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| beginning our day's travel |
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| we did not see Elk |
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| more crooked road |
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| the Ranger Station |
We traveled 94 miles today from Williams, Arizona to Cottonwood, Arizona and are set up in TT Verde Valley. We dropped 3-4000 feet in altitude!!! We saw the Arizona Divide at the elevation of 7,335 feet. We saw a sign that said 4000 feet elevation.
After we got our RV set up and rested a bit, Bruce and I went to The Montezuma Castle National Monument which is located near Camp Verde, Arizona in the Southwestern United States. It features well preserved cliff dwellings. They were built and used by the Pre Columbian Shingua. people, northern cousins of the southern Hohokam around 700 A.D. it was occupied from approximately 1125-1400 A.D. and occupation peaked around 1300 A.D. Several Hopi clans trace their roots to immigrants from the Montezuma Castle/beaver Creek area. When European Americans discovered them in the 1860s, they named them for the Aztec emperor (of Mexico) Montezuma II due to mistaken beliefs that the emperor had been connected to their construction. Neither part of the monument's name is correct. The Sinagua dwelling was abandoned 100 years before Montezuma was born and the dwellings were not a castle. It was more like a 'prehistoric high rise apartment complex'. The complex was five stories,20 room dwelling. A short distance west is Castle A, once an imposing six story apartment -like building with about 45 rooms. It is now badly deteriorated. Beaver Creek was a reliable source of water, and there was fertile land on the nearby terrace.
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We then went for pizza and this statue was in front of where we ate...the world's largest Kokopelli..a mythical fertility deity among the Native American Indians.
more later
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