Savvy Sightseer - tips and insights for seasoned travelers!
Defunct Gold Mine
Arizona: Amazing and Awe-some!
While it is known as the Grand Canyon State, there’s so much more to Arizona - and that’s the focus of this program. Look for the Grand Canyon under my National Parks tab.
Between Phoenix, the state capital toward the southern portion of Arizona, and the Utah border to the north, there's tons of iconic and intriguing spots! These include Tempe, the aptly named Superstition Mountains, the alluring Lost Dutchman Mine, Tortilla Flat and Canyon Lake. Beautiful desert vistas grace the ride up to mystical Sedona. At the state's northern border soak up its fantastic geological visions.
Superstition Wilderness Area
Phoenix
Various types of cacti have intriguing names.
Arizona is home to a very diverse population of butterflies; more than half of North America's 700 butterfly species can be found in the state.
Various types of cacti have intriguing names.
Click on the picture above for a slideshow of the Desert Botanical Garden.
Benefitting from a series of national projects to harness the Salt River’s water and power, Phoenix became a prosperous town and important agricultural center in the early 20th century. The population soared and brought easterners to the western desert town, but many missed their green lawns of home and considered the desert itself a “blighted landscape.” To conserve the local landscape and educate the newcomers about their new Sonoran Desert environment, a local group set about developing the Desert Botanical Garden. From the first cacti planted there in 1938, the center has grown and evolved. Today about a half-million visitors annually stroll the living museum’s 55 acres with over 50,000 plants. Five trails ranging from 1/10 to 1/3 of a mile take walkers through different aspects of the park. One of the more unique paths has much more than cacti. The Plants & People of the Sonoran Desert Loop Trail looks at the symbiotic relationship between the two and demonstrates how plants had been used by native people for food, medicine and building materials. In the spring, there's even a 3,200 square foot open-air pavilion housing thousands of butterflies to explore.
Tempe
On the outskirts of Phoenix Tempe likes to show off it dedication to the arts. The town’s name reportedly goes back to a comment in 1879 by Darrell Duppa, an Englishman who helped establish Phoenix. He had said the view of mountains, a wide river, and green fields reminded him of the Vale of Tempe in ancient Greece, an idyllic valley with a stream running through it at the foot of Mount Olympus. Tempe city officials commissioned more than 300 diverse permanent and temporary public art works. These are on display in various areas accessible to all, such as downtown, on neighborhood streets and bike paths; also in city parks and on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University, which is ranked in the top 20 art schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.
This artwork encourages visitors to strike a pose and have their picture taken, creating a homemade picture postcard.
One local artist asks for people to “Be the Good” with this artwork, whose message, inspired by Gandhi's "Be the change you wish to see in the world," gets even further reach than this corner – it’s also on Tempe Public Library cards. Four local artists were commissioned in 2005 by the city to develop art to transform unpleasant municipal objects into things more pleasing to the eye, which were then reproduced for libraries, making every patron a card-carrying art fan.
This 35’ tall stilt walker symbolizes the community’s respect for a former mayor and gratitude for his accomplishments. In his hands is an inverted pyramid, which symbolizes the Tempe City Hall he faces of the same shape. A steel, concrete and tile base depicts milestones in his 24 years of public service to the city.
Click on the pictures for a closer look and more information.
Click on the picture above to open a slideshow of the region.
For a kitschy look at frontier life and the gold mining era, there's Goldfield, a reconstructed 1890s gold-mining town, reflecting an era when it was the bustling with prospectors. Just when it looked like the town would really expand, the mine’s vein faulted, the grade of ore dropped and the original town died a slow painful death. Then tourists found it and Goldfield got a new lease on life.
By contrast a little spot called Tortilla Flat was never exactly bustling - it can’t actually be called a town because it never met the threshold of having 100 steady residents! But tourists keep it on the map as they stop by to see the unusual saloon on Main Street.
Beyond Phoenix
Venturing beyond the capital, Arizona’s dramatic desert vistas beckon. In order to be considered a desert, an area has to get less than 10 inches of precipitation and have an evaporation rate of more than 10 inches per year. The Sonoran is one of four recognized deserts in North America. One of the most striking features of the Sonoran desert is the Superstition Mountains Designated a national wilderness area, the highest form of protection of any federal wildland, the range accounts for over 160,200 acres of the Tonto National Forest’s three million acres. Several different tribes claimed their homes in the range over centuries, but the mountains became an Apache stronghold in the 1800s, and so is most associated with that tribe. The Superstitions, so named by early settlers because of the many myths and stories told by local Indians, are the largest of the mountain ranges surrounding Phoenix. Visible from miles away, they rise steeply above the flat desert to a high point of more than 5,000 feet, and are characterized by sheer-sided, jagged, volcanic peaks. One of the most popular stories tells of the Lost Dutchman's Mine, reportedly chock full of gold - the location of which died with Jacob Waltz back in the late 1800s.
Running through the Superstitions is The Apache Trail, as Arizona’s first historic highway. President Theodore Roosevelt may have offered the best description of the region when he said: “The Apache Trail combines the grandeur of the Alps, the glory of the Rockies, the magnificence of the Grand Canyon and then adds an indefinable something that none of the others have. To me, it is most awe-inspiring and most sublimely beautiful.”
Actual old saddles provide seating at the counter.
Sedona
This is one of Sedona’s four main vortex sites - places where the earth seems especially alive with energy.
At Munds Mountain, a particular formation formed by Mother Nature resembles an icon for so many.
This is one of Sedona’s four main vortex sites - places where the earth seems especially alive with energy.
Click on the picture above for more Sedona shots, and the one below to visit the Arizona-Utah border.
Lake Powell, billed as the second largest man-made reservoir in the U.S., is shrinking. This visual tells the sad story with a glance – the white cliffs mark the decreasing water level.
The Colorado River makes a wide sweep around a towering pillar of sandstone with dramatic effect.
The Great Basin Desert, the US’s largest, is a cool or "cold desert" - the only such one in the US.
Lake Powell, billed as the second largest man-made reservoir in the U.S., is shrinking. This visual tells the sad story with a glance – the white cliffs mark the decreasing water level.
A major star of old westerns is the town of Sedona, about 120 miles north of Phoenix. Ranked at the very top of USA Weekend’s Most Beautiful Places in America list, Sedona is described in the report as a place that looks like nowhere else. The area epitomizes the rugged character of the West, with its photogenic red-rocks. Native Americans first discovered and settled the area about 11,000 years ago. They were followed by homesteaders, artists and, most recently, New Age spiritualists, who assert mysterious cosmic forces emanate from the ruddy colored mountains.
Art, nature, history and commercialism have a vortex of their own in town - Tlaquepaque, an Arts & Crafts Village. Fashioned after a traditional Mexican village, the name translates to the "best of everything." It combines distinctive shops with artists at work and even some entertainment and music filling its squares.
Sedona is nearly halfway from Phoenix to the Utah border, where a town has gotten more than its fair share of attention during the 2020s - Lake Powell. It was formed when the 710’ high Glen Canyon Dam, which was built in the early 1960s on the Colorado River. Climate Change and overuse have caused a major drop in the lake’s water level, to only about 25% of its capacity in 2022 – the lowest ever. Its dropping elevation makes it less viable as a source of hydropower generation for surrounding regions, as well as challenges tourism as fewer water recreation activities are possible on the diminishing lake. Fortunately there are other sights to see in the area, which is part of The Great Basin Desert. This desert is very different from the Sonoran; there’s mainly low vegetation like sagebrush and very few, if any, cacti. It includes large barren areas, and some spectacular geological formations or buttes.
For more details about amazing and awe-some Arizona, check out my video or in--person presentation through your local library or community center. For a listing of programs and places I'll be, check my Programs page.
