The final four stops on this year's trip were relatively short ones. Nonetheless, we could have spent longer at each place if we would have liked. While staying in Flagstaff, Arizona for two nights, we drove a short distance to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. It was odd to suddenly be surrounded by black lava fields. We found the landscape, and the plant life, reminiscent of our trips to Hawaii. Even the geological terms for lava, such as A'a and Pahoehoe, are used here.
Adjacent to Sunset Crater is another national monument. Wupatki National Monument offers several sites of former habitation. The Native Americans who lived here built their settlements from these red stones, instead of carving into the hillsides, as they did in Mesa Verde National Park. In this flat landscape, you could see different aspects of community life, such as circular ball fields, in which children, and perhaps adults, played sports. There was also an interesting vent in the ground, through which you could hear air blowing to the surface.
The movie "Best Friends" featured a short scene here. In the movie, actor Richard Hatch, who would later go on to star in the TV series "Battlestar Galactica," played a young military veteran who is driving cross country in an RV with his friends and his fiancé. A recurring theme of the movie is the Native American peoples with whom they interact in varying ways. Certainly the movie reflects on the value of community, as well as one's responsibility to others. This is something that these Native American Indian ruins also make one reflect on.
Within another short drive of our motel was Walnut Canyon National Monument. Here you enter at the visitor center, then descend stairs to visit more Native American dwellings. You can see how stratified the stone layers here are. It looks as though a giant carved these hills into steps. The dwellings are interesting to look inside. Unlike those in Mesa Verde National Park and Wupatki National Monument, you get the feeling that there were lots of hillside homes here, located really close together. So this gives the area a real suburban feel.
Finally, there's the grandly-named Montezuma's Castle. Apparently it has no more to do with the ancient Aztec king Montezuma than the ride Montezuma's Revenge at Knott's Berry Farm. Someone just saw the abandoned community one day, and was so bowled-over by it that they gave it a grand name. It's the last National Monument we visited on our trip, during our drive from Flagstaff to Pheonix. We spent a couple hours there eating lunch, and people paused to look over our shoulders as I sketched and my wife did a water color. Unlike our experience at Bryce Canyon National Park, no one seemed all that enthused by my sketching, but they loved my wife's painting. When my wife told one woman that she had not been painting long, she exclaimed, "Well, it certainly doesn't show!"
Sadly, we found no places of value at which to stop on our drive home from Phoenix to San Diego. Just hours and hours of featureless landscape. Maybe we missed some truly remarkable places. I hope so. It'd be nice to discover that there were all kinds of places chocked full of scenic beauty and historic interest, and plan another trip to see them. Nonetheless, this trip was filled with so many overwhelmingly beautiful and interesting places. I'm glad we stopped in each of them. I just wish we'd had more time to explore most of them. But then, that's the best way to remember a vacation, as it leaves you with a sense of awe, and perhaps, a reason to return.
Dragon Dave
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