Arizona is filled with many vast expanses and amazing viewpoints. The landscape is diverse and varied, with cactus in the south and pine trees in the north. The land has seen equally disparate travelers, from the Indians that roamed the land hundreds of years ago, to the early European / American settlers who risk life and limb to trek across her rugged peaks and valleys.
Back 1000 years ago, tribes roamed this land having left abandoned ruins that leave only to our imagination life in another time. From A.D. 1050 – 1425 the Sinagua lived, foraged, and hunted this land from this ancestral Hopi pueblo, now known as Chavez Pass.
A large oval depression north of the pueblo is the remains of a prehistoric ball court. It also served as a trade center for a network that reached from the Hopi Mesas and Zuni Pueblo to the Pacific and Northern Mexico.
There is very little left of what once was. The overgrown thistle and foxtails outnumber the petroglyphs and stacked rock walls, or what’s left of them. Yet, the opportunity to wander through something so ancient and decaying into the land over time, allows us a glimpse of simpler times, when life really was rough.
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