As I wrote in a previous entry here, 17 hour hike in the wet hiking shoes made my left foot hurt. My left foot is slightly bigger than right foot. If I buy a pair of shoes, always left foot feel small, but right foot is perfect. In general, hiking makes feet swollen. If 17 hours in a shoe with swollen foot? Not good. In this trip, it got worse because the shoes were wet.
Due to this, we changed our plan and decided to do short hikes for a couple of days. Originally we were thinking about Subway in Zion, but we instead went to a couple of more National Monuments. Actually I didn't know there are many National Monuments in Utah and Arizona.
A day after we hiked Natural Bridges National Monument, we went to Walnut Canyon National Monument.
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Cliff dwelling
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About 900 years ago, in the Walnut Canyon, cliff dwelling started being built. In this canyon, so many dwelling can be seen. In the left picture, you can see some dwelling. It is amazing that they built home literally in the middle of canyon!
People who lived there are not known where they were from, but it is known that most likely plenty of plants and animal in the area attracted them. They hunted and gathered plants, as well as farmed.
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Their home
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The main trail is the Island trail, which is a 0.9 mile loop trail. You can walk along the many of dwellings. There are a lot of signage and explanation of culture. It was fun learning their lives in the past.
Their dwelling is cool. As you can see in the left picture, they were built by utilizing cliff structure. Walls are with stones and clay. Archeologists think the home was built by women. I wonder what the evidence is coming from, though. They took DNA from wall and it was always XX chromosome or something?
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door and hole for smoke
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The left picture is interesting. The entry door and a hole for the smoke. They used fire inside, so the smoke needs to be go outside. The top small hole is the one. You notice that the top of the entry door has log.
You can see the door top portion picture in the right picture.
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door top
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in the bottom picture, you can see how the trail is next to the dwelling. It is fun, right?!
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| dwelling |
One of the signs along the trail explained that people shout each other to the other side of house in the canyon, and also communicated with torch. Very interesting.
People occupied these for 100 years, then they left. Why did they leave? No clue. It is considered that these people were assimilated into Hopi culture.
In 1880s, this became a popular place for souvenir hunters and a lot of stuff was destroyed. Then 1915, to protect this area, this became National Monument.
It was a nice little walk to explore here.
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