Day 18 - Flagstaff, AZ

Monday, May 21, 2018

Weather:  Cloudy in the mid 60’s in the morning and clearing and 70’s later in day - seriously chilly once the sun went down though, and we didn’t dress appropriately to be stargazing at all!

Steps: Shaun - 15,667, Shannon - 14,706

 

The schedule for our day in Flagstaff was packed beyond packed, so we got an early start and drove to Sunset Crater, New Mexico before it even opened! Sunset Crater is the youngest volcano on the Colorado Plateau (erupting only 900 short years ago), and it’s amazing how many volcanoes are in the area if you know where to look. There is no hiking allowed into the actual caldera, but the lava flows have created a crazy landscape in the valley that has to be seen to be believed, so there is a Lava Loop Trail (1 mile round trip) that circles along the base of the mountain. It was an unbelievable landscape, and then to see that there is life growing from the charred black remains of the lava is truly amazing. Apparently, when the volcano erupted, the lava had nowhere to go at a certain point in its travels, so it backed up in the valley and cooled into its current state. We’re so glad we included this national monument in our trip because we’ve never seen anything even remotely like it.

After leaving Sunset Crater, we drove to the Wupatki National Monument where dozens of ancestral Puebloan villages are preserved.  We were able to walk through a wonderful ruin of a pueblo called Wukoki where the people of the Northern Sinagua, Cohonina, Kayenta, and Hohokam archeological culture groups lived between 1100 and 1250 CE when they mysteriously left the area. Other Pueblo sites within the Monument include Wupatki, Citadel, Nalakihu and Lomaki.

Our next destination was the visitor center where we briefly looked over the Wupatki ruins which included 100 rooms plus a ceremonial circle and ball court, but we were pressed for time and couldn’t hike down into the ruins themselves (which is a bummer because they were seriously cool—they apparently had been used by professors and other park employees in the last 100 years due to a housing shortage; how weird would that be?).

The drive back to Flagstaff took longer than we had hoped, so we had to make do with lunch from Del Taco that we ate in the car in the Arboretum at Flagstaff's parking lot (it was actually much worse than it sounds). The tour of the arboretum was short but informative about the efforts the staff is making in the area of studying how climate change is affecting plants.  The tour guide’s golf cart got stuck on a rock in the shade garden, so we were forced to finish the tour on our own. We looked through the native species beds, a constructed wetland area, an herb and medicinal plant garden, and also a greenhouse with a water tower system for temperature management.

There were lots of birds at the Arboretum, including hummers, swallows, and red-winged blackbirds.  Shaun was bummed that we didn’t spot the unique native squirrel with the tufts on their ears, and Shannon was sorry we didn’t see any javelinas.

Our next stop was at Riordan House where, around the turn of the 20th century, one of the richest dudes in Flagstaff built a house for he and his brother and their wives, who were sisters. The house was a rustic Arts and Crafts-style crazy big building that had a 6,000-square-foot section on the left and a mirrored one on the right attached to each other with a 1000-square-foot great room in the center. The house was designed to blend into the landscape by the architect of the El Tovar Hotel at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

We toured the east house which looks mostly as it did in the early 1900s. The house contains 4,000 books between the two houses, which had Shannon salivating. The west house is now a museum with exhibits about the family, the architect, the Arts and Crafts style, and Flagstaff history as a whole.

After leaving the Riordan House, we drove into Historic Downtown Flagstaff and browsed through some of the stores and then had dinner at a funky little noodle shop called Sosoba. Shaun was too scared to use chopsticks, but they had tons of stuff for her to eat, so a good time was had by all. To top it off, we found Cape Cod BBQ chips in a little party store, so we bought 3 bags! We also stopped at a grocery store and got a box to mail more stuff home for Shaun and some face cream for Shannon, who was having issues with the dryness of the air.

Our final stop for the day was Lowell Observatory, where we listened to a Stars and Galaxies talk that used a cool curved projection screen to make it 3D. The talk lasted about 45 minutes, and then we listened to a constellation origin talk, looked at the moon through a modern telescope and Jupiter through a historic telescope (it was hazy, so only 2 telescopes were available for viewing), and also got to see the International Space Station fly by (Shaun’s favorite part). It was really cold, though, and we didn’t have enough outerwear, so we headed back to the townhouse and prepped to leave Flagstaff (bummer). What a day we had, don’t you think? Did we pack enough stuff in?