Cape Royal Road cuts across Walhalla Plateau, a peninsula of rock extending south into Grand Canyon. About 13 miles up the road from its fork with Point Imperial Road, the Walhalla Overlook parking area provides access to one of the North Rim’s most interesting prehistoric sites, Walhalla Glades.

Occupied by the Ancestral Puebloans between approximately A.D. 1050 and A.D. 1150, archaeologists have studied this 10-room dwelling, learning about Puebloan daily life from pottery shards, chipped stone, and architecture.

Scattered over the Walhalla Plateau are more than a hundred farming sites where the Puebloans grew corn, beans, and squash during summer months. Because the plateau is lower than surrounding elevations, warm updrafts melted winter snow and made earlier planting possible.

During winters, some of the pueblo’s residents migrated into the canyon, where they could farm in the desert climes of Unkar Delta, visible from the overlook. At Unkar Delta, the inner canyon’s largest archaeological site, they built a pueblo of more than 50 rooms, a two-day journey from the rim via Unkar Creek Canyon.

During the summer months, rangers lead guided tours from the overlook to the ruins, discussing how people subsisted here on the North Rim a thousand years ago.