On the Road to Sedona

One of the great things about teaching on the semester system is spring break.  Of course, I had a spring break when we were on the quarter system, but it fell right between winter and spring quarters, so every professor I knew was busy finishing up their final grading for one quarter and planning their syllabi for the next.  Unless you were a speed-grader and a serious pre-planner, you never really got a break.  Under semesters, that has all changed.  Now, for one glorious week in mid-March, we have a true spring break.

This year, I did it up right.  My friend, Cindy, and I flew to Phoenix, rented a car, and drove to Sedona, Arizona for a few days of fun.  Cindy had spent a day in Sedona a few years back on a trip to the Grand Canyon, and she'd been wanting to go back to really explore this gorgeous place.  I was in Arizona in 2011 with my brother and sister-in-law, and we'd done a scenic train tour of the red rock canyons that surround Sedona, but I'd never been into Sedona itself.  Sunshine, warm days, low humidity, a good friend, and spectacular scenery: the perfect spring break ingredients.

On our drive north out of Phoenix, we decided to make a couple of stops.  Cindy turned me onto the National Parks Passport way back in 2002.  Here's a link, just in case you don't know about this truly addictive passtime: http://www.easternnational.org/passport.aspx.  We would be passing very near two National Monument Sites, so--passports in hand--we made a couple of stops.  First up, Montezuma Castle, a wonderfully preserved prehistoric cliff dwelling. These pueblo ruins--some of the best preserved in North America--were inhabited by the Sinagua people for more than 400 years. At that end of that time, they just up and left, and nobody knows why. Back in the thirties, the park system used to let tourists climb a series of ladders up to--and into-- the dwellings, but it quickly became clear that the ancient pueblos would not last long if this practice continued.  Now, you can view the cliff dwellings from a nice walkway on the ground below.  I loved the place: it was like nothing I'd ever seen before, and it satisfied a childhood interest of mine.  I can remember sitting in geography and history classes as a child, learning about pueblos and cliff dwellings, and I always wondered what they really looked like.  Now I know! By the way, Montezuma had nothing to do with this place: that name is an historical misnomer!

After touring around for awhile, we had lunch and then drove on to our next park site: Montezuma Well (you guessed it: Montezuma had nothing to do with this one, either). The well looks like a big round lake surrounded by cliffs, and according to the NPS, it was formed when a limestone cavern collapsed long, long ago.  They say that over a million gallons of water flow through the well daily.  The water is a constant 74 degrees, and even though Arizona is plagued by droughts, the well has never run dry.  I guess this explains why the Sinagua people populated this area, too.  On the cliffs along the edge of the well, there are more dwellings.  This place must have been quite an oasis in this desert landscape.  Cindy and I walked around the well for quite a while: it's really a lovely site.

 We stopped at one other NPS site on our way to Sedona, but we didn't stay long.  We hadn't heard of the place, and we couldn't tell exactly what it was!  We wandered around a bit, drove down a long dirt road, but never really ran into anything that suggested we were close to a monument--or a stamping station, for that matter.  We took a photo and moved on.

Next stop: Sedona and those remarkable red rocks!