Arizona
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April,
1997
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| arizona contents | arizona gallery | If I had to choose a single USA state as my favourite (so far) I'd pick Arizona. I could be biased because when we arrived from March-chilly British Columbia, Arizona was warm, the cacti were flowering and our adventure was just beginning. Arizona struck me as amost infinitely varied; from desert to forest, from plateau to mountain, from canyon to lake. As we drove down the highway towards Phoenix we passed through bands of desert — Joshua Tree Desert, Mohave Desert, Saguaro Desert — almost as if we were turning the pages of some huge geography textbook. The mixture of towns and cities , too, fascinated me. Tiny almost-ghost towns like Chloride and Superior. Ugly/interesting places like Globe. Cities sweltering under clear skies or thunderstorms. And then of course there's the geology. Coming from Britain, where geology is often mellow, grass-covered except where gnawed by the sea, it is wonderful to see geology exposed in great masses, as if the earth has been flayed like a whale. Fossil wood tumbling from stream sides as if it fell yesterday instead of aeons ago. Rocks tortured and twisted, or laid neatly in horizontal strata. We
began our Arizona exploration in Burro Creek, drove down to the
border with Mexico, then north-east to Canyon de Chelly, west via
the Grand Canyon, and ended it driving north towards Las Vegas,
camping near Chloride.
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