When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time playing down by the creek. Fortunately for me, Rich Creek was the perfect setting for a curious little boy. Most of the year it isn’t deep enough to drown in, but it’s deep enough that you can build a dam out of rocks and make a swimming hole. Little fish you can catch with a Zebco 33. Pools where you can sail little boats. Lots of secluded little coves that are perfect for assorted adventures. There was even a log across the creek that became a perfect narrow catwalk when my cousin and I needed to have a lightsaber duel over bubbling lava.

One day when I was probably 8 or 9 years old I was down there by myself, sitting on a big rock about 10 feet over the water, just thinking profound thoughts and watching the fish. Out of nowhere a huge tiger swallowtail showed up, flew a few circles around my head, and then landed right in the center of my chest.

I froze, and for at least a couple of minutes (but it felt like an hour) this perfect, stunning butterfly just sat there, spreading its wings across my chest. It was an amazing sensation. Like being touched, just a little bit, by something ethereal. Something from another world. It felt like being anointed.

Eventually the butterfly just flew away, but the feeling never entirely left me. In fact, it still comes up sometimes, generally involving an encounter with a wild animal. I felt that way the first time I saw a moose in Montana, again when a huge bull elk stepped out of the woods in the Cataloochee valley, and even when a fox squirrel tried to climb into a treestand with me on the Carolina coastal plain.

Fortunately the moose and the elk didn’t have to sit on my chest.

I guess maybe what I’m talking about here is just that sense of wonder. A warmth that spreads through you. A harmonic vibration that makes your bones ring. Kind of like being stoned, now that I think about it. Although just a little bit, and just for a little while.

Last weekend I was spending some time on one of our projects, and just after sunrise I spotted a whitetail doe and two fawns crossing a field near the site. All three dropped into a small wash down by the lake, and through my binoculars I watched them bed down in some heavy brush. I knew they would probably stay there through the heat of the day, so I planned to be down near the tail of the wash at sunset with my camera.

One thing most wildlife photographers won’t tell you is that the best blind is generally your vehicle. If it isn’t moving, most animals (especially birds) will pretty much ignore a truck or a car. It just doesn’t register as a threat, but the second you open a door they’re gone. So I picked up a window mount from Cabela’s that was designed to hold a spotting scope, but the screw size is the same as they use for cameras, so it makes an excellent tripod equivalent. The point being that when the evening light started to fade, I had picked out what I thought would be a good angle and was sitting in my truck with my camera locked and loaded.

I could just make out where one of the fawns was hiding, but it was the doe that woke up first. She ambled around a bit and then started feeding up the wash, moving away from me. I got a few photos of her, but nothing great. The first fawn quickly followed her out of sight, but the second fawn moved out of the brush into a clearing in front of me.

Before the deer had started moving, I’d noticed a rabbit sitting up on a rock and looking around in the bottom of the wash, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I have plenty of rabbit photos, and this one was too far off for a good shot anyway. The second fawn wasn’t ignoring it, though. It sort of pranced right over, looked down, and started nuzzling the rabbit.

Yeah, seriously. Big time Bambi & Thumper moment. No Flower present, thankfully. It was just for a second, and just kind of a peck, but even after that the fawn sort of fed in a circle within 5 or 10 feet of that rabbit for quite awhile. Eventually the doe snorted, the fawn ran to catch up with her, the rabbit wandered off in the other direction, and the moment was over. I have no idea what they were doing or why they would do that.

I just sat there in the truck for awhile and thought about butterflies.

- Ken

Gauley Bridge

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.

Cathedral Falls

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%.

Gauley Bridge

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.

Railroad Bridge

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?

Kanawha Falls

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

The still at the Wild Turkey distillery.

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.

Aging barrels of Wild Turkey bourbon.

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.

Jack Daniel's visitor center.

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.

Jack Daniel

Staff at the Jack Daniel's distillery.

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.

Ricks of sugar maple.

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.

Buildings at the Jack Daniel's distillery.

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.

Town square in Lynchburg, TN.

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.

The Wild Turkey distillery.

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.

Gift shop at the Wild Turkey distillery.

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 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.
 
 

Vicki knew we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

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.
 
 

Me and my Uncle Bill.

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.
 
 

Me, E-P1, Elk.

Lensrentals.com

Setting up for a photo of Cathedral Rock.

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?

The gang in Casa Grande.

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?

Vicki hiking in Sabino Canyon.

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?

Vicki on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

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?

Vicki at the airport in Vegas.

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

The Las Vegas Strip

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.

The Las Vegas Strip.

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.

Hoover Dam

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.

Hoover Dam

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.

M&M's World

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.

It's all about the camo, baby.

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

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.

Me and Vicki at the Grand Canyon.

Sunrise over the Grand Canyon.

Rock Squirrel

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.

Dawn in the Grand Canyon.

Bull Elk

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.

The Grand Canyon in the rain.

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.

Condors Turkey Vultures

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!”

The Grand Canyon

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

Me on the lip of Meteor Crater.

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.

The left side of the big hole.

The right side of the big hole.

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.

Meteor Crater Overlook

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.

Sunset Crater

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.

Lave field at Sunset Crater.

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.

Google Maps view of Sunset Crater.

It's dead, Jim.

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.

The road north.

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

Sunrise over Sedona.

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.

Cathedral Rock

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.

Bell Rock

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.

Me and Mike Blevins.

The view from our room.

Sunset at Cathedral Rock.

Vicki in Sedona.

Sedona

Gambel's Quail

Courthouse Rock

Sedona

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

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

Saguari in Sabino Canyon.

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.

The Dragoon Mountains

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.

Bisbee, Arizona

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.

Bisbee, Arizona

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.

The courthouse in Tombstone, AZ.

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.

Tombstone, Arizona

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.

Tombstone, Arizona

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