We drove through Sedona again at mid-morning, and it was
lovely, but the magic definitely happens at sunset. We congratulated ourselves
again at letting our fellow campers irritate us to the point of driving into
town at the perfect time of day.
Sedona in the morning
But it was time to move on, and so we did, to Flagstaff,
which is not the most exciting town I’ve ever visited, nor is it a place where
they eat breakfast, apparently. We’d left early thinking we might eat in
Sedona, but there was no place there for us to park with our camper in tow. And
in Flagstaff, it took about an hour of false tries to find someone who’d sell
us coffee and eggs. But we finally found sustenance about 11:00 am, and while we
wandered around Flagstaff, we also came across evidence of those Babbitt
Brothers from Price Hill that I was looking for in the wrong place, down in
Bisbee.
There’s a Babbitt Road, and we saw a Babbitt Ford
dealership, too, so the current generation is carrying on their mercantile
past. Valda Moore from the Price Hill Historical Society told me there were
five brothers, and three of them married sisters who were also from Price Hill.
After opening a very successful fancy grocery shop in what is now the Incline
District in Price Hill (it’s now Red’s Corner Store), they decided to head west
and make their fortune, which apparently they did, but in Flagstaff, not Bisbee,
to be clear on that. I was not really trying to track them down, but I was glad
to find evidence of them somewhere in Arizona, anyway.
After our Flagstaff wandering and breakfast, we decided to
head east a bit to see a couple of National Monuments not too far from the
Grand Canyon. We found a place to camp in the Coconino National Forest, a nice
little campground called Bonito, pretty much on the edge of the first National
Monument, Sunset Crater Volcano. In fact, the campground was built on a base of
cinders from the volcano, with lava flow evident in various places around us.
The Sunset Volcano blew about 900 years ago—pretty dang recently. So we saw
what the area around Mount St. Helens might look like in another 850 years.
Sunset Crater and the lava flow at left; more lava below the San Francisco Mountains
Onward to Wupatki National Monument, where the ruins of a
number of pueblo dwellings have been preserved, along about 30 miles of Forest
Service road, in the shadow of the San Francisco Mountains. The pueblos were
quite intriguing, and it was definitely interesting to be able to walk through
them and see how they were constructed.
The people who build them lived there around the time of the
Sunset volcano eruption. They knew the signs of the coming explosion
(apparently they were a bit more cognizant of thermal underground behavior than
the folks in Pompeii), and they packed up their belongings and moved a safe
distance away, or so the National Park Service signs told us. The pueblos were
built square and tall, and they blended into the surrounding landscape
amazingly well. From the heights where one was built, we could also look out
and see the Painted Desert, miles away. No photo can do that justice, but it was
quite a sight to see.
Another pueblo ruin at Wupatki
We stayed at Bonito two nights; we had to move to a
different site after the first night because there are people who do not know
how to camp without bringing along noisy, smelly generators. Gotta have their
air conditioning and television, I guess. We, on the other hand, are quite the
dab hand at proper off-the-grid camping. With our solar panel and some simple
modifications, like hanging battery-powered light bulbs (thanks, Amy &
Rob!) and a dry bag full of ice to make the refrigerator a cooler overnight when the solar panel
is not powering the fridge, we do just fine out in the wilderness—if it’s
not too cold; we can’t run our heater just on the battery. So yeah, we’re not
proper frontier folk, but we’re still better than anybody who runs a generator
day and night!
From Bonito, we had to backtrack to Flagstaff (boo!), but we
weren’t there long. We picked up I-40 and headed west to Williams, Arizona,
“gateway to the Grand Canyon.” We had been planning to camp at a Forest Service
area with several campgrounds, but it turned out that all but one of the
campgrounds were closed due to a recent fire. The one that was open, Dogtown
Lake, was not taking reservations for stays before May 15, and frankly, it was
getting cold—and there was rain in the forecast. So we found a nice motel in
Williams.
Besides being the gateway to the Grand Canyon (which is about 60 miles away), it is also on old Route 66, and they make a BIG deal of that. The main street—which IS Route 66—is lined with souvenir stores, many of them in replicas of old gas stations. And there are a lot of antique cars, as there seem to be throughout Arizona. It’s a cute town, though definitely a tourist town. Among its many attractions is the Poozeum, where one can see “the world’s largest coprolite” and what is also, they claim, the world’s largest collection of fossilized poop in general. Sadly, the museum was not open while we were in Williams. Other museum-like souvenir shops had Elvis themes, a collection of fortune-telling animatronics, and lots and lots of old cars and old gas station paraphernalia.
An animatronic cowboy in Williams
We had some good pizza and some good fruit pie in Williams,
and we found that the Babbitts had made a foray to that town, too; they ran the
stage coach depot and warehouse in town, located near the railroad. Which led
us to discover that there was a train that would take us the 60 miles to and
from the Grand Canyon. We went over to the ticket station and made arrangements
to take the train there and back again two days hence, when it would be warmer,
and not raining.
The Babbitt depot in Williams, and the Grand Canyon Train ticket counter
After dinner, we discovered that Williams also has amazing
sunsets!
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