On our first day we had approximately a 4.5 hour drive from Phoenix to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. We made several stops along the way to break up the drive. We first stopped for lunch at Los Altenos in Flagstaff and from there it was another thirty minutes to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and Wupatki National Monument are located on a 36 mile loop road off of Highway 89 and it’s easy to visit both sites in a few hours (or longer if you have the time).

We paid a visit to the Sunset Crater Visitor’s center, which was very informative despite its small size. Sunset Crater is part of the larger San Francisco Volcanic field (1800 square miles). The field has produced over 600 volcanoes and Sunset Crater is the youngest and least eroded. It erupted roughly 930 years ago and the resultant cinder cone is today almost a mile wide at the base and 1000 feet high. The crater measures 400 feet deep and 2,250 feet from rim to rim.

Just down the road from the visitor’s center is the parking area for the Lava Flow Nature trail, an easy one mile loop through the Bonito Lava flow. The Bonito Lava Flow covered over two square miles and the trail winds its way through the lava field for an up close look at the basalt rocks and Sunset Crater. We found the landscape really interesting and liked how it felt incongruous in contrast to the surrounding high desert landscape.

While Sunset Crater Volcano was an interesting geological stop, we learned more about the human history at Wupatki National Monument. Wupatki is a collection of five prehistoric pueblos and we visited two of them: Wukoki and Wuptaki. These pueblos are well constructed, amazingly well preserved (with some reinforcement and in some cases, reconstruction), and easily accessible (you can walk in them, but have to stay off the walls). The pueblos blend in with their environment, almost appearing to grow out of the rock. Artifacts excavated and tree ring dating from ceiling beams show the pueblos were inhabited from approximately 1120 through 1210. While a lot of literature refers to these people as Sinaguan (meaning “without water”), we learned this is actually a modern term and not accurate as it is not known what these people called themselves. It is known the people from Wupatki were ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni, and other puebloan peoples of today and the general term “ancestoral puebloans” is used.

Sunset Crater Volcano and Wupatki were both interesting places to visit and we're glad we had the time to stop.