We left Grand Canyon National Park to make the ~150 mile trip to Sedona, AZ. Along the way we got a few last looks at the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river deep inside it.
We then continued east to highway 89 and stopped at the Wupatki National Monument, where you can see the remains of a communal living space built by Native Americans around 500 AD and inhabited for about 700 years. It has 100 rooms, in its final years benefited from a layer of ash deposited by the eruption of the nearby sunset volcano that made the soil more fertile.
A very interesting part of Wupatki is a blowhole, which was blowing out air strongly and consistently when we visited (notice the yellow hat full of air in the image blow). It is essentially a very large underground cave that is only accessible via a small hole on the surface. During the way, when the outside air is warm and rises, causing lower pressure at the surface, the air from inside the cave rushes out through the hole. When it is cold outside, the direction reverses.
The final stop along the way was at the nearby Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, to look at the aftermath of the eruption of a very young (geologically speaking) volcano that took place about a thousand years ago.
We then headed to our Airbnb in Sedona, Arizona.
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