Today we visited the third Flagstaff area National Monument: Walnut Canyon. It differs from Wupatki in that the pueblos here are mainly cliff houses, built into the walls of the canyon and an "island" in the canyon. We hiked the open part of the Island Trail. About half of it is closed for maintenance. The section we hiked led to the best preserved cliff houses.
The trail descends about 185' with about 200 steps and hikers are warned that it is "strenuous," especially for people not acclimated to the 7,000' altitude.
Along the way we passed school groups of fourth and first graders, with the fourth graders serving as buddies for the first graders. We were surprised that so many small children were hiking on a trail that is sometimes quite narrow, without railings, and with extremely steep dropoffs. We asked one of the adults about this, and she said, "These are Flagstaff kids." Apparently they learn early about safe hiking in the mountains.
After we returned from the Island Trail, we stopped at the truck to get our lunch cooler and walked to the picnic area. It was breezy, but we didn't realize how difficult it would be to eat lunch in gusty wind. We packed everything back up and returned to the truck to eat.
After lunch we walked the Rim Trail. It's described as an "easy, fairly level" .7 mile trail with a couple of overlooks. It passes next to a pithouse and a pueblo.
This evening we returned to the nearby Sandy Seep trailhead for a walk before dinner. There's no place to walk at or near the RV park, and the trail is well protected from the wind.
We watched the final Cosmos episode, "The Immortals," tonight. We love Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the production values are fantastic, but tonight I appreciated most of all some of the questions and speculative answers about where life came from and whether there are other beings like us out there somewhere.
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