It’s been a while! Our travels have been reduced since last summer, mostly due to the loss of our dear old dog. So we’re all the more eager to get back on the road.
We’re off to Arizona tomorrow: a week in the canyon country with our friends Connie and Vladimir and then four days in Tucson, where we will meet Sarah, Dan, and the girls. I’m very, very excited about showing my granddaughters where I grew up!
We have no idea what to expect at the airport tomorrow morning: the Supreme Leader has ordered his icy brownshirts to “help” the belabored TSA agents (who are going unpaid because the Christo-Fascist Republicans won’t insist that Trump’s troops follow American law).
Newark, Phoenix, and the Grand Canyon,, Monday, March 23, 2026
Making our plane was not without its bumps. I thought that we had left plenty of time, but there were huge delays on the New Jersey Turnpike. We arrived in Newark a full 45 minutes after I thought we would.
As we neared the airport, Sue read that there was a ground stoppage caused by smoke in the control tower. By the time we reached our parking lot, the stoppage had been cleared. In the end, flights were delayed by only half an hour, which wasn’t bad. We did see a number of ICE agents, but they were standing around and clearly had no idea why they were there.
The flight felt a bit long and the Boeing 737 like a very narrow tin can, but before we knew it, we were in Phoenix and climbing into our humongous ride for this trip, a Jeep Grand Wagoneer that seats eight!
It took a while to drive through the exurban hellhole that is Phoenix. There are now five million thirsty souls in a landscape meant to support lizards and snakes, and they have spread out miles in every direction. I’ve always found the area around Phoenix unusually bleak: barren desert, barren volcanic peaks.
As we rose, we began to pass through the northernmost Sonoran desert. Not as verdant as the desert around Tucson, but an improvement over the Phoenix basin. Interstate 17 begins to rise rapidly an hour north of Phoenix; the roadway twists and turns through mountain passes, with chaparral replacing desert vegetation.
We were all awed by the enormously long vistas, with mountain ranges rolling into the distance and an endless series of unusual landforms. At the little town of Camp Verde, we began, as the name implies, to encounter a greener landscape.
As the interstate nears the town of Flagstaff it rises to over 7000 feet and passes through gorgeous ponderosa pine forests. For those of you of a certain age, think Bonanza.
Views then open onto the San Francisco Peaks, with summits close to 13,000 feet. There was still some snow on the southern slopes, but as we passed to the north, the northern slopes were still totally snow covered.
Somebody remind me why I live in New Jersey!
Our road led us onto Interstate 10 west for a while, then on fast state roads due north to the canyon. Our first sign that Trump had laid his dirty paws on the parks was at the entrance gate. There had been so many staff firings that there was no one present to collect fees!
We were staying at the Bright Angel Lodge, one of the oldest accommodations at the canyon. As we learned later, much of the infrastructure at the canyon’s rim had been designed by the architect Mary Colter, whose work blended Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival architectural elements with Native American motifs.
Parking proved to be a bit of a problem. There are far fewer spaces than rooms in thee properties along the rim, and I was forced to drive around the loop road and park a fifteen minute walk from our cabin.
The cabins are simple but quite comfortable, with a good bed and a great shower; who needs more?
Dinner at the Arizona Steakhouse was pretty good, with one exception: the steak. Salads were good to very good, and Sue’s fish was nice. My steak was the cheapest cut imaginable at an unimaginable price. Serves me right.
We had sat down to dinner at 8 PM, or 11 PM EST, depending on how you look at it. My body definitely looked at it as 11, especially after a longish drive. I fell into bed and it was lights out.
Up bright and very early with the time change, we had a genuinely excellent breakfast in the cafe in the lodge. Here’s an early morning iPhone shot from the Rim.
We started with a walk along the rim to the trailhead of the Bright Angel Trail, the most heavily used of the three trails to the river. Here is the crew ready for come what may!
This was originally the home and studio of a pair of photographers who were brothers.
And this is Connie and Vladimir’s “cabin,” with spectacular views out over the canyon.
We then boarded a park shuttle bus that takes the visitor to nine viewpoints to the west of Grand Canyon Village; although I had been here several times over the years, I had never seen the canyon from so many remarkable angles!
The shuttle along the “Red Route” makes nine stops at viewpoints; some are right along the access road, some are up to a few hundred yards distant. All are spectacular, and each one reveals something slightly different about the canyon.
At the bottom center is the Bright Angel Trail on the plateau just before it plunges to the river through Granite Gorge.
The canyon slopes from north to south, so that rainwater tends to carve the rock below the north rim more quickly than that below the south rim. The result is that some of the most spectacular “temples”—freestanding buttes—are in full view across the canyon.
As we traveled westward, more views down to the river began to open up. It’s that blue sliver just below the center of the image.
This is the view straight down into the side canyon called “The Abyss.”
The last stop, Hermit’s Rest, offers a snack bar, where we restocked our water bottles and had a bite before jumping on the shuttle back to the village.
We lazed around a bit, recovering from the sun and altitude, then climbed aboard a “Sunset Tour.” This was a bit of a blunder on my part. When I booked the tour, I was under the impression that we would visit viewpoints east of the village. Wrong. But it worked out all right. Our guide was extremely informative, and we saw another side of the canyon and its ecosystem.
The landscape looked very different bathed in the softer light of late afternoon. And the lengthening shadows thrown by the setting sun provided a new sense of drama.
We finished our day at Mohave Point, where we watched the sunset over the eastern walls.
We had a really nice dinner at the El Tovar, the fancier lodging right on the rim. I had Elk Bolognese; I’ll admit I couldn’t tell it was elk, but it was tasty.
This was my first visit to the El Tovar since I was forced to sleep on the lobby floor in 1969. I had hiked to the river with two friends in February; as we started to walk up the Bright Angel Trail, we were met with what was to that point the worst blizzard of the twentieth century. Emerging on the south rim, we had neither a tent nor money, and there was two feet of snow on the ground. So the three of us and another half dozen hikers bedded down in front of the great fireplace. The hotel manager wanted us to sleep in the snow and sent a staff member around every hour to shine a flashlight in the eyes of the dozen or so stranded hikers!
Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and Chinle, Arizona, Wednesday, March 25, 2026
The long drive through Grand Canyon National Park toward the East Entrance more than compensated for my screwup the day before: the Orange Route of the park shuttle buses actually runs along this road that is accessible by car.
We made several stops, watching as the canyon grows narrower and shallower; it is actually at its widest at Bright Angel Point, where it is 18 miles wide. In the east, at Grandview Point, it is perhaps 10 miles wide.
This is the extraordinary view from the aptly named Grandview Point. This was the site of the canyon’s first tourist hotel.
We got gas at the Desert View Watchtower at the far eastern end of the park: a cool seventy bucks for half a tank in this behemoth.
As we passed out of the park we entered the watershed of the Little Colorado River, with deep canyons running westwards toward its confluence with its big brother. We would cross this river several times in the next three days: it rises in the White Mountains near Showlow and passes through much of the Navajo reservation.
At a suspension bridge built across the Little Colorado in 1911 lies the settlement of Cameron, Arizona. Following a tip from yesterday’s guide, we stopped at the Cameron Trading Post, founded shortly after the building of the bridge and one of the oldest continuously active trading posts in a reservation in America.
The main trading post has rooms full of relatively affordable contemporary jewelry, rugs, pottery, baskets, and carvings. The jewel in the crown, though, is a separate building, originally a hotel associated with the trading post, that now houses their antique crafts. Well heeled collectors can find objects from the “first phase” of Navajo artistry from around 1870. We saw, for example, a chief’s blanket from about that time valued at $480,000!
We had the very good fortune to meet a staff member named Justin Yazzie, a young man born on a mountain nearby. An increasing rarity in his generation, he is a passionate advocate of the Navajo old ways and works with his uncle as a Hataałii, which means “singer” or healer. He led us through the two floors of the shop, embellishing his descriptions of the most interesting objects with an education on the Navajo way of life. This is the main room of the structure, with Justin explains a symbol to Connie and Sue .
Two other rooms on the second floor are showrooms but also preserved as they were when this was a hotel.
We would gladly ave stayed and learned more from Justin, but he did have a job, and we piled back into our great beast of a car and headed northeast. The road out of Cameron passes through the northernmost reaches of the Painted Desert, a large swath of badlands first named El Desierto Pintado by members of Franciso Vázquez de Coronado’s 1540 expedition in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola. The desert is made up of stratified layers of siltstone, mudstone, and shale that get their colors from iron and manganese compounds.
We were now well within the western borders of the Navajo Nation; the reservation encompasses more than 27,000 square miles, spread across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is larger than ten US states. Especially here, in the barren reaches of the western reservation, the poverty is oppressive. The Navajo are independent souls, and the vast majority of the 175,000 tribal members living on the reservation reside in widely separated spots; one woman with whom we spoke said that most people drive at least an hour to work. Many of the dwellings are trailers or shacks, and many lack electricity or running water.
As we drove we passed through two of the larger towns on the reservation, Tuba City and Kayenta, with populations between 5,000 and 10,000. As we approached and then drove through Kayenta, the bright red sandstone of the region became prevalent. A smaller version of Monument Valley in fact exists just north of Kayenta.
We arrived at the main gate of the Navajo Tribal Park at 2:55, where we found that the gate closed at 3 PM! We popped into the Visitor Center for a quick bite and took in the stupendous view from the terrace. We stood at the “John Wayne Overlook,” with a plaque remembering Wayne’s films, from “Stagecoach” to “The Searchers” shot in the valley.
When we got to the gate at the entrance to the 17-mile scenic drive that winds through the valley, a rather shrill woman refused to let us pass. It was 3:35 and she said last entrance was at 3:30! I reasoned with her, I begged, I pleaded, but she wouldn’t budge. So I asked “Would you take something to let us in?” Maintaining her aggressively hostile tone she shot back “Like what?” Twenty bucks did the trick.
The road itself is appalling, and not for the faint of heart. Not just rutted, not just a washboard, but actually dangerous, with large rocks sticking up everywhere. In the end, though, that’s a good thing: you have to go slowly and soak up the atmosphere of this unusual place.
One of the first stops along the road is the most famous: East and West Mitten. Indulge me in a few angles here.
As you drive around, the view continually rearranges the buttes.
Next up was the Three Sisters.
A long stretch of the drive circles the monumental Raindrop Mesa.
At the far end of the mesa is a side road leading to a famous overlook called John Ford’s Point.
Back on the main drive a long narrow view opens to the Totem Poles.
And here they are up close.
Here are a couple of explorers, and their chariot.
It had already been a long day, with the long drive across the reservation; we had spent 2 1/2 hours driving 17 miles. But what miles they were…and not just the stunning scenery in the valley, but the full package of northern Arizona.
We now had a shorter leg of the journey in front of us, 90 minutes to the town of Chinle at the mouth of Canyon de Chelly. We were again very pleasantly surprised by our lodgings. Thunderbird Lodge is native owned and operated, and lies inside the borders of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument. Built around an old trading post, the lodge has worked hard to maintain its original appearance.
The rooms are extremely comfortable. We were happy campers. Until, that is, we had to decide about dinner. TripAdvisor lists three choices: the cafeteria at the lodge, a place called The Junction, and a place called Garcia’s. Reviews of the cafeteria weren’t promising, so we started with Garcia’s,which promised Mexican food. Permanently closed. The Junction it was. The promised Navajo chow proved to be virtually inedible. Oh well.
We started the day off right with delicious blue corn pancakes at the lodge cafeteria, and then climbed into our monster car for a ride along the scenic drive that borders the south rim of the canyon. The name Canyon de Chelly is a Spanish bastardization of the Navajo “Tséyi’,” which means “deep in the rock.” Up until their forceful removal by the US government during the Civil War, thousands of Navajos lived in the canyon, which is still lush and verdant at many places.
The drive starts with a view of a side branch called Tunnel Canyon.
The next stop, the Tséyi Overlook, affords views into the south fork of the canyon, with several farms.
The next stop is the best known in the canyon, offering a view down onto one of the largest ruins, White House. There are more than 300 ruins in the Canyon del Muerto, the north branch of Canyon de Chelly, and more than 100 in the south branch. The ruins–and many, many pictographs on the canyon walls–are the remains of clan dwelling places of the Ancestral Puebloans, the people who preceded both the Hopi and Navajo peoples. The ruins in the canyons date from 700 to 1280 AD; within two hundred years of the disappearance of the Ancestral Pueblans, Hopi clans occupied the canyon. Navajos began moving into the canyon by the seventeenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth century had wholly displaced the Hopi.
The southern branch of the canyon is lower and broader than the north branch.
The drive along the south rim ends at a remarkable spot, an overlook above Spider Rock.
In Navajo mythology, ancient peoples saw spiders running up and down the rock and asked them to teach them weaving.
We just made it back to the lodge in time for our jeep tour of the canyon. We were picked up by our guide, Terrill, a Navajo who has been guiding since 1987, taking hikers, horse riders, and jeep passengers deep into the canyon.
The term “Jeep” isn’t strictly accurate. Most of the tour guides use Austrian troop transports built in the mid-1970’s. These are remarkable things: air cooled four cylinder engines drive a huge vehicle that holds 12 soldiers…or gringos. Here’s one with the top up: ours was totally open up top. I suppose “Steyr-Puch Troop Transport Tour” just doesn’t have the same ring.
We saw our first pictograph within five minutes of entering the canyon; a number of handprints that served as signatures, a dancer, and a thunderbird.
We came to our first major ruin, First Dwelling, just before the junction of the two branches of the canyon. Although several of the dwellings are reduced to rubble, the kiva (on the left) and a storeroom (on the right) are well preserved.
At “The Junction,” the canyon divides, with Canyon de Chelly running east and the Canyon del Muerto running northeast. Just past the junction is the aptly named Junction Dwelling.
This is Rounded Corner Ruin.
This is Ledge Ruin. It is one of he most complex in the canyon, and includes multiple storehouses and intact dwellings around the kiva.
The largest ruin in the Canyon del Muerto is the Antelope Dwelling. We were able to approach the ruin on foot along a path that runs out from a … snack bar! Many of the jeeps stop here, and a young couple sells water, sweets, fry bread, and, of course, jewelry and weavings. There are even toilets provided by the Park Service.
Terrill stopped the jeep a half mile or so up the canyon, just past the junction of the Canyon del Muerto and Black Rock Canyon, so that we could gaze up at the massive Navajo Fortress Rock.
Conflict between increasing numbers of white settlers and the Navajo had escalated since the mid-1840’s. The Navajos raided settler’s farms and army supplies, while the settlers and New Mexico militias responded with violence. After 1863, the Navajo took advantage of the distraction caused by Confederate Troops invading in the Rio Grande Valley to step up their raids. The US government concluded that the only solution was the removal of the tribe from its lands and its resettlement at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, some 390 miles from Canyon de Chelly.
Kit Carson and 389 troops were sent to the Canyon to round up the Navajo who had taken shelter in the canyon and deliver them to Fort Sumner. Carson found very few Navajo, but conducted a scorched earth policy on their farms and dwellings. Looking down from the rim, he realized that more than a thousand Navajo were hiding on top of Fortress Rock. Unable to force them to descend, Carson starved them into surrender. They joined other groups that had surrendered or been captured. Between 8,000 and 9,000 Navajo were forced to walk on foot to Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner, and remain there until 1868.
We saw one more ruin, Standing Cow, before returning to the Junction. As the door indicates, this is still in use by a local family.
From the Junction, it is a short jaunt to White House.
You may be wondering how the inhabitants, who were probably no more than five feet tall, reached the upper ledges–here or really anywhere. White House is unusual in that it includes a ground level structure which originally rose four stories up the cliff; above that were a series of ladders. In other cases, handholds and ledges with ladders led upward; many are now eroded.
This is the great American photographer Timothy O’Sullivan’s image of White House from 1873.
It had been an extraordinary day. The canyon is certainly one of the most beautiful and mysterious places I’ve seen. Four hours of violent bouncing, though, had taken it out of us and we were ready to kick the dust off our shoes by 5:30 when we returned.
Having exhausted all other options, we had dinner at…Dennie’s. Which proved not to be bad at all!
Second Mesa and Winslow, Arizona, Friday, September 27, 2026
I had hoped to bring the group on a tour of the Hopi Pueblos, but my search for a guide proved futile. This was the first sign that the Hopi reputation as an assiduously private people was well deserved. We drove down from Chinle through a series of plains bordered by mesas and, after about ninety minutes, rose onto Second Mesa, home to several Hope villages. We had hoped to find a guide or at least advice at the “Hopi Cultural Center,” but the single staff member showed no interest in helping us. We next tried a large jewelry store. The elderly silversmith was lovely but said that we wouldn’t be able to see any of the interesting sites, and especially the village of Walpi, without a guide. So we gave up!
This brought us to Winslow, Arizona much earlier than planned…which proved to be an incredible stroke of fortune. Winslow today isn’t much to write home about: a narrow strip town best known for its “Take It Easy Park,” which celebrates Jackson Brown’s song of the same name: “I was standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona / Such a fine sight to see / It’s a girl, my lord, she’s in a flatbed Ford, / Slowin’ down to take a look at me.”
They have everything here: the hitchhiker, the flatbed Ford, and, alas, a statue of Glen Frey of the Eagles.
But our hotel, oh, that was something completely different.
The hotelier Fred Harvey had contracted with the Santa Fe Railroad to build a series of luxury hotels along the railroad’s route. Harvey entrusted the design of the property in Winslow to the architect Mary Colter, who had designed several buildings at Harvey’s concession at the Grant Canyon. The result was La Posada, considered Colter’s masterpiece.
Working with unlimited funds, Colter created a Spanish Colonial fantasy. But the hotel closed in 1957, was converted into a railroad administration and then abandoned. starting in 1997, Alan Affeldt, his wife Tina Mion, and a group of friends took on the monumental task of restoring the hotel. The result is astonishing. We all agreed that it was one of the finest hotels we had ever stayed in. Every detail is superb. This is one of the lobbies.
This is the original ballroom, converted into a wonderful lounge.
And to top off our experience, the restaurant is superb. The chef, Jesus Nuñez, has been nominated twice for a James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Southwest.
It’s a long drive, almost five hours, from Winslow to Tucson. We got gas in Holbrook, paying another hundred bucks to feed the beast. Next to the filling station is the kind of thing that makes Arizona special.
But the scenery on the rest of the drive is superb. As the land rose, we began to leave the sagebrush for scrub forest. We were soon in the White Mountains; in Showlow, the biggest town, we were again surrounded by Ponderosa Pines.
After a long descent, the road follows a snaking path through the spectacular Salt River Canyon.
The rest of the drive took us up, down, and around a series of mountain ranges. The vegetation gradually changed to the classic Sonoran desert mix, with Saguaro, Palo Verde and ocotillo.
We reached our hotel, the Hacienda Del Sol about 2, and took some time to relax. We’d been going pretty hard in northern Arizona. The hotel is gorgeous. It was built by my mother’s boss, John Murphey, in 1929 as a girls’ school, the Hacienda Del Sol School for Girls. The rooms are comfortable, but that isn’t the main virtue of the place: it has been sited to take maximum advantage of the desert vegetation; one is in a huge, varied desert garden.
And it sits in the foothills, with bracing views of the nearby Catalina Mountains.
Sarah, Dan, and the girls arrived at about six, and we immediately drove into town for dinner. We went to the Guadalajara Original Kitchen, which serve classic Arizona / Mexican dishes. The salsa made at the table was excellent, and the food very good. It was wonderful to be in Arizona with our girls!
Predictably, jet lag had the girls up very early—and straight into one of three pools at the hotel. We found them at breakfast and chatted until Connie and Vladimir joined the party.
All eight of us piled into the behemoth and off we went for Saguaro National Park. The park has two “districts,” one in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains and one in the Tucson Mountains; we headed for the Rincons.
When people hear the word “desert” they imagine some barren, Sahara-like waste. The Sonoran desert around Tucson could not be more different: it is verdant, even lush; it’s just that it is a different shade of green.
Once in the park, I introduced the group to the main denizens. The picture above has several, starting with the ocotillo and its orange blossoms. In the foreground are the mesquite shrub and a small saguaro cactus; other, larger saguaros, with multiple arms are in the background. The bursts of yellow are the Palo Verde, the most common tree in the desert.
We also saw barrel cactus, yuccas, agaves, and century plants; and three distinct varieties of cholla, or jumping cactus. This is the “staghorn,” the least likely to jump!
And here’s the group, at the start of our adventure.
You’ve heard of tree huggers, right?
We were invited to lunch at our friends, Dora and Barry Bursey’s lovely home in the foothills. They had gone all out and really put on a lovely lunch for us and the Bradley’s. We had several hours of good times and reminiscing before we brought the girls back to the hotel for another swim.
We ate so much for lunch that we wanted something light. Yes, the best taco joints are all in South Tucson, but that was too long a drive for us, so we had decent though not memorable tacos close to the hotel at a place called Seis Kitchen.
Everybody had an early morning swim and then we were off to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. The road leads up and over Gates Pass, a low point in the Tucson Mountains west of the city; you descend through the western district of Saguaro National Park.
The Desert Museum is really one of the great zoos in the world: a huge complex with an astonishing variety of animal life, brilliantly folded into the desert landscape.
It was pretty warm, so we didn’t do everything, but the eastern types got a very good introduction to the desert flora and fauna. And Ingrid spent her souvenir money from Grandma and Grandpa wisely, choosing a darling stuffed Coata Mundi, something she clearly is not going to find in New Jersey.
Next stop was Old Tucson, a movie set made to look like a western town. I had been here as a kid, and so had Dan…who badly wanted to revisit his youth! So, although there were no events scheduled (they have gunfights and other fun activities), we took a tour with a quickly guy who explained how ever building, street, corner, and pond had appeared in a myriad of movies. Ingrid knew it was important to her dad, and got souvenir Old Tucson knives for dad and grandad…only to realize they couldn’t be taken on the plane. The replacement, an Old Tucson memorial spoon, sits proudly in front of my computer!
I had hoped to show the gang San Xavier del Bac, the “White Dove of the Desert,” the glorious Franciscan mission south of town, but we had promised the girls a long swim…so next time. Just as a marker: the mission was founded in 1692 by Father Eusebio Kino.
I did manage to sneak one more stop in on the way home. Bahti Indian Arts is one of the leading dealers in Native American art in the country. Founded in 1949 by Tom Bahti, it is now run by his son Mark…my compatriot at Catalina Foothills School during my middle school years.
Mark unfortunately had stepped out. But…my eye wandered to the wall of Hopi Katsina dolls. I had long lusted after a Katsina to remind me of home. And I fastened on a six-inch whipper, one of the dancers who literally whips the audience away from the dancers.
We had a really nice late afternoon by the pool, fueled by a spicy “green margarita:” tequila with lots of cucumber, nopales, and herbs.
The evening was absolutely festive. Our friends Thom Laursen and Michele Morris had arranged a dinner at El Charro, the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurant in America. The eight of us joined Thom and Michele, David and Patti Bradley, Kim Bradley, David’s younger brother, and Ralph Phillips for a riotous evening. The restaurant specializes in Carne Seca, and it really is delicious, especially in a chimichanga, which was invented here!
We traded some really old photographs: Ralph dug this up from Sue’s very first backpack, a trek across the Catalina Mountains and into God’s Pocket, our favorite and very private canyon on the north side.
It was a wonderful capstone to our time in Tucson!
Tucson and Bisbee, Arizona, Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Sarah, Dan, and the girls headed north, following in our footsteps through northern Arizona. We, on the other hand, headed southeast toward Bisbee. When I lived in Arizona, Bisbee was a pretty sad place: home to the largest open pit copper mine in the world, it was a company town wholly owned by the Phelps=Dodge Corporation.
Now, however, it is the Williamsburg of the West…or one of them at least! It has become hipster haven, home to trustafarians, dive bars, espresso bars, gelato bars, and probably some bars we missed.
Why you may ask, did we venture into Bisbee? Because our traveling companion Connie’s brother Jamie and his wife Rachel had inherited a small house there. Formerly a miner’s house, it is perched high on the hill over Bisbee’s Main Street. The 65 steep steps up do keep one in shape!
That’s the hill; Jamie and Rachel’s house is the one down and to the right form the large house at the top. And right below them live their son Brook and his girlfriend Hayden.
The town is actually rather nice. It sits in a narrow canyon in the Mule Mountains, and has retained some of its nineteenth century character.
We had a really nice lunch at a cafe in town and then Jamie led us on a tour of the whole place, concluding with a visit to the mining museum, which was beautifully done and really interesting.
No visit would be complete without a view of the pit.
There are actually three of these huge scars; this one, the Lavender Pit, is the largest and oldest. Jamie also showed us something at least as striking: the largely abandoned town of Lowell, on the far side of the pit.
Many of the buildings are intact and untouched since the 1930’s; the streets are lined with antique cars.
Hayden and Brook had prepared a delicious dinner of braised lamb and salad; we had found a wine in town, and a fine time was had by all. The drive back at night was uneventful…although I’m always a bit nervous on narrow Arizona mountain roads at night!
