HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE HIGHWAY: (Top) A little peek at the fabulous Painted Desert; (middle) A photo of a photo showing the true scope of the Meteor Crater; and (bottom) folks enjoy a beautiful day at Slide Rock State Park, just north of Sedona, Arizona.
ROAD MOST TAKENAfter many stops in New Mexico (and with a headline suggested by a Robert Frost poem), I was now in northeast Arizona.
Another vast southwestern state, the last of the lower 48, Arizona was at one time the home of the late Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative icon and environmentalist way back before it was so trendy, and is now the home base of shock rocker-turned-golf fanatic Alice Cooper. And, from the deserts in the south along the Mexican border to the mountain ranges in the north, the Grand Canyon State appears not only big enough to at once satisfy two such larger-than-life personalities and lifestyles, but also offer many diversified opportunities for recreation, exploration or just old-fashioned sight-seeing.
On way over to the Flagstaff, Arizona area, along with the highest mountain in the state, the snow-capped Humphries Peak (elev. 12,633 feet), I passed a couple of towns, Two Guns then Twin Arrows.
Looks like teamwork counted in the Old West – on both sides of the fight.
But it also seems to me that things have changed a little since then, because, judging by the license plates around me on the thoroughfares and in the parking lots, trailer parks and campgrounds, there appears to be lots of folks, both genders, traveling solo on the same highways and byways, and stopping in at the same spots as me.
There’s some in trailers or RVs, some with tents. Many have a dog for company, others don’t, but all appear to be having a good time. As am I.
So, you see, I’m by myself, but I’m not alone ...
Paint my wagon – Please!
After I spent a windy and chilly night at a RV park in the high elevations just over the Arizona border from New Mexico, I was anxious to get over to the Grand Canyon.
So anxious, in fact, that I almost passed right by the Petrified Forest/Painted Desert National Park in northeast Arizona. I’m so glad that I slowed myself down enough to consider this visit and eventually drove on up there. It was totally worth the time and effort involved.
This park, high in altitude and very dry, was once a huge floodplain, filled with tall pines and many species of dinosaurs. About 225 million years ago, as this area changed in a violent fashion and the dinosaurs disappeared, volcanic ash and mud sealed in the fallen trees.
Groundwater, heavy with silica, seeped up into these trees, crystallizing them into quartz and, in effect, petrifying them.
Later, the area, now the park, sank into the earth, and was covered with water. Afterward, the whole vicinity fell victim to another violent upheaval and these giant petrified logs were cracked and torn asunder. Natural erosion then revealed these logs along with many dinosaur fossils. This process still occurs to this day, along with the accompanying research by geologists and paleontologists.
One hundred years ago, in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt protected this area and, after some land purchases expanding its areas, it was named a National Park in 1962.
These logs and tree trunks, some large, some small, are very colorful and today are considered a precious resource, protected under Federal law. Colors I witnessed on these logs were yellow, black, blue, white and several shades of red. And they weigh a ton (or more accurately, according the park service’s handout, 200 lbs per square foot). One smallish round log was about 10 inches long and 4-5 inches across – a little smaller than your standard piece of firewood. Breaking the no-touch rule, I briefly picked it up … barely!
A 28-mile road running north-to-south bisects the park’s 95,500-plus acres, with a six-mile loop in the north though the Painted Desert. There are three Park Service facilities within its limits, including a museum/gift shop at its southern end that features some impressive dinosaur fossils, and a visitor’s center at its northern terminus.
Among the many trails maintained here is the Puerco Pueblo, with the ruins of a 100-room dwelling believed to have been built around 1250 AD and said to have housed up to 1,200 Indians. Also, of particular note during my visit were the Crystal Forest, which contains many of the park’s finest log specimens; Newspaper Rock, with several large stones displaying over 650 prehistoric drawings; the Agate Bridge, a 110-foot petrified log which was suspended between two points after centuries of floodwaters washed out a deep gully underneath it; and the Blue Mesa, a three-mile loop through the colorful and beautiful badlands. It was on this mesa’s trail that I had a brief discussion with a couple also hiking. When I volunteered how impressive this park was, the husband replied, saying, “More than that, it’s powerful.” I heartily seconded that motion.
The Painted Desert seems almost an afterthought in this park. But with eight scenic overlooks, it provided much fodder for those toting cameras (see above). Sandstone mixed with the iron and carbon content contained in the soil on these plains, peaks and mesas provides a blend of many colors and hues, an unmatched visual treat and a true joy to behold.
For more, go to www.nps.gov/pefo.
“Easy” flows the memoriesDriving west after visiting the Painted Desert, I had to pull off the road after fighting some nasty weather.
Really strong late afternoon headwinds had reduced the truck’s top speed to 45-50 mph, and were shaking the trailer. The dark clouds were hanging low, encircling the horizon. It started to sprinkle a little rain right before 5 p.m., but when the dust and hail roared up, I knew it was time to get under cover.
Wasn’t much to the dusty old cow town where I pulled off the highway, so then, the long hours left me thinking back some 34 years, all the way to 1972:
* Nixon was busy trying to get a billion Chinese to import Pepsi, right after Mao let the U.S. export some ping-pong players over there.
* Viet Nam was finally winding down and gas was but 36 cents a gallon.
* The minimum wage was $1.60 an hour, but you could get a loaf of bread for a quarter. A brand new house was 40 grand.
* Hot pants and tube tops were high style, but Studio 54 was still just a scheme.
* On the sports page, the Cowboys and A’s held sway and, while Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut dominated the Olympics, Islamic terrorists seized the front page with the cold-blooded murder of 11 Israeli athletes at Munich.
* The Godfather was packing ‘em inside the theaters, but it was Deliverance that had people rethinking that whole outside experience.
* The World Trade Center project was finally completed in Manhattan, while about 30 blocks uptown, just three and a half months after calling it quits with Priscilla, Elvis sold out four shows at the Madison Square Garden box office in just one day.
* I was a sophomore in high school and unloading meat & cheese trucks after school and Saturdays in the old Faneuil Hall Market – before the fern bars took root. Surrounded by characters straight out of a Five-&-Dime paperback, I was getting two bucks an hour with a free sandwich each Saturday and I wouldn’t have traded places with anybody.
* Ah, 1972 … A man on the Moon was a regular thing and the Watergate was only a hotel. Gerald Ford was still a Michigan Congressman, Jimmy Carter was picking peanuts in private and The Eagles were just a crossover country band rather than the mainstream hit machine and stadium concert monsters they soon became.
I’ve been lucky enough to hear The Eagles in concert at least 10 times, in venues as small as the Boston’s Music Hall, now the Wang, and as vast as the old Sullivan Stadium. Those shows were worth every penny then, and the memories are priceless now.
You see, as I type this, I’m in Winslow, Arizona, the town made famous in The Eagles’ 1972 seminal hit single “Take It Easy.” The cut was off their eponymous first album “The Eagles” (the band had first recorded “Desperado” for a film soundtrack, but the movie was never released and the group then put out that album as their second).
As for Winslow, it seems plum lucky to be a stopover on the road from the Painted Desert to the Grand Canyon. It’s tired and worn-out, but weather-beaten. Yep, it’s got all that going for it, which is nice!
With thanks to http://www.oldielyrics.com/, and in the spirit of brevity, I’m paraphrasing here, skipping a few stanzas and then leaping over to the chorus …
Well, I'm a standing on a corner
in Winslow, Arizona
and such a fine sight to see
It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed
Ford slowin' down to take a look at me …
Take it easy, take it easy
don't let the sound of your own wheels
make you crazy …
Sounds like good advice.
So, resolved: for the next little while, I’m putting the Eagles on the I-Pod. I turning them up and I’m leaving them up!
This little respite did offer me the opportunity to view a very topical movie on Turner Classics -- The Long Trailer, a 1954 film starring Lucille Ball and her then-husband and TV co-star Desi Arnaz. In their first feature film together that comedy duo played two wacky newlyweds, whimsically named Nicky and Tacy, who got into all manners of scrapes and hi-jinx towing their new home – the long trailer. Filmed partly in California’s Yosemite National Park (and the other part on some Burbank soundstage, no doubt), it was funny -- in a ‘50s sort-of fashion.
As I was leaving Winslow, I needed fuel. The sign at the gas station next to the highway listed Regular at $3.40 per gallon. Whoa there! That’s highway robbery. So I shopped around town and found some for $3.01 pg – a fair price, given the current marketplace.
Charging $3.40 a gallon may not be a felony, but it still stings, a misdemeanor at the very least. Desperadoes, indeed!
Mighty fell the MeteorOnce again on the road after Winslow, I soon began to see highway signs mentioning a “Meteor Crater.” In short order, I stopped at a roadside gift shop to inquire about this, and was told it was nearby and well worth a look-see.
Just 20 miles west of Winslow and six miles south off the highway was an unexpected thrill: a huge – make that spectacularly huge – meteor-induced hole in the ground.
Reportedly, about 50,000 years ago, a meteor composed of iron and nickel and weighing several hundred thousand tons streaked out of the northeast sky toward Earth. Measuring 150 feet across, it was zooming through our atmosphere at 26,000 MPH. In a flash, it struck this spot with the force of 20 million tons of TNT, displacing 175 million tons of limestone and sandstone for over a mile around the crater, creating the over 150-foot high berm that you can’t help but notice as you pull up. Some of the hunks of limestone tossed over the rim were the size of small houses.
The hole I was now staring at was 700 feet deep and 4,000 feet across and 2.4 miles in circumference. The force of the impact, thought to be 20,000,000 lbs. PSI, instantly transformed some chunks of graphite into diamonds, a process that normally takes millions of years.
From a personal point of view, this son of a gun crater is BIG! How big. It’s estimated that, you could play 20 football games simultaneously on the floor of the crater, and have two million fans watching, seated around the sloping sidewalls of the bowl. Man has created craters this big, but they had to use a nuclear bomb test to do it.
Indians lore referenced this crater down through the ages, but it took a scout for General Custer to first report it in writing to the government in 1871 for anyone to officially take notice. It was thought to be a volcanic crater ‘til a mining engineer, Daniel Barringer, began around the turn of last century to see abnormalities in its makeup. Because most of the meteor was vaporized on impact, Barringer’s theory was met with skepticism, but later studies by astro-geologist Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (of the Shoemaker-Levy Comet fame) proved Barringer correct.
This was the setting for the movie Star Man, which starred Jeff Bridges. It’s so much like another world, NASA used this crater to train Apollo astronauts for moon landings and the Learning Center at the side of the crater contains an astronaut tribute wall and actual Apollo training capsule.
This Learning Center, a set of buildings probably the size of a small hospital or high school is two floors tall, houses a great interactive museum, cafeteria, gift shop, courtyard, movie theater, elevators, various ramps and viewing platforms along with a large two-tiered parking lot. Yet it is positively dwarfed by the crater (see above). I took a bunch of photos here, but this thing is so unbelievably big that my pictures could not do it justice. So I decided instead to display this photo of a sky-shot photo hanging in the Crater Museum area. The little white specks you see near the bottom left corner are that Learning Center.
Back to NASA for a moment though: for all the Space Age skeptics out there, could it be the rumors were true? Maybe this Meteor Crater is where NASA “really” filmed the moon landings. As the Space Race heats up again in the next few years, with the U.S., China and India all vying to win the contest to be first back to the Moon (then maybe Mars) – only this time with underlying military reasons as the driving force -- maybe those moonbats will trot out those tired old “movie set” maxims once again.
The operative promo phrase here is “Experience the Impact.” I’m here to tell you it is quite the experience.
For more, visit http://www.meteorcrater.com/.
An open letter to C.W.Dear C.W.,
I hope this letter reaches you. It’s been tough to write lately. Been busy. You know how it is.
You were 100 percent right about the Sedona, Arizona area. Great tip! No overselling there. The whole place was great!
I arrived there late in the afternoon and was lucky to grab a campsite at Cave Springs in the Oak Creek Canyon.
What a spot!
The campground is at a 5,000-foot elevation and tall Ponderosa Pines mix with Juniper trees to form a beautiful forest. The red rock canyon walls are 500 feet tall and only about 1,000 feet apart. The campground, all 80 sites, is wedged in between those walls along with a tight two-lane road and Oak Creek.
Speaking of Oak Creek, I was relaxing along its banks at dusk watching some folks fish and I caught a Great Blue Heron swooping down and scooping up a trout in its beak. Natural magic.
Made a big fire too. The square stone fire pit was huge, the biggest I’ve ever seen -- three feet-by-three feet and 18 inches deep. You would have loved it. Bonfire City. The RV parks I’ve been frequenting are nice and comfy but, you and I both know, there’s nothing like a good fire. I even broke out the fire gloves. Good times!
Everyone around me had radios tuned to the Sun-Lakers Game 7. After the Suns smoked the hated Lakers, there was quite a bit of celebrating. Great atmosphere. Party!
There was a beautiful half-moon out and later the stars seemed so close you could almost reach up and grab a couple. It was 72 degrees at dinnertime, but it got much cooler. Exquisite sleeping weather!
Maybe the best part of this place was that nobody, but nobody, asked me where I was from. Perhaps they thought: So, that’s what a Florida accent sounds like!
I loved it there. Good call, but I do have one small bone to pick with you. In the mail you sent me, you did say that is was, and I quote, “Classic mountain driving. Hairpin turns and cliffs.” So I was forewarned but C.W., did you forget? I have the trailer. It was death defying – 23 switchback turns, four true hairpins, 1,000-foot drop-offs to the right, then to the left. And the road: it’s tight and nearly straight downhill. You drop almost 2,000 feet in just three miles. A classic, all right. Hairy doesn’t quite cover it.
The next morning, I went on down to Slide Rock State Park. It was everything you said it was. Great sights, great water slide. A very popular spot. In fact, in comparison, the Kancamagus is fit only for pikers, chiselers and deadbeats. And, as you know, I love the White Mountains.
Unfortunately, there was no way I was going to drag that trailer back up that mountain. I couldn’t do it to the truck. So I had to make a 67-mile detour back to the highway. Fortunately, that route was through Red Rock County and Sedona itself. How does anyone get anything done there with such beautiful scenery? The high cliffs, the red rock formations, incredible! And Sedona just blends in with the background. Pretty classy, if you ask me. Place does have a bit of a traffic problem though.
All-in-all, it was definitely one of the unexpected highlights of the trip so far. Thanks again for the tip.
As always, your pal,
Shflynny
PS: There’s more about these spots at http://www.visitsedona.com/.
PSS: Tell your friends and neighbors to keep those tips coming.
Next up, The Grand Canyon
After I left the Sedona area, I climbed up to an 8,000-foot elevation north above Flagstaff. The grass up here is almost an albino color, not dry, just white. There was some evidence of recent wildfires though. Too bad. The Coconino is a great National Forest.
I got up to just below the Canyon’s rim. It was late, so I checked into a motel. Proving how small this world really is, the clerk told me that the folks who registered right before me were from Lake Placid, Fla. – the small town full of murals that I told you about in one of my first posts!
Sounds like good advice.
So, resolved: for the next little while, I’m putting the Eagles on the I-Pod. I turning them up and I’m leaving them up!
This little respite did offer me the opportunity to view a very topical movie on Turner Classics -- The Long Trailer, a 1954 film starring Lucille Ball and her then-husband and TV co-star Desi Arnaz. In their first feature film together that comedy duo played two wacky newlyweds, whimsically named Nicky and Tacy, who got into all manners of scrapes and hi-jinx towing their new home – the long trailer. Filmed partly in California’s Yosemite National Park (and the other part on some Burbank soundstage, no doubt), it was funny -- in a ‘50s sort-of fashion.
As I was leaving Winslow, I needed fuel. The sign at the gas station next to the highway listed Regular at $3.40 per gallon. Whoa there! That’s highway robbery. So I shopped around town and found some for $3.01 pg – a fair price, given the current marketplace.
Charging $3.40 a gallon may not be a felony, but it still stings, a misdemeanor at the very least. Desperadoes, indeed!
Mighty fell the MeteorOnce again on the road after Winslow, I soon began to see highway signs mentioning a “Meteor Crater.” In short order, I stopped at a roadside gift shop to inquire about this, and was told it was nearby and well worth a look-see.
Just 20 miles west of Winslow and six miles south off the highway was an unexpected thrill: a huge – make that spectacularly huge – meteor-induced hole in the ground.
Reportedly, about 50,000 years ago, a meteor composed of iron and nickel and weighing several hundred thousand tons streaked out of the northeast sky toward Earth. Measuring 150 feet across, it was zooming through our atmosphere at 26,000 MPH. In a flash, it struck this spot with the force of 20 million tons of TNT, displacing 175 million tons of limestone and sandstone for over a mile around the crater, creating the over 150-foot high berm that you can’t help but notice as you pull up. Some of the hunks of limestone tossed over the rim were the size of small houses.
The hole I was now staring at was 700 feet deep and 4,000 feet across and 2.4 miles in circumference. The force of the impact, thought to be 20,000,000 lbs. PSI, instantly transformed some chunks of graphite into diamonds, a process that normally takes millions of years.
From a personal point of view, this son of a gun crater is BIG! How big. It’s estimated that, you could play 20 football games simultaneously on the floor of the crater, and have two million fans watching, seated around the sloping sidewalls of the bowl. Man has created craters this big, but they had to use a nuclear bomb test to do it.
Indians lore referenced this crater down through the ages, but it took a scout for General Custer to first report it in writing to the government in 1871 for anyone to officially take notice. It was thought to be a volcanic crater ‘til a mining engineer, Daniel Barringer, began around the turn of last century to see abnormalities in its makeup. Because most of the meteor was vaporized on impact, Barringer’s theory was met with skepticism, but later studies by astro-geologist Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (of the Shoemaker-Levy Comet fame) proved Barringer correct.
This was the setting for the movie Star Man, which starred Jeff Bridges. It’s so much like another world, NASA used this crater to train Apollo astronauts for moon landings and the Learning Center at the side of the crater contains an astronaut tribute wall and actual Apollo training capsule.
This Learning Center, a set of buildings probably the size of a small hospital or high school is two floors tall, houses a great interactive museum, cafeteria, gift shop, courtyard, movie theater, elevators, various ramps and viewing platforms along with a large two-tiered parking lot. Yet it is positively dwarfed by the crater (see above). I took a bunch of photos here, but this thing is so unbelievably big that my pictures could not do it justice. So I decided instead to display this photo of a sky-shot photo hanging in the Crater Museum area. The little white specks you see near the bottom left corner are that Learning Center.
Back to NASA for a moment though: for all the Space Age skeptics out there, could it be the rumors were true? Maybe this Meteor Crater is where NASA “really” filmed the moon landings. As the Space Race heats up again in the next few years, with the U.S., China and India all vying to win the contest to be first back to the Moon (then maybe Mars) – only this time with underlying military reasons as the driving force -- maybe those moonbats will trot out those tired old “movie set” maxims once again.
The operative promo phrase here is “Experience the Impact.” I’m here to tell you it is quite the experience.
For more, visit http://www.meteorcrater.com/.
An open letter to C.W.Dear C.W.,
I hope this letter reaches you. It’s been tough to write lately. Been busy. You know how it is.
You were 100 percent right about the Sedona, Arizona area. Great tip! No overselling there. The whole place was great!
I arrived there late in the afternoon and was lucky to grab a campsite at Cave Springs in the Oak Creek Canyon.
What a spot!
The campground is at a 5,000-foot elevation and tall Ponderosa Pines mix with Juniper trees to form a beautiful forest. The red rock canyon walls are 500 feet tall and only about 1,000 feet apart. The campground, all 80 sites, is wedged in between those walls along with a tight two-lane road and Oak Creek.
Speaking of Oak Creek, I was relaxing along its banks at dusk watching some folks fish and I caught a Great Blue Heron swooping down and scooping up a trout in its beak. Natural magic.
Made a big fire too. The square stone fire pit was huge, the biggest I’ve ever seen -- three feet-by-three feet and 18 inches deep. You would have loved it. Bonfire City. The RV parks I’ve been frequenting are nice and comfy but, you and I both know, there’s nothing like a good fire. I even broke out the fire gloves. Good times!
Everyone around me had radios tuned to the Sun-Lakers Game 7. After the Suns smoked the hated Lakers, there was quite a bit of celebrating. Great atmosphere. Party!
There was a beautiful half-moon out and later the stars seemed so close you could almost reach up and grab a couple. It was 72 degrees at dinnertime, but it got much cooler. Exquisite sleeping weather!
Maybe the best part of this place was that nobody, but nobody, asked me where I was from. Perhaps they thought: So, that’s what a Florida accent sounds like!
I loved it there. Good call, but I do have one small bone to pick with you. In the mail you sent me, you did say that is was, and I quote, “Classic mountain driving. Hairpin turns and cliffs.” So I was forewarned but C.W., did you forget? I have the trailer. It was death defying – 23 switchback turns, four true hairpins, 1,000-foot drop-offs to the right, then to the left. And the road: it’s tight and nearly straight downhill. You drop almost 2,000 feet in just three miles. A classic, all right. Hairy doesn’t quite cover it.
The next morning, I went on down to Slide Rock State Park. It was everything you said it was. Great sights, great water slide. A very popular spot. In fact, in comparison, the Kancamagus is fit only for pikers, chiselers and deadbeats. And, as you know, I love the White Mountains.
Unfortunately, there was no way I was going to drag that trailer back up that mountain. I couldn’t do it to the truck. So I had to make a 67-mile detour back to the highway. Fortunately, that route was through Red Rock County and Sedona itself. How does anyone get anything done there with such beautiful scenery? The high cliffs, the red rock formations, incredible! And Sedona just blends in with the background. Pretty classy, if you ask me. Place does have a bit of a traffic problem though.
All-in-all, it was definitely one of the unexpected highlights of the trip so far. Thanks again for the tip.
As always, your pal,
Shflynny
PS: There’s more about these spots at http://www.visitsedona.com/.
PSS: Tell your friends and neighbors to keep those tips coming.
Next up, The Grand Canyon
After I left the Sedona area, I climbed up to an 8,000-foot elevation north above Flagstaff. The grass up here is almost an albino color, not dry, just white. There was some evidence of recent wildfires though. Too bad. The Coconino is a great National Forest.
I got up to just below the Canyon’s rim. It was late, so I checked into a motel. Proving how small this world really is, the clerk told me that the folks who registered right before me were from Lake Placid, Fla. – the small town full of murals that I told you about in one of my first posts!
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