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| Cave Creek Ruin Search, AZ | |
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| | Cave Creek Ruin Search, AZ | | | |
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Cave Creek Ruin Search, AZ
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| Hiking | 5.40 Miles |
1,170 AEG |
| | Hiking | 5.40 Miles | | | |
| 1,170 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | Since we went out to find petroglyphs in our area last week we now wanted to see where some of these folks lived. I've been to many ruins to the far north, east, and west of Cave Creek but never have I seen ruins of any structures close by. I know they were here. Heck, we even have found metates and manos on our own property when we built our home back in 1999. The only large Hohokam settlement I know of was on the N/W corner of Cave Creek Road and Carefree Highway. The pharmacy on that location (prior to CVS) bulldozed and bladed it in the middle of the night back in the early 2000's choosing to pay the hefty fines in lieu of the delays in construction they would have had to "endure" by letting archaeologists survey the site.
I looked and looked on Google Earth till my eyes burned and found nothing. Mrs. SloFolks went on line for 5 minutes and said..."hey, this looks like some". Sure enough, looked like she found maybe a six or seven room settlement just north of town.
We headed out this morning to investigate and before we got to the location in question we found the remains of a circular stone "fort" that had direct visual contact with the lookout "fortress" on Elephant Mountain. We then stumbled onto the remains of a eight room dwelling while doing a local plant life hydration study.  We finally got to the original target of the hike and were rewarded with the decent remnants of maybe six rooms along with a long perimeter barrier wall. Pottery shards were everywhere. We had to be careful where we walked there were so many. There was a metal spike hammered into the ground in one of the rooms with a site # on it so archeologists had been here at some point.
Well, we found what we were looking for but it was one of the toughest five and a half mile hikes we've done. It was warmer than we expected and climb was steeper than we thought in some sections. The worst part is that Trail 252 is all baseball size rocks and the going was S L O W. The best tread we had all morning was when we bush wacked to the ruins. Downhill was the worst and it's a miracle we stayed upright. 
I forgot to mention that we saw two Whitetail Deer on the climb up. I was surprised to see them this far south. We have many "Muley's" on Black Mountain but seeing these was a first for me at this elevation. |
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| "If you wait, all that happens is you get older" |
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