Forty-eight hours ago, we had nothing fixed in stone about where we might go. Penciled in was the idea we might head into Los Angeles, but with our heat wave here in the Southwest, that didn’t sound like an appealing plan. With Caroline asking about doing something, I quickly looked at our options, but the prices for lodging in Greer and Pinetop/Lakeside were reflective of the attraction of desert dwellers getting away to those cooler parts of the state and thus were struck from the list of possibilities. Mount Lemon down in Tucson at 9,171 feet (2,795 meters) of coolness above the heat saw all lodging sold out throughout the next weeks, if not months.
Flagstaff wasn’t capturing my imagination, but just then, west of that mountain town, Williams caught my eye. It’s been ten years since Jutta, Caroline, and I one winter morning, hopped aboard the train that runs to the doorstep of the Grand Canyon South Rim north of here. Other than that overnight and one back in the year 2000, when Caroline had blue hair, and we made our very first train journey to the Canyon, we’ve not really given any time to explore the area, so we decided we’d rectify that.
With our cheap room at the Rodeway Inn booked (I can’t believe I have to say that it’s only $80 a night when that was luxury lodging of last resort for us 20 years ago), I went to work on finding us some hiking trails. Then, just this morning, on our walk, I was wondering if Caroline had a junior ranger badge from nearby Walnut Canyon National Monument, and she thought she didn’t. Looking up Walnut Canyon in the long list of 2,907 published blog posts, it would appear that it’s been about 20 years since last we visited, but maybe I missed publishing something about a subsequent visit; who knows? As it’s only about 40 miles east of Williams, I guessed that we’d pay it a visit.
Williams is only about 2.5 hours north of us, and that’s if we take the less-than-scenic route of driving up Interstate 17, which we’ve been doing a lot this year, so I had to mix things up. Why not add an hour to the drive time and take us out over Congress (the Frog Stone up top and this overlook are nearby), Yarnell, Skull Valley, Iron Springs, Paulden, and Ash Fork? Hey, that’s a great idea, and it’s a lot easier to stop for photos of the blistering desert before heading into the higher elevations.
It being Friday, Caroline finished her day with a quick happy hour in the form of a tasty Manhattan handcrafted by the boss. Out by 3:30, we were underway, and since I had already stopped for coffee, we had nothing to do but drive. But we didn’t get very far as in Wickenburg; I pulled into the old Tastee Freeze we’ve been stopping at for years so Caroline could get a small cone dipped in chocolate. Trying to be good about my diet, I had a single bite, and that was that.
After passing through the small town of Congress but before Yarnell, we detoured to check out the Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial State Park. It turns out that the park is actually a trail with memorial plaques along the first 2.5 miles that share a small story about each of the 19 firefighters who perished out here a few years ago. An additional mile of the trail takes visitors to the fatality site. It’s late, and it’s hot, so we pencil into our brains that we’d like to return around October for the 7-mile roundtrip hike.
Skull Valley is the tiniest little crossroads, and normally, I think I would have photographed the small market, but it’s looking shabby these days. The area out here between Yarnell and Prescott is beautiful, and most of it is used as ranchland, with a guy named Rex Maughan seeming to own nearly everything. Well, Maughan ranches include 512,000 acres of land or 800 square miles of Arizona (2,071 square kilometers). For scale, these ranches add up to being about eight times larger than Paris, France, or only slightly smaller than the entire country of Luxembourg.
Not a lot of sights, really but this sure was better than the interstate we’ve driven so often. Sunset was just south of Ash Fork, about 45 minutes from Williams where we’ll be spending the weekend.