We went back out to the Grand Canyon today. There are many ways to view the canyon including some that do not even require you to leave your car. But if you are going to stand on the rim, there are a variety of styles. There are couples where one person is saying “stand back-you’re making me nervous” and there are people who crawl out and peek over the edge. Molly just boldly walked out and stood on the rim while I yelled “just wait there until I can get a photograph” She is such a good sport.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Grand Canyon (3 of 8)")
We left family and Phoenix and headed back out on the road. Our first stop was at Montezuma’s Castle in the Verde Valley. The Verde River was running high and the surrounding country side lush and green. You can’t go directly up to the castle, but it is a pleasant walk under the trees and along the river. If anyone can identify the tree Molly is standing beside, let us know. We then headed up to the Grand Canyon and walked along the rim for as long as we could in the high winds. Then we did the only reasonable thing. We ate chips and artichoke dip in the restaurant, watched the sunset and made reservations for dinner at El Tovar.
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Normally a tour of gardens is not the first thing that comes to my mind on a Sunday morning , but anything done well can be interesting and these gardens were done very very well. The tours were organized by Phoenix Home and Gardens and the proceeds went to the Desert Botanical Gardens. And so with the promise of lots of sunshine, flowers and a lunch at Arcadia Farms, we set off to Paradise Valley to see the gardens.
The first garden was inspired by the couples many trips to Bali. They owners were from England and I suspect they went a little crazy in the warm Arizona sunshine. It had outdoor art work and plants set of by bold colored walls around the property. The art work focused attention to a small part of the garden and it had literally hundreds of spots to stop and meditate. It would have probably taken a week to really explore it.
%5B4%5D.jpg "Home Tour (4 of 42)")
The next garden was of typical dessert flora. The woman told us that she had been working on the garden for twenty years, which is easy to understand. It covered two acres and had gravel paths that wandered over hill and dale.
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This garden was built around a Frank Lloyd Wright style home. In the back of the house the garden was laid out in geometric squares of lawn and concrete, but at the sides, the owners began mixing the plants with Zen gardens and by the time you got to the front, it was a desert garden growing all over hill and dale and totally void of any structure and order
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This house was a delight and the one I could most imagine living in. There were courtyards with fountains and tile art work that invited contemplation. It had arches covered with flowers and an oasis of trees at one end of the swimming pool. It would have reminded me of the Alhambra in Spain, if I had ever been to Spain.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Home Tour (26 of 42)")
It is not often that I am jealous about how the other half live, but in this case I would have been happy to live in the stone covered guest house. The tour book described the garden as a Santa Barbara style estate, but this is a garden to entertain presidents and the occasional visiting tourists from rainy parts of the country.
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Anna, her friend Eileen, Molly and I went out to Picacho Peak to see desert flowers. It was particularly enjoyable given that we did not have to weed, water, or tend them in anyway. We saw a lot of Mexican poppies and a few purple lupine. At no point of the hike were we out of site of the parking lot or rest room. It was a very civilized hike.
On the way back we stopped at the “Gallery in the Sun” which was built by Ted DeGrazia. He did the original Christmas Cards for UNICEF which featured little Spanish and Indian Children. Though they quite often have haunting eyes, they should not be confused with the pictures of Margaret Keane which feature big round eyes. He was in my opinion a far more subtle painter. He built the gallery and it has the wonderful use of textures and colors that painters seem to have all through out its construction. You can take pictures, but I didn’t know that until it closed. May be next trip. He also built a small chapel for his local Indian friends which I did get pictures of. It was a great place to wonder around and feels a lot more friendly than most museums. I highly recommend it if you are ever in the Tucson area.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Picacho Peak (31 of 26)")
Molly, Joe, Kathy and I took a weekend trip to Sedona. There are many great things to do in Sedona, but a short list is: eat lunch at Rene’s in Tlaquepaque Plaza, climb Doe Mountain, climb Sugar Loaf, drive up Oak Creek Canyon, eat at the Cowboy Club and be spun around by one of the vortexes at Red Rock crossing. In addition, we had a great motel where you could set out on the deck with a cool drink in the evening and look across the valley to the red glow of Munds Mountain as the sun set. It would take many week ends to exhaust the possibilities, but only one to exhaust us. I could however, return many more times.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Sedona (12 of 21)")
My nephew Rich, his girl friend Jessica and I went for a hike to Weavers needle. Weaver’s Needle, as I’m sure you all know, is prominent in most stories about the Lost Dutchman Mine. Supposedly the tip of the shadow of Weaver’s Needle falls on the mine at 4:00. I don’t know if that is Arizona standard or day light savings time. 8000 people a year look for the mine, but we thought we had an advantage since we had previously bought a map at a tourist shop. We didn’t find any gold, but it was a great hike that wound through blind canyons to an overlook of Weaver’s Needle. Perhaps next time.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Peralta Trail (4 of 18)")
Molly, her brother, and I just went on a hike along a trail called the Hieroglyphic Trail. It was a gentle ridge walk that ended by a stream in a slot canyon. It is a natural amphitheater with plenty of seating and a calmness about it. One of the mysteries of the petroglyphs is why in a state where Indian petroglyphs are on every other rock, someone should suddenly think they were Egyptian Hieroglyphs. The glyphs, you decide if they were petro, picto, or hiero were chiseled into the rocks all along the sides of the canyon above the stream.
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Phoenix has a great set of urban parks where you can walk in the desert. That is a little easier to do when your city limits seem to encompass the whole state, but they are still great. Molly and I went on a hike to see all of the cacti. Arizona has had an exceptional amount of rain this year and the desert is very green. We had a great time on the hike with the possible exception of the end. Lost is such a harsh word, but there were a plethora of options at the end. It seemed easy to convince ourselves that the path up the steep hill was incorrect, but it is hard to be lost when you are surrounded by housing developments.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Piestewa Peak (10 of 10)")
If you have ever wondered where all of the dirt from the Grand Canyon went, check out the picture below. It is a picture of the Salton Basin looking towards the Salton Sea. In the past, the Colorado River flowed into it filling in the gulf of California from here to the current coast. The Salton Sea is almost 300 feet below sea level and was created in 1905 when canal builders from the Colorado River didn’t fully comprehend the implications of the phrase “water flows down hill.” The Colorado breached a dike and flowed into the Salton Basin for 18 months before they could get it plugged. Real estate developers in Palm Springs were upset at loss of potential water front property, but Mexico was happy to see the return of the River. The dessert flowers were starting to bloom. In particular, I liked the desert Lilly, but the other flowers were great too.
%5B3%5D.jpg "Anza Berrego (2 of 10)")
Me, Molly and the frog have headed out for Arizona. There were six new inches of snow in Northern California and chains were required, but they added enough weight in my trunk to give me good traction and six hours later we were having dinner with Cael in San Francisco. We left San Francisco and headed out for a leisurely day along the coast at Big Sur, found a great hotel and had a wonderful dinner at a sea side restaurant. So far the highest temperature that we’ve encountered is sixty degrees, but the sun is shinning and I think I got a sun burn today.
%5B3%5D.jpg "California coast (1 of 11)")
%5B4%5D.jpg "Picacho Peak (30 of 26)")