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Arizona - Phoenix, Sedona, Tucson, Grand Canyon
Time of Visit: January 2022
Intro
For the New Year, I went on a trip with my parents and girlfriend to Arizona. It pains me a bit to pollute the internet with even more images of the Grand Canyon, but the blog needs more content.
Phoenix
Legend has it that the name alone can send urban planners into a spastic, uncontrollable rage. Phoenix is the poster child of wasteful, single-family, car-dependent sprawl that has encroached on so many of America's beautiful landscapes like a metastasizing cancer. Although the Phoenix airport is located in the center of the city, it took 40 minutes to drive to our AirBNB on the outskirts.
In spite of all the city's faults, and as much as this new urbanist hates to admit it, driving in Phoenix is a joy. Roads are immaculately smooth, traffic is minimal, signs are logical, and most arterial roads are lined with an assortment of beautiful desert flora. The city's transportation engineers deserve raises. (The urban planners should lose their jobs.)
For my first meal, I had some authentic Arizonan cuisine.
The one other saving grace of Phoenix is the Musical Instrument Museum. The museum contains exhibits of musical instruments from over 150 countries and, for each country, video exhibits cycling through several representative performances of the music from that country. Admirably, minority groups in larger countries are not ignored; in the Russia exhibit, for example, Tchaikovsky and Tuvan throat singing are featured with equal prominence. Four hours was only enough for me to skim through half of it. A great place to be as a music nerd.
Tucson
Tucson is about a two-hour drive south from Phoenix through absolutely nothing. It's known for Saguaro (pronounced sa-WA-ro) cacti. We went hiking in the eastern portion of Saguaro National Park starting from this trailhead. The cold January weather was perfect.
To this suburbanite born and raised in the Northeast US, the variety of cacti was amazing.
This stream brought an end to our hike since we didn't have waterproof boots.
Sedona
About two hours north of Phoenix is the city of Sedona, known for its red-rock landscapes. Somehow, it also became a hotspot for New Age tourism. In addition to normal tourist town amenities, it also has plenty of psychics, massage centers, crystal and incense stores, and other shops that inexplicably attract exclusively rich white housewives.
Landscapes like these surround the entire town, which is situated in a valley.
The redness comes from the high concentration of iron in the rocks.
Petrified Forest National Park
Millions of years ago, Arizona had a subtropical climate and was covered in forests. Some trees fell in the water and were buried by sediment before they were able to decay fully. Groundwater containing quartz seeped into the logs, fossilizing them. Today you can see the result two hours east of Sedona in the middle of nowhere.
Although the park's name comes from the petrified logs, the landscapes are equally interesting.
Grand Canyon National Park
Two hours west of Sedona, and equally in the middle of nowhere, is the Grand Canyon.
You've heard it all - pictures don't do it justice, it's bigger than it looks, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. It's all true.
Instead of serving up 20 mediocre pictures of the canyon, I wanted to remark upon how excellent the park infrastructure is. Although I went during the low season, the shuttle buses seem well-equipped to handle huge volumes of visitors. And along the South Rim trail, which the vast majority of visitors visit exclusively, there are a mind-boggling amount of signposts, billboards, and educational centers discussing the geology and history of the region. The NPS is an American treasure and is the best government agency in this country.
