Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

by Charles Francis Saunders

Near Adamana, Arizona. A glimpse of the famous Painted Desert in the background.

A CORNER IN SANTA FE, N. M.

The New Mexican capital retains to this day many picturesque features of the Spanish and Mexican dominance.

CHAPTER XI
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.