Walnut Canyon National Monument, Arizona - February 7th to 8th, 2026
Our friends, Dave and Sandy, invited us to join them on a two week camping trip down to Arizona at the end of January and beginning of February. This is the fourth post of our trip, as we started to make our way back home. Walnut Canyon National Monument seemed like a great place to visit along the way.
After our morning bike ride, it was time to leave McDowell Mountain Regional Park on Saturday. It was a short drive to our destination, Lake Pleasant Regional Park on the north side of Phoenix in Peoria, about an hour away. As we started down Carefree Highway from I-17, the highway did not live up to its name. A car passed us, in a no-passing zone, and kicked up a rock into our windshield. Crack! It put a good size chip into the glass. Great.
Our reservations were in the Desert Tortoise Campground. There were gated entrances into each camping loop. We were given a code to operate the gates when we checked in at the park entrance station. Our site was 164. It had a very steep driveway up to the site. Keith turned Red Tail around so he could pull in forwards at a better angle. Ann got out to spot. However, she stood on the driver’s side of Red Tail. Unfortunately, the lowest spot on our rig is the tail pipe, on the passenger side. Yup, we scraped the tail pipe pretty good on the steep approach angle. It looks like the only damage was a slight flattening of the pipe on the bottom side.
Once we were up at the site, there was room to maneuver around and get Red Tail situated in the direction we wanted, in a decently flat spot. We texted Dave and Sandy to warn them about the sharp approach angle to our sites. They had site 165, right next to us. It wasn’t quite as steep and they were able to pull Red Tail Lodge One up into their site without scraping their bike rack hanging out the back.
Then we got the windshield repair kit out to fix the chip in the windshield before it turned into a large crack. We’ve been carrying windshield repair kits with us ever since we made our trip to Alaska. We used it once in Alaska on Red Tail Lodge One, so now it was time to use one on Red Tail Lodge Two. The first part of the process requires the windshield being in the shade, then the last part requires being in the full sun. There was no shade on our site, but an umbrella did the trick to give us shade.
As we were having dinner, a burro wandered through our camp site and over to Dave and Sandy’s site. Was he looking for a handout? He didn’t seem to approach us, but he did look up from his grazing to stare at us briefly.
Sunday, we managed to drive forward down the entrance to our camp site and not drag the tail pipe, with about an inch to spare. Sandy and Dave backed down out of their site, as they didn’t have the same kind of room up at their site to turn around. But they cleared without scraping anything as well.
It was another travel day, about three hours of driving. We stopped after about two hours, at Walnut Canyon National Monument, right off of I-40. After having lunch, we checked out the visitor center and walked the two trails. To reach the Island Trail, you had to go through the visitor center. It was about a mile long lollipop trail which first descended down steep steps before branching into a one way loop around the narrow peninsula that jutted out.
There were a lot of cliff dwelling ruins all along the cliff walls. They say there are about 300 of them in the canyon, with about 25 dwellings visible from the Island Trail. The loop follows along a cliff ledge, right alongside several cliff dwellings.
The other trail, the Rim Trail, was on top of the rim, leading over to an overlook of the canyon, about a quarter of a mile long. Part way to the overlook, another trail branched off that led over to some pit houses.
After enjoying Walnut Canyon, we hit the road again to reach our destination for the day, Homolovi State Park campground. We checked in at the visitor center and debated about going over to the ruins before they closed at 5 pm. We decided just to set up camp and relax instead. Keith and Ann have been to Homolovi State Park before (Winslow, Arizona - September 9th to 12th, 2023) and have already seen the ruins, but Dave and Sandy have not.
As we were now further north and at a higher elevation, the temperatures had cooled down. We were surprised to hear that the water was still on at the bath house along with hot showers and there was potable water at the dump station. However, the water at the individual camp sites was turned off. In order to close her exercise ring, Ann walked over to the dump station to fill up a bag of water. She was thankful that the bag was only 2.6 gallons, as our camp site was at the opposite end of the campground from the dump station. Temperatures dipped below freezing that night. We had already switched to our second tank of propane, so our furnace kept us cozy all night long.
Two travel days were under our belts, with only two more to go to get back home. Walnut Canyon was a great way to break up the drive and get out to stretch our legs. It is also one of the attractions along Route 66, so we were getting a little preview of our trip coming up in the summer months.
Check out our related video: Walnut Canyon National Monument, Arizona
(Ann)