The Arizona Trail in the Mormon Lake area is a mixed bag. North from the Horse Lake Trailhead the trail was an annoyingly rocky double track. I don’t mean rock garden technical riding, just a solid trail of rocks. Derek rode it and I hiked part of it and neither was great. In fact, Derek …
Mormon Lake isn’t really a lake anymore. In fact I think it was last full In the 40s. It’s more of a marshy wetlands now, but still pretty against the backdrop of the San Francisco peaks. We spent a week boondocking in the forest down the highway about 10 minutes and hiked and rode mountain …
Walnut Canyon National Monument in Flagstaff rounded out our stay in the area. We hiked about a mile into the canyon passing 25 cliff dwelling rooms constructed by the Sinagua, a pre-Columbian cultural group that lived in Walnut Canyon from about 1100 to 1250 AD. Sinagua is Spanish for “without water”, an acknowledgement that the …
The trails in Flagstaff are tough in that there is a lot of climbing and with exposure. Derek rode some different loops out here and I’ll just lump them together. We do most of our stuff on weekdays so there wasn’t many other users out. I did see some trail runners and he came across …
After hiking around at Sunset Crater Volcano, we continued driving through the monument to the Wukoki, Wupatki, Citadel, Nalakihu, Lomaki, and Box Canyon Pueblos. These pueblos all have a distinctive deep red color and made from thin, flat blocks of the local Moenkopi sandstone. We stopped and walked out to and around the Wukoki Pueblo …
Around the year 1085 CE, the Sunset Crater Volcano erupted. The ground split open along a great fissure nearly 6 miles long, and lava erupted out of it to heights of 850 feet or more. (The Statue of Liberty is only 305 feet). This type of “curtain of fire” created a sheet of lava that …