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Previously on my Arizona Adventures Travel Series we explored the ancient cliffside dwelling known as Montezuma Castle. This multi-leveled structure featured a ⅓ mile hiking trail only 36 minutes away from Sedona. In this video we will continue 20 minutes North on I-17 to a sub-unit of the National Monument - Montezuma Well. A ½ mile loop trail surrounds the well providing several outstanding observation points. Montezuma Well is a sinkhole, a collapsed underground limestone cavern filled with water. More than a million gallons of water a day flow continuously, providing a lush, verdant oasis in the midst of surrounding desert grassland. Montezuma Well is over 350 feet wide and 55 feet deep; it sits at an elevation of 3,618 feet. The well is a unique ecosystem with several plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. There are leeches, amphipods, water scorpions and turtles that live in this closed ecosystem. This remarkable habitat is perhaps due to the receiving and the discharging of large quantities of warm water (76° F) that enters through underground springs, keeping the environment within the well very stable. Due to the high concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide, 600 times higher than most natural aquatic environments -- it affords unique conditions for scientific studies of plant and animal interactions not found anywhere else. The ruins of several prehistoric dwellings are scattered in and around the rim of the Well. Their inhabitants belonged to several indigenous American cultures that are believed to have occupied the Verde Valley between 700 and 1425 CE, the foremost of which being a cultural group archaeologists have termed the Southern Sinagua.[2] The earliest of the ruins located on the property (with the exception of the irrigation canal), a “pithouse“ in the traditional Hohokam style, dates to about 1050 CE. More than 50 countable “rooms“ are found inside the park boundaries; it is likely that some were used for purposes other than living space, including food storage and religious ceremonies. The Sinagua people, and possibly earlier cultures, intensively farmed the land surrounding the Well using its constant outflow as a reliable source of irrigation. Beginning about 700 CE, the Well's natural drainage into the immediately adjacent Wet Beaver Creek was diverted into a man-made canal running parallel to the creek, segments of which still conduct the outflow today. The prehistoric canal, estimated at nearly seven miles in length, likely drained into a network of smaller lateral canals downstream, supplying perhaps as much as 60 acres of farmland with water. SOURCES:
