30 March 2018
Thousand Trails Resort
The National Park service operates the 42-acre Tuzigoot National Monument, an 800 year old Sinagua pueblo of 110 rooms, which is surrounded by hiking trails and hosts a complete museum. Just east of Clarkdale, Arizona, 120 feet 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.
We had a beautiful day to visit and an easy path to follow up to the ruins. When I first heard of these ruins, I thought that all “Puebleos” were built inside or along the sides of hills. But this one is in the open, on top of a hill, but not in it.
Ya know, here in America, we have very few historical sites that are 800 years old. As many of you know, when traveling through Europe, old is really “old”, and there are many examples of old castles/churches/beer and wine…. We just don’t have that history “yet””.
Tuzigoot is Apache for “crooked water,” from nearby Pecks Lake, a cutoff meander of the Verde River. Historically, the pueblo was built by the Sinagua people between 1125 and 1400 CE. Tuzigoot is the largest and best-preserved of the many Sinagua pueblo ruins in the Verde Valley.
The ruins at Tuzigoot incorporate very few doors; instead, they use trapdoor type openings in the roofs, and use ladders to enter each room.
As we walked through the ruins overlooking the valley, you could see the what was once the tailings from the copper mine in Clarkdale. That area has been leveled out and revegatated to keep the blowing dust down, but you could imagine the bellowing smoke from the smelter and the tailings traveling through hollowed-out redwood logs.
