With our car tires filled every morning and at every opportunity we make our way down a long dirt road to Sipe White Mountain Wildlife Area. There is only one other car in the parking lot and as we exit the car we are intercepted by the visitor center hostess. She gives us directions and tells us what animals she has seen here including wolves, nice, but also quite rare.
Next we explore the visitor center proper. With the hostess outside we are the only people inside exploring the rooms with exhibits and the conference room with a large mounted elk.
There are also a few informative panels about a pueblo on the grounds but we are not certain where it is, even with the instructions from the hostess, or whether we will be able to make it there. However the pottery found there and exhibited here is quite beautiful really and if possible it would be fun to see it.
There are also nature exhibits given the fact that it is a wildlife area, with a scary great horned owl and some beavers, not sure if they really can be found here.
Outside is a hummingbird feeding area, there are a lot of them here and we really enjoy watching them for a while. But we are careful as the hostess said one of them attacked her and almost took her eye out. There are also a few other birds around including a few bluebirds including a careful juvenile one.
And then it is time to explore the wildlife area, we follow the road/trail outside the visitor area and enter the grasslands, it is a nice hike with no one else around.
We follow the trail up and we assume towards the ruin area. We have about half hour to explore and we are not sure where the ruins are so we hurry on the trail up and then we see a fenced area, of course we have to explore what it is.
And it is actually the fenced area around the ruins with a very creaky entrance. We do not see any ruins yet but for certain we see quite a bit of pottery shards and we are excited for the actual ruins.
There are some interesting informative panels and finally we can see the ruins in the shrubbery, they were actually filled back in after excavated so there isn’t a lot left to see from the surface.
Here we can see rooms and walls and follow them, it wasn’t a huge pueblo but still it is fun to walk among the ruins of people that lived here hundreds of years ago.
Actually the highlight here are the many pottery shards, there are beautiful with many different patterns, quite special.
And then it is time to return to the car and leave for the mushroom hunt. We see a northern harrier along the way however the highlight is the herd of elk that we meet on the dirt road, it is huge and quite fun to watch as it moves slowly away. And then it is one hour drive to the mushroom gathering place where we will spend two hours gathering and learning about mushrooms.
