Friday (6/5) we drove from Page south. Our first stop was at the Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River.
The 3/4 mile hike through desert terrain from the parking area to the overlook (with no railing) was quite pleasant due to the early hour.
From the overlook it is nearly 3000 feet down to the river bed. We were able to see a few rafts, boats, and a campsite on the beach at the inside of the river bend.
Our next stop was Cameron. This little town was established in 1907 as a trading post with the local Indians when the suspension bridge was first built across the Little Colorado River at this point. This greatly reduced the difficulty from moving from one side of this tributary arm of the Grand Canyon to the other.
The original trading post owner's house has been converted to a very nice "gallery" shop for high end Native American arts and crafts. For example we saw an 1875 Navajo blanket priced at $92,000. There was a basket (old also) for $32,000. And so on. It was very attractive and I'm sure a great location for "true" collectors. We, however, did not make any purchases here. There was a much larger "trading post" across the street with more down to earth nick-knacks and tourist trinkets.
Behind the gallery building and enclosed by a small motel that was also adorned in the red rock of the region, was a beautiful little courtyard. The lushness of the courtyard belied the surrounding desert. It was clear this little courtyard received substantial doses of water each day in order to be sustained.
From Cameron we drove on to Flagstaff, where we hoped to find lunch. This drive took us out of the desert and to the higher elevations of the San Francisco mountains in the vicinity of Flagstaff. Flagstaff was an interesting, if crowded, small city. It is home to Northern Arizona University and the downtown had a sort of touristy, preservationist, college town feel. We also traveled a few miles of the historic route 66 just east of Flagstaff and saw several remnants of that era. Sadly, several of the old "motor court" motels were essentially tenement housing now and in very poor condition.
We found a quirky little restaurant for lunch. We had pizza, which was OK, but nothing to write home (or blog) about. The scenic route out of Flagstaff took us into and down Oak Creek Canyon. The upper reaches of this Canyon was so lush we felt, at times, as if we were back east (in the mountains of western North Carolina, perhaps). As we continued down the Canyon, it remained clearly more vegetated than the Page and Cameron areas, but less so than the upper Canyon and we started to see more and more evidence that we were in Sedona's red rock country.
About six miles north of Sedona we stopped at Slide Rock State Park. This was the 1911 homestead of the Pendley family. Frank Pendley first visited the area on a fishing trip in 1907 and decided to homestead the property in 1910 (after passage of the 1910 Homestead Act). He devised an irrigation system for his ~40 acres that brought water from more than a mile up Canyon to his property. This allowed him to have an apple orchard and raise numerous other truck vegatables. The family added some "tourist cabins" in 1933 and the Canyon road was paved in 1938. This homestead remained an operating family farm until 1984.
Of course as the name suggested, a prime attraction of the park is the sliding opportunities of the creek passing through the red rock bed. Nathan bravely decided to "wade" while the rest of us watched in anticipation of his falling.
But he managed to maintain his balance with only a few "near misses."
After our stop at Slide Rock State Park we made our way on into Sedona. I'm not sure what we expected, but we had heard from so many that we would just love Sedona. But we didn't really. It seemed an overly crowded and touristy, somewhat pretentious and expensive little town. Perhaps we were just too tired to appreciate it, but even the scenary didn't impress us that much. Maybe we just did Sedona in the wrong order, but if you have just come from the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon, both with stunning Red Rock scenery on a scale that put Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon to shame, it's just doesn't measure up. I'm sure if we had come from the south out of the desert into Sedona on our way north to the Grand Canyon, we might have felt differently. We could see it had some charms, but not enough to bring us under it's spell.
