BeBa

For the third weekend in a row, we had a fun outdoors family excursion.

On Sunday, we loaded up the van and spent the day on the Apache Trail.

We had lunch at Tortilla Flats. We white knuckled through Fish Creek Canyon, a scary part of the drive that included tight hairpin curves, sheer drops off the edge of a one lane dirt road and… no guardrail!!

We stopped to check out Theodore Roosevelt Dam, which was a pretty impressive feat of engineering and then for the best part of the day: Tonto National Monument – a very cool ruin site of ancient cliff dwellings.

That cave is a 1/2 mile hike up a (paved) path – 350 vertical feet! <huff puff> with baby in sling. Hear me roar! I had to pace myself by walking very, very slowly. And I did not appreciate any of my children coming to a dead stop in front of me; maintaining a slow, steady slog was essential. This trail was *steep*.

Tonto National Monument consists of the ruins of two cliff dwellings established by the Salado Indians in about 1300 AD. The southeast-facing settlements were built quite high up a steep hillside within well-protected natural caves overlooking the Tonto Basin, which is now flooded forming Theodore Roosevelt Lake, though originally the Salt River flowed through the Basin which was therefore well irrigated and fertile. As with many other ancient peoples of the Southwest, the Salado appear to have abandoned their villages suddenly, early in the fifteenth century, for reasons which are not known.

The two-story ruin originally had 19 rooms; these are quite well-preserved and it is permitted to walk around the inside. Originally, the only access was by ladder leading to an entrance at the far left of the structure, which made the settlement easy to defend.

Here’s a pic of Mira doing the hike up to the ruins:

Here we are in the ruins:

See the wee little parking lot way down there??

Gorgeous Arizona:

The least enjoyable part of the trip was the drive through Globe-Miami – a copper mining town. Strip mining has really defaced the mountains in this area.

This is an interesting town, established in 1876 after a large globe-shaped boulder of silver was found nearby. Both copper and silver were later mined extensively, and several old buildings remain from the boom times around the turn of the century. A few miles west, huge copper ore extraction operations still continue around Miami, and US 60 passes several miles of tailings ponds and spoil heaps.