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| Hiking | 2.16 Miles |
159 AEG |
| | Hiking | 2.16 Miles | 1 Hour 22 Mns | | 1.99 mph |
| 159 ft AEG | 17 Mns Break | | | |
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| partners | | I first visited Agua Fria last month and saw the Perry Tank Canyon ruins, and I wanted to see a few more of the "Seven Cities" of the Perry Mesa Tradition. The plan for today was to visit Pueblo La Plata first, then the Baby Canyon ruins. The parking lot was empty at Pueblo La Plata when we arrived, and the sign had some interesting history about the site and the natives. It was a very short walk to the first ruins complex, and there were fewer pot sherds than I'd expected after the impressive quantity at Perry Tanks/Rattlesnake. Since PLP is a more well-known, higher-traffic site, I'm not sure if that's a result of visitors carrying off pieces of pottery or professional excavation from archeologists studying the site. We did find one especially interesting, curved piece of pottery that looked like the bottom portion of a small cup or bowl.
The quality of some of the walls at this site was better than anything at Perry Tanks. Several of the rooms had well-defined walls with some of the mortar still intact, whereas the walls at Perry Tanks were almost entirely loose stacks of rock with no mortar. Here, we also looked for the roasting pits mentioned on the sign along the southeast side of the complex but didn't see anything definitive. There were numbered "Friends of the Agua Fria National Monument" signs scattered throughout the site, which I assume call out points of interest that correspond to a guide somewhere.
We hiked out to the point to see Fort Silver, and that site had very little pottery in the area, suggesting it was used more as a lookout rather than an actual living site. The walls there were also minimal--other than the "perimeter" wall running across the east side of the fort, there wasn't much to see in the way of structures, but the views overlooking Silver Creek were nice. Overall, the two ruins sites at PLP were interesting, but there were fewer artifacts than at Perry Tanks or Baby Canyon, which we visited next--I'll post a separate triplog for that site. [ triplog ] |
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