton - Public domain
House build by John D. Lee
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Ray Redstone, CC BY-SA 4.0
Hiking Trail Along The Colorado River At Lees Ferry
Paria River Mouth
Near the historical site of a ferry—Lees Ferry, also the launch point for modern Grand Canyon river trips—slumbers Lonely Dell, a Mormon pioneer orchard and homestead. Squeezed by jagged terraces and talus slopes, the Paria’s muddy flow ricochets between house rocks before it joins the Colorado. Hard to imagine that in 1871 sixty head of cattle were herded down this gash in the earth. How the walls must have rung with cows bawling at the land’s bitterness! The first Anglo to stare dumbfounded at these features was John Doyle Lee, after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had ordered him to establish a Colorado River ferry at the Paria’s mouth. Lee had been scapegoated for the Mountain Meadow Massacre during which a wagon train of settlers had been attacked and all adults killed. Reluctantly, the renegade obeyed his call of duty: to stay out of sight. He disappeared for a spell into No-White-Man’s and No-White-Woman’s Land, secure between scalloped reefs, and started the crossing business with a boat Major John Wesley Powell had abandoned during his Grand Canyon explorations.
If you have time and energy to spare, trace the Colorado’s shore by the ferry upstream to the challenging four-mile Spencer Trail switchbacking up the Vermilion Cliffs for a condor-eye view of the remaining miles of Glen Canyon below its dam and distant Page. Test the resounding of the Echo Cliffs across, named by a young boatman on Powell’s expedition. For a river perspective, you can book half-day floats from the dam to Lees Ferry with an outfitter in Page.
For more information, visit nps.gov/places/historic-district-river-trail.htm, nps.gov/places/spencer-trail-wayside.htm and nps.gov/places/lonely-dell-ranch-historic-site.htm.
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Larry D. Fellows
Sunset Crater
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Discover Flagstaff
Sunset Crater Hiking
Sunset Crater
As you drive south from the Cameron trading post, toward Flagstaff and the southwestern rim of the Colorado Plateau, cinder and jagged basalt oust the Painted Desert’s sinuous shale. The blond grasslands transected by Highway 89 appear torched, hardened with lava veins, blackened with pustules and scabs like charred skin. While this area of the North American tectonic plate was sliding across a hotspot in the planet’s mantle, molten rock pushed through fissures and cracks, oozing from the surface, or, mixed with gases, lobbing fiery mayhem mile-high. With the crust steadily inching northeastward, volcanoes boiled up, geysered, and fizzled, and the San Francisco Volcanic Field stretched into a 50-mile belt of more than 600 vents.
Near the crest where the highway starts dropping into town, Sunset Crater marks this ground’s most recent violent birthing, which occurred during the late fall or winter of 1064–1065 C.E. The event for miles around scorched prehistoric pit houses and filled them with cinders; lava undoubtedly mantles other hidden ones, a scattered Pompeii. No human bones were found at such habitations, so it appears that the local Sinagua had ample warning. Major John Wesley Powell in 1892 named the thousand-foot-high, symmetrical cone for its cap of rust-colored, oxidized, scoria spatter, deposits that make it appear bathed in evening light. When actual sunsets intensify the tinted layer, it seems as if the rim were about to ignite.
You can explore this national monument on short walks on groomed paths. Please don't hike off-trail, because fragile desert vegetation—including a penstemon that grows nowhere else—and even volcanic features are easily, irreparably damaged. One of the highlights amid lava bombs and cinder fields is a sinkhole cave so insulated that it preserves ice for much of the year. The Hopis consider this place sacred: the lair of the North Wind.
For more information, visit nps.gov/sucr.
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Khamson Sirimanivong
Wupatki National Monument family
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National Park Service
Wupatki National Monument
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Shen Pei
Wupatki National Monument
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Fredlyfish4, CC BY-SA 3.0
Wupatki Blowhole
Easily combined into a loop drive with the Sunset Crater excursion, Wupatki formed an ancient crossroads on the banks of the Little Colorado River, a major branch of the Grand Canyon. The Little Colorado here runs only seasonally, depending on rainfall and snowmelt. Wet or dry, it has attracted people for at least 11,000 years. Some Ice Age hunter lost a leaf-shaped, fluted spear point on the prairie close by, a dandy blade for killing mammoths; the bones of one surfaced not far from here.
The lower gorge enfolds the Sipapu, a travertine- dome spring from which the Hopis climbed after three previous worlds had been destroyed. Cut loose from this umbilicus—their most recent place of origin—they were set adrift in this fourth and final world. After they settled down, the Little Colorado linked Homolovi and the Hopi Mesas to the north with Wupatki, the Grand Canyon and points south. Goods, individuals and ideas trickled both ways, according to season and want. Tokens of far-flung trade—Mexican copper bells and scarlet macaws, seashells from the Pacific—traveled as far as Wupatki. The hundred-room pueblo squats on a rock knoll, a medieval fortress. Its Mesoamerican-type ball court is the northernmost of its kind. Between 500 and 1225 CE, the year they permanently abandoned Wupatki, evicted, most likely, by drought, thousands of people lived there or within a day’s walk, in outliers such as Wukoki and The Citadel. It is forbidden to explore the ruins on your own, but the visitor center schedules ranger-guided walks.
Another earth cavity on this umber plain deserves notice, formerly famous, drawing pilgrims, as yet another home of a wind god. A large tectonic fissure near the pueblo, one of several in the region, inhales and exhales through a blowhole only a few inches wide. As the outside temperature and barometric pressure change, air rushes through the opening at up to thirty miles per hour, forceful enough to levitate a plastic bag or to whip back the long hair of a person bending over the subterranean gale.
For more information, go to nps.gov/wupa.
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Steven Baltakatei Sandoval, CC BY-SA 4.0
Navajo Route 15 San Francisco Peaks
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Coconino National Forest
San Francisco Peaks
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Coconino National Forest, CC0
Abineau Trail on San Francisco Peaks
San Francisco Peaks
Qualifying Flagstaff as a true mountain town, six San Francisco Peaks crowd around their eminence, Humphreys Peak, which soars 12,637 feet above town. The climate on top of the state’s highest mountain can be arctic; the vegetation resembles tundra. In 1889, jack-of-all-trades scientist Clinton Hart Merriam developed his “life zones” concept on these slopes, the idea that characteristic plant and animal communities change with elevation changes—and 1,000 feet of elevation in this sense also roughly equal 300 miles in latitude. The panorama that rewards intrepid hikers on the final ridge after an almost 5-mile climb unscrolls to encompass the Painted Desert, distant Hopi mesas, canyons near Sedona and both rims of the grandest of canyons. Conversely, the range perched on the margins of the Colorado Plateau, can be seen for nearly 100 miles from any direction. The peak is a stratovolcano, like Japan’s Mount Fuji, steeper than shield volcanoes and estimated to have once reached nearly 16,000 feet. After winter storms, avalanches scour its gullies and ravines. Within minutes, rain can corn into hail, bouncing off rocks crusted with lichens. Lightning commonly strikes during summer afternoons. It is no surprise that weather gods are thought to dwell on these heights.
No fewer than 13 tribes hold sacred this blown-top upthrust, a place, for the Yavapai-Apache Vincent Randall, “where the Earth brushes up against the unseen world.” It’s a pilgrim destination, seasonal home of Hopi rain-bearing deities, one of four pillars that prop up Diné (Navajo) homelands and the cosmos. Sadly, the Diné name, Dook’oosłííd, “Its Summit Never Melts,” no longer fits. According to Hopi beliefs, Nuvatukya’ovi, the “Place ofthe High Snows,” is the home of a host of deities, one of whom is in charge of cold weather and the white gift that saturates the earth for the next year’s crops. The Kachina Peaks Wilderness honors the Hopi elemental spirits and the tribe’s links to this mountain fastness.
For more information, go to fs.usda.gov/r03/coconino.