Winter-Spring 2018
Our trip this year to Arizona for the Giant's Spring Training began with visits to two historic towns.
Usually we drive directly to Las Vegas for our first stop, but this year we spent the first night in Tonopah, NV, a place now known for its dark skies, perfect for star-gazing, and as the midway point between Reno and Las Vegas.
But its glory years were in the early 1900's when silver strikes turned it into a boom town. At five stories tall, the Mizpah Hotel was the tallest building in Nevada until 1927. Celebrities ranging from Wyatt Earp to Jack Dempsey passed through Tonopah and Howard Hughes married Jean Peters there in 1957. It's hard to imagine all of this when visiting this high desert location today.
Then we drove through Las Vegas and continued on to one of the two places in Nevada where gambling is illegal: Boulder City. The town was a planned community built in 1931 to house the workers needed to construct the Hoover Dam. We took the walking tour of the historic district where the design of the buildings is Spanish Colonial Revival. None of this was built as temporary housing at all as the original buildings are still the core of the city and what were the workers' homes are still occupied.
While there, we also re-visited Hoover Dam itself and things there have certainly changed. Homeland Security makes its presence obvious with military-style gear and assault weapons to make sure that the tourists don't hijack the place with their pen knives. So we headed on to Scottsdale.
Spring training has also changed over the years. It's certainly a big business now with high-priced tickets, sellouts--even lawn seating is sold by individual spaces--and this year we saw paid parking for the first time in Scottsdale. But still, we escaped the cold and snow and had a good time.
NAVAJO NATION
We took the long way home and visited two of the most iconic places in the Navajo Nation: Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon as well as the Navajo National Monument.Monument Valley is the symbol of the American West despite the fact that it is not part of any westward route and was rarely visited until Harry Goulding opened his trading post in 1923 and proceeded to convince John Ford to film a movie there in 1939.
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| Monument Valley from Goulding's Lodge |
The valley is a lot bigger in Stagecoach than it is in real life and the stagecoach itself is actually heading in the wrong direction as it travels through the valley. But that's Hollywood and scores of directors have followed John Ford's lead into the valley with mostly westerns but stretching to include Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Robert Zemeckis with Forrest Gump.
Goulding's was the original lodge there but it is actually outside of the park and we stayed in one of the Navajo-owned view cabins overlooking the valley where we watched sunrise and sunset.
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| View from Cabin |
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| Monument Valley Sunrise |
The Valley Loop road is unpaved and in terrible condition but you can drive it yourself--if you have high clearance or a rental car. We opted for a Navajo Guided Tour that included an additional loop.
The views were as dramatic as we expected and the famous view from John Ford Point is so well known that it's virtually a cliché. One of the valley residents rides his horse out to the desert promontory where you can take his picture. You can Google "John Ford Point" images if you need to see a wide selection of those pictures.
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| View from John Ford Point |
The additional loop was really interesting. About seventeen families have part-time homes in the valley proper and rely on propane and solar for modern power and, since all of the valley wells have been dry for quite a while, water has to be trucked in. We visited with one family and while we were there, two wild horses wandered in searching for water. The arid west was never more apparent.
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The road from Monument Valley to Page, AZ took us to the Navajo National Monument. This is a National Park site in the Navajo Nation that has nothing to do with the Navajo. It is the site of three separate cliff dwellings built by the Ancient Puebloans.
The Inscription House site is said to be quite fragile and is not open to the public (it's not even shown on the NPS maps). The Keet Seel site is the best preserved of the three. It was the first discovered in modern times and is the reason for the National Monument but it is a 5 mile hike from the Visitor's Center and can only be visited during the summer months with a Ranger guide. The Betakin dwellings weren't even discovered until after the Monument was designated but is the most accessible of the ruins both from hiking trails and from roadway overlooks.
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For our return to Page, AZ, we stayed at the Lake Powell Marina and Resort with a view of the lake and where we watched dozens of rabbits come out at dusk to feed on the grass.
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| View from Lake Powell Resort Room |
You may not have heard of Antelope Canyon but you have probably seen photographs of it. The canyon begins in the sandstone hills on Navajo land south of Lake Powell and is actually one of the smaller feeders into the lake. But it is quite a canyon.
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| Upper Antelope Canyon |
We went on a walking tour of Upper Antelope Canyon and a boat tour of the canyon where it enters Lake Powell.
The walking tour is extremely popular. A lot of tour books say you can just drive to the site and sign up for one of the guided tours. While this may be true for the less popular and more difficult Lower Canyon walking tour, it simply isn't true for the Upper Canyon. Even the low-light early morning and late afternoon tours were filled when we were there so we were glad we had made reservations with one of the Navajo tour guides.
The upper canyon is a slot canyon carved through the sandstone by flash floods with a depth of up to 120 feet. When the sun is high enough, beams of light can shine down into the canyon in dramatic fashion. Our visit in late winter certainly wasn't the best time for that, but there were still special photography tours scheduled for the peak mid-day viewing hours and we were fortunate enough to get a tour just ahead of one of these.
The tour walked us through the slot canyon and then returned the same way and as we returned we ran into a photography tour group with about a dozen tripods set up to take the same picture--I really regret not taking a photo of the group.
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From the Lake Powell Marina we took the boat tour of Antelope Canyon where it enters Lake Powell. It was a much shorter trip than the boat tour we took to Rainbow Bridge National Monument in the fall of 2016 but it was quite impressive.
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| Antelope Canyon at Lake Powell |
Antelope Canyon is also a slot canyon where it enters Lake Powell and our boat went up the canyon as far as it could. We almost traveled too far and the boat pilot carefully turned the boat around with precise back and forth maneuvers. The kayakers from the Antelope Canyon Marina went much farther up the canyon. It looked like a fun trip.
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| Antelope Canyon Kayakers |
For More Photographs, go to MONUMENT VALLEY
