What Do We Owe The Places We Visit?

700-plus steps down, a windy ledge under a limestone roof, and a cliffside “apartment” complex that once held a thriving community. I’m Craig Nitromedic, and I’m taking you along the Island Trail at Walnut Canyon outside Flagstaff for a fast, grounded tour of one of Arizona’s most memorable archaeological sites.

As we walk, we look closely at how the rooms were built and expanded over time, why the limestone overhang matters, and what the layout suggests about family growth, storage, and daily life. We also talk about the hard reality of survival here: Walnut Creek sits below, but water isn’t guaranteed, so seasonal rainfall and snowmelt would have shaped how people stored water and planned ahead. Along the way, I share a clear warning about why you shouldn’t enter certain shelters today, from preservation concerns to rodents and disease risk.

We also face the site’s more troubling history. Souvenir hunting once damaged and destroyed rooms, leaving collapsed rubble that still marks the cliffside, and I explain why modern protections as a national monument make that illegal now. To wrap up, we climb back up those steps at roughly 6,670 feet, then check out the plants and wildlife that still define the canyon, including the Arizona black walnut that inspired the name, plus owls, mountain lions, snowberry, and prickly pear cactus.

If you enjoy Arizona hiking, Flagstaff day trips, cliff dwellings, Indigenous history, and responsible travel on public lands, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Arrival At Walnut Canyon

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi there, this is Craig Nitromedic, and I'm at Walnut Canyon outside of Flagstaff today. Kind of my last stop before leaving town. Wanted to give you a look. Walking down the island trail. It's 700 and something steps down. Beautiful canyon here. And archaeologists think that at one time there may have been as many as 400 people living here. What a beautiful place they picked to live. So right here, you had a series of rooms that were built. And these rooms were continuously expanded upon as this family grew larger. But you can see how they just formed them all together, kind of like a set of apartments. Under the shelter of this limestone ledge, which I'm walking underneath. There's more homes or dwellings or buildings of some sort across the way here. And there's more, of course, over here. It's very windy. Here's some additional homes here with some little entrances, doorways, similar to what you would have seen back in the days. So down below where I'm standing there's Walnut Creek, which is a perennial stream. It doesn't really flow all the time. So you have to store water in order to live here. And depending on rainfall, snow melt, that's how you would store your water based on the seasons. Here's another shelter. Pretty cool. Again, using the limestone as a roof area over the top, and then they built reinforced walls. They don't want you to go in there because of French resources, and also because they have a lot of rodents in there. That could give you diseases, so don't go inside of these things. But they're very cool to look at. And walking around the loop again, there's more shelters tucked into the cliffside over here. I think they were opportunists, definitely found all the areas they could to place buildings and storage areas and dwellings. So one of the things that happened here, as you can see all the collapsed rubble and walls and stuff, is people souvenir hunted here. It was actually an encouraged process. People would find all kinds of things here, of course, and kept them as souvenirs. And rooms like this were destroyed by these souvenir hunters. Being a national park nowadays, it was set aside in 1915, I believe, as a national monument. That's all illegal, so don't do that nowadays. I know you probably can't tell by looking, but at one time this was considered good farming land. But with climatic changes, about 1250 or so, a lot of the native people left this area. But amazing that they made their homes here. Now the hard part. Going back up all these steps. But just about 200 feet of elevation, so not too bad. But remember you're at 6,670 feet or so. So know your limitations. Alright, made it to the top. This panel talks about several different wildlife and plant species that call the park home. The namesake for the canyon is from Arizona Black Walnut, which grow down by the creek area. You have owls, you have mountain lions, snowberry, and prickly pear cactus. Pretty interesting. So that was walnut canyon in a nutshell. It's hard to show you all the different things, but I tried to show you an overview of the park. What do you think about it? Give it a thumbs up if you liked it. Think about subscribing to the channel if you want to see more content like this, questions, comments about the place, drop them in the area below or send us a message if you're listening on the podcast. Till next time, we'll talk to you out on the trail. Bye.