High living

Sunday, April 3, 2011

CORNVILLE, AZ – It’s always interesting to attend a church service far from home; there are enough familiar aspects to provide comfort, but also variations which can be very touching. Today at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Sedona, when it came time for the Lord’s Prayer, everyone in the congregation held hands in a long chain, from pew to pew. It was a lovely surprise.

After lunch back at the trailer, we decided to visit the Tuzigoot National Monument, to the south and west of Sedona. The monument is a ruin of an ancient stronghold, constructed by a native tribe in about 1000 AD on top of a 120-foot high cone-shaped hill in the middle of a huge valley. They scouted out the real estate pretty well; the view in all directions was fantastic!

The ruins were discovered in the 1930s when they were mostly just a pile of rocks on the hillside. Careful removal of the surface earth revealed walled-off rooms on two levels made from thousands of limestone and sandstone rocks that were cemented into place. Down the hillside, the archeologists found shards of pottery and implements that helped establish an idea of the people who built Tuzigoot.

The people (later named Sinagua, from “sin” meaning without, and “agua” meaning water) grew crops, hauled plenteous water from the river nearby, made clay pots, ground corn and flourished for some 400 years. There were about 50 communities in the Verde Valley, but after that length of time, they all mysteriously disappeared. No one knows what became of them. It’s hard to believe that a community of that size and longevity left no trace or legacy in subsequent generations.

When we left Tuzigoot, we decided to have a better look at Jerome, the ghost town up on the mountainside above the valley. We only saw part of it on the day of our train ride. Sunday wasn’t the best day to do this, we discovered; everyone and their dog was up there and we couldn’t find a single parking space to allow us to get out and walk around! However, we did get to see some of the old buildings, and were rewarded with a spectacular view from the lookout point at 5000 feet elevation before we turned around and headed back to the valley.

Continuing with our ancient society theme, we set off for Montezuma Castle National Monument, about 20 miles to the south and west of Tuzigoot. By contrast to the sandstone red of the rocks we’d seen in such abundance in Sedona, the rocks in this region were limestone, and almost pure white.

A curving walkway brought us in to the site, which was an enormous white cliff towering some 200 feet above us. Just under the upper rim of the cliff, there was a large sheltered recess, and below it the Sinagua tribe had constructed a stone, multi-storied dwelling, adding on to the natural caves and hollows that were already there. Accessible only by ladders, this city in the rock was cool during the heat of the day, warm at night, and virtually impregnable to attack.

The site got the name Montezuma because explorers who discovered it mistakenly thought it had been built by Aztecs. Just as with Tuzigoot, the Sinagua people disappeared after several hundred years without a trace.

It was humbling to look at this complex structure and think about the people who gathered hundreds of rocks and laboriously hauled them, one by one, up homemade ladders to a dizzying height, fitting squared-off walls into the natural curves of the rock with mud mortar and bare hands. People who are referred to as “primitive” in current times!