| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 14 February 2005 |
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I'm glad I called it to ask for specific directions, because it was in a shopping center and not easily visible from the road (a common problem here--Susan says it drives her crazy trying to find things). It was a good choice and we enjoyed it a lot.
A couple of random observations: They do have bagels out here, but I'm not sure how authentic they are--in Bisbee they had Jalapeno bagels. And Phoenix is in what is called the Valley of the Sun, which I think means that the temperature approximates that of the sun. As a result, everyone walks around with water bottles, much as everyone in England walks around with umbrellas.
Mileage today: 85 miles.
October 19, 1992: Today we start at about 1000 feet and climb to 7000 feet. We also go from highs in the mid-90s (Fahrenheit) to the high 60s. As we started our climb out of Phoenix we first saw more saguaro (it doesn't grow as well in the lowest parts of the valley), but then it thinned out and we saw scrub brush and then actual trees. We traveled along I-17 for 63 miles, exiting at Cordes Junction. But not for Arcosanti, the main tourist destination around her. Arcosanti is a fully planned community which charges to allow tourists to walk around it. As far as I'm concerned, this makes it more a tourist attraction rather than a real community (at least to me). We had also skipped Biosphere 2 north of Tucson, a completely selfcontained community of six people taking in nothing but sunlight and money from tourists, who have to pay $12 each to walk around the outside.
Our goal, however, was Prescott, 33 miles west on AZ 69. The town itself is supposedly very pretty, looking like something out of Norman Rockwell. Well, it does have a courthouse on a town square, and some of the residential streets have Rockwellian houses, but I can't claim this is worth going out of your way for. We also planned to see the Smoki Museum, but it is apparently closed from September through April, contrary to what the guidebooks say.
The 'Smoki tribe' is really a secret society of non-Indians formed in the 1920s to preserve the old Indian culture (or so they claim). There is, not surprisingly, much dissension between the Smokis and real Indian tribes, who think they should be the ones preserving the culture, the dances, etc. They have a point--I'm sure if a bunch of Methodists started a secret society to have seders and bar mitzvahs to preserve the old Jewish ways, Jews would have a thing or two to say about that.
We did drop into the Bead Museum, one large room with a fairly extensive collection of beads, beadwork, and other ornamentation. The gift shop had handicrafts of all kinds from around the world. In fact, one thing I saw in a lot of shops here was Guatemalan cotton--hardly a local item. This shop looked like an outlet for the Oxfam catalog of handicrafts.
Fifteen miles north on AZ 69 and twelve on AZ 169 brought us back to I-17. Driving the 62 miles north to Flagstaff, we drove through a bit of rain--enough to splatter the dust on the car but not enough to clean it or warrant running the wipers.
We wended our way through Flagstaff past a string of motels, restaurants, and other tourist amenities. We didn't make a reservation because we were still toying with the idea of staying near the Grand Canyon tonight. (It's a two-hour drive each way between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon.) The drive to the canyon was scenic, through stretches of national forest, but not particularly more so than other roads we've driven on.
We came in through the south entrance (where most visitors enter). Coming in this way you pass Mather Point and its view of the canyon, somewhat obscured from the road itself by trees. I carefully avoided looking at it, wanting to get the full impact all at once. We drove on to the Visitors Center, parked the car, and hiked the quarter mile or so through the woods to the Rim Trail and our first view of the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon is big. Saying that it's twenty miles across and a mile deep doesn't convey how big it is. The first view from the Rim Trail is impossible to describe. We walked along the Rim Trail to the Yavapai Museum, trying to get some feel for the scope of it all. The Rim Trail is a good way for the non-hiker to 'hike the Canyon.' You can walk along a level paved path along the rim--right along the rim in places. Even though the drop is not a sheer one, it looks like one until you're within a few inches, and pets (and probably younger children too) should be kept on a leash.
By now, it was getting late (one walks slower at 7000 feet, even on a level path), so we drove to Hopi Point on the West Rim Drive to see the sunset, or rather, the Canyon at sunset. It had been cloudy since we arrived, but the sun managed to come out for sunset. As impressive as it was under clouds, the Canyon is even more so in the sunlight, when you can see all the colored layers and get a much better idea of the scale of it all. I can't describe it--you'll have to go see it.
Since we stayed for the sunset, we ended up making the two-hour drive back to Flagstaff in the dark. Mark was somewhat worried about finding a room at 8:30 PM, but there were a lot of vacancies. (Oh, we had decided to stay in Flagstaff because the weather forecast for the Canyon was better later in the week, and because all the rooms near the Canyon were about $100 a night!) We picked the Starlite Motel in Flagstaff--what a mistake! The building was of cinder-block construction, there were no extra outlets to plug things into, the toilet didn't flush properly, and the door was a sliding glass patio door that provided little sound insulation. We decided to stick it out for the night and find a different hotel for the remainder of our time in Flagstaff.
Dinner was at El Chilito's, but I was too tired to notice the food very much. And no wonder, because
Mileage today: 392 miles.
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Breakfast was at the Village Inn, then we filled the tank and drove south on US 89A (a.k.a. 'alternate 89') to Oak Creek Canyon. As one book puts it, you 'amble innocently along through Ponderosa pine forests, then suddenly the bottom drops out.' Well, not quite that suddenly, since there is a scenic view announced. And we knew that it must be very scenic, since there were rows of jewelry dealers lined up at it. It was: the ground drops over a thousand feet and the steep walls and floor of the canyon are covered with green pines and with oaks and other trees in golds and scarlets. The road makes this descent in a series of switchbacks, starting at 7000 feet and settling in below 6000 (more or less--the canyon keeps descending, though at a slower pace, until it is about 4200 feet in altitude at the mouth). This is the canyon that Zane Grey wrote about in THE CALL OF THE CANYON, a book of great descriptions if less than stellar plot. The canyon road travels along between towering cliffs and under a canopy of trees.
Along the way were a few motels, cabins set back from the road. Someone at the Grand Canyon had suggested that these looked like good cheap places to stay, but they were fairly obviously not cheap, and driving down that switchback after a hard day's sightseeing would not be my idea of fun.
As we approached Sedona at the mouth of the canyon, the character of the scenery changed dramatically. The canyon opened up and gave way to 'red rock country'--all those incredible formations so familiar from Marlboro ads. Buttes and mesas are outlined against the sky in fantastic shapes, providing a sharp contrast with the narrowness of the canyon.
Sedona itself is an artists' colony, which means it's full of galleries and shops and tourists. Traffic slows considerably through Sedona to avoid hitting all the pedestrians. We had planned on stopping, but the touristy nature of the town put us off that idea and we continued on US 89A for 17 miles to Cottonwood, where we turned west onto AZ 260 for 5 miles and then through Clarkdale to Tuzigoot.
Tuzigoot is one of the three major Sinagua sites of the area. The Sinagua lived about the same time as the Hohokam, but in the northern part of Arizona. One theory is that the Sinagua were the ancestors of the present-day Zuni, and the exhibit in the museum dealing with the warrior gods would seem to bear that out, as it related the warrior gods of the Sinagua to those of the Zuni: lion (north), bear (west), badger (south), wolf (east), mole (nadir), and eagle (zenith). (I assume the lion here is a mountain lion rather than the African variety.)
There was also a display which charted the percent of burials at various ages, giving a way to calculate life expectancy. 42% of the burials were of children under eight years old, 24% were in the eight- to twentyyear -old range, 29% twenty-one to forty-five, and 5% older than forty-five.
By the way, the name Tuzigoot was given to the site in 1933 by an Apache, Ben Lewis, and means 'crooked water.'
The ruins here, while well-preserved in some regards, are not as impressive as those of Mexico or Peru. In part that is due to the much larger scale of the Latin American ruins, and in part it is because the materials used here were just not as durable--mud rather than fitted stone.
We returned to I-17 via AZ 260 and drove north 3 miles to the exit for Montezuma Castle. This is a very well-preserved pueblo built in a cave in a cliff. It was named by explorers who thought it was built as a retreat for Montezuma, who never actually got anywhere near this site and lived several hundred years after it was built. But the name stuck.
I was surprised at how many people were at Montezuma Castle. There were some bus tours--I guess it's convenient since it's right on the route from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon. As usual, there was a self-guiding trail past the ruins. These are very well done at the National Parks and Monuments, including information about the plants as well as the sites. For a change, we arrived at just the right time to photograph the ruins (12:45 PM to 1:20 PM). The sun was striking them, instead of putting them in the shade, which is what seems to be true most of the time for us.
Umberto Eco's hyperreality struck again, as people stood in front of a model of the ruin listening to an audio program when the ruin itself was right there to look at. (There is also an Imax theater presentation of the Grand Canyon right at the entrance of the Grand Canyon.)
We also got to see a new animal--a gopher--a nice change from the usual lizards and birds.
North a couple of miles is Montezuma Well, part of the same site as the Castle. The Well is a natural sinkhole filled by a warm (76 degrees Fahrenheit) spring and having more ruins in and around it. (The water fills the sinkhole only part way, leaving room for dwellings in the cliffs that form its sides.) This site was considerably less crowded and even among the people there, few felt like climbing down into the sinkhole to see the ruins. It wasn't that the path was rough, but the fact that they would have to climb back up the seventy feet that dissuaded them.
We finished at the Well by 2:20 PM and decided to return to Flagstaff through Oak Creek Canyon instead of I-17. So we took I-17 as far as AZ 179, then took that 15 miles north to Sedona. This gave us some great vistas of another part of 'red rock country,' as well as seeing some of what we had already seen, but from a different angle. Having driven both directions through Oak Creek Canyon, I would still recommend the north-to-south direction as the way to see it first. In the other direction, the canyon grows gradually; coming from the north, the impact hits you all at once.
Back in Flagstaff we settled on a Rodeway Inn (at $32 a night, the same as the Starlite). |
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