FLAGSTAFF AS A BASE
A score of years ago Flagstaff[68] was chiefly known to the traveler as
the gateway to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, 70 miles to the
northwest. One may still reach that marvelous chasm by automobile from
Flagstaff, arriving at Grand View after 5 or 6 hours’ driving, now
through a park-like forest of yellow pine, now across an open plateau
region with alluring views of far-off mountain ranges and of the Painted
Desert. The completion of the railroad spur from Williams to the Grand
Cañon, however, put a quietus upon the operation of the horse stages
from Flagstaff; and since the passing of the Grand Cañon business the
town has cut small figure in tourist itineraries, its energies since
being concentrated on the less precarious profits from lumber, cattle
and wool. Nevertheless, its situation in a clearing of the beautiful
Coconino National Forest, 7000 feet above the sea makes it a convenient
base for visiting certain attractions of a remarkable nature thereabout,
as lava beds, ice caves, extinct volcanoes, prehistoric cliff[69] and
cinder-cone dwellings, the Painted Desert, and the famous San Francisco
Peaks, fabled home of the Hopi Katchinas and the scene of many an Indian
legend. The town has several hotels of a modest sort, and is on the line
of the National Old Trails transcontinental motor highway; and if you
have your own car or the wherewithal to rent one in Flagstaff, you can
be very happy in this neighborhood for a week or two. The town itself,
with a population of a couple of thousand, has a certain picturesqueness
of an up-to-date frontier fashion, in which automobiles and soda-pop
largely take the place of ponies, pistols and “forty-rod,” for at this
writing the hand of “bone dry” Prohibition rests paternally upon
Arizona. Especially interesting are Saturday nights, when the streets
are likely to be thronged with lumberjacks, cowpunchers and
ranchers—American and Mexican—come to town to swap news and trade, to
see the “shows,” play pool and listen to the “rag” of blatant
gramophones. A Navajo or two, standing in the glare of the electric
lights, may add a touch of aboriginal color to the scene—teamsters for
some desert trading post.
Dominating Flagstaff, as Mont Blanc dominates Chamonix, is the isolated
mountain mass, the highest in Arizona, called the San Francisco Peaks,
snow-crowned seven or eight months in the year and familiar to every
traveler by the Santa Fe’s transcontinental trains. Their clustered
half-dozen summits in the form of graceful cones attain a maximum
elevation of 12,611 feet above the sea (5600 feet above Flagstaff) and
have been a famous landmark from the time of the Spanish conquistadores,
who named them, to the present day. The Navajos, as has been told in a
previous chapter, assign to the great mountain a divine construction
from earth brought up in the Emergence from the underworld, the gods who
built it pinning it down poetically with a sunbeam. Matter-of-fact
geologists, however, consider the mass as merely an extinct volcano with
its top blown off, and find its flanks covered with the congealed lava
streams of successive eruptions. The disintegrated surfaces of lava make
a fertile bed for the abundant forests, gardens of wild flowers, and
natural fields of indigenous grasses that clothe the base and sides up
to within a few hundred feet of the craggy top. If you have a taste for
mountain climbing and fine outlooks, by all means give a day or two to
the San Francisco Mountain. It is of easiest ascent, and the views, full
of delight from the moment you leave Flagstaff, attain at the summit a
climax that is nothing short of dramatic. The whole of the northern and
central Arizona plateau is spread below and about you in such glory of
color (if the atmospheric conditions be right) as you have never dreamt
of. You can pick out the farther wall of the Grand Cañon and the
Buckskin Mountains beyond; the companion volcanic cones of Kendrick,
Bill Williams,[70] and Sitgreaves to the westward; the Mogollon Mesa
stretching south towards Phoenix; the Verde Valley; the Red Rock Country
and Oak Creek Cañon; Sunset Peak;[71] and most striking of all, the
glory of the Painted Desert stretching illimitably to the northeast,
with the Little Colorado River winding across it to join the Big
Colorado 60 miles due north of you. The opportunity to enjoy that
unobscured outlook upon the desert from a point over a mile above it, is
alone a sufficient reward for the trip. It is like looking on another
world, so unearthly are the tones in which that marvelous waste is
dyed—indefinite shades of yellow, pink, crimson, brown, cream, green; so
striking the sculpturing of its mesas and promontories. Then, too, if
you have a spark of romance in your make-up, will it not be an event to
tread the very pathways of the gods with whom the Indian fancy has
peopled the glades and gorges of this hoary old volcano, as the Greeks
peopled Ida—to know that somewhere in these sunny, piny slopes is the
fabled house of the Sun God, who, when he would travel, summons a
rainbow, as you or I would ring for a taxicab, and to whom, it is said,
the Hopis still send prayer plumes by a messenger who trots the 70 miles
from the pueblos hither between sunrise and sunset of a summer day?
Would it not give you a thrill to feel when passing through the aspen
groves that dot the upper heights, that in such a rustling wood here
upon this very mountain, when the world was young, the Hero-Children of
the Spider Woman slew the wicked Giant Elk who ravaged the land of the
Hopi—those Hero-Children of whom one was Youth, begotten of the Light,
and the other Echo, begotten of the Raindrop?[72]
From Flagstaff to the tip of Humphrey’s Peak, the highest of all, is 10
miles in a bee-line, or about 15 as pedestrians and horses go. Of this
distance about 5 miles are by a good road practicable for automobiles,
now winding through open forest, now skirting some ranch—a pleasant,
old-fashioned highway bordered with worm fences and thickets of wild
rose and goldenrod. From a certain point on the road to the Peaks, which
are always in view, an easy trail leads through a charming forest to
which the absence of underbrush gives a park-like character, open and
sunny and carpeted in places with wild flowers. The prevailing trees for
a couple of thousand feet of the ascent are yellow pines, rising at
their best to a height of over 100 feet and probably of an age of 300 to
500 years. Above this yellow pine belt the trail steepens and zigzags
sharply bringing you out at last amid broken stone and volcanic scoriae
where no trees are, only shy sub-alpine plants clinging by their toes to
the crevices of the rocks. Here a hog-back joins Humphrey’s Peak (12,611
feet) and Agassiz (12,330 feet), and you have the choice of mounting to
either or both. Under the eastern slopes of these peaks a glacier 2
miles long once headed, whose bed is now a large valley within the
mountain’s folds dropping downward to the northeast. To the geological,
this valley with its moraine and glaciated rocks is a source of especial
interest, since it constitutes one of the southernmost instances of ice
action within the United States.[73]
A good walker used to high altitudes can do the round trip from
Flagstaff to the summit and back in a day of 12 hours, but he should be
sure to carry water. For the average tourist, however, horseback is
recommended with a guide (procurable at Flagstaff). Added interest will
be secured by arranging to camp over night upon the mountain, for in
this way the superb light effects of early morning and evening may be
enjoyed at leisure. Owing to snow on the peaks most of the year, the
ascent must usually be made between mid-June and mid-October. June is
probably the best month, if snow is absent, as the atmosphere is then
apt to be at its clearest; after that, September or early October is the
choice. July and August are months of frequent, almost daily,
thunderstorms, which, of course, are disturbing factors in more ways
than one. Flagstaff, by the way, is credited by the United States’
Geological Survey with a greater rainfall than any other station in
Arizona, and this is attributed to its nearness to the San Francisco
Mountain.
Should you desire a closer acquaintance with that harlequin of wastes,
the Painted Desert, there are from Flagstaff two trips you can take
across an end of it with reasonable success in a motor car. One is to
the Hopi village of Oraibi by way of Tolcheco, and the other to Tuba.
The distance in each case is about 70 miles. To Tuba there is a
semi-weekly automobile stage (with shovel and water bags strapped to
it), making the round trip usually inside of one day. It is an
interesting excursion, taking you close to Sunset Peak, with its
remarkable rosy crest, and over the Little Colorado River by a bridge
that makes the traveler independent of the sudden rises of that erratic
stream. You will pass here and there mounds that are the crumbled
remains of prehistoric pueblos, and again stone chips and bits of trunks
of petrified trees, the scattered fragments of vanished forests of which
the Petrified Forest of Adamana is our most perfect remnant. Sometimes
we pass beneath ruddy cliffs eroded and weathered into such
grotesqueness of face and figure as would make Alice out of Wonderland
feel at home, squat toads and humped camels and ogres with thick
grinning lips. Farther away, mesas jutting into the desert present the
semblance of cities with towers and ramparts in ghostly tones of pink
and yellow and cream.[74] Occasionally an auto-truck, hauling goods to
or from some desert trade-post, passes you, and sometimes a wagon train
of wool, horse-drawn, in charge of Navajo teamsters. Approaching Tuba,
you cross the Moenkopi Wash, and are refreshed with the greenery of the
farms of the Hopis, who from time immemorial have occupied this haunt of
moisture. If you have time to visit the little pueblo of Moenkopi, 2
miles from Tuba and perched on the mesa edge overlooking the farms, it
will interest you. It is the westernmost of all the Hopi villages, its
population of a couple of hundred enjoying life in Indian fashion with
abounding dances and thanksgiving. At Tuba itself, there is not much for
the casual visitor, except a couple of Indian trading establishments and
a Government Boarding School with its concomitant buildings connected
with the Agency of the Western Navajo Reservation. The region
roundabout, however, includes enough points of local interest to occupy
a two or three weeks’ vacation very pleasantly. Accommodations are
obtainable at a trader’s or one of the Government houses, and saddle
horses may be hired from the Indians. Some 65 miles to the north are
certain remarkably fine pueblo- or Cliff dwelling-ruins, known as Betata
Kin and Keet Seel, in Marsh Pass.[75]
Twenty or thirty miles south of Flagstaff is a region of unique
interest, known as the Oak Creek Valley, whither Flagstaffians motor in
season to fish for trout and enjoy a bit of Arcady. There are a public
resort or two and a number of ranches in the valley, tributary to which
is some of the wildest scenery in the Southwest. In adjacent cañons,
whose sides often rise an almost sheer 800 to 1000 feet, are the ruined
habitations of a prehistoric people (probably ancestors of certain
existing Hopi clans)—cliff houses, cavate dwellings and fortified
eminences, the last advantageously adopted by the Apaches in the wars of
half a century ago. The dominant color of the rock is bright red,
frequently in horizontal bands, and has gained the region the popular
appellation of “The Red Rock Country.” The cañon walls and outstanding
rock masses have been worn by the elements into columns, minarets,
steeples, temples and other architectural semblances such as are shown
surpassingly in the Grand Cañon. Indian pictographs abound—some
prehistoric, some evidently of modern Apache doing. Dr. J. W. Fewkes,
the scientific discoverer of the region a quarter of a century ago,
thought himself justified in comparing it to the Garden of the Gods,
than which it is much more extended.[76]