This morning we drove north to Tuzigoot National Monument, where a 14th-century, 110-room Sinaguan pueblo was discovered and rebuilt in the 1930s.  We first did the marsh hike:

Next we visited the visitor center:

It was fascinating to see 500 year old jewelry:

The Indians here mined and traded a number of colorful minerals:

Next we hiked out to the pueblo site:

When the site was found in the 1930s, the walls had all collapsed, leaving behind the only the lowest row of stone and mortar.  The park service reconstructed the site to give visitors a better idea of what it looked like back in the day.

Looking north from the top:

And South:

The park service rebuilt this enclosed room to give visitors a better idea of what the dwellings look like inside:

The kids earned their Junior Ranger badges:

Next we drove west to the hillside town of Jerome:

Jerome has many galleries and shops.  We stopped to visit this copper boutique:

The shop had a number of artillery cartridges from World War I that soldiers at the time had crafted into trench art:

We also visited the Audrey Shaft Headframe Park.  The headframe stands above a 1,900 foot deep shaft that was use to bring copper ore to the surface.  The mine eventually produced over 500,000 tons of copper:

The shaft itself is covered with an acrylic walkway.  Walking over it, we could look down into the darkness as we stood over a 1,900 foot vertical drop below our feet.  Falling down the shaft would entail a free-fall 650 feet longer than from the roof of the Empire State Building to ground level:

We tried to explore downtown Jerome, but parking was a problem, so we returned to Cottonwood and did some grocery shopping before returning to the RV.

Our move north from the Phoenix area seems to have been a success.  Daytime highs here are in the low 70s.

We are near Sedona, at roughly 3,500 feet:

It turns out that we had overnighted next to a watering hole.  In the morning, the cows came down to drink:

Afterwards, they spread out and resumed their usual bovine duties:

Since dispersed camping regulations don’t allow us to park within a quarter mile of a livestock water source, we hitched up and said goodbye to our erstwhile neighbors:

We stopped at the Motezuma Well unit of Montezuma Castle National Monument.  The “well” is a 15 million gallon spring.  The water, seeping up from below, eventually created the massive sinkhole we see today:

Ancient Native American cliff dwellings line the rim:

We hiked down to where 1.5 million gallons of water exit the well each day through a tunnel under the wall of the sinkhole:

A turn of the century photographer wrote his name on the rock above an ancient Indian dwelling:

Another view of the cliff dwellings:

Remnants of a pueblo built above the spring’s rim:

Outside the sinkhole, the water from the spring reappears from the natural tunnel under the sinkhole wall.  Native Americans built a canal over a thousand years ago to use this water to irrigate their fields.  A creek flows to the left of the canal:

Near the spring, remnants of a pit house have been discovered, thought to have been built around the year 1050:

Continuing west, we visited Montezuma Castle National Monument, whose primary feature is a cliff dwelling thought to have housed about 30 people until the early 1400s:

The kids received their Junior Ranger badges:

Continuing west and north, we found a nice dispersed camping location near Cottonwood, Arizona.  B picked some flowers for the Shabbos table:

We’re looking forward to cooler weather here.  Good Shabbos from near Cottonwood, Arizona!

This morning we packed up the RV and left the Salton Sea.  I was sad to leave, as the PPG flying there is fantastic.  Hopefully we will be back again soon.

Update: Here’s a video montage of solo flights 14 through 31, which were flown at the Salton Sea: