Ten Hours in Phoenix

Sedona Travelog #2
Phoenix, AZ - Sat, 28 May 2022, 7:30am

When I stop over in a city en route from Point A to Point B I like to call it "8 hours and a shower in ___." That's not accurate for last night's stop in Phoenix. One, we'll been here more like 10 hours. Two, I'm not taking a shower. I plan to get dirty & sweaty during the day. I'll take one this evening to clean up & cool down. Anyway, our 8-10 hours and not-shower in Phoenix have been... as dull as that phrase is meant to imply.

Our flight to PHX last night was uneventful. We left pretty much on time and got in pretty much on time. Edited to add: Oh, and it was 100° F (38° C) when we landed just after 8pm. The daytime high had been 105. This is only late spring weather in Phoenix. In the summer daytime highs will top 110° frequently.

Could we have driven all the way to Sedona last night, as I remarked in my previous blog? Yes, though I'm glad we didn't. Everything after the plane landed seem to take forever. Our hotel is just a mile from the airport, yet we didn't get to our room until almost 9:45pm. Driving to Sedona would have taken until almost midnight. And I was totally ready for sleep before 11. I'm glad I wasn't driving 2 more hours.

This morning we'll drag our stuff back down to the car, get some breakfast at a nearby place like Del Taco— because the free breakfast at the hotel is all sugar-and-carbs crap— and hit the road for Sedona.

Tuzigoot National Monument

Sedona Travelog #3
Cottonwood, AZ - Sat, 28 May 2022, 11:30am

On our way to Sedona this morning we took a detour. As we were passing hrough the small town of Cottonwood we saw signs for Tuzigoot National Monument. Hawk quickly looked it up while I was driving and found it was 15 minutes off our route. As we didn't have strong feelings about what to do at the end of our route we decided the detour would be worth it— to a park we've never been to before!

The oddly named Tuzigoot is a small park where the ruins of an ancient Puebloan village were discovered 100 years ago. The ruins themselves date from circa 800 years ago. We actually don't know what the people who build this place called it. Tuzigoot is an Americanization of the Apache name Tü Zighoot , which means Crooked Water and refers to the prominent bend in the Verde River below the settlement.



The greenery around the river in the picture above is remarkable, BTW. As we drove up from Phoenix this morning we started in low desert— which frankly looks like a volcano, minus the cone peak. We then climbed into high desert... which looks like a volcano but with some scrub grass growing across it (because it gets a smidge more rain). The ruins of numerous villages have been found along this river valley. Together they paint a picture of a relatively prosperous people farming and trading across the area.

At its height there were 110 dwellings in this settlement. There is architectural evidence some dwellings were built to multiple storeys. But by c. 1400 CE the people who lived here started to leave. Around 1600 when European settlers arrived these rock dwellings were already abandoned, and the descendants of the Pueblo builders lived in tents and huts down on the plain.

Where did the people who built settlements like this go? The Hopi say that settlements like this were never meant to be permanent. Instead, it was a stop on a migration... but to where, and why, they don't/can't say. The Zuni say the able-bodied left; the sick and weak stayed behind. The Yavapai say their ancestors left behind these pueblos and the cultivated farming to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.