Sedona, Phoenix, and Tucson

It has been almost 2-weeks since I have made a posting, and it seems like it has been 2-months.
Once we left Zion National Park our plans were to visit the Grand Canyon. I have always wanted to raft the canyon and we were prepared to spend a few days in the bottom of the canyon on a raft trip. When I began to research these trips I learned that not only do you have to make reservations several months (sometimes 6-10) in advance, but Erik is too young at 8 years old. Plan B was to take a mule ride to the bottom of the canyon. Again we were foiled because the minimum age is 12 years old to do this activity. We decided to bypass the canyon and plan a separate trip in a couple of years (when Erik is older) and do it right, rafting the canyon for 2-4 days and mule riding.

We moved on to Sedona, Arizona. This is a tourist trap of a town that sits between several beautiful canyons of red rock. There are more galleries in Sedona than Ketchum, Idaho (and we are not interested in spending $30,000 on a bronze statue of an Indian with a deer head: which by the way was very cool). 4 hours of street walking and browsing curio junk shops was enough for us. We stayed at a great park on the river but were only able to get 1-nights stay due to earlier reservations by others. I would come back here for 2-3 days and hike the surrounding hills. http://www.visitsedona.com/

On to Phoenix:

Our bike rack, with 4 bikes, has been mounted to the rear bumper of the fifth wheel. This is not a very good mounting system since each bump in the road translates into a lot of movement in the rear of the trailer (sort of a sea-saw). I began to notice, several thousand miles ago, that the rear bumper end caps kept loosening up, and one of the bike handles was occasionally hitting the rear of the trailer. This did not make sense since the bike handle was 10 to 12 inches from the rear of the trailer. In order for this to really be happening the bike would have to move twice this distance; swaying almost 2 feet. Finally, I was convinced that this was really happening, and the rear bumper was "corkscrewing" causing the end caps to loosen up, and it was just a matter of time before the bikes tore the bumper off the trailer and abandoned us somewhere on an interstate. We did some research on alternatives and visited a few bike shops before finding a new rack that mounts on the rear ladder. I ordered one to be delivered to a bike shop in Page, AZ; thinking that we would pick it up after our trip to Zion (5-days shipping promised; 7-day trip. Sounds OK). After 7-days, no bike rack. Repeated e-mails and phone calls with no reply we figured we had been screwed and continued on our trip.

We began to enter Phoenix and noticed a halo of smog over the valley, and a lot of traffic. Almost everything is new! New houses in huge developments and a lot of new retail strip malls. This city is on fire! The growth is astronomical. We settled into a park on the northern outskirts and received a call from the bike rack guy. He claimed he shipped it to the wrong address and it was returned; and he promised to send it overnight to his brother-in-law who lives in Scottsdale. OK, we should have it in 1-2 days and can then get out of this huge city.

Unfortunately, we do not have much to share about Phoenix. The bike rack took another 5-6 days to arrive. We tried to look up an old high school buddy to no avail (anyone know where Michael Henning and Linda Vandsant are?), and played a little tourist stuff; met up with my sister Jody-Butt for dinner (she was here on business), and then got out of town as soon as we could.

Tucson, AZ: A little smaller town at about 900,000 people (vs. 2,000,000 for Phoenix).
Our direction is towards the gulf of Mexico. We do not really have any plans between here and there and Tucson was on the way. Just outside of town there is an old movie set called "Old Tucson". This is really just a tourist trap and re-creation of an 1800's western town but it seemed like a good field trip for the kids. They have filmed about a hundred movies here including several TV shows (Think about: Gunsmoke, Bonanza episodes, little house on the prairie, etc.) Not worthy of a stop.

Up the road is the Saguaro National Park, in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. The famous Saguaro cactus only grows in the Sonoran Desert (although not everywhere in this desert). They range from the SW third of AZ south into Mexico, on the Eastern side of the sea of Cortez about half the distance the length (south) of the Baha peninsula. I know so much about the Saguaro because the kids earned their eighth Junior Ranger badge here (we spent over 2-hours at the visitor center and were evicted at closing time). The Saguaro is very slow growing (it only grows about 1 to 1.5 inches in the first eight years of its life). Branches do not appear until it reaches 50 to 70 years old, and they live to be up to 200 years old.

In late April through early June, the tops of the saguaro's trunk and arms sprout a profusion of large, creamy white flowers. Individual flowers open at night and close the following afternoon. To develop into fruits, they must be pollinated within this time frame. Pollination is carried out by nectar feeding bats, birds and insects. Each fruit contains about 2,000 tiny black seeds. When these fruits and seeds are eaten by a coyote or cactus wren, the seeds pass through their digestive system and are distributed throughout the desert. A saguaro can produce 40 million seeds during its lifetime.

For Halloween we visited the Tucson Zoo where they had a small celebration (Sunday eve). The kids dressed up and got their candy fix and we all waited in lines for about 2 hours as it rained lightly Tucson style.

The Official Visitors Guide in Tucson named several "Must see" places: including the town of Tombstone (made famous by Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp and his brother, and the movie with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer). This place is a joke! There are about 5 dozen junk shops all with the same crap. Their claim to fame is 4 staged shoot outs each day. This town is not on the way to anything else you would want to see and not worth the trip unless you really enjoy cheap crappy souvenir shops.

Kartchner Caves: Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen, two cave enthusiasts, first discovered a small opening in a sinkhole that led to the main cave in 1974. Worrying about potential vandalism, they spent the next two years exploring the cave in secret, even keeping the secret from family and friends. It wasn't until February 1978 that Tufts and Tenen told the property owners James and Lois Kartchner about the cave (after they tried to buy the property from them), and later led them and their five sons down to see it for themselves.

In 1988, fourteen years after Tufts and Tenen's discovery, Arizona State Parks purchased the site where the cave still lay hidden beneath a hill, and named it Kartchner Caverns State Park. Since then, Arizona State Parks has conducted many studies of the cave, focusing on protecting its environmental integrity. It has also developed the cave, making it accessible for visitors through a wide, winding path network accessible only through a series of conservation chambers that maintain cave conditions. Visitors may see the cave only through the parks reservation system.

This place is incredible! There are 2 separate tours of different caverns: one of which is only open 6 months out of the year due to Bats that hibernate, and raise their young in this cavern (Closed April through early October). We were lucky to be here at the right time of the year and were able to visit both caverns.

The caverns have only been open to publicblic for a few years and they have done an incredible job of developing the park towards conservation of these caverns. If you have the opportunity, this is a place to see: about 1 hour east of Tucson. The kids also earned their ninth Junior Ranger badge here.

The following day we headed out of Tucson to a town called Bisbee. This was another "Must see" stop in the Tucson Visitors Guide. This town is south of the infamous town of Tombstone; very near the Mexican border. We spent the night (Halloween) partly due to the fact that the towns web site claimed famous celebrations in its downtown core. The town was dead! Evidently Halloween celebrations ceased several years ago and no one thought to update the official town web site. The kids were disappointed. Kind of a cute town, with shanties built on several hillsides, that looked like old refurbished miners cabins (definitely would not meet codes in Washington). As we walked through town in the late afternoon it felt like a Twilight Zone episode. There were tons of cars and structures, but hardly any people. Then at about 7:00 PM humans in costumes began to emerge: mostly young adults or older kids, and we learned that Halloweenween celebrations this day are carried out in the local bars (all 3 of them).

The next morning we donned miners gear and headed into the Queen City Mine to explore old tunnels.

Copper mining in the late 1800's put the town of Bisbee on the map. The Queen mine has over 144 miles of tunnels. The Copper Queen's lode was mined for nearly a century, from 1877 to 1975. During that time, the mine produced more than eight billion pounds of copper. In addition, substantial quantities of gold, silver, lead, and zinc were extracted from the ore, making the Queen one of the richest mines in Arizona.

Our guide, Juan, spent most of his career working in Bisbee mines. As we rode the train into the cool mine the temperature is a constant 47° Fahrenheit. Juan, regaled us with personal anecdotes from his colorful past. At one stop, he instructed us to train our lights on a wall rigged with more than a dozen sticks of dynamite as he explained how miners used fuses of different lengths to create sequential explosions. "Then we would light them, and go and stand behind another wall," he said, summing up the extent of their safety precautions. As he continued to describe a day in the life of a Bisbee miner, it became clear that blasting was by no means the only perilous task. Challenges from cave-ins to bad air quality meant that miners risked their lives on a daily basis.After viewing ore samples, drills, elevator cages, ore cars, and even a toilet car, we re-emerged from the tunnel aboard the train and rode back to the visitors' center.

Tomorrow on to Texas!