Can you go inside these Arizona National Monuments?

Can you take tours inside the buildings in these National Monuments?

- Canyon de Chelly National Monument
- Navajo National Monument
- Montezuma Castle

If not, are there any nearby that we can go in to tour?

Here is the setup for these three parks:

Canyon de Chelly – Canyon de Chelly consists of multiple pueblo ruins and cliff-dwelling along two major canyons (de Chelly and del Muerto). You can take half or full day jeep or horse tours into the canyon bottom to visit some the ruins along the floor. Although you can walk right up to walls, they don’t really let you get into the inner rooms. If you don’t take a guided tour, then you are limited to looking down at the ruins from the drive-up overlooks on the rim or doing the short hike down to White House ruin. At White House (the one in the famous Ansel Adams photo), there is a fence around the ruins itself.

Montezuma Castle – The famous main ruin here is a well-preserved cliff-dwelling. Many decades ago they had ladder to allow visitors up into the ruins, but that has long since stopped due to both safety and preservation concerns. Now you are pretty much limited to looking up at the ruins from a trail below. The last time I was there, there was one small cliff-side cubby hole that you could climb up a ladder into and a couple of small roof-less rooms with partials at the base of the cliff that you could step into.

Navajo National Monument – Although I have not been there yet myself, it is on my list and I have looked into it. First off, you can not visit any of the main ruins by yourself – only as part of a ranger-guided tour that involves some hiking and usually requires reservations. I believe they go up into the alcoves with the ruins and probably wall around the edges and into some of the outer roof-less rooms, but I doubt they would let people go much further.

Because of both safety and preservation concerns, they generally are very careful and restrictive about what people can do at ruins. This is very understandable considering that the ruins are a thousand years old and held together with adobe mud – without careful controls, they would be reduced to rubble in a few years by the thousands of visitors.

However, there are some places where the structures are strong enough or have been re-built where they do allow a fair amount of free roaming into the ruins. Probably the best of these is Chaco Canyon in the desert north of Gallup, NM (north of I-40). This is probably the most impressive prehistoric site in the southwest and you can wander through a number of the rooms in the largest ruin (Pueblo Grande). Another interesting one, is Aztec Ruins near Farmington (near the Four Corners) where you can wander through quite a few rooms (many still have their roof) and also a large restored Great Kiva.