My hometown made the news last week, but it sure wasn’t for anything you’d be proud of.

Gauley Bridge is a cozy little town built on a hillside in Fayette County, West Virginia. It sits at the confluence of the New River and the Gauley River, where they come together to form the Kanawha. It’s named for a bridge that was built there in the mid-1800′s – one of the few places where people could cross the Gauley back in those days. The bridge was destroyed (several times, actually) during the Civil War, and the old piers can still be seen from the riverbank.

It’s a beautiful place, with amazing scenery and friendly people – but unfortunately there’s something really ugly going on back home.

It turns out that the police force in the little town of Gauley Bridge issues more speeding tickets each year than any other municipality in the state of West Virginia. To understand just how absurd that is, you need to look at population figures. Gauley Bridge has less than 800 residents, the city of Charleston has 50,000 – and yet Gauley Bridge issues more speeding tickets than Charleston? Yup. More than Charleston, more than Huntington, more than Beckley. In fact, the little town of Gauley Bridge, with maybe four miles of paved road in the whole place, issues more speeding tickets than any single county in the state.

Sure, small towns are speed traps. It happens everywhere. I get that. But what we’re talking about here is a level of simple extortion that beggars the imagination – but as bad as it looks, the published numbers don’t seem to tell the whole story. It may be a lot worse, because there’s some evidence that the town hasn’t been reporting all the tickets they write. If you pay the fine and don’t make a fuss, they don’t report it to the DMV, so your insurance company won’t find out about it. Not only does that hide how many speeding tickets the town police actually issued, but it’s also against the law.

So what the hell is going on here? As I’m sure you can imagine, accusations have been flying left and right since all this hit the papers. Corruption, larceny, embezzlement, fraud – you name it. But I don’t think you need to look that deep to find an explanation. All you have to do is look at the town’s operating budget, because nearly 60% of the their annual revenue comes from speeding tickets.

Yeah, you read it correctly. Almost 60%.

To understand all of this, you need to understand a little bit of the recent history of southern West Virginia, and Fayette County in particular.

The region has never been what you’d call crowded, but the population peaked in the 1950′s. The United States was going through a population explosion, and the growing nation needed a lot of energy, and back then that meant coal. So the coal business was booming, and it was very manpower intensive at the time, so there was a huge demand for labor. People flooded in to meet the need. Schools were built, businesses thrived, and healthy, active little communities popped up everywhere.

In the early 60′s all that started to change. Automation and machinery started to have an impact on how many miners you actually needed, and the emphasis started to shift from deep (underground) mining to strip mining, where heavy equipment is an even bigger factor. The result of these changes was that over the next 40 or 50 years, the amount of coal produced steadily climbed, while the number of people it employed steadily dropped.

Here in Lenoir where I live now, something similar is happening because about 8 years ago all the furniture factories shut down and all the work went to China – but the way people are reacting is different. Here it was a sudden, cataclysmic event, and the people saw it happening and are trying very hard to do something about it. Back home in the coalfields it was more of a slow bleed. Over time the jobs just trickled away, and so naturally the people trickled away as well.

The result of all of this is that the population of Fayette County has dropped by almost 70% over the last 60 years. Can you imagine that? If you started with 1000 people living in an area, then now you’ve got 300. To make matters worse, most of the people who stayed were of retirement age, so not only has the population shrunk dramatically, but the average age has climbed steadily. In terms of percentages, parts of southern West Virginia have seen a greater population decline than any other region in the United States, and the average age is higher than any other state except Florida.

But the population decline isn’t really the problem that has led so many places to the immoral practice of depending on speeding tickets for revenue. The problem is that even though the vast majority of the people left, the towns are still there. The businesses and most of the people are gone, so most of the tax base is gone, but the governments are still trying to function.

If you’re reading this, the odds are good you live in a subdivision. Here in North Carolina it’s not uncommon to see subdivisions with more than 800 residents. In fact, I’d say most of them probably have more people than that. Now imagine if your subdivision decided to elect a mayor, appoint a town council, build a town hall, start supplying utilities, picking up the trash, maintaining streets, and hiring a police force. Where would all the money come from?

The whole idea sounds absurd, doesn’t it? And yet that’s exactly the situation you see across so much of West Virginia. It didn’t start that way. In the 30′s, 40′s and 50′s when most of these towns incorporated there was a genuine need for the kind of infrastructure and support they provide, and there was enough economic activity to sustain them. That simply isn’t the case today, but there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism (or desire) in place to un-incorporate. They just keep limping along.

Considering the circumstances, I guess it’s no surprise that otherwise good people would eventually toss their ethics out the window and basically become little more than leeches. Gauley Bridge may be the most egregious example, but it certainly isn’t the only one in the area. Until people accept the fact that they’re going to have to start dissolving these government entities and doing without, it’s only going to get worse. There simply aren’t any alternatives for revenue, and there aren’t going to be any.

As someone who maintains a lot of emotional connections to that part of the world, it’s both disgusting and humiliating – but I guess in some ways it could be seen as an improvement. It used to be that when I’d tell people I was from southern West Virginia they’d ask me if I married my sister. Now when I tell people they say “Holy cow. I drove through there once. Never again.”

- Ken

In Gaelic they used to call it uisge beatha, and that turned into the Old English word for it, which is usquebaugh. In Latin they called it aqua vitae. In all three languages it means the same thing: Water of Life.

Today we call it whiskey. Scotch, Tennessee whiskey, Irish whiskey, bourbon – it’s all whiskey.

The Scots claim they invented it. The Irish claim they invented it. Historians seem to think Irish missionaries probably learned how to do it from Babylonians in Iraq, and brought the trick back to fair Hibernia with them in the 7th century. Whoever invented it, Americans, Scots, Irish, Finns, Germans, Swedes, Canadians and even the Japanese think they’re the ones who perfected it.

What follows is the simplest possible description of the whiskey making process. People who are really into this stuff will probably want to skip the next few paragraphs, because I’m going to omit a lot of the things they consider significant.

You start with some kind of grain. Barley, wheat, corn, even rice. Something with a lot of starch in it. If you grind that up, mix it with water, cook it, then add some yeast and let it ferment, the starch turns into sugar and the sugar gradually becomes alcohol. Naturally the alcohol is the part you’re interested in, so you distill it to get the alcohol out.

Distillation is the interesting part. See, alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water. If you get the mix just hot enough to boil alcohol, but not hot enough to boil water, then the steam that comes off of it will be mostly alcohol. You capture the steam and condense it, and you end up with a bottle full of raw spirit. If you started with corn as your grain, then what you have at this point in the process is moonshine. You can drink it, but it’s probably not something you’re going to enjoy very much.

Technically moonshine is corn liquor, not whiskey. In order to become whiskey, you have to put it in a wooden barrel and let it age for awhile. The aging process smooths it out a little bit, reduces the alcohol content as some of it evaporates, and adds some flavor and color from the wood.

So it’s a fairly straightforward process, but there are a lot of variables involved, and juggling those variables is how you end up with so many different types of whiskey. In Scotland they burn peat and smoke their grains to dry them out before they start the fermentation process, which is why scotch tastes like drinking dirt. In Ireland they distill the raw spirit at least three times to purify it, and they have a leprechaun piss in each barrel. In Tennessee they filter the raw spirit through a drum full of charcoal made from sugar maple wood.

But in terms of the end product, the biggest differences are probably a result of the barrels that are used to store the raw spirit while it gradually transforms into whiskey. Scotch is never stored in a new barrel, it’s always a recycled barrel that originally had something else in it. Wine, bourbon, sherry, all sorts of used barrels get shipped to Scotland and filled with scotch, and that’s one of the reasons why the flavor tends to have a lot more variety. In the US, all whiskey has to be stored in a brand new barrel, but they burn the inside of it before they fill it to create a type of carmel that ends up flavoring the product. US whiskey makers claim that they use a new barrel each time because it results in better whiskey, but the truth is they do it because it’s the law. Lobbyists for the timber industry got that made into a legal requirement back before prohibition, so they’d have a constant market for wood.

A few weeks ago I was traveling through Tennessee and up into Kentucky and I had a little time to kill along the way, so I decided to visit a couple of distilleries and see the process for myself. It’s fascinating stuff, especially if you like whiskey. Since I do, it was.

I started with the Jack Daniel’s distillery, which seems to constitute roughly 90% of the town of Lynchburg, Tennessee. As soon as you pull up, it’s obvious that Jack Daniel’s has been in this tour business for a long time, and it’s something they take pretty seriously. There’s a huge parking area, a visitor’s center which is basically a museum of American whiskey making, and tours that leave every 15 minutes.

The tour seems to be specifically designed to convince you of four things.
1. Jack Daniel was a hell of a guy.
2. Making Jack Daniel’s whiskey is a family tradition.
3. They have their own water supply, and that’s pretty special.
4. The whole charcoal filtering business is the best thing anybody ever did with anything. Ever.

By the time the tour was done I’d accepted 2 and 3, and was at least open to the possibility of 1 and 4, so I guess it worked. The truth is I’ve never been all that big a fan of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good and I’ll drink it, but I tend to prefer bourbons so it just wouldn’t be my first choice. If nothing else, the tour made me wish I liked it better, because it really is made in a pretty cool place by pretty cool people.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy about the tour is that they won’t let you take any photographs inside the buildings. They claimed that was for safety reasons. Alcohol vapors are explosive, after all. You know, like we were all going to be wandering around in there with bellows cameras and big wooden trays full of flash powder or something. I assumed the whole safety thing was bullshit, and that they just didn’t want people taking pictures of their process. Turns out I was wrong about that – you’ll see why later.

I hit it off with the tour guide immediately. We were the only two hillbillies in a group of about 30 people, so we had fun rolling our eyes at the lack of manners, strange accents, goofy questions, and zany antics that are typical of flatlanders and yankees.

I guess the only funny part of the whole process was when we met the guys who burn ricks of sugar maple wood to create the charcoal. They have to keep the wood burning, but not let it get too hot or else it turns to ash, which would be useless for filtering purposes. It reminded me of the way people back home used to burn coal to reduce it to coke (coke is a concentrated form of coal, basically) in beehive coke ovens, and I was standing there discussing that with these two guys when they handed me a jar of raw spirit and told me to smell it. I took a whiff and said “Oh, that’s just moonshine”, and then there was a long, awkward pause while all of the yankees stopped and looked at me. I said “Not that I’d know anything about that, of course” and they all laughed and we moved on.

The only real disappointment with the tour is that you don’t get to taste any of the whiskey when it’s done. Believe it or not, Lynchburg is in a dry county, so they can’t serve you any. They did get a special exemption from the state legislature so they can sell you a bottle of it. You just have to promise you won’t actually drink it until you arrive somewhere less anal.

The strangest thing is that there’s no gift shop at the distillery at all. To get to the gift shop, you have to cross a footbridge and walk about a mile into downtown Lynchburg, which didn’t make any sense to me until I realized that it’s Jack Daniel’s way of trying to channel some foot traffic into town to support local businesses. That’s kind of a cool thing, but it was a brutally hot, muggy day in July when I was there, so I’m not going to claim I enjoyed the walk all that much. The town square was worth seeing, but if I would have known how long the walk was going to be I probably would have taken my truck.

My second tour was a visit to the Wild Turkey distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. Wild Turkey is my favorite bourbon, and has been for years, so I was kind of excited about seeing where it was made. Unfortunately the distillery was a little bit of a disappointment.

To understand the difference, you need to understand the following: During prohibition, the guy who owned the Jack Daniel’s distillery shut the place down and mothballed it, but they were ready to fire it up again when prohibition was lifted in the 1930′s. The people who owned the Wild Turkey distillery tore the whole thing down, so when prohibition was lifted they pretty much started from scratch. As a result, the Jack Daniel’s distillery is full of old brick and stone buildings, quaint landscaping, antiques, and a very historic looking process. The Wild Turkey distillery looks a lot like a modern chemical plant.

I think the result is that Wild Turkey produces a better product. It’s definitely more consistent, and I suspect they can probably crank out a lot more of it. It’s just not as nice to look at, and it’s definitely not as interesting to wander around in.

The coolest thing about the Wild Turkey distillery is that it was shut down for maintenance when I was there, so they said we were welcome to take as many pictures as we wanted. That seemed to imply that there are genuine safety concerns involved with taking pictures when they’re running, which made me suspect that the people at the Jack Daniel’s distillery weren’t just being paranoid about trade secrets or something. I still think the concerns are a little overblown, but they didn’t ask my opinion, and that’s probably wise. I can rationalize anything if it means I get to take photos.

Don’t get me wrong – if you’re in the neighborhood anyway, the Wild Turkey distillery is definitely worth a visit. It only takes about an hour to see the whole thing, and they have a bourbon tasting after the tour which I found very interesting. They also have a better gift shop than the Jack Daniel’s folks, and you don’t have to walk a mile to get to it.

So did I learn anything profound during my distillery tours? No, not really. Like any business, there are things they want you to know, and things they would prefer you didn’t think about too much. There’s a lot of proactive public relations going on here, I think. The American public has turned into such a mindless horde of terrified chickenshit weasels that I can easily see how whiskey makers could get painted with the same brush people used against the dreaded Big Tobacco, and are now trying to use against firearms manufacturers. All three industries after all, produce wonderful products that people routinely use to destroy themselves. As we move closer and closer to a grand utopia where nobody takes responsibility for anything, and no hazard, no matter how pleasurable, is acceptable, then you have to think the alcohol business is somewhere on the hit list.

These distillery tours seem like a way of portraying themselves as small, family-run companies making a traditional American product in a rural setting. There’s valuable PR in that, and I hope it pays off for them. Of course, in the short term selling t-shirts for $30 apiece in the gift shop doesn’t hurt the bottom line either.

- Ken

This is the final post in a series called Blitzing Arizona, that chronicles a vacation Vicki and I took in the second half of July. We covered central Arizona from top to bottom, landing in Tucson and flying out of Las Vegas the following week. The previous posts in the series can be found at the links below.
Part 1: Sabino Canyon
Part 2: Bisbee & Tombstone
Part 3: Archeological Sites
Part 4: Sedona
Part 5: The Craters
Part 6: The Grand Canyon
Part 7: Hoover, Vegas & Home

This series has generated a lot of e-mails, which is always kind of nifty. After awhile though you notice that the same questions keep popping up, which made me think that putting the last post in an FAQ format might be a good idea.
 
 

1. You visited so many different places! How did you know where to go?
Credit for that goes almost entirely to Vicki and Fodor’s Travel Guides, actually. I assumed we could find things by surfing the web beforehand and then just driving around once we got there. That would have been an unmitigated disaster, I think. Vicki was smart enough to go online and order the Arizona & The Grand Canyon guidebook from Fodor’s about a month before we left, and that damned thing was priceless.

It’s not just where to go, but Fodor’s will tell you whether or not it’s worth seeing, how much it will cost, where you should park and when it won’t be crowded. Good shit. Not one time did we find ourselves disagreeing with it. By our 2nd day in Arizona we’d see a sign or an ad for something, look at each other and go “What does the book say?”

Of course, tapping into local knowledge helped a lot as well. We never would have visited Sabino Canyon or Bisbee without Kate McKinnon to tell us about them. We would have missed at least half of the good stuff in Sedona if Mike Blevins hadn’t been such a great source of info. And my Aunt Karen and Uncle Bill in Casa Grande do a lot of traveling, so they know the area from Flagstaff up to the Grand Canyon like the backs of their hands.
 
 

2. Why in the world would you go to Arizona in July? That’s crazy.
There were really two reasons behind the timing of it. The first and most important was that Marshall spends a week at Space Camp every summer, and if you are parents and you want to take off somewhere for a week or more, you have to either find a wonderful babysitter or synchronize it to a time when the kid is going to be somewhere else anyway. The second reason was that Vicki subscribes to all those BIG SALE e-mails from airlines and travel websites, so she spotted an amazing deal on airfare. We just had to buy the tickets 6 months in advance.

Besides, it really wasn’t that bad. The bit about it being a ‘dry heat’ gets overused, but there’s a lot of truth in it. I tend to think of it in terms of a Misery Factor. Yes, Phoenix in July was much hotter than anywhere in North Carolina in terms of temperature, but trust me – you go down east in North Carolina, inland from the coast a little ways – say somewhere around Fayetteville or Laurinburg, and you might be 10 degrees cooler, but you’ll also be a hell of a lot more miserable than we were in Phoenix.

Misery aside though, you do have to take direct sunlight seriously in Arizona. There’s just no humidity in the atmosphere to filter it down, so it’s like a blowtorch or something. Heavy duty stuff, and it’s no joke. But as long as you keep covered up and stick to the shade as much as possible, it’s not that big of a deal.
 
 

3. Great photos! What did you take them with?
Thank you. Most of the shots with these posts were taken with my Olympus E-P1, and any one of about a half-dozen lenses I took with me. Due to the unique nature of the Micro 4/3rds camera format, the E-P1 adapts really easily to all kinds of lenses, and I’ve been having a blast tracking down old Olympus film camera lenses that nobody wants anymore. Some of the best photos I took on this trip were shot with an old 28mm/f3.5 Zuiko OM lens I found in a pawn shop and got for $40. How cool is that?

But I also have to give some of the credit to a website (and company) called Lensrentals.com. I rented a sweet Sigma 10-20mm/f4-5.6 wide angle lens that was absolutely perfect for the wide open spaces of the Arizona countryside. Vicki got utterly sick of hearing me say “Geez, I love this wide angle lens.” That never would have happened without Lensrentals, because I don’t generally have enough of a need for a wide angle to justify buying a good one. Working entirely through their website, I rented the lens for 2 weeks and it cost me less than $80. I’ve used them several times now, both for lenses I only had a temporary need for, and also for lenses I wanted to try out before I bought them. It’s an awesome service, and one of those ideas that seems completely obvious and excellent now that somebody else has done it.
 
 
4. Great photos! How did you know where to take them?
Thank you. Good landscape photography is really all about light. Is the light good, is the light bad, and (most importantly) which direction is the light coming from? I use Google Earth to figure all that out before I go somewhere to take a photo.

It’s really simple. Open Google Earth, zoom down to the thing you want to take a picture of, move the viewpoint around until it’s showing pretty much what you’re going to be looking at, from the same direction and everything, and then you press the little button at the top with a picture of the sun on it. Google Earth will show you where the sun will be at any time of the day, and will even show you how the light will fall on whatever you’re looking at. It’s amazingly handy.

I’ll be honest and say I’m not happy with most of the photos I took on this trip – but then again I never am. The sky was overcast a lot of the time we were there, and I’m just not a good enough picture taker (yet) to be able to accomplish much with a flat grey sky for a backdrop. Plus, with a travel schedule that was somewhat crowded, I wasn’t always able to be in the right place at just the right time for a great shot. But by using Google Earth, at least I knew when I should have been there.
 
 
5. What did you learn on the trip?

Well, for one thing I wish I would have taken one of my guitars. I was reluctant to try flying with it so we didn’t bother, then on the flight out of Nashville there were at least 20 guys packing guitars into the overhead compartments. Made me feel pretty stupid for worrying about it.

We also learned that in the future we can probably pack a little lighter than we did this time. Every hotel we stayed at had a washer and dryer where you can do some laundry if you need to, so there’s really no reason to pack enough clothes for the whole trip. I would have been a lot better off taking fewer shorts and t-shirts, and packing at least one pair of sweatpants and a jacket or something. The temperature on the south rim of the Grand Canyon was in the 40′s one morning and I was out there taking sunrise shots freezing my ass off.
 
 
6. How was the food?

Really, really good food.

My job requires me to travel pretty much all the time, and since I’m always moving I rarely have the opportunity to track down interesting places to eat. The vast majority of the time I end up eating in chain restaurants just because they’re easy, simple, and common. So on this trip we resolved to avoid chain restaurants entirely, and only eat in local places. I thought that might be a tricky resolution to stick with, but it turned out to be pretty easy.

From the Cafe Poca Cosa in Tucson, the Bisbee Grille, Tag’s Cafe in Coolidge, the Silver Saddle and the Coffee Pot in Sedona, Bright Angel Lodge and the Arizona Room in Grand Canyon Village, and a half-dozen other little restaurants along the way, we never had a problem finding interesting places to eat, and we found consistently good meals there. In fact, our first and only lousy meal of the entire trip was in Las Vegas.
 
 
7. So what did you think of Arizona?

Mostly I think I was surprised at how diverse it is in terms of the terrain. From the mountains near the Mexican border, to the desert around Tucson, up through Phoenix to Sedona, then on to the pine forests around Flagstaff, then the high plains of the northeast out towards Winslow, and finally the Grand Canyon, it seems like every hour of drive time puts you in a whole different world. I tend to think of North Carolina as being pretty geographically diverse, going from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the west to the Outer Banks on the Atlantic coast, and all sorts of things in between – but Arizona ranks right up there with us when it comes to different regions in one state. I really enjoyed that part of it a lot.

The archeological sites really blew me away as well. We just don’t have that sort of thing in the east. We have a lot more in terms of early American and Civil War history of course, but it’s simply too wet for anything more than a few hundred years old to be left around in any condition that would make it worth looking at. And there are many more sites of this type in Arizona, and just over the border in New Mexico that we simply didn’t have time to see. If archeology is a big thing with you, then you could easily fill an entire vacation, and have a genuine blast doing it.
 
 
8. So when are you going back?

I’d love to go back, and I’d do it in a heartbeat. In particular, I’d like to have more time to spend in Sedona, and I think I’d like to visit the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Same view, and it’s supposed to be a lot less crowded. I’d really like to have enough time to focus on some wildlife photography (not generally something you can do when you’re rushed) and to go down into the canyon itself.

But the truth is we’ll probably never go back.

Vicki and I have a tendency to fall in love with every place we visit. We loved the Canadian Rockies. We loved Cozumel. We loved Ocracoke. We loved Montana. We loved Arizona. The list goes on. We always talk about going back, but we never do. It’s a big world, you know? There’s so much we haven’t seen yet. I’ve never been to Yosemite, or even Yellowstone for that matter. Denali has been calling my name for years. A friend of mine went to the Big Island in Hawaii last summer and sent me some pictures that were just stunning. I’d love to take a tour of the ancestral homelands too, although cramming West Virginia, Oregon, Texas, Scotland and Israel into one trip might be a little ambitious, even for us. Hell, I’m 42 years old, and I’ve never been to Cape Canaveral. How could I justify going anywhere twice?

Now that I think about it, that’s probably why these trips of ours always seem to follow the ‘blitz’ pattern. It’s a big, beautiful, interesting world. Let’s see all of it.

And take pictures.

- Ken

My original intention with this post was to make a lot of my usual snide remarks and snarky comments about Las Vegas, but you know what? I’m not going to bother. It’s just too easy. Besides, Vegas is what it is. Some people like it and that’s fine, but I’m clearly not part of their target market, so none of it is for me anyway.

Blame it on my hillbilly upbringing if you will, but I simply dislike anything, anyone, or any place, that values appearance over substance. Form over function. Show over go, so to speak – and Vegas is all show. It may very well be the most superficial place on the planet, but that kind of shallowness really appeals to some people. I’m just not one of them, I guess.

It’s not like I have any moral objections to any of it. Gambling, drinking, prostitution, drugs, infidelity, living large, whatever. For the most part I’m in favor of all that. It just doesn’t interest me much personally, and if it did, I wouldn’t see any need to go someplace specifically designated for it.

It’s kind of like my Hooters theory, to tell you the truth. See, I don’t like Hooters restaurants. I tend to think that guys who spend a lot of time eating at Hooters would really rather be in a titty bar, but they just don’t have the guts. If I wanted to see tits and ass, I’d just go to a strip club. I don’t need to put up with overpriced bar food and lousy service just to see that. Vegas is a similar thing. If you’re after whores, liquor and gambling, trust me – there’s no reason to fly cross-country to find them.

I should probably toss in the caveat that once you get beyond the Strip and the tourist areas, I’m sure Las Vegas is probably a nice city and a good place to live. That would also fall solidly into the category of ‘things I don’t find very interesting.’

Besides, Vegas has changed a lot in the last decade or so. If the strip had anything going for it at all, it used to feel like a den of iniquity. Sin City, etc. Now it feels more like an amusement park. Disneyland in the desert, maybe. Walkways and barricades to channel all the tourists from casino to mall to casino to food court. Families go there. Wandering up and down the strip you’re surrounded by people who brought their kids with them. It feels like Mickey Mouse (or maybe some guy in a Bugsy Siegel costume) is going to pop out and all the children will chase him down to get an autograph. Then you wander into one of the casinos and there are strippers dancing on the roulette tables.

It’s pretty surreal.

We left Grand Canyon Village on the morning of July 21st. You head back down towards Flagstaff, hook a right on I-40, over to Kingman, then another right to take you north into Nevada. Ugliest country you’ve ever seen. Trust me, we looked at a lot of desert on this trip, and that part of the world is just desert without any of the redeeming virtues. No dramatic scenery. No beautiful mountains. Nothing but scrub brush, sand, and piles of rocks. You drive through mile after mile of this relentless wasteland, then you go over a hill (the first hill in hundreds of miles) and there’s the Hoover Dam.

Hoover Dam is something I do find kind of interesting, both from a professional and a historic standpoint, but we were running behind so other than stopping to take a few pictures from the overlooks, we didn’t spend much time there. Besides, the heat was phenomenal. The wind was blowing hard enough to push you around, but it was that kind of wind you only encounter in the worst parts of the desert. Wind that doesn’t cool you off, but actually makes you hotter when it hits you. Like standing in front of one of those portable jet heaters. Blistering sun, blasting wind, furnace heat. I can be a pretty hardcore photographer sometimes, but a quick Google Image search will find you hundreds of great photos of the Hoover Dam, you know? It’s been done. Let’s move on.

Back in March when she was planning this blitz, Vicki made the mistake of asking me where I wanted to stay in Vegas. How should I know, right? I’d stayed at Caesars Palace before, but I didn’t even know if that was still in business, so I said “How about that one that looks like a pyramid? That seems interesting.” Turns out the Luxor is all the way down on the low-rent southern end of the strip and is now considered somewhat passé, but I guess that wouldn’t have made much difference to me anyway. It’s not all that interesting. The rooms are shaped funny and the elevators go diagonally, but other than that it’s just another casino.

I guess my favorite thing in Las Vegas was probably the M&M’s World store on the strip. I’m not even a big fan of M&M’s candy, but the store is pretty impressive. Four stories tall, and every inch is packed with anything and everything you can imagine with an M&M’s logo on it. They have an entire wall in there with big tubes full of M&M’s candy in hundreds of colors. The idea being that you can mix your own bag of M&M’s in whatever colors you want, so of course I had to create the first-ever bag of camouflaged M&M’s. I still haven’t finished eating the damned things.

July 22nd was my 42nd birthday, and Vicki woke me up that morning with breakfast in bed, then I spent about an hour soaking in the jacuzzi with a big nasty cigar and a redeye from Starbucks. Hard to top that for a birthday, but I’ll spare you the photos. You can thank me later.

And that’s also how we ended the Arizona Blitz of 2010, now that I think about it. After that it was hustle, bustle and hassle. Cleaning, packing, loading, returning the rental car. Airport, security, wait, board, fly. We survived, our luggage arrived when we did, and no one got strip searched, so not much there to tell you about. I’ll do one more post in the Blitzing Arizona series with some tips, lessons learned, and final thoughts, then I’ll wrap this up. There are other things going on I want to talk about.

- Ken

So what exactly can a person say about the Grand Canyon that hasn’t already been said? If you’ve been there you don’t need me to describe it. If you haven’t been there, then no description is really going to cover it for you.

It’s really big.

OK, OK… I’m just kidding. You know what? I should divide this into two topics, because we’re really talking about two things:
1. There’s the Grand Canyon, which is a massive rift in the surface of the Earth, exposing billions of years worth of geology, and in the process creating one of the most beautiful sights on the planet.
2. Then there’s Grand Canyon National Park, which is a manmade facility designed to let 5 million people a year see the Grand Canyon without screwing it up.

I was simply awestruck by the Grand Canyon. Gobsmacked. Dumbfounded. The park, on the other hand? Well, let’s be honest. It wouldn’t be fair for me to be critical of the park. The whole damned thing is in the middle of a major facelift, so I guess the park can be forgiven if it wasn’t exactly at its best.

See, the routine annual funding that the National Park Service gets from the Federal government is pretty much a joke when you consider how many of us visit and use the park system on a regular basis. They do the best they can to hold things together, but a lot of the major parks were starting to show some heavy-duty wear and tear. Fortunately, the Obama administration dedicated a significant portion of the stimulus funds to construction projects in the National Parks, so from what I understand there’s work going on at all of the big ones right now. Unfortunately, my first visit to Grand Canyon National Park just happened to occur in the middle of all this.

And just for the record, all you bogus conservatives (currently calling yourselves Republicans) can do me a favor and spare me any comments about the stimulus bill. There’s nothing “unprecedented” about it. George Washington increased government spending to help stimulate the economy during a recession in his second term, and he devoted a larger percentage of the GDP to the effort than Obama ever thought about. It’s a standard approach, advocated by Adam Smith himself, and it’s been done dozens of times. The Bush administration‘s TARP Bill on the other hand, was naked fraud designed solely to use our money to protect the personal fortunes of the legislators who voted for it.

But I digress.

We arrived at the East Entrance to Grand Canyon National Park on Tuesday afternoon, July the 20th. It was raining like hell. The rain sort of put a damper on things, but we decided to brave it anyway because I really wanted to get a photo of the Desert View Watchtower – but once we got out there we found the entire base of the tower was surrounded by chain link fence and construction equipment (just exactly as Kate had warned me it would be) so I didn’t even bother to get the camera out.

And that was kind of the story of our visit, to tell you the truth. It’s obvious that the NPS is trying very hard to keep things open and accessible even with all the construction going on, but it’s also a constant pain in the ass. We spent an hour navigating around orange cones and closed roads to find our lodge in Grand Canyon Village that night. The next morning we decided to watch the sun rise from Mather Point, so we parked in the designated area, and walked half a mile in the dark, only to find more chainlink fence and a sign announcing that Mather Point was closed. After sunrise we went to the restaurant in the Bright Angel Lodge for breakfast, only to find construction workers redoing the roof. Everytime they would walk overhead I’d end up with a thin sheen of plaster dust in my coffee.

It would be best not to dwell on the half-mile hike in the rain to find a working bathroom after breakfast.

The thing is, it makes me feel like a shithead to bitch and complain about all this. I was genuinely pleased to see all the work being done. Besides, the whining seems really petty when you can step outside of any building at any time and just be completely blown away by how magnificent the canyon really is.

There’s so much about the Grand Canyon that is both wonderful and frustrating. You’re confronted with this incredible thing, and all you really want to do is sit quietly, soak it all in, and study it carefully. Let it lead your thoughts, somehow. Then a bus pulls up, the door opens, and a tsunami of chattering Japanese tourists comes pouring over you. I love the Japanese, and I love the fact that so many of them want to see our parks, but my God they’re loud.

It’s like going to the Sistine Chapel, only to find they’ve turned it into a shopping mall. Botticelli‘s frescoes now grace the ceiling of an Orange Julius.

I think seeing the canyon at dawn was probably my personal highlight of the entire trip. You stand on the rim with an endless ocean of black beneath you, and an indigo sky slowly lightening overhead. The sun breaks over the far rim, and the next hour you watch as more and more of the canyon is illuminated, more and more of that black sea is dispelled. It’s kind of like a stripper gradually showing off the good parts, only that’s a horrible analogy and I’m a bad person for thinking of it.

Oddly enough, my greatest disappointment of the entire trip occurred at the Grand Canyon as well.

One of the things we really wanted to see was Kolb Studio, because we both know a little of the history of the canyon and the Kolb brothers were awesome back in the day. After breakfast the rain let up a little bit and we walked along the rim trail to the studio, which was every bit as cool as we expected, and on the way back I looked down the hill from the trail and saw two big black birds perched in a dead tree. I stopped to take a few pictures, and as I was standing there a member of the park staff came walking along. I said “Those are Turkey Vultures, aren’t they?” and the guy said “No, those are Condors. Good spot!”

Condors! Holy shit, right? So I got out the big lens, set up the tripod and the remote shutter, and spent about 15 minutes there on the trail shooting pictures. That night I loaded them all onto the laptop, took a good look, and realized I’d shot about 200 high-resolution photos of a couple of Turkey Vultures. Damnit to hell. I can’t figure out if the Park Ranger didn’t know the difference himself, or if that’s just something they tell gullible tourists to get them excited. Either way it really pissed me off. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice shot of a pair of Turkey Vultures, but I can shoot those anytime I want anywhere I want. A Condor shot would have been incredibly awesome.

After that we went back to our lodge, got everything packed up, checked out, and watched the sky finally clear and blue skies come out just as we were leaving the parking lot. We needed to get on the road to Vegas, but I was in a great mood (because of those awesome Condor photos) so we decided to double back to Yavapai Point for one last look before we left.

I’m really glad we did. Crystal clear and brilliant, the canyon was glorious. It was a great way to say goodbye.

- Ken

We left Sedona on the morning of July the 20th, but getting out of town took awhile. I kept stopping to take “just one more picture”, and for some odd reason Vicki tolerated it. Eventually we headed north up Hwy 89A through Oak Creek Canyon to Flagstaff, which is simply an incredible drive. Fortunately for our timetable the road doesn’t have many wide spots or shoulders so I couldn’t pull off to the side and get out my camera every 5 minutes.

Our first stop was Walnut Canyon National Monument, just east of Flagstaff. A great site and a very cool way to spend the morning, but I’ve already posted about that one so I won’t go over it again.

The second stop of the day was Meteor Crater, which is 35 or 40 miles east of Flagstaff on Interstate 40. Visiting Meteor Crater was pretty much my idea, so I’m also the one who ended up feeling guilty when it turned out to be such a dud.

Fifty thousand years ago a meteor slammed into the plains of northeastern Arizona. It was about 150 feet across, and travelling over 28,000 miles per hour when it hit. It probably scared the shit out of a bunch of wooly mammoths, but there weren’t any humans on the North American continent at the time so it didn’t affect any people.

Now, that’s a pretty awesome event. Unfortunately, awesomeness 50,000 years ago doesn’t necessarily mean awesomeness today. Today it’s just a big hole in the ground. A big hole you have to pay $15 to see. Per person.

See, Meteor Crater is privately owned property. It should probably be a National Monument or at least an Arizona State Park, but it’s not. Instead, it’s run like a tourist attraction. A painfully cheesy tourist attraction. The commercials we heard on the radio while we were driving in were so bad we almost turned around right there in the road. METEOR CRATER! SEE THE AMAZING SITE! WONDER AT THE MARVEL! FEEL THE IMPACT! That kind of crap. Like ads for wrestling, drag racing or vacation bible school.

So you get there and park, and then you wade through the ticket booths, struggle through successive layers of increasingly obnoxious gift shops, bypass the restaurant and the ice cream stand, fight your way past a dozen pseudo-educational displays and dioramas, resist the temptation to pay even more money to see the 3D Surround Sound METEOR CRATER MOVIE EXPERIENCE, and finally wind your way down the cattle chutes to see that it’s just a big hole in the ground.

It’s not even all that big, to be honest. I’m in the construction business, you know? Mostly what’s called ‘heavy civil’ work. Give me a year, 50 construction workers, and a decent equipment budget and I could dig you something that would look just like it.

The funny part is that I really think that if Marshall had been with us on this trip I might have actually convinced myself that Meteor Crater was cool. You know what I mean? Sometimes you take your kids to things that are tedious, but you spend so much time trying to get them pumped up that you end up enjoying yourself. I can see myself standing on the edge of this big hole, telling Marshall all about how amazing it is, painting a verbal picture of the impact 50,000 years ago, and in the process convincing myself that it was somehow interesting and important.

In reality it’s all just kind of tired and lame, but none of it really got on my nerves until I saw the way the staff was dressed. Remember I told you that Meteor Crater is privately owned, right? So it has nothing to do with the National Park Service, and yet every employee I saw there was dressed in a near-perfect simulation of a Park Ranger‘s uniform. Same colors, same types of patches in the same places, same types of name tags, same goddamned hats. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fan of the Park Service, but that really pissed me off. I’ll bet half the people who come through there every year end up thinking it’s a National Park or a National Monument.

So we showed up, saw the big hole, took a few pictures, and left. Didn’t buy a thing, other than the tickets. After seeing that crap with the uniforms I didn’t want to let the bastards squeeze another dime out of me, quite frankly.

Our next stop was Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, and that was a lot better, but in some ways the drive to get there was the most interesting part.

We got back on I-40, heading west back towards Flagstaff, passed a sign that said “Road Work Ahead – Next 74 Miles” (they take their highway construction pretty seriously in Arizona) and then turned north on 89A again – the same road we’d taken going from Sedona to Flagstaff. There’s a range of mountains in the area northeast of Flagstaff called the San Francisco Peaks. We’d been able to see them pretty much all day, and they looked really dark in the distance. I assumed they were just covered with pine trees, but the closer we got, the darker they got – which is kind of the opposite of how it normally works.

As we neared the base of one of the mountains, Vicki said “Ken, those mountains are black“, and she was right. Charred black. Burned black. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the Schultz Fire had burned across those mountains just a few weeks before we got there. It had started on June the 20th, burned 15,000 acres across the San Franciscos, and took over 300 firefighters and a couple of weeks to get under control. It was a pretty eerie sight. See, in the Appalachians a forest fire simply isn’t that big of a deal. It will generally burn the underbrush, fallen leaf matter, and singe the trees a little bit, but even during a drought there’s simply too much moisture for things to really get out of hand. In the west, the forest is so dry that their wildfires burn everything – including the trees.

We’d come through a few rainstorms on I-40, and the sky just kept getting darker as we got closer to Sunset Crater. Finally as we pulled into the parking lot at the visitor center, the sky just completely opened up. Driving rain, pouring down hard. We’d been in Arizona long enough to have learned that sometimes it rains hard, but it doesn’t ever seem to rain very long, so we decided to wait this one out. We leaned our seats back in the car and slept for about an hour, while the rain hammered down outside. Little did we know that all hell was breaking loose just 2 miles away.

When a mountain burns the way the San Francisco Peaks did, it loses its ability to hold water. It’s kind of like turning the whole thing into a parking lot. While we were sleeping in the car, all the water from that thunderstorm was blasting its way down the mountainside, and there wasn’t anything to stop it. Houses that we’d driven by just 15 minutes before were hit by an avalanche of water and mud. Some were flooded, some were destroyed completely, one little girl was killed and over 1000 people ended up getting evacuated. We slept through it all on the other side of the valley.

Finally the rain eased up and we were able to get out and look around. We were glad we waited.

About 900 years ago (that’s right – less than 1000 years) a rift, 14-miles long, opened in the Earth’s crust, and lava came blasting out of it. After a few days the lava flow concentrated on a single area in the rift (presumably where the flow was easiest) and a cone started to build. That cone is now Sunset Crater. Unfortunately there’s no easy way to get up on the lip of the crater and look down inside. You can do it, but it’s a long hike, and I wasn’t about to embark on a long hike with my camera when rain was still threatening overhead. On rainy days, you become very aware of just how far you are from your vehicle at any given moment.

But you can wander around the lava fields, and those are definitely worth checking out. It’s genuinely fascinating. A blasted landscape, sparsely dotted with patches of grass and twisted trees. It’s surprisingly dramatic, to tell you the truth. You would think that 900 years would have given the area more time to heal, but there are places where you feel like the eruption might have happened last week. Black, knotted and gnarled rock spreads away from you for miles in every direction. Lots and lots of dead trees, too – which contributes to the eeriness of it all. This is strictly a layman’s opinion, but it looks like the soil is both very rich in nutrients, and also very hard. Trees grow quickly, but they can’t put down much in the way of a root network. They hit a certain size, a storm comes through, and over they go.

We stayed there until a Park Ranger came up to inform us about the disaster across the valley. He said all roads to the south were closed, and probably would be for quite awhile. The Park Service folks were apparently concerned about people who were headed south getting stuck there, and he said they were rounding up chairs and things and we were welcome to come hang out in the visitor center while we waited for the roads to open.

I thought that was a pretty cool thing to do, but we didn’t need it. The Grand Canyon lay to the north, not the south – and the Grand Canyon was our next destination.

- Ken

“I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in creation’s dawn. The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.” – John Muir

The trip through Arizona was not our first blitz. In 2006 Vicki and I took a similar trip that started in Calgary, then down into Montana where we crossed the Rockies in Glacier National Park. Then we headed back up into Canada along the glacier fields of British Columbia, finally ending up in Banff. I wrote a similar series of articles about that trip, but they were lost (for the most part) when I redesigned the site. Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to redoing them. Maybe.

But the point is that when you leave Calgary and head west, you’re driving across the plains. It’s interesting, but not exactly beautiful. Then you pull into Waterton Lakes, which is a Canadian National Park, and suddenly the Rockies open up all around you. Rugged mountains loom above, and crystal clear lakes practically glow in the valleys. We were stunned. Awestruck. We walked around speechless, grinning like idiots.

I simply don’t have the words to describe these kinds of places. Muir could, but even he had to draw on all sorts of mystical bullshit to pull it off. There are just some places that are so beautiful, so striking, that they touch something inside you. Something that forces you to smile. Something that makes you happy just to know you live in a world where sights like that exist. Glacier National Park, the wildness of the Linville Gorge, dawn in the New River Gorge, walking across the Athabasca Glacier, the night sky over the Mojave, the windward shore of Cozumel. I’m sure that everybody could make a list of places that had that kind of an impact on them.

Sedona is one of those places.

I’m going to post a lot of photos with this article, and you should click on every single one of them. The photos from Sedona and the Red Rocks area are probably some of the best I’ve taken. Unfortunately, they fall far short of actually capturing even half of the beauty of the place. See, when you look at an image, you can appreciate that the photo is of something beautiful, but what a single image can’t do is convey the feeling of being surrounded by that kind of beauty in every direction. That’s Sedona.

We’d spent Friday and Saturday night visiting my Uncle Bill and Aunt Karen at their place in Casa Grande. We had a great time and really enjoyed the visit, but by Sunday morning we’d had enough of the lowland heat. We pointed the car north and shot across the desert like a lizard on a skillet.

We rolled into Sedona on Sunday afternoon, July the 18th. Our 17th wedding anniversary, and what a hell of a place to celebrate it. We were planning to go out for a nice dinner, so we checked into our hotel as soon as we arrived. We stayed at the Sky Ranch Lodge, which sits on a mesa above town next to the Sedona airport. Accomodations at the Sky Ranch are a little on the rustic side. The rooms have kind of a 70′s vibe going on, and the wireless internet access is kind of patchy, but let’s be honest, OK? Nobody stays at the Sky Ranch because of the rooms. You stay because of the view, and the view is spectacular.

Thanks to Facebook, I’d learned that a friend of mine from High School named Mike Blevins actually owns and manages a couple of stores in town – Sedona Green, which is an art gallery and a gift shop, and The Bucking Lizard, which sells t-shirts. Mike was a big part of the reason why our stay in Sedona was such a positive experience. His advice on where to stay, what to see, and where to eat, was priceless. If you’re ever in this part of the world, go by and see him. If nothing else, be sure to ask him where the public outhouses are.

On Mike’s recommendation, we had our anniversary dinner at the Silver Saddle downtown. Perfect meal. Vicki had some sort of pasta concoction that I couldn’t pick out of a line-up but it tasted great. I had a buffalo steak that hung off both sides of the plate. They know how to do buffalo right at the Silver Saddle. See, some places marinade it so much that it ends up tasting like beef, which I’ve always thought was silly. If I wanted beef, I could have ordered that, you know? They let the buffalo taste like buffalo, and it was one of the best slabs of meat I’ve had in awhile.

The most interesting thing though was they kept bringing around these little samples of stuff they’d whipped up in the kitchen. Delicious little freebies, I guess. Some kind of crab-based situation, then a little chocolate deal, and even a couple of shotglasses full of (get this) tequila sherbert. None of this was stuff I saw on the menu. I have no idea whether or not they do that every night. It could be that things were slow, the chef was bored, and he was passing his experiments out to the customers, but whatever the reason it was cool as hell.

We had some flexibility in the schedule, which is my way of saying we were pretty much playing everything by ear after we left Casa Grande – and it only took about 10 minutes in Sedona to realize we wanted to spend 2 days there. I’m really glad we did. Rain, storms, and cloud cover seemed to follow us everywhere we went in Arizona, and cloudy days make for lousy landscape photography. It was kind of funny, actually. I hiked out into the desert Monday night to get a particular sunset shot I wanted (the one of the sun setting behind Cathedral Rock) and met another photographer out there. A storm was rolling in as the sun went down, and we could see lightning on the horizon. He said “That’s really unusual. We hardly ever see lightning in Arizona!” and I said “You’re kidding. I’ve seen lightning every single day we’ve been here.”

Day 2 we watched the sunrise (which is easy to do when you’re still functioning on Eastern time) and then had breakfast at the Coffee Pot, which seems to be kind of an institution in Sedona. Their claim to fame is that they offer 101 different omelettes, but when you look at the menu you see that #101 is an omelette with jelly, peanut butter and bananas. I think it’s cheating if you’re just tossing crap on there that no one in their right mind would eat on an omelette. I mean, with that approach you could claim 102 omelettes if you tossed in some thumbtacks and a few post-it notes. Good breakfast, notwithstanding the validity of this whole 101 omelette insanity.

Good shops in Sedona too, and it’s all put together well enough that you can park and spend as much time as you want just wandering around on foot. Sure, you’ve got some of the standard tourist crap, but there’s enough local stuff and interesting stores that you don’t end up seeing the same thing over and over again the way you do in most tourist towns.

If you’ve heard anything about Sedona, you’ve probably heard some of the mystical, metaphysical bullshit that seems to surround the place. Vortexes, healing energy, crystals, the usual new age garbage. There’s definitely some of that, but it’s not nearly as pervasive as I thought it would be. It’s there if you’re interested, but it’s not in your face or anything.

To sum it all up, of all the places we’ve visited I think Sedona is one of my clear favorites. You get genuine jaw-dropping scenery, plenty of wilderness, hiking and wildlife, and yet you’ve also got interesting stuff to do in town, hotels that don’t suck, and restaurants that are worth eating in. Getting all of that in one area is a really unusual combination, and it makes for a pretty neat little place.

The bad news is that it had to come to an end eventually, and we left town the morning of the 20th. The good news is that we were working our way north, and higher into the mountains as we went. Flagstaff, and eventually the Grand Canyon, were still ahead.

- Ken

You probably remember the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, right? Theseus was a prince of the city of Athens, and he insisted on being one of fourteen youths the Athenians were forced to send to King Minos once a year to feed to his Minotaur. With the help of Minos’ smokin’ hot babe of a daughter, Theseus slew the Minotaur and sailed back to Athens in triumph.

This whole event was understandably a Big Freakin’ Deal to the people of Athens, so they saved the ship that Theseus came back in, and they displayed it as a kind of memorial. It sat in the port of Athens for hundreds of years. The problem is that ships, especially wooden ships, tend to decay over time. Boards rot, nails rust, ropes fray, that sort of thing.

Of course, the people of Athens maintained the famous ship. They replaced the rotten boards and damaged rigging, and pretty much replaced everything as it wore out. Eventually every single part of the ship had been replaced with something new, and some parts had been replaced two or three times.

This ignited a major debate among Greek philosophers, and it’s something people still argue about today. If there wasn’t a single board left that Theseus had stood on, and not a single rope left that he’d held in his hand, then could you still call it the Ship of Theseus? Is identity related to the ship itself, or to the individual parts that make up the ship?

Believe it or not, this actually becomes a significant question when you’re touring some of the archeological sites in Arizona. A lot of them were torn down, messed with, and even added to by well-meaning, but generally pretty clumsy people back in the 1920′s. Some were just looking for loot, and some wanted to rebuild the ruins to their original state, but the end result is that most of what you see at these sites now is something that had to be rebuilt from old pictures.

That seemed to bother Vicki a lot. For her, I think it seemed less authentic if the bricks hadn’t been formed and stacked by the original occupants. It didn’t bug me nearly as much, and after thinking about it awhile I’ve come to believe that’s because I wasn’t paying as much attention to the buildings themselves. For me, the interesting questions are about place. Why did these people live here? How did they make a living here? Why did they build in this spot, and in this way? To seriously consider those questions it doesn’t really matter who stacked the bricks. What matters is where the bricks are stacked.

We toured four different archeological sites during the blitz, each one a National Monument managed by the Park Service, and each one was fascinating. If you’re into this sort of thing (and who wouldn’t be?) then I’d strongly recommend all four.
 
 

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
Casa Grande means “big house” in Spanish, and that’s basically what you’re looking at here. Four stories tall, the house was the main building in a large compound with multiple buildings and surrounding walls, and the outlines of the other structures are visible, but the house itself is really all that remains – but it’s one hell of a house. By the way, the big pavilion over the house obviously isn’t part of the original structure. It was added to the site in 1932 to protect it from erosion. Let me tell you, metal structures last a long time in the desert. It looked like it had been built yesterday.

Vicki and I visited the Casa Grande Ruins with my Uncle Bill on July the 17th, after an incredibly good breakfast at Tag’s Cafe in Coolidge. It was ferociously hot that morning, so we didn’t spend a lot of time wandering around outside, but the museum they have there is pretty good too. Lots of information about the Hohokam people, who built the site and inhabited it around 1200AD. They were farmers, for the most part. Agricultural people, who didn’t just build a huge house and community in the middle of the desert, but actually dug canals from nearby mountains to bring the water to nourish their crops.

All things considered, this was a pretty advanced civilization. They had ballcourts like the ones we saw in a Mayan city in Quintana Roo a few years ago, which indicates some kind of social and cultural connection spreading all the way down into Central and South America.
 
 

Montezuma Castle National Monument
Vicki and I visited Montezuma Castle on July the 18th. Like Casa Grande, it’s easy to get to, and you can see the whole thing in about an hour.

Oddly enough, Montezuma Castle doesn’t have anything to do with Montezuma. He was the Aztec emperor of Mexico when the Spaniards showed up, and for some reason the first Europeans who found these ruins thought it had been some sort of northern outpost of his empire. It turns out the thing was built, inhabited, and eventually abandoned long before he came on the scene, but I guess the name stuck.

This place was actually inhabited by the Sinagua people, which literally means “without water”. It seemed to me like they had access to a lot more water than the Hohokam down in Casa Grande, but it’s still an extremely arid area. There were originally several dwellings built back into natural hollows in the cliff face, but the one you see in the photos is the only one that remains in any substantial way – and it’s pretty substantial. Twenty rooms, and as many as fifty people may have lived there.

The big mystery about the Montezuma site is what happened to the people who lived there. It was continuously inhabited for over 600 years, from 700AD until the 1300′s, and then everybody left. I told Vicki “Maybe they just got sick of being the ‘without water’ people.” One day someone said “Hey, maybe we should move somewhere with more water!”
 
 

Walnut Canyon National Monument
Walnut Canyon seems like it had a lot more water, but oddly enough it seems to have been inhabited by the Sinagua before Montezuma Castle, not after. It’s a valley, and all around the steep sides of the canyon the people built dwellings into the cliffs by walling in the areas under rock ledges. It’s a fascinating thing to see, and you get a good look at it because the park features a 1-mile loop trail that drops almost 200 feet into the valley and lets you walk right in to some of the structures. It’s very, very cool, and you get an idea of just how large a community this was when you look around. All of the cliffs on either side are riddled with dwellings.

When you look at a site like this, with what are basically houses built right into cliff walls over a narrow valley, it’s tempting to ask “Where’s the farm?” – but I think that’s an example of us applying our thinking to a culture that didn’t operate the way we do. To us, agriculture requires a squared-off field with all your food plants growing together. I think for the Sinagua, plants were probably spread around wherever there was a little patch of dirt that could support a few of them. I don’t think their agriculture was something they did, so much as it was something they lived with.
 
 

Wupatki National Monument
Nine hundred years ago a volcano blew up just north and east of present-day Flagstaff. We visited the the site of the eruption, and I’ll write about that later – but we went to Wupatki on July the 20th. See, when the volcano erupted it blanketed the entire area with a coat of volcanic ash, and a few years later groups from the Sinagua and Anasazi peoples moved into the neighborhood because the ash made for great fertilizer.

Wupatki was probably my favorite of the four archeological sites we visited. The main complex of houses is very cool, but that’s only part of what I liked about it. See, I noticed that every site had a map of how the community was laid out, and I would always see people standing in front of those maps, trying to understand how the community was organized. I think it points to another flaw in our thinking when we approach a site like this.

In some of the photos of the large structure, you may be able to see that it’s basically built beside, around, and on top of a big single rock. If you look at it awhile, you realize that this structure wasn’t built all at once the way we’d build a house. It grew organically, probably over years and years. It probably started with people camping in the shelter of the rock, then they started piling up bricks to give their shelter a wall. Then they added a roof, and they had a room. Then another room, and so on, until eventually you get this sprawling complex.

I tend to think the same thing probably happened at Walnut Canyon and Montezuma Castle. “Sure, it’s nice camping under this ledge, but wouldn’t it be better if we had a wall here to block the wind?” A few hundred years of this, and you have what for all practical purposes is a city. Or a castle. No plan. No efficiency, the way we look for it. Just something that grows almost organically over time.
 
 
 
The more I learn about psychology, the more intriguing I find archeology as a subject. In an article I posted last fall, I wrote that you can’t really understand who we are unless you understand who we were. Sites like these four in Arizona offer some genuinely fascinating insights into how adaptable and resourceful early human beings really were, and if we’re thoughtful about how we approach them, I think we can learn a lot. I felt like I picked up a few things, anyway.

- Ken

The original plan for Friday, July 16th had been an early-morning hike up Sabino Canyon, and then we were going to head for Saguaro National Park. This is because I’m an idiot, and I had assumed that if one wanted to see some Saguaro (Saguari?) Cacti, one would have to go to the park named after them. Now, if you’ve looked at any of the photos I took in Sabino Canyon, you may have noticed that it’s pretty much wall-to-wall Saguaro (Saguari?) all up and down that sucker. It would be fair to say that one could not juggle kittens anywhere within the confines of Sabino Canyon without some of them getting hung up in the arms of a Saguaro.

So when we finished the Sabino Canyon hike, I’d seen enough Saguaro (Saguari?) to last me for awhile. Don’t get me wrong – it’s an impressive plant. It’s basically what you’d end up with if you took a small cactus and turned it into a very large tree. But once you’ve seen one up close, you’ve pretty much seen all of them.

Oh, speaking of Saguaro (Saguari?) did you know that they actually have a wooden skeleton in there? Seriously. It’s like a big rib cage. My Aunt Karen took the skeleton of a 12-foot tall Saguaro, shellacked it with some preservative or something, and now it’s standing in the living room of her house in Casa Grande. Fortunately, their living room has a really high ceiling.

Anyway, we canceled our plans to visit the National Park, which left us with an afternoon to burn. Kate had told us about an old mining town called Bisbee, way down south of Tucson, which she said was extremely cool, so we decided to check it out. She’d been on the money about Sabino Canyon, anyway – so Kate had established some cred. And if you’re on your way to and from Bisbee, you might as well check out Tombstone, which is just up the road.

Now, if you’re like me (I hope you’re not like me) and you’ve never bothered to do much reading about the state of Arizona, then you probably suffer from the same misconception that I used to have. If I thought about it at all, I guess I thought Arizona is really high and mountainous in the north around Flagstaff, and that it gradually kind of slopes downward as you go south, ending in some kind of miserable sea-level arid desert down along the Mexican border. It’s not like that at all. Yeah, from Phoenix down to Tuscon and points south it’s a desert, but that desert is studded with mountain ranges, with wide flat areas between them where people build cities and highways and stuff. Go a little farther south and it starts rising again, until towns like Bisbee and Tombstone, fairly close to the border, are a mile and more above sea level.

And all of those mountain ranges have beautiful names. The Santa Catalina Mountains, the Dragoon Mountains, the Rincon Mountains, the Huachuca (Wah-Chu-Kah!) Mountains. The list goes on and on. In North Carolina we give our mountain ranges names like the Appalachians, the Blue Ridge, the Brushies, the Smokies and the Blacks. Nice, but not nearly as poetic. In the central part of North Carolina we have the Uwharrie Mountains, which is a cool name, but the mountains themselves are pretty unimpressive.

So we barreled south across the desert between the Huachucas and the Dragoons, and then climbed into the Mule Mountains to the town of Bisbee.

Bisbee is one of those places where there was nothing, and then somebody discovered something, and suddenly there was everything. So to speak. Boomtowns. In Bisbee’s case it was copper, but boomtowns from the late 1800′s and early 1900′s all look similar, no matter what the natural resource was. It reminded me a lot of coal mining boomtowns like Thurmond and Sewell in the New River Gorge. All that architecture designed to invoke strength and permanence, all of which evaporated when the coal ran out, or the copper got too expensive to bother with.

But the people of Bisbee have done a great job of transitioning to a tourism-based economy without letting the place turn into a faceless hellhole like Gatlinburg, for example. There’s a lot of character in Bisbee. Lots of personality. The style, layout, and even the businesses retain the feel of an old mining town. There’s also a strong hippie mentality about the place… so, you know, a lot of spiritual nonsense and crappy artwork, but it doesn’t interefere with the historic elements. There’s kind of a fine line with the economics of a tourist trap too, when you think about it. When it’s not too popular and rent in the tourist district is low enough, you get lots of quirky little shops and interesting things for sale. Once the tourism business takes off and there’s suddenly real money to be made, the bigger businesses roll in and it becomes economically infeasible to sell anything other than funnel cakes and t-shirts.

We spent a few hours wandering around Bisbee, and I was really, really glad that it’s a few thousand miles from my house. With all the antique shops and cool things we found, I think Vicki would have spent approximately a bazillion dollars if every single item wouldn’t have required cross country shipping. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I caught her at one point, deep in the basement of a maze of an antique shop, staring lustfully at a gargantuan kitchen woodstove made of solid iron, and calculating freight costs in her head. The railroad might have given us a discount on shipping it, I suppose. It was, after all, approximately the same size and weight of a loaded freightcar. Mount some wheels on it and hook it to the caboose.

So Bisbee was very cool. I don’t know if I’d want to spend more than a day there, but it was perfect for an afternoon’s wandering.

On the way from Bisbee to Tombstone we got stopped by the US Border Patrol.

Yeah, no shit. No surprise, I guess. Bisbee isn’t far from the Mexican border, and the Border Patrol seems to be working very, very hard to convince everyone that they’re working very, very hard. They had a road block set up on Hwy 80 with traffic control, about 10 big 4×4 vehicles, tents, sunshades, surveillance cameras, a command post trailer (with satellite dishes) and a first aid station.

When I stopped at the road block there was a kid standing there in a Border Patrol uniform. The only person in sight in the entire massive complex, he looked to be 18 or 19 years old. Young black man with high-pitched voice and a thick Mississippi accent. I rolled down the window and he said “Is ya’ll US citizens?” I said “Yup” and he said “Have a nice day!” And that was my first encounter with the US Border Patrol.

Tombstone was founded by a guy who discovered a vein of silver in the nearby hills. It boomed, both in terms of money and population, virtually overnight. Lots of money, lots of hombres, very little law enforcement, and Tombstone was fortunate enough to play host to one of the most famous gunfights in history. Then the silver played out and the town died just as quickly as it had appeared – until the 1950′s, anyway.

In the late 40′s and early 50′s America was obsessed with the Wild West. Every other show on TV was a western, every other movie at the theater was a western, and every kid in America had a set of plastic six-guns. Tombstone was one of the few places where the west was just as wild as advertised, so people started moving into what was left of the town and setting up Tourist Attractions.

I’m not going to spend a bunch of time describing Tombstone. It’s crap, basically. Two streets, some 1950′s buildings trying very hard to look like 1850′s buildings. A few restaurants, and a bunch of shops selling the same kitsch as all the other shops. I guess once or twice a day they have some people re-enact the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, but unless you’re really big on wild west stuff, have a collection of black velvet paintings, or are convinced your spirit animal is a wolf, I’d give it a pass. Well, there was a so-called general store that sold animal hides and cow skulls, which I thought was neat, but that was pretty much the high point. In a nutshell, I’m sure Tombstone seemed cool to somebody in 1954. Welcome to 2010.

We bought some t-shirts for the boys, saddled up the Rogue, and headed back north – but Tucson got bypassed this time. My Uncle Bill and Aunt Karen live in Casa Grande about 30 minutes south of Phoenix, and that was our next stop.

- Ken

She said “There’s water there” and she said it with a degree of intensity, as if a data nugget of genuine value had just been bestowed upon me. But did I catch it? No, I really didn’t. I’m a proud son of the Appalachians, and in my universe water is everywhere. An excess of water is the problem, much more often than a lack of it. We were discussing a valley. Of course there’s water there.

I was having dinner with Kate McKinnon at the Cafe Poca Cosa in downtown Tucson, and she was explaining to me and Vicki just what it is about Sabino Canyon that makes it such a great hike. Tucson lies in the middle of a vast desert, and while Sabino Creek isn’t exactly a rushing torrent in mid-July, there are pools of standing water in the valley floor. Those pools are pretty much Wondertron McAwesomeness for desert wildlife, and Kate knows I dig the wildlife.

I should probably say a thing or two about Kate McKinnon before I proceed with the narrative.

I’ve been involved in all sorts of ‘net-based social interaction for a long time. As a direct result, I’ve probably had meatspace meetings with a dozen or more people that I first got to know online through gaming or forums or what havest thou. Typically what you find is that no one is quite as bizarre or extreme in person as you generally expect them to be. When you read what someone writes, you’re getting a fairly condensed and concentrated version of that person’s personality – then you meet up in person and words like “surprisingly normal” get used a lot.

Kate isn’t like that. She’s every bit as intense in person as she is on her blog. Perceptive and sharp, she’s got a rapid-fire mind that constantly makes intuitive leaps. The quintessential artist. It’s a little intimidating until you make the jump to her wavelength, and then it’s just exhilirating to tag along for the ride. She’s also one of the few highly intelligent people I’ve met who seems capable of both genuine happiness and profound compassion, and that alone would be reason to find her fascinating. If you’re interested in the type of art that she teaches, I can’t help but think that attending one of her classes would be an awesome experience.

So Friday morning Vicki and I loaded our gear into the rental car and headed for Sabino Canyon, in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains on the northeast edge of Tucson.

The rental car, by the way, is a Nissan Rogue. A 2.5L 4-cylinder powerhouse, and at least 3 of those cylinders work most of the time. Not what we wanted, and not what we reserved, but it is what they had – and when you think about it, that’s probably the most important criteria when it comes to selecting a rental car. To be honest, I’ve never understood why Hertz even bothers with reservations. They never seem to look at it until you arrive at the counter, and then they just stick you in whatever they have laying around that’s kind of in the ballpark.

Sabino Canyon itself is well worth the hike if you’re ever in the area. It was cloudy and overcast the whole time we were there, which was great considering that it kept us from baking alive and burning to a crisp, but it wasn’t all that wonderful from a photographic perspective. I managed to get some halfway decent shots, but it would be nice to go back when I had better light and some blue sky to work with.

And much as Kate had implied, the profusion of wildlife was pretty amazing. Hawks, doves, woodpeckers, prairie dogs, snakes, jackrabbits, lizards, owls, and desert quail (I loved the quail) were everywhere. I didn’t get nearly as many wildlife photos as I would have liked – desert fauna seems to have an uncanny knack for knowing when I’ve got the wide angle lens mounted, and they never show up when I’ve got the 400mm telephoto ready for them – but just seeing so many of them made it well worth it.

We even found a nest of wild honeybees, right alongside the main road that goes up the canyon. That may have been the best part of the hike.

On the way back we’d stopped to take a break. We were admiring the bark patterns on a large tree right beside the road when Vicki said “I think I hear honeybees buzzing.” I was tempted to dismiss it – I didn’t hear anything – and we were out in the middle of the desert, but Vicki and I have often talked about how being beekeepers makes you amazingly sensitive to the buzzing of bees. We can usually tell what kind of bee it is just by listening to it flying by, and after awhile you can even tell what mood a hive is in just by standing outside and listening to the buzz.

After a little walking around and tilting our heads back and forth, we found the hive inside of a huge branch on the backside of the tree. Very active, very happy and healthy wild bees. It was really great to just sit and watch them for awhile.

Next dispatch: Tombstone and Bisbee.

- Ken