What is Tuzigoot National Monument?
Tuzigoot sits on a long limestone ridge about 120 feet above a loop of the Verde River, with Tavasci Marsh on one side and the old Clarkdale smelter tailings on the other. Starting around A.D. 1000 the Sinagua built a few rooms on the crest; over the next three centuries they added and added until the village had about 110 rooms on two and three levels and housed perhaps 200 people. Few rooms had doors. You climbed a ladder onto the roof and dropped through a hatch, and the roofs were the streets. By the early 1400s everyone had left, for reasons the museum lays out honestly as unknown.
The site was dug in 1933 and 1934 by University of Arizona crews with Depression-era labor, and the stone museum that the same program built in 1935 still holds the finds: pottery, cotton textiles, bone tools, and shell bracelets and beads that came up trade routes from the Gulf of California. Franklin Roosevelt made it a monument in 1939. The Apache name means roughly “crooked water,” for the river bend below.
The Pueblo Trail is a paved 0.3-mile loop that goes through the room blocks and up to a rebuilt rooftop room at the summit. The Marsh Overlook Trail runs about half a mile each way down to a platform over Tavasci Marsh, the largest freshwater marsh in Arizona not connected to the Colorado and one of the best birding spots in the Verde Valley. What you get is the one Verde Valley ruin you can walk through and the best museum of the three. What you do not get is shade, a cliff dwelling, or more than two hours of things to do, which is why it pairs so well with what is next door.
How to visit it right
Pay once, use it twice. $10 per adult, free under 16, good for 7 days at Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle; $35 for an annual pass to both; America the Beautiful accepted. Montezuma Well is free regardless. Everyone, including marsh walkers and people arriving on foot from Dead Horse Ranch, checks in at the visitor center.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, north about 70 miles to Camp Verde, then exit 287 to SR 260 west 14 miles to Cottonwood. Turn north on Main Street/SR 89A toward Clarkdale, then right on Tuzigoot Road, which crosses the Verde and ends at the monument. Roughly 2 hours 5 minutes from Old Town, all paved. The lot is adequate on weekdays, tight on winter weekends when snowbirds and Sedona day-trippers overlap.
Mind the hours and the heat. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. The marsh is closed sunset to sunrise. There is almost no shade on the pueblo trail and the pale limestone reflects it; October through April is comfortable, and in summer go at 9. Bring water; there is a fountain at the visitor center and nothing on the trails.
Do the rooftop and the museum. Climb to the rooftop room at the top of the pueblo; it is the only place in the Verde Valley where you can stand on a reconstructed Sinagua roof and see the river, the marsh, Cottonwood and Jerome’s buildings stacked up Cleopatra Hill all at once. Then spend real time in the museum, whose cases of shell jewelry and textiles most parks would keep in storage.
Walk the marsh. The Marsh Overlook Trail is the birding walk, with more than 245 species recorded in the corridor; go at opening in winter for ducks and raptors. It is paved and accessible. The Pueblo Trail is paved but steep in places and the Park Service does not recommend it for wheelchairs.
Dogs. On a six-foot leash on both trails, not in the building except to check in, never left in the car. The Park Service suggests boots on the paved trail in summer.
Make it a day, or skip it if you want a cliff dwelling, in which case Montezuma Castle is the one. Dead Horse Ranch is next door for camping, cabins and the fishing lagoons. Jerome is 15 minutes up the mountain. The Mingus Mountain campgrounds above Jerome are an hour’s climb and 3,000 feet cooler if the valley is hot.
The copper company’s ruin
The people who built Tuzigoot were farmers the archaeologists call Sinagua, and they farmed the same bottomland the marsh now covers. From about 1000 they stacked limestone and river cobble on the ridge, roofed it with juniper and sycamore, and traded far: the shell in the museum came from the Gulf of California and the cotton from their own fields. The village grew to 110 rooms, and then, in the early 1400s, it emptied along with every other big pueblo in the Verde Valley. Drought, conflict, disease and simple migration have all been proposed; the Hopi count the Sinagua among their ancestors.
The valley did not stay empty. The Yavapai and the Dilzhe’e Apache lived here for the next four centuries and gave the ruin its names, Tú Digiz in Apache, “crooked water,” and ʼHaktlakva in Yavapai. The United States ended that in a decade: a reservation on the Verde in 1871, its dissolution and a forced march of its people to San Carlos in 1875, and a long exile before some families came back around 1900 to found the Yavapai-Apache Nation, which today holds a small parcel in Clarkdale within sight of the ridge.
What brought the ruin back into view was copper. In 1912 William A. Clark, the Montana senator who owned the United Verde mine at Jerome, built Clarkdale as a company smelter town on the flats below the ridge, and the smelter’s tailings pond spread across the Verde bottomland beside the pueblo. The company owned the ridge too. When the Depression arrived with federal relief money attached, two University of Arizona graduate students, Louis Caywood and Edward Spicer, got a Civil Works Administration crew of about 50 relief workers and dug the pueblo in 1933 and 1934, uncovering more than 400 burials and most of the rooms. The company took first pick of the artifacts under a 1933 agreement, then sold the site to Yavapai County for $1 so the county could hand it to the federal government, and a Pueblo Revival stone museum went up in 1935 and 1936 to hold the finds. Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed Tuzigoot National Monument on July 25, 1939. Much of what the company kept has since come back to the museum cases.
The copper left in 1953, when the Jerome mine and the Clarkdale smelter closed together and the town emptied out. The tailings were eventually stabilized and planted over, and a cement plant built in 1959 kept Clarkdale alive. The marsh below the ruin had its own owners all this time: Harriet Hawkins homesteaded it in 1884 and tried to farm it, the O’Shea family and United Verde traded it back and forth, and from 1928 the Tavasci family ran a dairy on it, which is why it carries their name. Grazing, pumping and mining runoff wore it down through the early 1990s.
In 2005 the Park Service acquired Tavasci Marsh, about 96 acres, as part of the monument and began to restore it. It is the largest freshwater marsh in Arizona not connected to the Colorado River, cut off from the Verde nearly 10,000 years ago, and Audubon lists it as an Important Bird Area. The copper has not entirely gone: a 2014 U.S. Geological Survey study found elevated metals in marsh sediment laid down before 1963, and a tailings pile on a private inholding still sits inside the monument boundary. The Park Service’s next step, in its own words, is to work out how far the contamination extends.
Why it matters
Tuzigoot explains the Verde Valley in one view from its roof. Below you is the floodplain the Sinagua farmed, the marsh a dairy family drained, the tailings a copper company left, and the river that has outlasted all of them; behind you is Jerome, the mine that paid for the dig. It is the rare ruin whose rediscovery and its damage have the same author, and the monument is honest about both. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is straightforward: it is the Verde Valley ruin to walk through rather than look at, it takes two hours, and it belongs in the same day as Dead Horse Ranch and Jerome.