A hike into Rogers Canyon leads to ancient Salado ruins

By Lindsay Walker

Sitting on the limestone in an ASU jacket, I was a modern girl. But for a moment, I was Salado.

When I was in the fourth grade, I took a field trip to Montezuma Castle, 100 miles north of Phoenix. The Sinagua Indian ruins appeared distant, located high on the side of a mountain. I gawked, marveled and promptly left. I’d seen all there was to see.

So when my uncle Craig told me about a hike where he walked among ruins, it sparked my curiosity. I had been trying to spice up my school-and-work-driven life with new experiences. So even though I’m not much of a hiker, I asked him if he’d take me to visit them.

The hike was located in Rogers Canyon, in the Superstition Wilderness just east of Apache Junction. In the 14th century, an ancient people, known as the Salado, constructed cliff dwellings in three clustered caves in what is now part of the Tonto National Forest. The Tonto National Forest boasts more than 9,000 Indian ruin sites, but James Muñoz, wilderness program manager for the Mesa Ranger District, said Rogers Canyon is the “hottest spot.” The site off Trail No. 110 is the only one in the Superstition Wilderness with a path that leads directly to the ruins, and at least 800 people visit every year.

I met my uncle—a 5-foot-10-inch man of medium build and 45 years, with tan arms, an abundance of dark brown hair and strong cheekbones—early on a Sunday morning in October. We jumped into his 1998 Chevy Blazer and took off for the wilderness. He looked at me and asked if I had enough water, as the trail was nine miles roundtrip. Hearing the distance out loud for the first time made me uncomfortable. But I thought, “I’m young. I can handle it.”

Photo by Lindsay Walker
Thousands of years ago, a dozen or so Salado sheltered inside this cave in Rogers Canyon.

To be safe, we made a sunscreen-and-water stop at Bashas’, and about an hour later, turned off the highway onto a dirt road. Without a decent map or signage, we almost lost our way several times. Once, my uncle got out of the car, ran a little ways and came back waving and pointing. “We have to go that way.”

After several “yee-haws” and some fishtailing, we put the Blazer into four-wheel drive, and eventually reached the Rogers Trough Trailhead. A mule deer peeked up from behind a bush and bounded off.

Following ancient footsteps
Expecting warm weather, I wore shorts and a T-shirt. But when we got out of the Blazer, a breeze chilled me. At this point, I felt totally unprepared. But I wanted to see the ruins and was determined to do it. So I borrowed my uncle’s extra-large ASU jacket and we left the barely filled parking lot (there were a total of five vehicles) and trekked toward the dirt trail that quickly descended into the canyon.

My four water bottles sloshed rhythmically as I did a “downhill shuffle”—putting one foot in front of the other, carefully alternating the pressure between the balls of my feet and my heels in an attempt to not slip on the loose gravel. I felt like a tightrope-walker, holding out my hands for balance. As I stepped, grasshoppers jigged around me. A black, yellow and white butterfly floated past. I stopped and watched it land gracefully on a manzanita branch, opening and closing its wings slowly, like a dance.

We crisscrossed the canyon floor, back and forth over the dry creek bed. In the spring, water flows over the rocks, but now the bed lingered dry and stationary.

After 45 minutes, we heard faint voices. My uncle called, “Hullo!”

A man yelled back, “We’re safe. We just smell bad.”

Hearing their voices surprised me. Strange as it sounds, by this time, I’d almost forgotten other people existed. But in hiking this trail, we were following in the footsteps of many who had gone before. William Neil Smith, the first person to record the ruins at Rogers Canyon, wrote in his 1941 report that these trails were originally made in the 1880s by cattle rancher Jack Fraser.

But even before that, in the 1300s, people were settling in the area. The Hohokam lived in the present-day Valley and sent out small groups to build trading contacts throughout Arizona. The Hohokam taught others agricultural and irrigational techniques and brought them into the Hohokam way of life, said Scott Wood, archaeologist and heritage manager for the Tonto National Forest.

Wood, who has been with the Forest Service for 30 years, said the Salado people, a genetic blend of the Hohokam and other groups, developed out of this way of life and settled in the wilderness.

“Anywhere you’ve got water and dirt, and can grow things, people will live there at some time,” he said. Several flat areas in the canyon would have made good farmland, so the Salado were farmers, growing corn, beans, squash, barley and agaves.

“Agave!” My uncle, a landscape architect, was calling out names of various desert plants to me. The manzanita stood tall with its smooth purple-red trunk in contrast with the alligator juniper, which leaned slightly, its coarse gray bark segmented in rows of tiny squares.

“Desert spoon … that’ll rip ya if you’re not watching for it.”

I watched for it the rest of the way. But while I worried about desert spoon, dry branches scratched my legs as I maneuvered along the trail. I wanted to quit, but I wanted even more to see the ruins. Weary, sweaty, cut and bleeding—OK, there was only a trickle of blood—I kept going.

And then, there they were—across the canyon, up high, built in a cave in the side of the mountain. But this wasn’t Montezuma Castle. Here, I could climb up there and see those ruins up close.

Picturing an ancient cave-dwelling family
Cliff dwellings served as a form of defense, and this particular site was what Wood would consider a “rural homestead,” where 10 to 15 people probably lived with their families at any one time. The Salado mostly dwelled in the Tonto Basin, northeast of Rogers Canyon near Roosevelt Dam, until they disappeared altogether in the late 15th century. Though the cause is unknown, Wood said there was a general economic collapse and “after that, things went to hell pretty fast.”

Heartened by the sight, I crossed the canyon floor, making my way up to the cave.

And now, in front of me stood a little house constructed with rocks and cracked mud. The Salado used ground-stone tools like axes mounted on wooden handles to build their houses. A partial roof made of 6-inch diameter sycamore logs rested on top of the house.

The Salado shaped the mud with their hands. My uncle placed his own hands where he saw the handprints of the people who had constructed the gray-tinted dwellings. A walled-in courtyard jutted out from the front of the house. A 4-foot-high “doorway for midgets” (as my uncle called it) led the way into the courtyard. Wood had said the courtyard and short doors are trademarks of the Hohokam people and were used as means of defense and privacy.

On the back left corner of the cave, a tall black stain streaked the cave wall. I imagined the Salado people sitting there in front of a fire, the women grinding corn, weaving tapestries of brilliant colors and shaping pottery with their strong forearms. The men would have been crafting arrowheads, leaning intently over their projects.

I sat at the edge of the cave. The mountains spread before me, tall and still—and for once I stopped to hear the silence. I felt like a kindergartner, wide-eyed, amazed by the simplest things.

Sitting on the limestone in an ASU jacket, I was a modern girl. But for a moment, I was Salado. And though they were different from me in so many ways—they probably wouldn’t have complained about getting scraped up by overgrown branches—it wasn’t all that hard to imagine.

As Wood said, “There’s more to these people than decaying sticks of mud and rocks.” These were people too.

It’s strange that I never fully understood that till now.

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The Devil’s Tale showcases the coursework of individual students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.