On December 9th 2024 Wupatki National Monument will turn 100! At this point, no big celebration is planned but smaller, unique experiences that reflect the significance of the natural and cultural beauty of the monument are taking place.
On the last Saturday night in September more than 60 people attended a pop up art installation at Wupatki entitled “Convergence.” Former NAU faculty member and pianist Janice ChenJu Chiang played piano pieces written by indigenous artists on a Steinway grand piano. Shawn Skabelund, who curated the experience, was an artist in residence at Wupatki this past year. He is a Flagstaff based artist who works in “landscapes to reveal their complex issues, ecologies and cultural histories”. During his residency, he was inspired by the blanket of black cinders, the bright purple berries of the juniper tree and the ubiquity of the coyote found at Wupatki to create a space for one evening that celebrated the connection between people and place. The evening was magical and a reminder of why the importance of protecting beautiful places should not be taken for granted and be appreciated and celebrated in a variety of ways. Kudos to Chief of Interpretation, Richard Ullmann, for making the special experience happen. There may be more small celebrations in the coming months so check for updates about the centennial at www.nps.gov/learn/wupatki-national-monument
Erica Watson, Artist in Residence at Wupatki this past winter has produced a thoughtful and provocative essay on life at Wupatki that also celebrates the centennial called “A Wupatki Century”. Erica is an Alaska based writer who “explores ideas of community, self, political action, and climate change at the intersection of the human and non-human worlds.” She is also the daughter of Kim Watson, retired Chief Ranger and current treasurer of the Friends of Flagstaff National Monuments. Learn more about Erica and her writing at www.ericarobinwatson.com
A Wupatki Century
Erica Watson
Most mornings during the winter month I spent as a writer-in-residence at Wupatki, white-crowned sparrows flocked to the leafless cottonwood tree growing slant against the wall in the corner of the yard. They’d arrive in its branches in twos or threes, flit between the tree and the ground, peck at seeds, and depart in the loose flock in which they arrived.
*
It’s a strange thing to be a writer-in-residence in a house you lived in as a child. Maybe it’s also a strange thing to have been a child. And to write about it. The truth is, I feel strange most of the time. But I know that most days since those three years my family spent living in the Wupatki National Monument rock house more than thirty years ago, I have thought about light shifting across the expanse of the Painted Desert as seen from the front yard and the feel of Moenkopi sandstone under bare feet and the way early or late sun on the Pueblos casts sharp shadows on the opposite walls. It’s a place that feels like both the edge of the map and its center, a quality I realized I’ve sought out my whole life: quiet places where the low rumble of car tires announces an approach long before they appear, where people know each other’s business but care more about what the ravens are up to, where human history is inseparable from the ecological patterns it evolves alongside.
The first days back at the house I spent identifying and pointing out to my partner things that were different or the same, and identifying which changes I attributed to time and which to choice. The cottonwood tree in the corner of the yard contains elements of both: my brother and I used to crawl along the top of the wall and squeeze under the trunk to a canopied shelter only one of us could fit into at a time. Our bodies soon outgrew the route (time), and the tree has clearly been dramatically trimmed back in the last thirty years, so the branches no longer created the angled tunnel that defined the climb (choice).
A lot of my memories felt like this: specific, true, and utterly mundane.
*
It’s almost funny how bad I am at knowing birds, despite knowing many expert birders and having ample opportunity to learn. While I understand the tenants of seasonal migration, I fail to register the specifics. Calls and beak shapes and behaviors blur together, and in this not-knowing the appearance of the white-crowned sparrows at Wupatki surprised me. I didn’t know them growing up in Arizona, but their call was one of the first I learned in Denali National Park, Alaska, twenty years ago, and soon after that, their distinctive white and black striped heads. For several years, I’d migrated unknowingly alongside the sparrows, before Denali became my home year-round.
I texted my friend Nan in Alaska to ask where, exactly, Denali’s birds spend their winters.
“All around, including right where you are!” she answered. “The ones you’re seeing could have been born at Denali.”
*
Alan Feldman’s poem “My Century” begins
The year I was born the atomic bomb went off.
Here I’d just begun, and someone
found the switch to turn off the world
and goes on to imagine that the world did not end that year, and that his life and others continued unscathed in that century of charred cities and a future made finite. “No time to worry about collective death,” the poem goes on, “when life itself was permeated by ordeals.”
We are all born to a time and place.
*
1924, the year Wupatki National Monument was designated a monument, was the last time a major fire swept through the boreal forest of the Denali National Park front country. Forest succession at high latitudes moves slow, and spruce trees that sprouted after that fire might only be six inches in diameter now, a century later. The forest is scattered with charred trunks grayed with time, which naturalists use as cues to talk about fire, and my dog likes to pull loose and parade like a prize across the tundra.
This summer, almost one hundred years later to the day, a wildfire ignited on the park’s eastern boundary, and in the next few hot dry days burned more than 400 acres of forested mountainside above the Nenana River. On one of those days, I walked the river’s edge to watch helicopters drop water, and found several broken gulls’ eggs nestled between river rocks. What a time and place to come into the world, I thought: to a sky filled with smoke and engine noise.
It wasn’t a big fire, though for a short time it was designated the highest firefighting priority in the US due to the threat it posed to the park’s infrastructure. The parallels between this the 1924 fire were undeniable, though firefighting technology and communication has, of course, advanced considerably. No one was injured, no buildings burned, and the park soon reopened.
I don’t know which birds nesting in those 400 acres of burned forest had yet to fledge.
*
Ornithologist David Alan Sibley said for the short term he’s “not too worried about birds in general, but individual species may struggle.” White-crowned sparrows, however, are categorized as “low concern,” meaning that they are about as safe as a bird species can be in this era of habitat loss and climate catastrophe.
I am struck by how like us birds are in their relations to the local and the global. A sparrow might have a lifelong connection to a single spruce tree in Alaska and a single cottonwood in Arizona, and also to the thousands of miles of airspace and fire-prone forest in between.
*
Days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1947, Courtney (Corky) Jones, who, along with her husband Davy, lived in two reconstructed rooms of Wupatki Pueblo and eventually in the rock house where my family lived decades later, wrote to her family that “it just seems unbelievable that the war is over.” World War II had pulled the couple from their lives as Wupatki National Monument’s caretakers, as funding for the National Park Service was diverted towards the military. Davy was drafted into military service overseas for a time, then reassigned as director of the rest and relaxation camp at Grand Canyon before returning to Wupatki.
According to the introduction to Letters from Wupatki, the published collection of Corky’s letters, Davy was active in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, after his retirement from the National Park Service.
*
After World War II, the United States maintained its nuclear status by mining uranium on the Navajo Nation, leading to multi-generational health crises and still-unfolding environmental harms.
My mom told us not to play in the mud in the Little Colorado River because it might be radioactive. I didn’t know what she meant at the time. But eventually I’d come to understand what it meant that one side of the river had reliably drinkable (if awful-tasting) water, and the other didn’t.
In Lydia Millet’s novel A Children’s Bible, teenage characters of the near future joke that fearing nuclear bombs is “quaint” in comparison to the threats of climate change. “Like being scared of cannons.”
*
Forgive me: I didn’t set out to talk so much about bombs. But when I draw myself a map with Wupatki at its center and added points along a timeline of 100 years, I can’t ignore the shape of what emerges.
I sought out poems to better understand literary relationships with the passage of a century, and found mostly reflections on living in a world at war. Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” begins
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
…
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
I imagined the devices of our time rather than hers, but I too—and you, if you’re reading this—have lived in these centuries of world wars and maybe the specifics of the devices are immaterial when the effects are the same. If I’d had a better internet signal in that month at Wupatki, most mornings would have started with images of bloodied children in Gaza and wildfire seasons extending into winter months in addition to a tree momentarily full of birds.
These poems echo something I think I first learned from childhood at Wupatki: one hundred years is not very long. The effects of time and choice, displacements and migrations, of individuals and nations, are carved into the land and trees and rivers, carried in our bodies, reflected back to us. A house might feel old but have nothing on the millennia of dwelling and traveling in a place or the sandstone walls already returned to the earth. Nothing is permanent, and everything is remembered.
To describe Wupatki as a crossroads strikes me as an active position, not merely an interpretive statement. To position oneself at a crossroads suggests an openness to exchange, to an evolution of thought and action.
In 2024, Wupatki is a place long lived in and cared for by Puebloan people far longer than by the United States government. It is a home to birds that depend on an intact boreal forest, and part of a watershed suffering from abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation. It’s a place both protected and scarred and by this last century. From the crossroads, anything seems possible for the next.
In the north, the birds are getting restless, readying for their journey south.
Other News and Park Updates
Last year Friends of Flagstaff National Monuments received a pledge from an anonymous donor of $20,000 per year for the next ten years. The donors asked that the money be used to support the continued participation of NPS in the Roving Ranger program. This program was started more than 30 years ago to foster a partnership between the US Forest Service and the National Park Service to help interpret the greater regional story of the San Francisco Volcanic Field and the rich archeological history that exists in Flagstaff and is managed by the two agencies. Chief of Interpretation Richard Ullmann writes that the donation has been crucial to provide increased NPS capacity with the program. Ranger Lauren Carter was able to provide valuable interpretive training to the roving ranger staff. An SCA (Student Conservation Association) was hired and volunteers were scheduled to help out at Snowbowl and provide programs at Bonito Campground.
The Tunnel Fire that raged north of Flagstaff in 2022 burned more than 19,000 acres. That fire combined with the Pipeline Fire burned more than 60% of Sunset Crater. Earlier this year, over 1000 trees within the monument were removed, trimmed, limbed or felled depending on type of fire damage. The park loop road was closed for a few days but it has fully reopened.
The Walnut Canyon Exhibit Renovation has begun. This project will take 1-2 years but will result in an updated space and a designated area for cultural demonstrations.
Superintendent Robin Martin has been on a detail to Grand Tetons National Park since January.
FOM board membership has dwindled to just 5 since the resignation of Alicyn Gitlin. She took a position in Washington DC working for the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. Her official position is as a Policy Analyst in Wildlfire and Forestry. We wish her all the best.
Year End Reflections 2023