Images of Agua Fria National Monument – Central Arizona, taken in April 2018.

As the speedometer approaches the 75 mile per hour speed limit along I-17 in central Arizona it’s not hard to imagine that one would completely miss the fact that they are skirting the boundary of Agua Fria National Monument. There is one sign marking its existence but that is easily missed so you really have to know it’s there and be looking for it. This monument is pure wilderness; there is no visitor center, the roads are not paved and most are marked by simple posts with the designated road number. This is a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) park.

There are several access points into the wilderness and the first I went to was the Badger Spring Trail which winds its way in to the Agua Fria River. This is an easy trail which takes one into the park and to some very nice petroglyphs.

To the north of the Badger Springs area was the Bloody Basin Road which leads to my next destination, the Pueblo la Plata archaeological site. The road was maintained for several miles and then it was not; becoming a little rougher with rocks and a washboard surface and even transforming into a single lane road as it made its way upwards onto the Perry Mesa. My pueblo turnoff was well marked, Road 9320 was only a mile long but the surface became progressively rougher the farther along I drove. This was indeed the road less traveled and although my Subaru is all-wheel-drive I became increasingly concerned that this might actually be a 4 by 4 route. I’ll be damned if I was going to turn around now, less than a mile from the ruins, so I slowly climbed over a path that was more rock than road finally reaching my destination. Pueblo la Plata is an unexcavated site much like Yucca House National Monument which I visited in southern Colorado. There are recognizable walls and rooms which make it easy to see how the pueblo was situated but the most interesting feature was the fact that there were pottery shards everywhere; you were literally walking on them. It made exploring the pueblo that much more interesting.