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Pueblo La Plata
Agua Fria National Monument

Aerial photos of Pueblo La Plata (Jan, 2011)

How to Get There

Pueblo La Plata is the one site in the Agua Fria National Monument the location of which is published by the BLM. To get there, take the Bloody Basin Road exit from I-17, and head east. The blacktop will change almost immediately to a well-maintained dirt road, where you will find a sign marking the entrance to the Monument and a kiosk with a map. A high-clearance vehicle is recommended, but if it hasn't rained recently almost any vehicle will do.

Measuring from the kiosk, go south and east on Bloody Basin Road. It will run parallel to the highway for a while, wind down into a valley, cross a ford at the Agua Fria River at the 4.9 mile mark, and climb back up on top of Perry Mesa. At the 8.9 mile mark, turn left onto an unmarked (and much more poorly maintained) dirt road. For this you will definitely need a high clearance vehicle. This road is a little more than a mile long, passes to the right of some large piles of dirt that were bulldozed up during the excavation of a stock pond, and ends at a parking area near a sign marking the trail to Pueblo La Plata (see Photo 1). The walk from there to the ruin is a few hundred yards. For those with a GPS, the coordinates of Pueblo La Plata are 34o 15' 06"N, 112o 02' 00"W.

The Site

Photo 1
Sign marking the trail head to Pueblo La Plata. The ruin is the mound, barely visible in the middle of the photo.(Jan 2005)
Photo 2
Low altitude shot looking northeast. (Jan 2005)
Photo 3
Low altitude shot looking west. (Jan 2005)
Photo 4
Interior walls. Note the pot sherds in the foreground.(Jan 2005)
Photo 5
A basalt caprock cliff surrounds the mesa on which the ruin is located.(Dec 2008)

Pueblo La Plata: Click on a thumbnail for larger pictures.

The site itself is difficult to photograph. The walls are reduced to only a few feet of height in most places, and brush and grass has collected inside the ruins, restricting visibility. (The brush grows preferentially inside the ruins because the walls give them some protection from high winds and, more importantly, from grazing cattle. Thus, spotting little islands of brush from a distance can be a good clue to the presence of ruins.) In any case, although you can get a good feeling for the size and complexity of the site as you walk around it, it is difficult to capture the same sense of scale in a ground-level photograph. To get above the brush, I occasionally employ my "pole-cam," which consists of a camera mounted on the end of a collapsible sixteen-foot pole. For more challenging situation, I also use a balloon-mounted camera called "Balloon-Cam" (see photo 10, and the balloon-cam mosaic below).

Photos 2 and 3 were taken using the pole-cam. You can see my vehicle (barely) in the parking area in the center of Photo 2. Photo 3 is looking towards the west, out along a peninsula that is bordered on the right (north) by Silver Creek and on the left (south) by an unnamed wash. If you walk out to the tip of the mesa in that direction, you will find Silver Creek Fort, a man-made rock wall that divides the tip of the peninsula from the rest of the mesa.

Photo 6
Wall construction using field stones and mud mortar. (Jan 2005)
Photo 7
Wall joints indicate that sections were added at different times. (Jan 2005)
Photo 8
Different materials indicate different periods of construction. (Jan 2005)
Photo 9
Pot sherds and obsidian flakes litter the ground. The decorated black-on-white piece may be Anasazi. (Dec 2008)
Photo 10
The Balloon Cam.(Dec 2008)

Pueblo La Plata: Click on a thumbnail for larger pictures.

Photo 6 shows a close-up of the construction technique used in the walls. Note that the stones are used as they are found (field-stones) with no attempt to modify them to fit, except perhaps for breaking exceptionally large pieces into more manageable sizes or smoothing off inconvenient nubs. Note also the strawless mud mortar used to stabilize the walls, and the extent to which is has decayed over time. In cliff dwellings, which are protected from rain, it is common to see such walls covered over in a plaster of mud half an inch to an inch thick. If that technique was used here, the covering has long since washed away.

One of the ways archeologists can tell that a structure was built over time rather than all at once is through features like the one shown in Photo 7. The vertical joint between wall sections (near the right) clearly indicates that this was once an outside wall, with a new section subsequently added on. Another indication that a structure was built in stages is a sharp difference in construction techniques or materials. The wall section on the left of Photo 8 is constructed predominantly of sedimentary rocks, while the section on the right uses a form of basalt.

Photo 9 shows a fairly typical section of ground around the ruin. The red-brown pot sherds are "plainware" of local manufacture, while the decorated piece was undoubtedly imported. This black-on-white design appears to be Cibola White Ware of Anasazi origin (anyone with more expertise in pottery identification is invited to comment). Also present are obsidian stone chips (lithics), left over from tool-making, which probably originated in the Bradshaw mountains.

Mosaic Image from the Balloon Cam

Photo 10 (above) shows the semi-famous Balloon Camera being readied for launch over Pueblo La Plata. The balloon is too large to be conveniently carried inside a vehicle, and must be inflated on site. The tank with the pink top contains the helium--and yes, it is heavy. The fishing rod and reel on the ground next to the tank are used to hoist and retrieve the balloon. The camera itself dangles from the balloon's bottom right corner.

The Balloon Cam must be operated in calm weather, as even the slightest wind results in excessive camera motion and blurry images. The best conditions are usually found in the early morning. Photo 10 was taken at the crack of dawn on a very chilly December morning.

The image below is a composite of several images taken using the Balloon Cam. The images do not quite line up in places, because the balloon cam had to be moved around to photograph the entire site. Click on the image below for a larger photo.

Mosaic of Pueblo La Plata from the Balloon Cam (Dec 2008)

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