Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma are very green, full of forests and lakes. They are nothing like I pictured them. Looking at the roadside scenery, I would guess that I was in West Virginia. The forest looks like is mostly oak and pine. Little Rock is a pleasant city. I looked at one of the home pages. Houses, what look like nice houses, are amazingly inexpensive. You can get three bedrooms for less than 100K. I told Chrissy that we should live here. She is less than enthusiastic. I am not serious, of course. This is, after all, still Clinton and Jed Clampet country. Besides, I really like Northern Virginia. I only wish it was cheaper.
Adding this the next day – I went running this morning right outside the hotel. It is a little too hilly for a good run. Running down the steep grades pushes your toes against the tops of your shoes and you have to run up on the balls of your feet the whole way. The grades are also a bit too long. That said, it was a nice run. Everything is so green. The emerald blaze almost hurts your eyes. After coming out of the desert where all life is precarious and vegetation has to be coaxed to grow, this is Eden. If you drove a stick into the ground, I think it would sprout leaves. The soil is deep enough to support very large trees. Vegetation crawls from every crack in the sidewalk. I think it has been a particularly wet season, but it can’t be far different from the normal. Of course it is the humidity that keeps the plants so green and luxuriant, but even that feels good after you have dried out for a couple of weeks. This part of Little Rock looks remarkably like Vienna, Virginia. The hills are steeper, but when I ran though the suburban neighborhoods, I could have been there. There are just not that many types of landscape.
We are back in the green part of the U.S. I like the state of Oklahoma. At least in this part, there are a lot of trees and green pastures. The weather is warm, but pleasant. Oklahoma City, however, I could do without. It is an ordinary looking Midwestern city, but it doesn’t seem to have the parks and infrastructure like Minneapolis or Milwaukee.
We visited the Cowboy Museum. It is a very nice. There is a lot of western art – sculptures and paintings. The building is evidently used for community events. It is one of the most tasteful venues I have ever seen. I liked the beautiful gardens. There were exhibits of western clothes, weapons and gear. The “West” is in many ways a creation of the movies and this was evident at the museum where at least a quarter of the exhibits were of artifacts from western movies and television shows. Many of the distinctive hats, guns and boots were created for actors like John Wayne, Charlton Heston or Tom Mix in the movies: cowboys probably never saw many of the styles. One of the characteristic cowboy hats, for example, is specifically called the Tom Mix hat after the early movie actor. It would have been awkward on the plains. Among the displays was a giant bowie knife, made by Gucci for John Wayne. It looked very impressive, but would have been far too big to be carried by a man in the wilderness. I have done enough hiking to understand how good looking gear gets abandoned along the trial. I don’t suppose it was any different in the old west, especially when we were talking about life and death. The real west was more like a blue-collar outdoor adventure punctuated by fits of deadly violence. Cowboys were hard working guys just trying to make a living – heroic in the sense that a working man is heroic. In many ways more noble than the fancy pants “code of the west” drifters portrayed on film.
The most interesting thing in town is the Big Texan, where I had the best steak I ever tasted. It is a kitschy place, but nice. You can get a 72 oz steak. If you eat the whole thing within an hour, it is free. The waitress says that about ten people a day try to eat the big steak and about three actually finish. They got a big table in front where the big eaters do their thing. Nobody was trying when we were there. It seems to me that it is embarrassing to lose and maybe even more embarrassing to win.
The town itself is mostly strip malls and hotels. It is not that bad a place, but not that good either. The thing I noticed in the paper is how cheap houses are. You can get what looks like a decent house for less than $100,000.
We visited the Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas nearby. The museum was nice and inexpensive. It is housed at West Texas A&M. Texas Universities are good and in state tuition is cheap. This school seems particularly good for geology, paleontology and agriculture. The most interesting part was the history of oil exploration. Texans worked hard to develop technologies to find, get oil and to get it to market. It is a ground up history, where many entrepreneurs innovated their way to success – very heroic. Oil is an interesting topic. Compare how the people of Texas created a resource to how the princes, potentates and nabobs of Arabia had an unearned resource handed to them by foreign companies. Oil corrupts third world counties because they don’t do anything to develop the resource. It comes free along with resentment of the firms that gave them this undeserved bounty.
There were also exhibits on Texas in the past, starting with the Pre-Cambrian. My personal favorite is the Pleistocene, but there is not that much you can say about a couple of bison skulls so let me skip to the last couple hundred years ago. Life was a challenge for people in the Texas panhandle. The land is semi desert. Adapting crops to the environment only goes do far. Farmers water their land with water drawn from the Ogallala aquifer, a giant underground lake. The aquifer was created 100,000 years ago by water runoff from the far away Rockies. It is no longer being recharged because the Pecos River now cuts through and drains off the water into the Gulf of Mexico. The water will last awhile longer, but needs to be conserved. Maybe we could plug up the Pecos in set the whole recharging thing in motion again.
I listened to AM radio on the way into town. Most people around here are conservative, if you survey what they listen to. But contrary to what we might think of people so far inland in the U.S., they are interested in foreign affairs. They have to be, since their agricultural commodities are sold on world markets. The local radio included interviews about markets overseas and a report of a trade delegation from Russia visiting the panhandle. They also had a call in program about how biotechnology is being received in Europe.
At 6500 feet, Durango is much cooler and nicer than the deserts below. It is a truly cute town. Everything is clean and in good condition. It is a bit like a living Disneyland. People look healthy and outdoorsy. Durango was built by the railroads and grew because of mining, but now it depends on tourism and resident yuppies who love its mountain activities and pleasant, carefree atmosphere. The town does have a lot to offer an active person. Bike, running and hiking trails are all over the city. The slopes are good for skiing and the rivers are good for white water rafting and kayaking.
We went white water rafting on the Animas River that goes through town. Actually, I am not sure it qualifies as white water, since water levels are low. We had a decent, but not that exciting a ride. The river guide was named James. James studied anthropology and has some interesting insights. He believes in spiritual use of herbs (like peyote), was generally new age and a thoroughly charming person. He decried the greed of those who would use water for purposes other than sending it down the river for rafting or fishing. Talking to him makes me understand how far I am from Washington. People around here don’t care much for national politics. They feel separate from the East-Coast elites. In many ways this is the land of the lotus-eaters. It seems very politically correct. I don’t believe people litter or abuse animals in any way, and they even have non-smoking areas outside. The inhabitants of the region live well on the fat of the American economy without really understanding that theirs is a resource intensive lifestyle made possible by the larger U.S. They need energy intensive four-wheel drive vehicles to get to idyllic recreation places, which were deathtraps and wastelands before the government built roads to the general area. Their high tech equipment is made in those satanic factories far away (probably China). The town’s pride, a steam engine that still runs, makes more pollution than hundreds of big cars, yet that smoke is picturesque. I can’t blame them for their attitude. They are lucky. This is the kind of place I searched for as a young man and would like to retire to when I am old, but like Ulysses and his crew, I can’t linger in the land of the Lotus Eaters too long for now. Besides, parts of it are on fire.
We had planned to visit Mesa Verde, one of the oldest Indian ruins in America, but a forest fire closed the park. The drought here has lasted a couple of years and dry wood burns. James is philosophical. He has seen the rivers high above the bridges and seen them so low that the rocks scraped the bottom of the boat. He pointed out that this so called drought is small potatoes. It is nothing like the one that started about 900 AD and lasted about 500 years. He is talking about the catastrophic drought that finished off the Anastazi. I guess we can be thankful for small favors. But before we shout hallelujah too loud, we may ponder that this could just be the start of something much bigger. What happened before can happen again. Well as we all know, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it and we have enjoyed some good weather in the last 150 years. James says that water will be the biggest resource issue of the 21st Century. I agree. In the arid Southwest, with its history of boom and bust, you see how fragile things can be and how whole communities can dry up and blow away as dust in the wind when their water is cut off. In the deserts of Arizona the old cowboys said, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting about.” Let’s hope this doesn’t become a worldwide truth. On that happy note . . . Colorado is a great place. I still think I like Montana better, but I could learn to love this state.
As long as I am thinking about timeless truths, I just need to share two more. One I saw on a t-shirt, the other on a tombstone. “Give a man to fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he sits in a boat and drinks beer all day.” That’s the t-shirt. “I never killed a man that didn’t need killing and never killed an animal except for meat” from the epitaph of an old west marshal.
Coal burning train gives us the familiar Krakow smells.
Durango main street
Side Street – looks a lot like Wisconsin
Very politically correct. You probably cannot read the sign because of the glare in the picture. It declares this a no smoking outdoor zone.
The pictures speak for themselves. You can understand why this place is such a popular setting for westerns. It is part of the Navajo reservation and we had to pay $25 to get in. We drove a 17-mile course, stopping at various places to look at the scenery or take pictures. The flat, big rock formations are mesas, after the Spanish word for table. When they get thinner and broader at the bottom, they are called buttes. When the butte gets very thin it is called a spire. Which are which is open to some interpretation.
After that we went on to Durango, Colorado, stopping at the four corners monument. The four corners is where the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet. It is also part of the Navajo nation, and it cost us $15 to get in there. I guess they have to make money in this dry, inhospitable place. It is the only place in the U.S. where you can set your foot in four states at once. The Navajo arrived in the area only about 800 years ago. Before that Anastazi people occupied the place. The Anastazi lived in Pueblo villages that you still see around here, but they died out for reasons anthropologists still speculate about. A big reason was the harsh climate. Despite the grandeur, this place is obviously a wasteland. We drove for hours at 60 mph through almost nothing but rock, sand and dirt. Occasionally you see a house. I don’t know how the inhabitants make a living. This is even bleaker than the desert near Phoenix. The only redeeming characteristic is that it is much cooler than the lower desert. Daytime temperatures are only about 100, which seems cool at least in the dry air, and it gets into the 50s at night.
As we crossed into Colorado and gained altitudes, things became a lot greener. We are staying at KOA in Durango, Colorado. It is a nicer cabin than we had before. Durango has all the conveniences, including a Wall Mart, where we bought a window fan for $10. It is bringing in the cooler air very nicely. I am writing at about 11 pm and it is comfortably cool outside. Tomorrow we plan to go rafting and I hope to have pictures.
Monument Valley road
Family at Four Corners.
Me at Four Corners
Espen in the desert outside Four Corners. It is bleak.
We crossed into the Navajo Nation today. The geography is bleak but beautiful, mostly sand and rock. The Navajo are the most numerous Indians in the U.S. and their reservation is one of the few that is economically viable without gambling casinos. The economy is based on sheep herding and tourism. In the middle of Navajo country is Monument Valley, a place of great natural beauty where many Western movies were filmed. There are a lot of signs supporting our troops in Iraq and more American flags than you find even in most other places in the U.S., and I understand that the Navajo are eager participants in the military. Navajo soldiers were important during World War II as code talkers. The Japanese could break American military codes, but they had nobody who could understand Navajo, which was spoken nowhere outside the American southwest. U.S. units had Navajo who spoke to each other in their obscure native language that baffled the Japanese throughout the war.
On the way, we went past the Grand Canyon again. I have included some pictures. We also went past an Indian village ruin. It thrived until about 1150 when the climate became hotter and dryer (without the help of the greenhouse effect). Climatologists have managed to piece together a complete climate history using tree rings. The earth’s climate is very unstable. It was warmer in the year 1200 than it is today. The Southwest has droughts that last hundreds of years. On the side is a painting of what it is supposed to have looked like. You really can’t think of these things as cities. They are more like apartment buildings or townhouse complexes. The picture shows the WHOLE thing, so it would be a small apartment complex. Doors are on the roof. The ancient McDonalds and Seven-Eleven are not pictured.
Our campsite complex. It did get cool at night, as I anticipated, but the cabin stayed hot until the wee hours of the morning. We didn’t get much sleep. This cabin thing is not as much fun as it seems when people talk about it.
The boys at the Grand Canyon.
Ruins of the Indian settlement.
Gorges of the little Colorado. The river is dry most of the time, but it managed to carve this canyon. It is not as big as the Grand Canyon, but it drops off more steeply.
Espen & Alex at the gorges. Notice how much nothing there is behind. I remain amazed by how much open space there is in this country.
Bluffs on the Navajo nation.
I see a lot of beach, but no ocean. This is bleaker even than the Sonoran desert south of Phoenix.
These are the traditional Navajo house and the more modern variety. Nobody actually lives in the traditional mud house (called a Hogan) anymore. It must be a lot like living in a hole in the ground. The trailer is probably more comfortable, although not as picturesque.
Beautiful downtown Kayenta, Arizona. Really – that’s the town, although some of the suburbs (mostly mobile homes trail off into the distance. What else do you need? There is a shopping center, a McDonald’s, Burger King, several gas stations and a couple of hotels. We are staying at the Holiday Inn, which is a nice place. The people around here are very friendly and have a real love & pride in their home. This is the kind of place you have to love or leave.
The kids are not as enthusiastic about being at KOA campgrounds as they should be. It is a kid friendly environment with a nice pool and places to do things. We rented a small cabin. As I write, it is still hot both inside and outside the cabin, but I know that in this thinner mountain air it will be cool as soon as the sun goes down.
Williams is a much higher altitude than Phoenix. Thick forests of ponderosa pine cover the nearby mountains, and the air is cool at night. Up a little farther north is the Colorado Plateau, with widely spaced trees in a park-like setting. It is always surprising to me how fast environments change in the mountains. Our campground is in a fairly dry area of small trees. A few miles up the road the trees are really tall. Up a little farther is high plains (what in most of the world they call steppe). I plan to wake up early tomorrow and run through at least three distinct biomes. I like it here.
Meteor crater was featured on the movie “Starman” with Jeff Bridges. It looks a lot bigger in the movies. It is worth seeing, but not worth going to see if you have to go very far – unless you are interested in those sorts of things, and there are such people. Before we went, I consulted the web about the crater. It is a Mecca for meteor watchers. The crater was formed by a meteor impact about 50,000 years ago For reference, this is about the time anatomically modern man started to wipe out his Neanderthal cousins. (This factoid I know because I am listening to an audio book on evolution as I drive. Now I will probably remember both factoids until the day I day or dementia sets in.) The crater is well preserved because the meteor had the good sense to land in what was a desert even then. In a more temperate climate, it would have filled with water and the sides would have caved in.
Route 66 Thousands of emigrants from the East headed west for the Promised Land in California along the “mother road”. Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles before the advent of the Interstate Highway system. Highway travel was more of an adventure fifty years ago than it is on today’s highways with today’s cars that slice through mountains and make travel across deserts an air-conditioned pleasure. Although Interstate 40 roughly follows the course, most of Route 66 is now gone or converted to local streets. We will be traveling along the route for much of our trip. We are starting in Williams, Arizona where part of the original road is preserved in something approaching its original condition. Below are photos.
We ate at the Route 66 Diner. I had a 1950 style greasy hamburger that made no pretense about being healthy. Even I thought the batter fried French fries were a little grease redundant however. After we ate, a small band dressed in Civil War costumes played songs. The leader said that he was a teacher who had done a project with his class. Some of them were so interested in the subject they wanted to explore it further and did studies on the songs.
Meteor crater – worth seeing, but not worth going to see.
Espen contemplated the crater.
Living in a town called Two Guns.
Mariza and Route 66 Diner.
Map of old Route 66. I don’t believe they had the salad bar in the 1950s.
Espen dining.
Civil War music on main street in Williams. As I recall, only one short battle was fought in Arizona. I don’t recall who won, but I don’t think anyone was killed.
I woke up this morning with no way to hold my body that didn’t hurt. Hiking from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River at the bottom and back in one day is not easy. The National Park Service warns you. Their brochures and webpages threaten dire consequences for those foolish enough to make the attempt. Men between the ages of 18 and 40 are the target audience for the campaign. Members of this benighted crowd, evidently high on testosterone and overconfident of their strength, try to do too much. The ads say that most of the people the rangers rescue are young men, and they curse the day and hold their manhood cheap whenever anyone speaks of it. Since I passed the upper limit of the group more than eight years ago, I wasn’t worried, but I have to admit it was a tough trip.
The biggest challenge is the heat. It was 117 degrees on the canyon floor. The sun fixes its blank and pitiless gaze on the canyon from about 5:30 am until 7:00 pm and heats up the rocks so that they radiate heat like a rotisserie grill. During most of the day there is almost no shade anywhere. You literally cannot drink enough water to prevent dehydration if you move around in the sun between about 10 and 3:00, since your body can absorb only a liter of water an hour and you can easily sweat out two liters. If I ever do this again, it will not be in the middle of summer. The payoff is truly breathtaking scenery. The pictures I included do not do it justice. No pictures I have ever seen can capture the true majesty, but I do suggest you consult a site that features taken by professionals with more skill and better equipment.
I went down with my brother in law Alex Sandoval and one of his neighbors named Bob. Bob is an eagle scout who had experience walking up and down the canyon. Although he was only about sixteen years old, the kid was our guide. Both Alex and Bob are young, in excellent condition and are indigenous to this hot, dry climate. I was outclassed. As the kid ranged effortlessly ahead, I kept on thinking, for reasons I can’t explain, of Yoda and said to myself, “Wonder whether you this good will look when you my age are.” It didn’t make me feel any better when he complimented me on being so old and still able to walk relatively well – not in exactly those words of course, but it is like complimenting an old lady by telling her that she must have been very good looking when she was younger.
We started down the South Kaibab trail at 5:30 when the temperature was still pleasant. It only took us about 3 ½ hours to get to the bottom. The kid set a grueling pace. We passed many people along the trail. Some carried what looked like ski poles. It was a good idea, takes some pressure off the knees and generally improves balance. I have included pictures from the trip down. There were many breathtaking views, but my pictures insufficient to express them. At the bottom there is not much to do except lay in the cool streams. This pleasure is not to be underestimated, but you can only do it so long, especially because the sun is high and hot. We finally hunkered down in a shelter probably build by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. The CCC boys did a good job. We stayed there, protected from the worst of the sun until about 3:00. Then we started up the hill on the Bright Angel trail.
Bright Angel is very beautiful but I would have enjoyed it more if it had not been so hot. If it is 117 in the shade, the ranger told us that is probably 130 in the sun. The hot rocks actually destroyed my shoes. They were old and I would have thought it was just their age, but Alex’s shoes also came apart and the ranger told us that part of her shoe gave out. Anyway, the bottom came off my right shoe. I had to put a sock over it to keep shoe and sole together. This expedient worked until almost the end of the hike. It is a very tough hike. The Grand Canyon is like a reverse mountain – first you go down and only then – when you are tired out – you do up. Bright Angel follows a little stream much of the time. We dunked ourselves on several occasions to stay cool. About halfway up the hill, you come to “Indian Garden,” an oasis of cottonwood trees. It is very pleasant and there is drinkable water. We got there about 5:00 and for the first time the walls of the canyon shaded out the sun in many places. I would have liked to stay in this little paradise, but it was still 4 ½ miles to the top with an elevation gain of more than 3000 feet. The last three miles were the hardest. Up and up, more up and up again. My enthusiasm was waning, but I kept on putting one foot in front of the other. It was a perdition highway with about fifty lost souls slogging up the hill at the end of their day. Of course, I felt more virtuous than most, since we had hiked all the way down and back. Most day-trippers hike down to Indian Gardens and back only. Logs designed to limit erosion on the trail are placed just a little too far apart to allow you to step from one to another. Between are potholes, so you are always stepping up and down and unable to get a decent rhythm. My shoe fell apart just before I got to the rim. The flapping of my shoe attracted attention and made it harder to walk. Finally, I just cut the bottom clean off and walked on the foam.
Well, it is a tough job but somebody has to do it. I would not have made it if it had not been for Alex. He made sure we brought enough water and salty snacks, and he understood that we had to rest as well as walk. Yesterday at about 7:00 I would have paid a thousand dollars for someone to drive me to the top and I promised myself I would never get into a situation like that again. Now sitting in air-conditioned comfort, I now look forward to my next hike.
My foot over the canyon before going in.
That old buzzard knows that he can wait. I didn’t think it was nice of the ugly thing to wait for me to desiccate and die like a dog on the rocks below. The ranger said that they were California condors (buzzard is a politically incorrect term). The California condor is an endangered species. These particular ones were introduced into the canyon a couple of years ago. They are now well established, but still not breeding.
This is us the morning of the hike, before we were dried out.
My colleagues have already walked ahead of me. It is hard to see them along this trail, but I have circled them in red.
This is a nice vista. The colors are much better than the picture.
Our first look at the Colorado River far below
Everything that comes in and out of the canyon comes on mules. The perspective is bad on this picture. The mules are about 100 meters below me on the vertical axis. The picture makes it look like they are just far away horizontally.
Brook at the bottom of the canyon. It was cool and fresh.
The blue hoods are kept wet all the time. They really help keep your head and neck cool. Alex and my shoes are giving out as you can see from the picture. We have bandaged them. In the background is the Colorado River that created the canyon.
We spent a couple of hours hunkered down in a cool shelter. Only lizards and snakes can move around in the noonday sun. Soon after this picture was taken, a lizard crawled across Alex’s head. The CCC or the WPA probably built the shelter during the great depression. Thank God for those guys. They built to last. That was the golden age of parks and forests. I like the idea that parks are for people, but that facilities should be simple and Spartan.
Looking back halfway up the hill
This is Indian Garden, a desert oasis still 4 ½ miles and 3000 vertical feet from the rim.
Not much energy left in me. It doesn’t look like I am walking up hill on the picture and it is not the steepest part, but look at how the landscape drops off behind.
Went to Tombstone today. It was hot and sunny, although the sky was not completely clear because of the forest fires nearby.
Tombstone was founded to take advantage of rich silver deposits nearby. It was the classic boomtown that grew rapidly, burned almost the ground twice and was rebuilt each time. Of course it is most famous for the gunfighters, especially Wyatt Earp, his brothers & Doc Holiday and their fight with the Clantons. I have been interested in Wyatt Earp since I was a little kid and saw the Wyatt Earp television series. The series debuted on Tuesday evenings the year I was born, but survives in reruns even today. When I heard the song – Wyatt Earp – brave, courageous and bold, I though it was brave, contagious and old. I saw several of the movies. My favorite is “Tombstone” with Kirk Russell as Wyatt, Sam Eliot at Virgil Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc. Their rendition of the gunfight at OK Corral seems the most like the real thing, although eyewitness testimony varied. The other movies killed people at the corral who were not even there. For example, in “Gunfight at OK Corral” starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Doc Holiday Killed Johnny Ringo, who was not even present at the fight. “My Darling Clementine” with Henry Fonda was no where near accurate, but had the redeeming characteristic of being innocent. “Wyatt Earp” with Kevin Kosner sucked so much it does not even merit comment. The whole thing was over in about 30 seconds in reality, so accounts varied. I was surprised how small the OK Corral was in real life. The actual fight did not even take place in the corral. Recent CSI style forensic investigation indicates that the whole bloody business was a misunderstanding. Probably Doc Holiday cocked his shotgun, which set everyone else off.
We saw the usual attractions, including a reenactment of the gunfight at OK Corral, the Birdcage Theatre and Boot Hill. The Birdcage was the place where the cowboys pursued their three hobbies: gambling, rye whiskey and wild-wild women. The gambling rooms have all the charms of a teenager’s basement rec-room, which is pretty much what they were like.
The reenactors did a decent job. I felt sorry for them in their black coats in the hot sun. I think they were all members of the NRA. One of them set his gun on the ground and yelled, “kill”. It did not go off and he said, “See guns don’t kill; people kill.” People killed a lot of each other in Tombstone, if you can believe the markers on the streets and in the graveyard of Boot Hill.
Boot Hill is really depressing. The dry, bleak loneliness of the place gives you an idea of what it might be like being dead, and maybe going to hell. The graves are more than 100 years old, but they still have their piles of stones. There is no grass here to do the work of covering the sins of the past and soften the landscape. The graves just bake in the sun forever, or until the next ice age, which is got to be a long time from now. It is also such a small graveyard. I have been to Arlington many times. Sometimes I make a point of walking through it on the way to the State Department. It is calm and pleasant. The dead lay there with some dignity. Boot Hill is just land of the dead, like you might see in an episode of the Twilight Zone – a dry hell of a place to spend an eternity. You expect the dead might want to get up and leave.
Tomorrow on to the Grand Canyon. I expect it to be a hard walk – uphill at least half the time.
This is Tombstone today. Dirt streets are gone and cars have replaced horses.
Reenactment of the gunfight at OK Corral. It was hot for us and hotter for the poor guys in the black coats.
John and the Earps. The little guy is Doc Holiday. They don’t look like the guys in the pictures or in the movies. I don’t think they are the real Earps or Doc Holiday.
Another thing that is much bigger in the movies
Inside the Birdcage with an idealized picture of what it should have looked like in the Birdcage.
We drove south to Tucson today. Highway 10 just south of Phoenix crosses what must be one of the most barren stretches on the face of the earth. A picture taken from the car window is below. But all of a sudden you come to irrigated pecan orchards. This is a productive agricultural area. The soil is fertile and when water is applied things grow well. There is the added advantage of weed control. To get rid of weeds, all you have to do is not provide water and everything is wiped clean so you can start again. Arizona is also a big producer of corn, cotton and watermelons, among other things.
We stopped in a small city called Casa Grande and ate at Taco Bell – the boys’ favorite restaurant. I took a picture from the parking lot. If Clint Eastwood was to make a class b western in the 21st century it would be set in a place like Casa Grande. The funny thing is that there are all kinds of stores and facilities here in the middle of nowhere.
Just before Tucson, we set out for “Old Tucson”. It is an old movie site used in many of the western movies we all know and love. On the way, the desert is beautiful. Pictures are included. The terrain is very steep and the pictures don’t do it justice. We climbed to a little stone shelter. Out of the sun, it is cool. Actually it is still 100 degrees, but the breeze is nice. Old Tucson looks familiar because I have seen it so often. Many John Wayne movies, “Gunfight at Ok Corral”, “Tombstone”, episodes of “Bonanza” & “The Big Valley” and many others were made here. Unfortunately, much of the set burned down in 1997.
Near old Tucson is the desert museum, which is sort of a park and botanical garden. The desert is still strange to me. I can appreciate it, but I don’t think I would ever learn to love the treeless landscape. It reminds me of a giant construction site, piles of dirt and rocks laying all over the place. All the plants live precariously. At least that what it looks like to me. And many of the plants look like giant houseplants. The big ones are the kinds you find in offices and hospital waiting rooms. I saw various lizards scampering around, but no snakes. The absence of snakes does not upset me. The rattlesnakes are bad enough, but at least they sometimes warn you by rattling their tails. There is a little, fortunately rare, snake called the Arizona Coral Snake. It is a two stepper. It bites you; you take two steps and you die. It looks just like a non-poisonous “milk snake”, except its stripes are different. They both have red, black and yellow stripes, but the sequence is different. The rhyme goes, “Red touches yellow, you’re a dead fellow; red touches black, you’re all right jack.” I think it is better to avoid all snakes like that rather than count the color rings after being struck by one.
The only mammals were some wild pigs sleeping under a stone bridge. I smelled them before I saw them. They are pigs after all. The only unpleasant part of the visit was the “true cave” experience. They have a dark cave you can crawl though. I bumped my head on the stalactites, tripped over the Stalagmites and generally felt claustrophobic. Big guys like me are not meant for cave dwelling. Fortunately, it was a short visit. My digital camera helped. I took flash pictures and then could consult the lighted panel. Saved by technology.
We got to Tucson in the late afternoon. It is a very pleasant city, with clean, wide streets and some nice landscaping. It is still a desert city, but there is a lot more green and nature seems kinder here than in Phoenix. The elevation is higher and it is cooler. Even when the temperature is hot, the thin air feels cooler. I like it here. We are staying at Towne Suites. They are nice for the family because we have two bedrooms and a sofa bed.
Near the Tucson are “sky islands” – mountains with high enough elevations to support forests. These islands extend south way into the Sierra Madre in Mexico. You can literally walk from the Sonora Desert to the climatic equivalent of Hudson Bay as you walk up the slopes. They call them sky islands because they are like islands of forest is a sea of desert. It is an apt comparison. The nicest part is the “montane” about halfway up the hills, which is mostly ponderosa pine. Unfortunately, it has been a dry year and the area is suffering forest fires. We can see some of the smoke from the road. It was coming up a notch in the mountains.
It is amazing how much nothing there is along the road just outside Phoenix.
With a little water, the same bleak landscape is green with pecan trees. Lets see, before we have dirt, sagebrush and rattlesnakes. After, trees that provide edible nuts. In this case, I think humans have improved on nature.
Chrissy and Mariza at a desert stop over.
Espen on the desert hill.
This is my artistic picture of the parking lot, taken from a little stone shelter.
This is the road to old Tucson.
Street scene from Old Tucson
This is one of the most filmed mountains in the world. According to the guide, it has been in scores of westerns. I will have to watch for it next time I watch a gunfight movie.
Posters of some of the many movies filmed at Old Tucson
Desert. I think they call this a Joshua Tree.
I don’t like caves. They are gloomy and fetid, and they are always underground.
Another thing I could do without are poisonous snakes. The only time I have actually seen a poisonous snake was in the Shenandoah in Virginia. It was stretched across the hiking trail. I threw a couple of rocks at it and it slithered off.
