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The above slide show gives you an overview of the experience of hiking the public trail in Walnut Canyon National Monument.
Graphics and photos © JHThomas

General History and Information

The Walnut Canyon National Monument has been set aside to protect the remains of an ancient culture archaeologists have named the Sinagua (without water). According to information provided by the rangers who manage the park: "We don't know what name they called themselves because we have no evidence of their language. The Sinagua lived here as farmers approximately 800 years ago, planting corn, squash and beans. Fields were cleared along the mesa's sloping areas to catch rain behind simple check dams. There was no use of irrigation because the creek is 400 feet below the farming mesas. The Sinagua depended completely on rainfall coming at the right time of the year, so that crops would mature in the very short growing season. When they first moved here around 1150 A.D. from nearby sites, they tried to follow their familiar pattern of building houses dug into the ground (called pithouses). One of these can be seen along the rim trail, near a farming area. Soon the Sinagua found digging a six foot deep house into solid limestone wasn't the easiest task, and they began to make use of the cliff overhangs found in the canyon. These cliffs made pleasant houses - shielded from direct sun in the summer and warmed by reflected sun in the winter. The Sinagua people simply partitioned ledges into houses, adding a front wall with door and smoke hole just under the ledge dripline. Life must have been much as a farmer's today: work timed to planting, tending crops and harvesting. Hunting supplemented diet, and wild plants were collected for variety. Some time was probably set aside for ceremonies tied to birth, death, crops and other emotional needs. There may even have been time left for play, music, gossip and story-telling. Sometime in the middle of the 1200's these people found they couldn't survive here. Perhaps the rains didn't come at the right time, and there wasn't enough food to tide them over the winter; perhaps crowded conditions caused too much disease; perhaps they just got tired of the place and decided to find better homes. Whatever the reason, we find the canyon was abandoned about 1250 A.D. Explorers discovered the canyon in the 1850's." It sat untouched for 600 years.

Walnut Canyon was carved over the ages by the erosion of Walnut Creek with the occasional aid of some earthquake faults, which altered its course as it developed. There is little water in Walnut Creek today except after heavy rains because Lake Mary, man-made in the 40's serves as a dam for this natural water flow. Often not observed is the fact that when water does flow through this canyon, it is on its way to the Grand Canyon, which is about 85 miles away to the north. Most of the water drainage in northern Arizona flows somehow into the Little Colorado River Basin, and then into the Grand Canyon. Very little moisture makes the entire trip these days. The low-ceiling alcove shelters used by these people are located in the upper half of the canyon in the formation called Kaibab Limestone. This Permian marine limestone surfaces throughout most of the Coconino Plateau and is the common top layer here and at the Grand Canyon. It is filled with marine fossils. The limestone in this area is peculiar in composition and it erodes with an uncomfortable prickly surface. Fortunately for the Sinagua the alternating ledges of limestone vary between harder and softer types allowing for the natural formation of the overhangs. The second major depositional layer on the plateau is the Toroweap Formation, containing in this area stream deposited an wind deposited sand. This was once a near shore environment, 260 million years ago. Very little of the Toroweap Formation remains in the Walnut Canyon area, according to USGS geologists and the National Monument staff. They've discovered, however, that the Sinagua apparently valued the composition of what little of Toroweap there is, as they used it heavily in making their mortar to build their rooms. This is what gives them their unique peach color. The portions of the Toroweap that do exist in the canyon are not visible from the island trail. The cross-bedded sandstone rock you see in the lower half of the canyon, billowing out like large frozen sand dunes, is the Coconino Sandstone, also the third major layer at the Grand Canyon.