Round Trip Distance: 2.2 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 3941 - 3990 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 2 hrs.
Trailhead: Squaw Creek Group
Fee: none
Attractions: pueblo ruins, petroglyphs
The Squaw Creek Group is a large pueblo complex that is located in the Tonto National Forest, bordering on the Agua Fria National Monument, northeast of Black Canyon City, Arizona. Taken together the 3 pueblos that make up the group contain between 150-200 rooms. Hundreds of petroglyphs are found below the rim of the mesa below the ruins that we will cover in 2 separate posts.
To get there take I-17 Exit 259 and follow the Bloody Basin Road east for 11.3 miles and turn right at the kiosk onto Agua Fria 9014/FR 14.
Agua Fria 9014 becomes FR 14 once it crosses the boundary into the Tonto National Forest. Stay to the right at the 4.35 mile point unless you are going to the Brooklyn Group first. To the right the road continues as FR 599 and passes through a gate.
At the 6.8 mile point from the Bloody Basin Road take the left fork onto FR 3164. Going to the right leads to Point Extreme.
After another quarter mile the first pueblo will be on the left side of the road.
Sitting out in the open on the flat mesa the medium sized ruins of the 1st pueblo have a few intact walls and a scattering of pottery.
The road gets rougher as it continues for another 4 tenths of a mile to the main pueblo that sits on the edge of the mesa overlooking Squaw Creek. The main pueblo has a very large defensive wall that encloses it with a lot of open space between the wall and the pueblo.
The main pueblo is so massive that about all you can do is walk around its circumference where there are many intact walls peeking out among the piles of rubble.
One feature that we haven't noticed among all the other ruins in the area is a doorway in one of the inner walls. Pueblos aren't generally built with doors or windows in their outer walls. The only opening is through the roof by means of a ladder. Knowing that many pueblos were more than one story high and that storage rooms probably wouldn't have a hole in their roof it stands to reason that there had to be inner doorways and passages and here we have found one.
Among the large amount of pottery spread about the ruins there are a few pieces that are quite large. Be sure to leave all the pottery and any other artifacts where you find them for others to enjoy, remembering that it is illegal to remove them.
Several hundred feet to the northwest of the main pueblo there is a much smaller ruin that sits off by itself. In this photo the main pueblo can be seen in the background.
