The ruins of the 1200-year old Walhalla Glades Pueblo are carefully excavated and preserved neat the Walhalla Overlook at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. These ruins are very well interpreted, but are very fragile. Please stay off the walls of the Pueblo.
IMPORTANT: sometimes Ancient Puebloan artifacts will surface. If you find what you think might be an Ancient Puebloan artifact, take a photo and leave it where you found it. Alert an Ranger as soon as possible. Every artifact discovered here adds to our knowledge of these prehistoric people, and all artifacts belong to the People of the United States.
From the National park website: (
visit link)
Nine hundred years ago, people were living at
Walhalla Glades. The site was a summer home to
families for over 100 years. Walhalla Plateau is a
“peninsula” surrounded on three sides by the
Grand Canyon. The elevation in this area is a bit
lower than most of the North Rim of Grand Canyon,
and updrafts of warm air from the inner canyon
allow the winter snows to melt earlier from Walhalla
Plateau than from other rim areas. This made
Walhalla a favorable place for ancestral people to
farm.
More than 100 farm sites have been found on
Walhalla Plateau, all occupied between A.D. 1050
and A.D. 1150. These sites usually consist of small,
one-room structures known as field houses and
agricultural terraces or garden plots where corn,
beans, and squash were grown.
It is hard to say how many people lived here at one
time, but there may have been not more than
twenty. It is likely that the large rooms were living
quarters, the small rooms used for storage.
Additional food storage was found on the small
“island” visible from the overlook. Sky Island, as it
is known, contains the remains of fifteen rooms,
eleven of which were used for storage. The
remaining four were used for food processing.
A good example of one kind of storage room, a
granary, can be seen on the Cliff Spring Trail.
During winter the people moved back into the
canyon, probably to Unkar Delta along the Colorado
River, where they had been living for at least 200
years. On Unkar evidence suggests that population
size increased over the years to a point where
farming the delta alone could not produce enough
food for all the families. Use of Walhalla Glades for
farming could have been a direct result of the
shortage of food on Unkar Delta.
Archeologists can understand much about the
people who lived here by examining the size of the
rooms, their relation to other rooms and other sites,
and the kinds of artifacts found. Detailed study
reveals the time during which people lived at a
particular site, what they ate, where materials came
from, and how they provided for themselves. The
key to unraveling the questions of the past lies in
the artifacts found on the site. Without artifacts,
only part of the story can be told.
If you find a site,the most important thing to remember is not to
move artifacts or take anything away. The position
of the artifacts and the artifacts themselves allow the
archeologist to interpret the site. Not only will
disturbing the site destroy valuable information, it is
illegal. Federal penalties can be imposed upon
anyone who disturbs an archeological site. If you
find a site while at Grand Canyon, mark its location
on a map, take pictures if you have a camera, and
contact the park archeologist or a park ranger. By
doing this, you will help preserve the valuable
pieces of our past."