Today brought us to cliff dwellings, more remains of ancient communities, and a volcanic ash field.
We got to Walnut Canyon just before the gates opened at 9am. After briefly browsing in the Visitor Center, we hiked down and followed the Island Loop Trail past the ruins of cliff dwellings. After a snack at the car, we hiked along the rim trail and past some more ruins (of the non-cliff variety).
After leaving Walnut Canyon, we headed to Wupatki. After driving past two ruins along the way, we parked at the Visitor Center and hiked to the Wupatki Pueblo. We did not get to see the famous Wupatki Blowhole” due to trail work. After exploring as much of the Pueblo as we could, we backtracked to the two pueblo ruins that we drove past on our way in. There were EarthCaches to be logged at many of these points of interest today.
From Wupatki, we took the state highway south to Sunset Crater, stopped in the Visitor Center (so we could get our NPS Passport stamp before closing time), then went out to hike some of the lava field trails.
We could have spent a little more time exploring Sunset Crater area, but I had one more spot that I wanted to visit today before the sun went down. On our way back to Williams, I took a small detour in the Kaibab National Forest so that we could take a hike to Keyhole Sink. It was a geocache that brought us to this spot, and we were definitely a bit rushed as we visited the area. It was neat to see some petroglyphs, and I would imagine that in a few more weeks the waterfall would have been very beautiful. We were pretty much jogging most of the way back to the car, making a lot of noise along the way because we did not want to sneak up on whatever kind of wildlife comes out there around dusk!
We had pulled pork for dinner. Since there was no microwave in our room, we made the lobby eating area smell like a barbecue house when we warmed it up with the microwave located there!