Day Eight
Montezuma Castle, Tuzigoot, Grand Canyon, and Pipe Spring
Today we are leaving our home for the past few days and heading out on the road for the next 5 nights. Once again we have to make sure that we have everything packed up and loaded in to our already Montero sport. We have not fixed our problems yet. We couldn't seem to to find a software program that would let us download the digital photographs in our digital camera. We are the track though, and it would have to wait until we get to our western headquaters outside of Boise, ID.
Today we have a lot of driving ahead of us, but we do have time to stop off at a few NPS sites along the way. We are driving north to our real destination of southern Utah. We'll spend 4 days there traversing the national parks located throughout the southern Utah. For tday though, we have to drive across all of Arizona to get there. We left early from our Sierra Vista lodgings and headed north of Phoenix to our first stop of Montezuma's Castle National Monument.
Located right of of the highway, Montezuma National Monument is another ancient dwelling built around 1150. Sinagua farmers began building this five story, 20 room dwelling early in the 12th Century. Its stands in a cliff recess a hundred feet above the valley. Early settlers marveled at the structure and thought mistakenly that it was Aztecan in Origin. A short distance west is Castle A, once an imposing 6 story apartment with about 45 rooms, now a badly deteriorated ruin. This dwelling was built against the base of the cliff. The Sinaguans probably thought this was a good place to live. The creek was a reliable source of water, and there was fertile land on the nearby terrace. Like Tonto, a visit to the actual structure requires a hike up the hillside. The starts at the visitor center. At the visitor center there are many exhibits on the daily like of the Sinaguan peoples.
Leaving Montezuma, we head west to visit the related Tuzigoot National Memorial. These two parks are run co-operativly. Tuzigoot (Apache for "crooked water") is the remnant of a Sinaguan villiage built between 1125 and 1400. It crown the sumit of a long ridge that rises 120 feet above the Verde Valley. The original pueblo was two stories high in places and had 77 ground floor rooms. There were few exterior doors; entry was by way of ladders through openings in the roofs. The village began as a small cluster of rooms that were inhabited by about 50 persons for a hundred years. In the 1200's the population doubled and doubled again as refugee farmers, fleeing drought in outlying areas, settled here. The museum and visitor center located just below the pueblo contains a large collection of artifacts and makes for an interesting exploration. Allow at least an hour to explore the museum and Pueblo. The view from the hill top commands a view of the surrounding area. This area is far enough above the desert further south that actual trees cover the hill sides and you can see the highest peaks in Arizona just to the north.
Our journey from here to our next park, the Grand Canyon, was perhaps one of the most scenic and welcome of the trip. After seeing bleak desert landscapes for the past week, the terrain became more rugged, the scenery was greener, and the rocks were redder. We drove north into Sedona, a mostly upscale type town that is surrounded by the most red rock I have ever seen. The contrasts between the evergreen trees and the red rock was so spectacular. It didn't help that as we headed nort we entered the extremely scenic Oak Creek canyon. The road is very narrow and I can imagine that it gets very crowded during peak tourist times. Even we in late September had trouble just doing the speed limit following trailers and slower moving vehicles with no turn outs. The road climbs out of the canyon up several thousand feet to reach the plateau of northern Arizona. Dumping out in Flagstaff after about an hour of very scenic driving, we just had to look back and say 'WOW!'. We drive on a portion of the historic route 66 and drive nortwest out of town and towards the Grand Canyon. One of the benefits of being at this higher elevation is the cooler temperatures. We find this day here to be cloudy and cool which is refreshing. Gone is the death heat of the south. We drive right by the highest point in Arizona (Humpherys Peak) and across a vast plateau towards the canyon. This area is not what I was expecting. It was very remote, and green. It is lushly forested, but I'm sure the recent rains helped enhance that.
Visiting the Grand Canyon was not a planned highlight of the trip. We realized early on that this was a site that we would need at least a few days to fully enjoy. We had to make concessions with certain things and knowing that we will be back in this part of the country sometime in the future, that we could just 'check this out'. We have this attitude that by seeing as many things as possible on our annual trips that we will know what areas and sites are worth returning to. You can do all the reading and get all the recomendations, but until you've been there and know what to expect, it won't mean anything to you until you've been there. The Grand Canyon was going to be one of these for us, like so many other sites. We can't do the park any justice because we stopped at the visitor center (the very least any park visitor can do), and enjoyed the drive east along the canyon rim. Having said that, soon after visiting the visitor center we got our first glimps and view of the canyon. Perhaps no landscape on earth is as startling to the observer as the vast yet intricate face of the Grand Canyon. Over several million years the Colorado River has carved an immense chasm through an arid land-one of the greatest geological features of its kind. The layers of rock exposed in the canyon walls record much of the geologic history of North America. But it is the sheer visual impact of the landscape that impressed us. The world seemed larger here with the sunset and storms taking on an added dimension to match the landscape. It is a land to humble the soul. We wound our way east and stopped at the Desert View for a final look.
From her we have to travel north all the way around the canyon and then northwest to enter Utah and find our lodgings in Hurricane. We had a lot of territory to cover here and based upon the time, we would not arrive in Hurricane until 10pm or so. The most interesting thing about this drive would be the plateau of the north rim of the Grand Canyon. We were both very supprised at how heavily forested it was and cold it was outside. The temperature was about 40, which was much cooler than it was on the south side. Originally we had planned on being at the Pipe Spring National Memorial in daylight (even though the visitor center would probably be closed). Well, we're about 1.5 hours east of the monument and it is already dark so those plans will not come to fruition. When we do come back to the Grand Canyon, we will have to visit the north rim again and Pipe Spring.
We did get into Hurricane, UT very late, but at least we were here and ready to enjoy 4 leisurly days of exploring southern Utah.
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