NOTES FROM THE ROAD


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A Last Sedona Trail for Now…


Revisiting the Honaki Ruins…


20 October 2019: Drove up Schnebly to catch a last Sedona sunset and then made the drive back down as night fell quickly as it seems to do in these waning days of autumn. Was a great ending to this segment of time in the southwest. Looking forward to the next time …



With the Ancient Ones…


Revisiting the Honaki Ruins…


20 October 2019: Closed the loop back to the Sedona area and decided to revisit the Honanki ruins site and go out on the trails on the west side for the afternoon. The ruins here are linked to the same culture and period as the others in this area and it was a bit like connecting up dots, traces of lost history which retain something of their mystery despite being so accessible…



Exploring around Tonto Basin…


Joined a few friends on the trail…


19 October 2019: Was a great opportunity to connect with some friends and get out on an unfamiliar trail in a different part of Arizona today, in the Tonto Basin along Gun Creek. Fun wheeling and a nice day catching up …



Out on the Rim…


Camping on the Mogollon Rim…


18 October 2019: Headed up to the Mogollon Rim to set up camp for the night in a location that seems like the top of the world. Out on the edge of the precipice looking down onto the magnificent landscape below it is really a bit of heaven…



A Favorite Trail…


Starting the day on Broken Arrow…


18 October 2019: Got out on the trail this morning at Broken Arrow, an “old favorite” that always delights. It was a great day to be out there despite the crowds, and was a good chance to get a feel for the Jeep…



Enjoying the Red Rock…


Looping around the scenic spots…


17 October 2019: Took some time to do a quick loop around some of Sedona’s most scenic vistas today, soaking up some energy and appreciating the natural beauty where red rock meets blue sky…



The Cliffdwellers…


Montezuma’s Castle…


16 October 2019: Continuing on the theme of ancient cultures, made a stop at what is called “Montezuma’s castle” though it has nothing whatsoever to do with Montezuma. It is a well-preserved site of another ancient pueblo, constructed into the walls of a cliff. There are additional ruins at the site which was once a sizeable community. The exact history of the people and the place remains a mystery, apart from the knowledge that it was built by the ancestral peubloans from the Sinagua group (a designation made by archaeologists, not how the people would have referred to themselves). Spending time visiting these traces of lost cultures raises so many questions that cannot be answered…



Looking for Traces…


Tuzigoot National Monument…


15 October 2019: Visited the old stone structures at Tuzigoot, the location of an ancestral puebloan archeaolgical site that has been restored and gives a sense of what was here before. While there is not all that much information available about the site’s history or the actual inhabitants, the very fact that it has been preserved allows us to connect a little deeper with all the unrecorded history of this land…



Back to Red Rock…


Around Sedona…


15 October 2019: It feels good to be back to the red rock landscapes of the Sedona area with a little bit of time to explore a few new places and revisit some old favorites …


PREVIOUS NOTES FROM THE ROAD >

THIS MONTH:
sedonabadge
A short break to enjoy the number one destination on USA Weekend’s “Most Beautiful Places in America list.” Sedona, AZ is surrounded by 1.8 million acres of national forest land, with great jeep trails that wind in and out of a rugged landscape defined by pinnacles, spires, buttes and domes…


COMING UP SOON:


Back to Paris to visit friends and familiar places and maybe explore someplace new…


Its almost holiday roadtrip time and there is plenty of planning for what’s next. Perhaps a surprise or two as we head into the new year…


More southwest exploration with the original USnomads team taking some time to just appreciate the journey…


HONANKI RUINS

The Honanki Heritage Site along with its sister site, Palatki, were the largest cliff dwellings of the Red Rock country between AD 1150 – 1350. The ruins sit at the base of Loy Butte on the sheltered west-facing cliffs. They are among the largest ancient population sites in the Verde Valley, occupied between AD 1130-1280. This period in Southern Sinagua prehistory is called the “Honanki Phase” and many of the cliff dwellings in the area west of Sedona were occupied during that period. The Honanki site originally contained about 60 rooms. The cave is rich with pictographs; some date back to 2000 BC, long before the the cliff dwellings. Most of the pictographs are from the Sinagua and date to AD 900-1300. Others by the Yavapai or Apache date from 1400-1875. The Sinagua, ancestors of the Hopi, lived here preparing meals, raising their families, and making tools from stone, leather, and wood. Nearby they hunted for deer and rabbit, tended various crops, and gathered edible wild plants. They were first described by Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes, famous turn-of-the century archaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution, who gave them the Hopi names of Honanki (Badger House) and Palatki (Red House). The Hopi, however, have no specific names for these sites. The Honanki Heritage Site cliff dwelling and rock art site is managed by the U.S. Forest Service under the Red Rock Pass Program.


MONTEZUMA CASTLE

Montezuma Castle National Monument protects a set of well-preserved cliff dwellings located in Camp Verde, which were built and used by the Sinagua people between approximately 1100 and 1425 AD. The main structure comprises five stories and about 45 to 60 rooms and was built over the course of three centuries. The monument’s name is misleading, as it has nothing to do with Montezuma and was not a “castle” but rather a pueblo village complex built into the cliff side. It got its current name when Europeans first encountered the abandoned ruins in the 1860s and assumed it was constructed by the famous Aztec emperor. In fact, the dwelling was abandoned more than 40 years before Montezuma was born. Montezuma Castle is situated about 90 feet (27 m) up a sheer limestone cliff, facing the adjacent Beaver Creek, which drains into the perennial Verde River just north of Camp Verde. It is one of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in North America, in part because of its ideal placement in a natural alcove that protects it from exposure to the elements. The precariousness of the dwelling’s location and its immense scale of floor space across five stories suggest that the Sinagua were daring builders and skilled engineers. Access into the structure was most likely via a series of portable ladders, which made it difficult for enemy tribes to penetrate the natural defense of the vertical barrier. Perhaps the main reason the Sinagua chose to build the Castle so far above the ground, however, was to escape the threat of natural disaster in the form of the annual flooding of Beaver Creek. During the summer monsoon season, the creek frequently breached its banks, inundating the floodplain with water. The Sinagua recognized the importance of these floods to their agriculture, but likely also the potential destruction they presented to any structures built in the floodplain. Their solution was to build a permanent structure in the high recess afforded by the limestone cliff. The walls of Montezuma Castle are examples of early stone-and-mortar masonry, constructed almost entirely from chunks of limestone found at the base of the cliff, as well as mud and/or clay from the creek bottom. The ceilings of the rooms also incorporated sectioned timbers as a kind of roof thatching, obtained primarily from the Arizona sycamore, a large hardwood tree native to the Verde Valley. Several Hopi clans and Yavapai communities trace their ancestries to early immigrants from the Montezuma Castle/Beaver Creek area.


TUZIGOOT

Tuzigoot National Monument preserves a 2- to 3-story pueblo ruin on the summit of a limestone and sandstone ridge just east of Clarkdale, Arizona, 120 feet (36 m) above the Verde River floodplain. The Tuzigoot Site is an elongated complex of stone masonry rooms that were built along the spine of a natural outcrop in the Verde Valley. The pueblo has 110 rooms. ″Tú Digiz” or “Tuzigoot″ is a Tonto Apache term for “crooked waters,” from nearby Pecks Lake, a cutoff meander of the Verde River. The pueblo was built by the Sinagua people between 1125 and 1400 CE and is the largest and best preserved of the many Sinagua pueblo ruins in the Verde Valley. Tuzigoot was excavated from 1933 to 1935 by Louis Caywood and Edward Spicer of the University of Arizona, with funding from the federal Civil Works Administration and Works Project Administration. In 1935–1936, with additional federal funding, the ruins were prepared for public display, and a Pueblo Revival-style museum and visitor center was constructed. Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Tuzigoot Ruins as a U.S. National Monument on July 25, 1939…


THE ANCESTRAL PUEBLOANS

The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings. The Ancestral Puebloans possessed a complex network that stretched across the Colorado Plateau linking hundreds of communities and population centers. They held a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences that found form in their architecture. The kiva, a congregational space that was used chiefly for ceremonial purposes, was an integral part of this ancient people’s community structure. In contemporary times, the people and their archaeological culture were referred to as Anasazi for historical purposes. The Navajo, who were not their descendants, called them by this term, which meant “ancient enemies”. Contemporary Puebloans do not want this term to be used. Archaeologists continue to debate when this distinct culture emerged. The current agreement, based on terminology defined by the Pecos Classification, suggests their emergence around the 12th century BC, during the archaeologically designated Early Basketmaker II Era. …




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MORE NOTES FROM THE ROAD:
8-14 October – LON TOP TEN
1-7 October – Girl Gang Garage
16-30 September – Women’s Wheeling
1-15 September – Long Island
9-31 August – Serbia
1-8 August – #LONCON2019
16-31 July – Roadtrip to Atlanta
1-15 July – Cape Cod
15-30 June – Eastern Long Island
1-14 June – Bantam Jeep Festival
May – PA Trail cleanup
22-30 April – Minnesota
16-21 April – PA Trails
1-15 April – New Jeep
15-31 March – Paris
1-14 March – Arizona
15-28 February – San Antonio
1-14 February – Sedona and Glamis
January – Iran
December – Holiday Road Trip
16-30 November – Senegal
1-15 November – Paris
October – New York
Archive


REFLECTIONS

EGYPT: CAIRO REFLECTIONS

A quick overview of impressions from a stop in Cairo during our recent scouting mission in Egypt and Sudan … [read]


SPECIAL REPORT

ALGERIA SCOUTING

A look into south-eastern Algeria on the border with Libya and Niger: overlanding with the Tuareg in one of the most remote corners of the Sahara … [read]


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