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| Upper Cherry Crk Camping Trip - Day 1, AZ | | -
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| | Upper Cherry Crk Camping Trip - Day 1, AZ | | | |
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Upper Cherry Crk Camping Trip - Day 1, AZ
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| Hiking | 3.60 Miles |
1,070 AEG |
| | Hiking | 3.60 Miles | | | |
| 1,070 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | This was the first day of a six day camping trip to Upper Cherry Creek Canyon starting 4/14 and ending 4/19/2014. I had detailed plans and gps tracks for hikes for five of the days which involved searching for Indian Ruins and one homestead site.
On day one I took two short hikes at two different locations on the drive up HW288 to the FR203 intersection at Board Tree Saddle. The first destination was a prominent view point to look at a south facing cliff face that I had seen on an earlier trip. I wanted to get a closer view and take some telephoto pics to check for cliff dwellings.
The off trail hike to the viewpoint was a pleasant stroll in the pines with fantastic views down into Cherry Crk Canyon. The view point had a clear view of a long cliff overhang on the distant cliff face. I took many pictures and was about 80% sure that there were cliff dwelling walls visible in the pictures. However I wouldn't be sure until I got home and zoomed in on the pics on my PC. Viewing the pictures at home revealed that there were walls for at least 5 separate rooms spread out along a section of the overhang. The outer wall on four of the rooms had crumbled to the ground because the overhang wasn't deep enough to protect it from the rain. One room appeared to have an intact fully plastered wall. This is a site that is not listed in the two major archaeology reports on Sierra Ancha cliff dwellings. This got me excited but figuring out where a cliff dwelling is located is the easy part. Getting to it is the difficult part.
The second hike this day was a short jaunt up the McFadden Horse Mtn Trail from the TH on HW288 to check out an archaeology site next to the trail. I had estimated its location from info in one of the SA archaeology reports. If I could verify that my estimated location was correct then I could use the same locating method to find over 100 sites in this same report. I didn't know what type of site was at this location other than some type of habitation but enough artifacts had been found there by the archaeologists to classify the pueblo period it was from. As it turned out I found a one room dwelling with collapsed rock walls hidden in a dense manzanita thicket within a few feet of my estimated location. The ruin wasn't much but verifying the accuracy of my locating technique made up for my disappointment over the magnitude of the site.
That finished my hikes for the day and I continued the drive down into Upper Cherry Creek Canyon and set up camp at Camp Grasshopper. |
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