Tonto NM Upper Cliff Dwelling
— — the rooms held warm for seven hundred years.
Not only on a wall.
“Forty rooms of stacked stone and mud, tucked into a south-facing alcove of the Sierra Ancha foothills, above the Salt River where Roosevelt Lake now sits. The Salado people lived here in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, weaving cotton, firing red-on-buff pottery, and walking the canyon trails. The Upper Dwelling is reached only by a ranger-led hike, three miles round trip, offered from November through April when the desert is cool enough to climb. from the studio
Tonto NM Upper Cliff Dwelling, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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The place, in three passes.
The Upper Cliff Dwelling at Tonto National Monument sits in a natural alcove of the Sierra Ancha foothills in Gila County, Arizona, about a hundred and ten miles east of Phoenix and a short drive northeast of Roosevelt Lake on State Route 188. It contains forty rooms built between roughly 1300 and 1450 by the Salado people, who farmed the Salt River valley and traded across what is now the Southwest. The monument was established in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt under the Antiquities Act and is administered by the National Park Service.
The walls are quartzite cobbles set in mud mortar, drawn from the slopes below the alcove. Roofs were laid with sycamore and saguaro-rib beams, packed with grass and clay. The alcove faces south, so the rooms held winter sun and afternoon shade; soot still darkens the ceilings where the cooking fires burned. The Salado wove fine cotton textiles and made the red-on-buff and polychrome pottery that bears their name. Most of the recovered artifacts are held by the monument's visitor center, three miles down the road at the foot of the trail.
The Upper Cliff Dwelling is open only by ranger-guided hike, scheduled most days from November through April and limited to fifteen visitors per trip. Reservations are required and tend to fill weeks ahead. The hike runs about three miles round trip, climbing six hundred feet up a steep, rocky trail with no shade. Sturdy shoes and a litre of water per person are required. The Lower Cliff Dwelling, a separate nineteen-room site, is open year-round on a self-guided paved trail and asks no reservation.