Road Trip -- Flagstaff to Scottsdale

 Road Trip - Flagstaff to Scottsdale

1.

A little after eight in the morning on a bright day, I leave the Americana Motorlodge in Flagstaff, take the freeway south for five miles or so, and, then, exit on a two-lane to descend to Sedona through Oak Creek Canyon.  The ponderosa forests of the plateau are split by the gorge, at first a deep green rift bathed in shadow with dark stone towers brooding overhead.  The road twists and turns, dropping into a narrow fissure crowded with fallen boulders and a stream lunging downward.  Now and then, I pass Coconino National Forest campgrounds, tenting sites in the gloom among forts of scrambled boulders.  The canyon descends for a long way and, then, I am on a narrow shelf overlooking a reservoir locked in the rocks, more steep hills falling in steps to the canyon floor under huge angelic wings of red, feathered stone.  At the base of the gorge, businesses are crowded around some traffic semaphores and, then, I take the road west from the intersection, past the expensive spas and restaurants and the New Age shops, through more red rocks warm and slick-looking above and, at last, at the bottom of the Mogollon rim in the arid, desolate Verde valley.  Lots of people live here – the sides of the mountains are dotted with white and grey subdivisions, town homes and single residence neighborhoods clinging to the bare slopes and, about every quarter mile, there is a stoplight, strip malls and bunker-shaped churches lining the boulevard.  At the lowest point in the valley, between mountain ranges, it’s a suburban wasteland, half wilderness and desert, the other half construction debris, parking lots, fast food places, abandoned truck-trailers in places too dry even for cactus.   The road that I follow runs southeast and, after a dozen miles, the trailer courts and apartment buildings have fallen behind me, and the steep slopes are green with pine once more.  Big buttes with palisades rise over the road that ascends again, corkscrewing up onto the plateau once more.  A few miles from Payson, there’s a forest road to the Tonto Natural Bridge, a state park at the bottom of another deep canyon cut into the side of the plateau.

The road down to the park is very steep – it’s an 18 to 20% downgrade.  The pinon clinging to the sides of the gorge are contorted, twisted and deformed by hardship and drought.  The steep descent pulls you down toward the rooftops of a curious-looking structure, perhaps, an old resort hotel with outbuildings next to a toll-booth at the state park’s entrance.  This is all directly below you, viewed from a bird’s eye vantage, as you come down the steep grade toward a broad grassy meadow rolling across the bottom of the canyon. I don’t see any natural bridge.  The canyon walls are sheer, with jagged palisades, and there seems to be a kind of green, tree-lined ravine at the edge of the meadow.  

People are strolling in small groups on sidewalks crisscrossing the meadow and there are some pit toilets next to the sun-burnt fields where dogs are dashing back and forth.  I take the one-way lane next to the broad, flat tongue of the terrace in the canyon.  The cliffs close together to the southwest, forming a stone funnel at the outlet of the canyon onto some parched rolling hills below .

The curious thing about the Tonto Natural Bridge is that the feature is, more or less, invisible.  There’s really no vantage from the meadow filling the gorge from which to see the formation and, in fact, it’s not intuitively obvious even where it is to be found.  The bridge is hidden because it is, in effect, a sort of cavern, a colossal sinkhole through which a stream has bored a hole.  The entire canyon seems to have been once part of a travertine cave system, fallen now onto the underground river that previously coursed through the grotto.  In a literal sense, the natural bridge is under your feet, concealed below the dome of rock that earlier enclosed the stream.  In Utah and other places in the Southwest (for instance, Sedona), the natural bridges are wind-sculpted and airy formations, arching up over the landscape.  Here, the formula is reversed.  The natural bridge is the outlet of cavern pierced by a slender, if persistent, trickle of water.    It’s not above you but below.

Several viewpoints have been designated from which to view the bridge from the flat terrace of domesticated meadow spread out across the canyon bottom.  The distribution of these viewpoints accessed by short trails doesn’t make an immediate sense – how can the bridge be in several locations simultaneously?-- although as it happens, the perspectives triangulate on the big, ragged mouth cut through the rock supporting the meadow.  The only obvious way to see the feature is to descend several hundred feet into the narrow gorge incised around the edge of the meadow.  The way down is steep, assisted by some daunting stairs mounted against the crumbling walls of the fissure.  At the bottom, the space is claustrophobic with a stony streambed trapped between rocky bluffs and, even, at that point, the bridge hides itself.  A hundred yards down the trail along the creek, the path turns sharply and the bridge comes into view.  In fact, it is cave opening, a hundred feet high, all clogged at its base by fallen rocks the size of mini-vans.  Inside the arch of the cave’s mouth, the ground slopes upward at a 45 degree angle toward an oblong window cut through the rock plateau.  Most notably, two silver threads of water, coruscating in the sunlight, stream from the rim of the canyon above the cave’s mouth, twin falls that shower the boulders at the opening’s threshold.  A large family has descended the steps and trail to the entrance to the grotto and they are scrambling around among the rockfall, clambering on the inclined planes of stone above the slender ray of the creek toppling downhill.  Voices echo.  I suppose its “reckless play” of the kind now endorsed by Wichita educators.  

I climb back out of the gorge, pausing on the switchbacks and landings on the steps.  It’s an arduous ascent but I make it to the top.  A small trail leads through some brush to a vantage over the bridge formation.  I walk to the end of the trail, crane my neck to look down into the pit below me, but can only see the edge of the cave’s opening.  Another vantage, on the opposite side of the valley, provides a better look at the natural bridge.  From this perspective, the feature looks like a square-cut quarry hewn into the bottom of the creek bed, a sinkhole opening downward to a small arch through which the stream is skipping and dancing.  

This place has another weird feature.  On the edge of the flat meadow, across a broad sidewalk, another short trail dips into the scrub, only thirty feet or so, and, then, points downward to a sheer metal stairway pressed tight against the edge of gorge cut into the side of the canyon’s bottom.  At the base of the stairway a rainy trail runs along a rock face that is oozing water, streams splashing down from above, wet veins of seep slicing through dense mats of moss growing on the cliff.  Some people are standing in the spray drizzling down onto them.  The trail is trampled mud and water courses over it, slipping in braided streams down to the creek.  

The travertine bridge in Pine Canyon, as it is named, was supposedly discovered in 1877 by a Scotsman named David Gowan.  The legend is that Gowan was pursued by Apaches, narrowly escaped, and stumbled onto the natural bridge, hiding for three days in the grotto while the war party searched for him.  It’s an appealing story but, probably, not true.  In fact, written records show that three prospectors found the place and, then, told Gowan about it.  Gowan built a log cabin near the cave and lived there for part of the year.  By 1890, people were traveling to see the feature and, so, the hotel was built in the bottom of the canyon, at the base of a hair-raising trail descending from the rim – in places, wagons had to be tethered to winches to be lowered down to the meadow.  The site was owned by successors to the original pioneer families until 1986 when the property was acquired by the State of Arizona for use as a park.  The old hotel was renovated although I’m not sure it is being used as a lodging at this time.  

2.

It’s all downhill to Scottsdale.  The Bee-line Highway tilts down from the Mogollon Ridge through a hellish landscape of high, naked peaks slit by bone-dry canyons, stony gorges too dry to even support saguaro or prickly pear.  Ridges brood over shattered rock, crowned with jagged basalt palisades and there are strange pinnacles and box-shaped buttes in dead valleys.  The whole land is a vast, burning mausoleum, vibrating with heat even in March.  The desolation is astounding, like some vision of the end of the world, a scorpion landscape with scarcely the space of a sidewalk or lawn level, everything tilting upward or downward with great striations of layered rock exposed, the bowels of earth it seems ripped out and scattered between the pyramids of hot stone.  

Then, there’s a reservoir, a stoplight, and Scottsdale, cupped in the hollow between two yellow peaks.