AZ -- Montezuma Castle Natl Monument -- Well:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 18.116.42.208 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
 MONTW_030601_03.JPG
|
[2]
MONTW_030601_10.JPG
|
[3]
MONTW_030601_18.JPG
|
[4] MONTW_030601_25.JPG
|
[5] MONTW_030601_36.JPG
|
[6]
MONTW_030601_38.JPG
|
[7]
MONTW_030601_39.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- MONTW_030601_03.JPG: This was my third and final rattlesnake on this trip. A naturalist had captured the snake, put it in this plastic tube, and was preparing to inject it with an electronic tagging device. By putting this chip in the snake, they could identify the snake later if they caught it again. This would help them determine migration patterns, life expectancies, etc. The snake (a female) wasn't very happy with this experience.
- MONTW_030601_10.JPG: These are some of the ruins in the Montezuma Well
- MONTW_030601_18.JPG: The floating thing is a muskrat which makes its home in the well
- MONTW_030601_38.JPG: Old graffiti: "Photos of this by Rothrock Phoenix 1878 & ..."
- MONTW_030601_39.JPG: Old graffiti: "I Hill, Duke, G Heflin 6/30/1896"
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Wikipedia Description: Montezuma Castle National Monument
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Montezuma Castle National Monument, located near Camp Verde, Arizona, in the Southwestern United States, features well-preserved cliff dwellings. They were built and used by the Pre-Columbian Sinagua people around 1400 AD. Several Hopi clans trace their roots to immigrants from the Montezuma Castle/Beaver Creek area. Clan members periodically return to their former homes for religious ceremonies. When European Americans discovered them in the 1850s, they reported native traditions recalling they had been built by a divine hero named Montezuma; whose name may have been connected with the well-known historical Aztec emperor of Mexico, Moctezuma II, and accounts in Spanish as early as 1694 reference them as the "Casas de Montezuma". Some of these accounts have led to a mistaken belief that the Spanish or Americans themselves had named them after the emperor.
Cliff Dwelling:
The last known record of Sinagua occupation for any sites are for Montezuma Castle National Monument around 1425 AD. The reasons for abandonment of their habitation sites are not yet known, but warfare, drought, and clashes with the newly-arrived Yavapai people have been suggested. The five-story stone and mortar dwellings contain 20 rooms and once housed about 50 people. A natural overhang shades the rooms and shelters them from rain. Another part of the cliff wall bears the marks of an even larger dwelling, which has not survived.
The dwellings and the surrounding area were declared a U.S. National Monument on December 8, 1906. The National Monument was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966.
This is an easy monument to visit, a short distance off Interstate 17, exit 287. There is a paved trail of 1/4 mile from the visitor center along the base of the cliff containing the ruins. Access to the ruins has not been allowed since 1950.
Montezuma Well:
Montezuma Well is a separate part of the monument, located 11 miles northeast, near Rimrock, Arizona. The Well is a natural limestone sinkhole through which some 1,400,000 gallons of water flow each day. The water is highly carbonated and contains high levels of arsenic. At least five endemic species live only in the Well: a diatom, a springtail, a water scorpion, an amphipod, and a leech -- the most endemic species in any spring in the Southwest US .
Montezuma Well's outflow has been used for irrigation since the 8th century. Part of a prehistoric canal is preserved at the picnic ground, and portions of the original Hohokam(?) canal are still in use today. In 1968, Montezuma Well was the subject of the first ever underwater archaeological survey to take place in a National Park, lead by archaeologist George R Fischer.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
