However, i suddenly realized that I had done what a lot of people do when they go on vacation - I was moving WAY too quickly and climbing just to get there. Generally, I avoid doing that like the plague (which DOES show up every now and again in the southwest. Be thankful for antibiotics.)
SO, taking my out- of- control route firmly in hand, I'm going to pull over in the first available wide spot on the switchbacks (it's near the bottom and really is just a wide spot on the shoulder), turn around and skip back South on I-17 toward Camp Verde. Wherein we will come upon a Castle and a Well...called, respectively Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well. Montezuma never had anything to do with either location, of course. He lived in the late 1480s to early 1500s, and the "castle" had been abandoned by its builders by then.
Here are pictures! To give you an idea of perspective, the green at the bottom of the picture on the left below is trees. The Castle is a 5 storey cliff dwelling and National Monument. The builders of the Castle were a people called by archeologists the SinAgua (Spanish for Without Water). The National Monument includes both the Castle and the Well.
The builders of the Cliff Dwelling (it was started in the 1100s and abandoned in the 1400s for reasons no one clearly understands) were farmers as well as hunters; and the small creek that runs through the area beneath the Castle was used for irrigation of tiny plots of land on which crops were raised.
The neat thing is (and I learned this while listening to one of the tour guides: they are generally a wealth of information, and this time is no exception) that the SinAgua knew how to use the sun to their advantage: their dwelling was built of thick adobe bricks that insulated the cliff dwelling against the high heat of the summertime, when most people slept outside. In the winter (and, yes, there is fairly cold weather in the winter in this area), the curved face of the dwelling was angled to catch and hold as much of the sun's heat as possible, making the nights a little warmer inside.
The SinAgua also used vacuum sealing to store their grain crops. Storage was done in holes made in the side of the cliff: the holes were filled with grain, except for a very small hole big enough to allow a lighted piece of branch through. The lighted taper was allowed to burn off all of the oxygen in the small horizontal hole and, as the flame flickered and died, the small opening was sealed, leaving grain safely stored in a virtually air tight compartment. Indeed, some of the grain retrieved for those holes was found to still be good, after 600 plus years!
The visitors' center has a diorama with a display of what the inside of the Castle looks like: it was closed to the public in the 1950s when the damage to the site due to all of the people climbing through and around it was determined to be so severe that the site was in danger. By the way, the Monuments was established in 1906 by order of the President (the President is the only person who can declare something a national monument. National Parks are a different story.)
And the other thing that both the monument and the well have is trees. Not any trees, but sycamores. More about that in a minute.
Montezuma’s well comes next: it's actually a part of the same National Monument, although not directly next door or anything.
The “Well” is actually a sinkhole that is continuously filled with water. It’s really a closed ecosystem because the water, which passes through limestone (CaCO4) has a great deal of CO2 in it. It’s some ridiculous number – I don’t remember what the park guide said, but it’s way beyond what fish can cope with. That doesn’t mean that there’s not life there. There is and a lot of it. Birds, of course, because Arizona is one big ol’ flyway, and animals, like deer and liazards and turtles that can drink the water (and, probably, feel all bubbly and stuff!!!) and there are sycamores (I remember them really well. To see the Well, there’s a path that goes out so you can look down at it. And there’s another branch of the path that leads you down and away. And there they are, beautiful, beautiful trees.
The Well provides an oasis in the desert, because, unlike most of the rivers in Arizona, the water level doesn’t vary with the seasons. Both the Sinagua and, earlier, the Hohokam lived near the well. The Hohokam knew irrigations and there are archeological remnants of it today (although I only saw something that looked faintly like some rocks piled up, I’m told that there were ditches. Pretty cool, huh?
Also, there are a couple of niches below the rim of the land overlooking the well where some Apaches may have lived in the later 1800s.
I liked it there, mostly because the water has been consistent for the last several hundred years, and it’s pretty easy to let the present go and imagine how the Hohokam (HO-ho-kahm) and the Sinagua lived…That and the fact that everywhere around where you are is middle Sonoran desert and here you are in an oasis. …VERY neat…picture is up above. And that blue-green is the color of the water (well, the algae in the water), for real!
Here are the trees: well, here is one of the sycamores:
The trees are old and beautiful. I can't quite describe their bark. It's silver and smooth with irregular patches of darker bark...it's the state tree as well, and I can see why. They’re hardy and enduring, and the shade that they provide, the sound of the wind playing tag with itself in their branches just makes me feel much more alive and about 20 degrees cooler than what the thermometer says...
Stop at the National Monument and get feel of the place. I can't explain it, but just knowing that people lived and had livelihoods and died hundreds of years ago here is enough to set my mind to wondering...
Tomorrow, I promise we'll go to Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon! I promise!!!!
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