Kinishba Ruins

Rating: 
Round Trip Distance: 0.5 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 5247 - 5283 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 45 mins.
Trailhead: Fort Apache Museum
Fee: $5/adult, $3/senior
Attractions: Ancestral pueblo

The Kinishba Ruins are located on White Mountain Apache Lands in the Fort Apache Indian Reservation west of Fort Apache, Arizona. Kinishba, aka 'Brown House', is a National Historic Landmark whose massive size consisted of around 600 ground floor rooms. The ruins were occupied by the ancestors of today's Zuni and Hopi Pueblo tribes up into the 1400's. - (Visitor Guide to Kinishba)

Before visiting the ruins you must first stop at the Fort Apache Museum which is interesting in itself. Paying admission to the museum allows you to also visit Kinishba. We advise you to purchase the Visitor Guide to Kinishba at the gift shop to get the most out of your visit. The interpretive trail through the ruins has numbered posts that coincide with the guide. For turn-by-turn directions enter 'Apache Cultural Center' into your driving app. Don't try to go to the ruins first.

After paying the requisite fee at the Museum head west on Highway 73 for a couple of miles to the signed turnoff for the Kinishba Ruins. After turning off of the pavement onto the graveled road there is a sign that mentions that trailers are not recommended beyond that point. There is room here to drop a trailer but not knowing whether it was permitted we left ours at the Cultural Center's large parking lot.

From the parking area there is a well worn, easy to follow, path that leads to the ruins that are still more than an hundred yards away.

The main room block still has some second story rooms that haven't yet fallen.

The foremost row of rooms appear to have been a single story high but maybe with the outer wall sticking up a few feet above the roof of the room like a parapet.

An effort has been made to brace and stabilize the very fragile walls that yet remain standing. Be sure to stay clear of the walls and rubble piles and not climb on or enter any of the ruins.

Here you can get a good idea of the method of thatching used to construct the between floors ceilings.

To take this photo of the large main plaza we are standing next to a kiva that is in a smaller plaza.

This would have been a covered walkway between 2 blocks of rooms on the north end of the plaza that lead from the outside of the village into the inner sacred space.

Some shards of bright colored pottery give a hint of the artful trappings like pottery, rugs, and wall hangings that probably adorned the ruins back when it was a thriving community.

Just north of the Kinishba Ruins are the more modern ruins of a former museum and caretakers quarters that were dedicated for use in 1941. The museum has deteriorated just as much as the ruins themselves in the short period of time between the 1940's and the present. The stones to build this structure were probably pilfered from the northern block of the Kinishba Ruins.

There are a few old black and white photos of Kinishba that show the ruins mostly intact with even the roofs in place. Much of that was due to the reconstruction efforts of Dean Cummings. Dean's hopes of completing more of the restoration and turning Kinishba into a National Monument were interrupted by the onset of World War II and subsequently never resumed.

We might mention that the hours for the Apache Cultural Center are listed as 8am - 5pm Standard Time but on the day that we were there they didn't actually open until 9am. Fortunately that gave time to wander around their outside displays. The fee to see the museum and ruins also covers some of the buildings of Fort Apache which makes it quite a bargain. If you would like to see it for yourself then all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.