Photo Tour of the Sedona, Arizona Back Country

Our guides knew just where to look. About 5 feet after the fence ended, we turned right and followed a trail into the woods. The leaves rustled and we anticipated the thrill of seeing ruins and pictographs that others rarely get to see.

The first tribes to settle in the Sedona area were the Hohokam, who were farming people. The Hohokam were in the Sedona area from about 1000 to 1400 AD. They built pueblos and cliff dwellings. Once the Hohokam mysteriously disappeared, the agrarian Sinagua Indians, whose Spanish name means ‘without water,’ arrived. They were able to farm in the dry desert without much water.

Traces of the Sinagua may be found in the remains of their ruined pueblos scattered around the Sedona area. Sites such as Palatki, Honanki, and Wupatki had dozens of rooms in double story buildings and were decorated with pictographs and petroglyphs depicting clan affiliations, mythological beings and astronomical observations. Early in the 15th century, the Sinagua disappeared from the area for reasons which remain a mystery and about this time the Yavapai and Apache Indians began to settle along the sides of Oak Creek canyon.

It is the pictographs and hidden pueblo ruins, which my friends from Oregon had discovered. It was that guided hike in the Sedona back country that afforded me the opportunity to take pictures and memorialize the work of a people who had been there hundreds of years before me.