We really really like to see ruins and ancient dwellings so if possible we structure our trips to visit some historical spots. Today our primary goal is to visit Perry Tank Canyon Ruin (a.k.a. Pueblo Pato), a relatively difficult to access Indian Ruin in Agua Fria National Monument. The road there is high clearance recommended with some good nerves when driving the shelf road also recommended. We park at a corral and start in the rough direction of the ruin, we have an idea where it is but until we get there we can’t be sure.
Soon all our orientation challenges are forgotten as we see a big herd of proghorn antelopes in the distance. it is quite cool and we haven’t seen that many till now in Arizona so it is very exciting!
We know that we are approaching the ruin area when we start seeing petroglyphs on many rocks. In fact the major attraction here is a petroglyph panel that we really hope we will be able to find when we reach the ruin proper.
When we reach the ruins we notice that they are not excavated and maintained. You can see the walls and guess where the rooms where but it can be tough to understand the size of the pueblo. What we understand is that the location was strategic with a great view of the river and approach points towards the mesa.
We start to search for the famous duck panel (Pueblo Pato, the name has to mean something, right?) with no luck initially. We find quite a few with proghorn petroglyphs though and given our encounter just a few minutes ago that is not surprising.
And then we finally find the famous panel. It has besides the usual proghorns also a duck which is a quite unusual petroglyph in the area. Also an alien afterwards but who is looking for those?
We explore a bit more finding also lots of shards, some of them very colorful. But then it is time to return, we get at the car just in time to enjoy the beautiful sunset before carefully making our way to the interstate and then back to Phoenix.
