10/1 Flagstaff – Sunset Crater & Wupatki National Monuments

Checked out of my campsite today and drove the loop around the volcanic area and to the Wupatki sites.  The Bonito Campground where I spent four nights was on the ash field, but very close to this lava area.  Here is a photo of the cinder cones and the lava flow, with the volcano in the background.

 

When the volcano erupted in 1085, some of the homes of the native peoples were destroyed by the lava flow and ash falls.  It is believed that they moved to the Wupatki area which was at the edge of the ash but out of the way of the lava.  The ash provided a sort of mulch for their fields and made them more fertile.

One place they went was this 2-3 family home, called Wukoki:

 

And the larger village is a few miles away and called wupatki.  It had over 100 rooms and a ball court.  Wonder how your home would look when it was 800 years old?  These people did an excellent job of stonework construction:

Headed back to Flagstaff to stay at a cramped commercial RV park so I can get cell phone and internet service, which was lacking in the national forest campground I had been staying at.  I also needed an address closer to town so the Dell technician could come by to service my old laptop.  Really hard to explain to a technician in India why they could not send someone to Bryce Canyon when I had called last week!  Anyway, he did stop by but found out that a different part was needed, so Dell would ship it overnight, and he would try again in a day or two.  Nice to have that old in-home warranty, even when your home moves around a lot!