The rest of Arizona – or at least the bits we saw

 Following our visit to the Grand Canyon it would be easy to suppose that the rest of the trip would begin to anti-climax but there were adventures and excitements to come after all.   To start with, we passed through a few places that could probably claim that since the beginning of time until now, nothing has happened.  Then we happened upon Flagstaff, Arizona (as featured in the song Route 66) which turned out to be a delightful little place.  It’s a University town which always seems to add some life and vibrancy to anywhere, it has a centre to it and is full of little shops and a decent selection of restaurants.  Flagstaff lies just north of the centre of Arizona and when we arrived the temperature was in the high 90’s.  A most unlikely place you might think to be a winter sports town but the highest peak in Arizona lies a little to the east and this is the winter sport area.  Close by is a chair lift which we took to 11,500 feet, riding above the ski runs, which as you might expect at the moment are grassy.  At this altitude, even at this latitude there is an Alpine Flora with one plant species being an endemic to these mountains.  For you non-wildlife people out there, it means that it occurs nowhere else on earth.

We have noticed a similarity with Norway in that many doors open outwards that in England we expect to open inwards e.g. shop doors, hotel entrances and public lavatories.  Another thing we’ve noticed that’s different for us is that we’ll often see a road sign saying something like 1500 feet to Historic Marker.  Now in England it would never say that, it would be 500 yards and personally 1500 is too big a number to cope with when driving.  That’s what we Brits are like with a horizontal distance but with a vertical one we would never say that a hill is 500 yards high, we would say 1500 feet.  So consistency points to the Americans here.

South of Flagstaff we’re aiming for the recommended Sedona which is scenically stunning, surrounded by the reddest of eroded rocks and canyons in a desert like scrubby lansdscape.  As we check in for our 2 day stay the receptionist asked if we’d come for the eclipse.  What eclipse, we say.  Our good luck again because this is a total lunar eclipse whose totality will be seen from Sedona.  Not only that but the moon is particularly close to Earth and it’s supposed to be a red moon, a set of three that only occurs once in a zillion years or something.  Naturally I exaggerate here but I gather that the last time this happened was in the 1980s and the next will be in the 2030s.   We saw a fantastic total eclipse with the rising moon already half obscured and it did become quite reddish in totality.  My photographs make it look like a big bloodshot eye.

The rocks around the town are an astonishing rusty red and of course they get what appear to be unnaturally brightly coloured as the sun dips to the horizon and they get bathed in that warm red sunset glow as well.  I’m very pleasantly surprised by Sedona.  It has the usual miles of strip development running southwards which is the very worst and ugliest thing about most American towns.  Here though the edges are planted with many trees, there aren’t huge advertising hoardings and everything is low rise, so looking down the interstate highway, we can’t see all the stores and shops along the route, just trees and plants.  The town itself is very touristy but not overmuch and it has a good selection of restaurants.   My doubts about the town are because it’s a New Ager place, full of the whole gamut of offerings for the gullible.  It’s a centre for vortexes, spots that radiate the earth’s energy in such a way that the energy is undetectable to any equipment known to science.  Oh and I know the plural of vortex is vortices but it isn’t here in Sedona.  One vortex spot is at the airport, just where you want some sort of energy disturbance as you come in to land and at least one is gender specific.  This is a feminine vortex in Boynton Canyon, it’s called Kachina Woman and looks like a huge rock phallus which just adds to the hilarity.  According to the publicity we must ‘try not to be moved’, although my feeling was in the direction of weeping for the dolts who fall for all this guff and contempt for the parasites who part them from their money.  I noted a few of the other offerings around town : Aura Photographs: Psychic Energy: Crystal everything: Tarot: Mystics: Energy Fields: Chakras: Spiritual Healing and of course loads of shops with ‘super-foods’, whatever the hell they are.  Well I do know really, the term ‘superfood’ is a marketing tool, with little scientific basis to it.  That’s according to Cancer Research UK and I think they’re being very kind to use the word ‘little’ rather than ‘no’.

We had a great walk in Boynton Canyon, starting very early to miss the high 90s midday heat.  Roseate red pinnacles rose either side (sorry about that) and got closer as the canyon narrowed and we walked to what was a dead end for us at a sheer rock face.  The last two or three miles were in the welcome shade of trees as more water was at this end of the canyon than the desert scrub at the start of the walk.  It was on our return trip that we had another stroke of luck.  Whether it was good luck or bad luck depends on your point of view.  Heather whispered loudly to me and about thirty yards away to our left across a small dry creek bed, making it’s way in the opposite direction to us was a fully grown Black Bear ambling along.  He or she, I didn’t investigate, was big, about three to four feet high at the shoulder, built just like a bear should be and must have known we were there.  Fifty yards or so past us he turned, crossed a spot on the path we’d been a minute previously and silently disappeared into the undergrowth.  Excitement and relief rolled into one.  If he had turned his attention in our direction we were in technical terms, in deep doody.  If a Black Bear attacks you mustn’t run, you must fight back.  My weapons were a Swiss Army Knife and a terrible singing voice.  Flimsy, I grant you but fortunately uncalled for.  Black Bears do eat acorns so we had to make sure we looked as little like acorns as we could manage.  We think it was a great slice of luck and talking to a local that evening he told us that he’d lived there thirty years and had never seen a bear.

Arizona has a number of the towns recognisable from all those Cowboy films I know I saw as a youngster but don’t remember.  The ones where the Indians were always plains Indians and the baddies, the goody cowboy wore a white hat which never fell off in a fight and the shapely saloon owner was a warm hearted innocent rather than a prostitute.  Dodge City and Wichita are way over in Kansas but towns like Tucson and Tombstone lie in the south of the state where the Saguaro Cactus grows.  These are the ones seen in all those films.  They stand twenty to forty feet high with fat limbs branching out from the main stem.  Put a hat on one and draw a face and it looks quite human.  I’d still like to see some tumbleweed though.  In reality the south of Arizona was part of Apache country and central and northern parts of the state, Navajo and Hopi.  You may not know but in WWII, native Navajo speakers were used in voice communications for the US army based on the assumption that Nazi Germany would have few fluent Navajo speakers to call upon.

Of course we knew about the Grand Canyon but Arizona is much more attractive scenically than we thought it would be.  Our biggest surprise is that vegetarian food is much easier to find than it is in California, outside of San Francisco.  Tucson was where we saw a car dealership with a sign reading ‘Ugly But Honest Cars’.  This must be an Arizona thing (or possibly thang) because earlier as we whizzed past Phoenix we saw a sign reading ‘Ugly Houses Purchased’.  Seems like handing a great negotiating tactic away before you begin.  “Well sir, it might have five bedrooms and a swimming pool but it sure is ugly”.  It was also in Tucson as we checked in that we were told so much about the room and the hotel it even included the information that the mattresses were changed in January.  Here in southern Arizona it is revving up for Halloween at the end of the month and we saw a poster advertising a Vampire Banquet.  Dishes like Beetroot Soup and Blood Orange Sorbet as you would expect and a picture of Whitby Abbey, so full marks for Dracula accuracy.  What caught Heather’s eye and creased us up was a line across the bottom of this poster for a Vampire’s Banquet, “Vegetarian option available.”