Walnut Canyon Ruins in Arizona
Park entrance. We visited this one on our last trip 3 years ago, but a landslide had blocked the path to the ruins. We hoped that the path would be cleared by now and were glad to find out that it had. Now we could hike to the cliff dweller ruins and actually step inside!

The entrance to the ruins is through the park visitors' center at the top of the canyon.

Here we look back from the first section of stairs leading to the ruins.

Looking across the canyon to the ruins on the other side.

The dwellings were built under the natural overhang of the cliffs. This is the remains of one of the rooms.

Here I am looking at soot stains from the fires that were built inside this room.

A view of 3 rooms in this section. There were dwellings that still had the stones and mud fronts with small doorways and vents, but visitors were not allowed to enter. We walked past dwelling sites on the shady side of the cliff, then the sunny side.

Pretty cactus flowers were a surprise.

Now we must return to the top of the canyon. This marker at the beginning of the return path will give everyone an idea of how far down we were from the visitors' center.

This is the view from the stone marker!!! Thank goodness we brought water as the weather was hot and dry.

Here we were about half way up the climb.

There are several landings with benches for resting. We were at about 6000 ft. above sea level here and needed to stop a few times to catch our breath and get the heart rate back to normal. One of the drawbacks of living a sea level.

This was a highlight which burned a lot of calories, and left us both with some sore muscles.

We had lunch in the picnic area before heading to our next camp site.