Trevor Huxham

What remains of a multi-room complex “Is this it?” I thought while walking back to my car. Compared to the Ancestral Puebloan dwellings I had visited the day before at nearby Wupatki National Monument , the low stone walls at Homolovi State Park didn’t do much to convince me that a complex of more than a thousand rooms once stood on this patch of northern Arizona. High Desert Housing But unlike Wupatki, it was clear that this lonely grassland once teemed with the residents of those thousand-plus rooms. Potsherds were everywhere!

Cliff dwellings It’s 4:00 p.m. and I’m in a race against time: after having driven through Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano national monuments earlier in the day, I’ve got just one hour to visit the last of the Flagstaff-area monuments before closing time. The park ranger at the front desk lets me continue through the visitor center after I display my annual parks pass, and once I’m back outside, I quickly descend a steep set of stairs while managing to  not  fall off the cliffside of Walnut Canyon National Monument.  Just 185 vertical feet later, and I’ve made it down to the trail that loops around an “island” floating above a meander of Walnut Canyon.

When you think of ruins, what comes to your mind? Maybe the flattened apartment blocks of Roman Pompeii , a once-glistening palace for a Moorish caliph , or the spindly skeleton of a Lisbon church . For many Americans, our imaginations often turn to history-rich Europe, where the remains of empires, wars, and natural disasters are easy to see. But that’s a shame, because we can find reminders of the past in our own backyards. Nalakihu Pueblo Sure, they may not be on the same scale as Mexico’s monumental pyramids in Teotihuacán or Chichén Itzá, but the cliff dwellings and villages built by Ancestral Puebloans make the Southwestern U.S. the best place in the country to encounter places that were inhabited almost a thousand years ago. Colorado’s Mesa Verde and New Mexico’s Chaco Culture are some of the biggest marks the ancestors of today’s Puebloan peoples left on the Southwest, but they’re either in the isolated Four Corners region, off long dirt roads, or both. Wupatki Natio...