Round Trip Distance: 2.8 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 3674 - 3743 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 2 hrs. 30 mins.
Trailhead: 9610/FR 610 MM 4.3
Fee: none
Attractions: pueblo ruins, petroglyphs
The Lousy Canyon Pueblo is located in the Agua Fria National Monument northeast of Black Canyon City, Arizona. The pueblo sits near the edge of the mesa across a branch of Lousy Canyon just south of the Lousy Canyon Fort site.
To get there take I-17 Exit 259 and follow the Bloody Basin Road east for 11.3 miles turning right onto Agua Fria 9014. Continue as 9014 crosses into the Tonto National Forest and becomes FR 14. As the road reaches the turn to the Brooklyn Complex of ruins keeping to the right will transition you onto FR 610 where you will pass through a gate. About 0.4 miles beyond the gate stay to the right to remain on FR 610.
After 2 more miles FR 610 passes through a gate and enters the Agua Fria National Monument where it becomes 9610.
For the next 2.3 miles the road varies between being smooth to bouncing over rocks that require at least medium ground clearance to pass over.
At the 2.3 mile point there is a primitive campsite that serves well as a trailhead. From here it is about 1.2 miles further to the Lousy Canyon Pueblo.
A person could continue driving although the road is pretty rough in places. We began hiking because we had a couple of waypoints for some other ruins in this area that required a bit of searching. As it turned out none of them actually existed. Someone probably saw something in satellite view that looked like it might be ruins and somehow or other we ended up with the waypoints.
About 4 tenths of a mile from the primitive campsite there is a fork where going to the right leads to Lousy Fort and keeping straight will get you to Lousy Pueblo.
As the old road levels off on top of the hill it passes through a fence.
A few hundred yards off to the left, after turning sharply to the right toward the Lousy Canyon Pueblo, there is an old ruin that looks like it had 4 rooms. There is a brown mylar marker at the site but about all you can see is a single layer of rocks outlining the rooms and a scattering of pottery. The most interesting aspect of the ruin is that it occupies high ground where it had line of sight with the Lousy Canyon Pueblo to the north and the Point Extreme area to the south. It probably served as a relay station for smoke signals between those sites.
It is about another half mile across the mesa to the Lousy Canyon Pueblo. When we were there we scared up a small herd of antelope. We had already seen a few other antelope while driving along FR 610 and some deer back around the Brooklyn Complex area.
There is a large room here where it looks like the stones have been restacked. We wondered whether that would have been done by archeologists or pot hunters. Since there is a lot of steel cans and other rubbish around a primitive campsite we were inclined to think that it was done by pot hunters trying to get the stones out of their way rather than by archeologist that we thought wouldn't have left all of their trash behind. The original sections of walls at the site have the stones fitted together snugly. For these walls the stones are simply loosely stacked. The original walls are also about 2 feet thick.
The satellite view of the Lousy Canyon Pueblo shows at most about 25-35 rooms.
There are a few faint petroglyphs that can be found on boulders just north of the pueblo but there are some much better ones that can be found a little to the west over the side of the cliff.
We took photos of a few of them that we could see from the edge of the cliff. As we were leaving we found what was probably the route over the side of the cliff to get to the petroglyphs but as we were anxious to beat the weather we didn't try it.
