What is Walnut Canyon National Monument?
Walnut Canyon is a crooked limestone gorge about 400 feet deep cut by Walnut Creek on its way from the Flagstaff plateau toward the Little Colorado. Its walls are Kaibab limestone, which weathers in layers, so the cliffs step back in long horizontal ledges with overhangs above them. Around the year 1100, the people archaeologists call the Sinagua walled in those ledges with stone and mud and lived there for a little over a century, about 300 rooms in all, farming the rims, hunting the canyon and carrying water up from the creek. They left by about 1250 and left the rooms.
The monument protects a bend in the canyon where a fin of rock, the “island,” is ringed with dwellings. The Island Trail descends 185 feet on 240 steps from the visitor center, loops the island past 25 rooms you can walk into, with soot still on the ceilings and fingerprints in the mortar, and climbs back out. It is a mile and about an hour, and the park rates it strenuous because of the stairs and the 6,700-foot altitude. The Rim Trail, 0.7 miles, stays on top, with two overlooks, a rebuilt pithouse and a small pueblo. Across the canyon from either trail you can count dozens more rooms in the far wall. It is as intimate as Southwestern archaeology gets without a backcountry permit.
What you get is a one-to-two-hour stop with real rooms at arm’s length, a visitor center with water and a fountain, and a dark-sky park ten minutes from a city. What you do not get is a trail along the canyon floor, a dog on the stairs, or a gate that stays open past five.
How to visit Walnut Canyon right
Pay at the gate, by card. $25 per vehicle for seven days, $20 per motorcycle, $15 per person on foot or bike, card only. A $45 annual pass covers Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater and Wupatki; an America the Beautiful pass works too. Fee-free days are listed on the park site.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, I-17 north to Flagstaff, then I-40 east about 7 miles to exit 204 (Walnut Canyon Road). Turn right and drive 3 miles south on the paved park road to the visitor center. About 2 hours 20 minutes from Old Town. The lot is a normal size and fills on summer midday; the overflow waits. The park closes at 5 p.m., the Island Trail stops admitting hikers at 4, and the Rim Trail at 4:30. Arizona does not observe daylight saving time; if your phone has been across a state line, check it against Arizona time.
Do the stairs first and early. The Island Trail is in shade before eleven and the buses have not arrived. The climb out is the only hard part, 240 steps at 6,700 feet, and it is a different experience at 9 a.m. than at 2 p.m. in July. Look across the canyon as much as at the rooms beside you; the rangers’ binoculars at the visitor center are free.
Pick the season. Open all year except a few federal holidays. The Island Trail closes when ice makes the stairs dangerous, often for days after a winter storm. Summer mornings are cool and pleasant; afternoons bring the monsoon in July and August. Spring and fall are ideal.
Water and restrooms. Flush restrooms and a water fountain at the visitor center. Nothing on the trails; carry a bottle.
Dogs. Leashed on the Rim Trail and in the lot only.
Fisher Point and the upper canyon. Upstream of the monument the canyon is national forest. From the Sandys Canyon Trailhead on Lake Mary Road, near Canyon Vista Campground, the Arizona Trail follows the canyon floor to Fisher Point, a sweeping sandstone overhang, about three miles each way and free. It is a fine walk and it does not reach the dwellings. Flagstaff’s Fort Valley Trailhead on US 180 is a different AZT access point on the far side of town, not a way in here.
Skip it if you want a full day on your own; it is a one-to-two-hour stop, not a destination. Build the day around it with Sunset Crater and Wupatki, stop on the way home from the Grand Canyon, or pair it with the Verde Valley’s Sinagua sites at Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot on a longer loop.
The canyon the railroad nearly emptied
The Sinagua moved into Walnut Canyon late in their history. They had farmed the Flagstaff country for centuries, and the eruption of Sunset Crater around 1085 pushed people east and south onto new ground. Between about 1125 and 1250 they built roughly 300 rooms into the canyon’s limestone ledges, using the overhangs as roofs and the ledge floors as foundations, walling the fronts with limestone blocks and clay. They farmed corn, beans and squash on the rims, where the soil was deeper, and climbed down to the creek for water. The canyon gave them shelter, a defensible position and, in a dry country, a stream; it did not give them much level ground, and after little more than a century they left. Drought and pressure from neighbours are the usual explanations. The Hopi and Zuni count the Sinagua among their ancestors, and the park consults with them and with the Yavapai and Apache, who used the canyon later, about everything from excavation to signs.
For six centuries the rooms sat undisturbed, and then the railroad came. The Atlantic and Pacific reached Flagstaff in 1882, and within a few years Walnut Canyon was a Sunday outing for the new town and a stop for travellers who wanted a souvenir. They dug out the rooms for pots, baskets and sandals; dealers followed; and some used dynamite to bring down walls and get at what was behind them. Michael Riordan, one of the lumber brothers whose mansion is now a state park, was among the better-known diggers before he became one of the canyon’s defenders. In 1904 the canyon was folded into the San Francisco Mountains Forest Reserve and a ranger was stationed there, but one man on horseback could not stop a town, and the damage went on.
Protection took local pressure. The Riordan family and a Flagstaff Catholic priest lobbied for a monument, and on November 30, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Walnut Canyon National Monument under the Antiquities Act, to preserve the cliff dwellings from looting and vandalism. The Forest Service ran it for its first two decades. In 1933 and 1934, as part of the reorganization that handed the national monuments to the National Park Service, Walnut Canyon changed agencies, and in the late 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived with the labour the place needed: crews stabilized walls, led guided tours to keep visitors off the ruins, built the stone stairs and retaining walls of the Island Trail, and put up the buildings the park still uses. The trail you walk down is their work.
The monument has grown slowly since. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966; boundary additions brought it to about 3,600 acres; and in 2016 it was named, with Sunset Crater and Wupatki, an International Dark Sky Park, one of the few such designations within ten minutes of a city. The pot-hunters’ holes are still visible in some rooms, which the rangers point out on purpose: they are the reason the monument exists.
Why it matters
Walnut Canyon is the clearest case in Arizona of why the Antiquities Act was written. A railroad, a growing town and a market for pots came within a generation of emptying 300 rooms that had survived six centuries, and the people who stopped it were locals who had done some of the digging themselves. The monument is also the model for the small NPS site: one trail, one loop, real rooms at arm’s length, an hour and a half, and a gate at five. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the best archaeology stop on the way to or from Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, and the one to take parents and children to first. Go before eleven, take the stairs, and look across the canyon.