A landscape’s dramatic features can overwhelm first-time visitors. But sometimes the places that exist on a more human scale can have a greater impact. In his latest Canyon Commentary, author Scott Thybony tells how this happened to novelist Willa Cather in an area of Walnut Canyon that’s now closed to the public. After securing hard-won permits, Thybony retraced Cather’s steps on the ancient Water Trail with the archeologists who rediscovered it.
In 1912 novelist Willa Cather spent three days exploring Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff. She called it “a cleft in the heart of the world,” and the experience became a turning point in her life.
Her work in New York City as a highly successful magazine editor had gone stale. After taking a leave of absence, she stepped off a train in Winslow, Arizona ready to have her life upended. Having put aside her writing, she found her head full of stories. “I dream about them at night,” she wrote a friend. And those dreams would later take form in a novel, The Song of the Lark. Her travels restored her spirit, and she went on to write one bestselling novel after another.
When I think of her, I see a woman striding down the ancient Water Trail in her canvas shoes with red rubber soles. “Good for rock climbing,” she told a friend. It was springtime when she came upon a stone house built on a cliff ledge 800 years earlier. Taking a break, she sat in the entryway catching the morning sun. “The atmosphere of the cañon,” she later wrote, “was ritualistic.”
In this cliff-walled place it’s hard to walk anywhere without encountering evidence of an earlier human presence. Sometimes it’s a line of cliff houses stretching along a canyon ledge, and sometimes it’s pieces of a broken pot.
Finding potsherds on the old trail reminded Willa Cather of the women who had worn the path carrying water, the key to life. An old map called it the “Ancient Trail to Water.” Centuries ago it led to deep basins at the bottom of the canyon where the Sinagua people filled their water jugs. But over the years it had become overgrown and lost to memory. Until 2008. That’s when park archeologist Ted Tsouras and his crew rediscovered the old trail. And what they found came as a surprise.
Curious to learn more, I link up with Ted and archeologist Bernie Netseway, a Hopi who was on the original discovery team. They lead us down the old trail which angles through the rock layers of an older geological past. One day, Ted tells us, they were searching for an easier way to reach an archeological site across the canyon. They found a surprisingly good route without realizing at first they were following an old trail. Partway down, Ted stepped onto a bare outcrop for a better view and noticed the massive stonework filling a sharp cut nearby.
The stacked boulders were surprisingly large with the heaviest weighing more than two tons. It turned out to be the ancient Water Trail and would have taken a community-wide effort to construct. The archeologists followed up with a major study to document the intriguing landscape feature.
Our group continues descending. Talus rubble mantles the steep slopes banded by cliffs where the Sinagua built houses on protected ledges. The trail breaks into the open as it drops to a ledge with a simple two-room cliff dwelling tucked into it. The masonry walls have a yellow tint resembling antique ivory, and they blend so well with the cliffrock it’s hard to separate the archeology from the geology. Ted believes this site is likely the cliff house described by Willa Cather, and it matches her description well.
“The empty houses …” she wrote, “were haunted by certain fears and desires; feelings about warmth and cold and water and physical strength … A dream had been dreamed there long ago, in the night of ages …”
As we start back, dark clouds have settled lower and the rain begins with a scatter of drops. Soon thunder rumbles through the gorge, and I pull out a rain shell. The rainstorm gains intensity as we climb higher, and after a dry month no one complains.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
