The Rodeo Parade

On Saturday, June 30, the day before we left to go to the Grand Canyon, we attended the Prescott Rodeo Parade. We had to get up before breakfast to get there early enough to get a roadside seat.

We got set up about an hour and a half before the parade actually started. We were right at the last corner of the last block of the parade and right around the corner from some of the staging area so we got to see some of the participants as they arrived. There were also the usual hawkers out selling souvenirs. Some elected to get noisemakers.

While others elected the big floppy hats to help with the sun.

The parade celebrates the Prescott Frontier Days, an event which dates back to 1913. But Prescott has been celebrating long before then. What evolved into today's professional rodeo circuit began in Prescott on July 4, 1888 at the first organised "Cowboy Contest" that awarded cash prizes. And rodeo is still going strong with a four day event staged along with the parade. It looked like handicap seating was going to be difficult to navigate so we settled on just seeing the parade.

There were several teams of big horses.

And also teams of miniature horses.

Hauling all kinds of products from stages coaches to milk wagons.

And, of course, there were cowgirls.

And cowboys.

The guy in red was asking if the two gun rig made his hips look wide!

I wanted to get this guy shooting his gun but he ran out of ammo just as he got to us. The rule was if you are going to shoot a weapon, no live ammo was allowed!

There was even one float featuring Indians.

The parade was arranged to show the chronological development of the area, so the oldest units were in the front and the more modern followed further back. We saw old fire apparatus.

And old cars.

There was also this mule hitch and wagon. He was traveling through the area on his way from Kentucky to California and had been camping locally for a few days.

The military was well represented and two units had striking models of ships including this U.S.S. Arizona.

Every parade seems to have the local Shriners contingent and this was no exception. What was different is that, this being Arizona, they were mounted on horses instead of the usual mini-bikes.

There were commercial entries and political entries but, with the exception of a Highland Pipe Band, there were no bands. No drums pounding out a beat. No school marching bands. All the music came from boom boxes powered by Honda generators or a very few live musicians on some of the floats. I assume from the numbers of young people we saw on horses that the riding associations are the focus of the youth and school bands are not.

The parade ran for a little over two hours. The restaurant across the way from us was open so we ran over to go to the potty and to get eats. Our setup let us sit in shade the whole time and we only had two blocks to walk back to the car. Probably the most comfortable I've ever been at a parade. It was a fun time and very interesting to see and contrast with the big parades back home.

Home on the Ranch

That's a picture of Cisco, one of the horses on the ranch here. He's 27 years old and in retirement. He's worked on a ranch all of his life out on the range pushing cattle around, moving them to new pasture, and into corrals for counting and branding. He's been a good horse. So good that he's been written up for an issue of Western Horseman magazine. I feed him twice a day along with the other two horses we have here. They all get an allotment of grain and some hay. Cisco gets alfalfa hay which is richer than the grass hay the others get. I have to be careful not to give him too much or he'll get sick.

This is Sonny. He's a clown and a mischief maker. He's a gelding, which means he's been neutered. That's supposed to calm him down but he gets into more trouble than the other two combined. But he's a nice horse. When the kids try to ride him, he just stands there and won't move. But we can lead him around and he's fine.

I finally got all four cats into the shop for the night tonight. They get fed in there at night but they don't all want to spend the night in there so they're reluctant to go in when I feed them. But they need to be shut in at night because there's always the threat of coyotes getting them if they're out. But herding cats is like herding cats and I don't always get them in there, but tonight I did.

We're settling in to a quieter pace.  Today we went to garage sales for entertainment but didn't find too much. We got a couple of things for the grand kids and Diane found a bunch of tops at a thrift store, not that she needs any.

I had to water everything today 'cause it just won't rain. It threatens every day but its always to one side of us. Right now it's blowing like mad and there's rain on three sides of us but it's 8-10 miles away and I have no faith that it's going to get here and give us some relief. In the area in general it's rained enough for things to green up considerably. It looks like spring and it's almost August. The country is deceptively attractive but underneath it's still rocks and sand and prickers.

So, a low key time for awhile, but that's OK. but I need to tell you about the parade we went to. Next time.

The Vegas Experience

We have spent the time since our Grand Canyon visit trying to get in shape for a trip to Las Vegas. I have been concerned about Diane as she's been losing weight and getting weaker since our trip started. We've worked the last few weeks to get her strong enough to continue. A trip to Vegas was both an incentive and a test of how well she's doing. She came through OK but we realize that we have a tighter set of boundaries to work within than we had first anticipated. With that said, mostly as an explanation of our lack of a posting, here's how Vegas went.

We left on Sunday morning and got to Vegas about 3:30, just after it had stopped raining. We had reserved a Select Room at the Stratosphere for two nights.

This hotel/casino is located in the North Strip area about midway between the Fremont Street area (the old downtown) and the more modern strip with all of the bigger casinos. That tower has a revolving restaurant and an observation deck at the top. It also has a ride that hangs you out over the edge and a Sky-Jump where you can jump off the edge and land over 800 feet below.

Here's a look at the ride peeking over the edge on the left and the platform you can jump from on the right. Here's a guy in mid-leap:

Funny, I didn't have any urge to follow him.

The casino has several restaurants ranging from a McDonalds up to the "Top of the World" upscale one in the tower. We had an excellent dinner at the Italian themed one on the casino floor, Fellini's. They even had creme brulee, our favorite dessert.

I wasn't sure how we would get around town but we wound up taking the bus. The RTC bus system has stops located close to the hotel and a 24 hour pass was $7 each. We rode the double-decker buses called "The Deuce".

I like watching "Pawn Stars" on TV and since it is set in Las Vegas, I looked up the address of the shop itself. It turned out to be on the same street as the hotel, Las Vegas Boulevard, about a mile up the road. So, on Monday morning, I left the hotel early and walked up to see it. While the pawn shop function is open 24 hours a day, the showroom is only open from 9 to 9 so I didn't get a chance to see the inside.

The shop is set in a district of storefronts advertising bail bonds, title loans and tattoos. Las Vegas is a town best viewed late in the day when the bright lights and glitter enhance the fantasy that is the town's main business. In the cold light of morning the scene is stark and gritty, filled with discarded come-on cards and the homeless  sleeping in the alleys and on the park benches. I returned to the hotel to clean up and get ready for the day.

We took the bus down to the middle of the strip and got off at the famed Bellagio, hoping to see the iconic fountain in operation. Unfortunately, this was as close as we got:

Maybe it was being there in the daytime, but many of the attractions were being worked on while we were there.

Just to the North of the Bellagio lies Caesar's Palace, so we wandered in there to see if it lived up to its' reputation. Well, here's the lobby in front of the registration desk.

The place is huge and complex, with a great many restaurants, hallways and gaming rooms, and with a huge parking garage out back. They have the top entertainment, including Elton John and Celine Dion (at up to $250 a ticket). Of course, if you'd like to pick up a little something, there are the Shops at the Forum.

They feature the likes of Armani. Tiffany, Prada and a host of others. Here's a look at the inside:

They also had an Apple store, a SONY store, Swarovski and Baccarat crystal, Breitling watches and other brands that I hadn't even heard of. I never saw so many  leather purses. But I never did find anything very attractive, even if I had that kind of money. The mall runs along the North side of the casino and then wraps all across the back and I'm sure it's over a mile long. And when you get to the end, they want you to retrace your steps all the way back to the front. We found an exit and ducked out of the crowds only to find ourselves lost in the parking garage and had to return to the casino and wander around until we found the front door again. After that exhausting trip we returned to our hotel to clean up and rest for the evenings excursion.

The alternative to the strip proper with its enormous casinos and stunning performances is what is called Downtown, or The Fremont Experience, in what was the old center of the casino district to the North of the strip.

In this area they have taken the last three blocks of Fremont Street and closed them to traffic. There are several of the old casinos here including the Golden Nugget. The last two blocks of the street have been roofed over with a mesh dome.

After dark, the mesh is used as a screen upon which are projected images that correspond to the loud music being played through the speakers which also line the  dome. The effect is dazzling and people just stand and stare. It's really very neat.

Heading from East to West into the mouth of the dome is a zip line. A long line of people were waiting after having paid their $20 for a few seconds of thrill.

Now, that I could do!

We had dinner at Binions, another casino that's popular with the cowboys when the pro-rodeo is in town. It was good but not as good as Sunday's dinner. Then we wandered the area picking out some souvenirs. I was getting tired of walking so we stopped at an Irish pub, Henningers, so I could rest with a tall glass of Guinness. Directly across the street from the pub is the Heart Attack Grill. This place has made a name for itself by claiming to offer the burger with the highest caloric content in America. They also have milkshakes with the highest butterfat content. They have an ambulance parked outside to rush heart attack victims to the hospital and the waitresses are dressed as naughty nurses. They advertise that anyone over 350lbs eats free. They get a lot of reactions, including quite a bit of outrage.

Then we took a last turn around the block only to find that one of the stages inside had come to life with a cover band call Rock Candy. They were very good. Four guys and four gals really giving a good show.

Then it was time to board the bus one last time and make the trip back to our room. We had a really good time, saw some neat stuff and ate some good food.

Now we'll hunker down for a while. We're house sitting for the month of August while our hosts attend a family reunion back East. I'm going to play rancher for a while, feeding three horses, three dogs, four cats and a tank of eleven goldfish that sits outside. Let's see, if I feed the fish to the cats and the cats to the dogs... naw, that wouldn't sit very well. Besides, it'll be fun.

Rain

It rained here yesterday. We all know what rain looks like so I didn't take any pictures. So what's the big deal? Well, it's the first measurable rain here since February. Typically, the sky is blue and clear all day, every day from February through June. In late June clouds start to form, promising rain some day in the future. Nobody around here expects to see any rain until July 4th which is the local start of the "monsoon season". The monsoon season generally lasts through July and August and then tapers off by September when cooler weather returns. During the monsoon season, clouds develop during the morning and then it's supposed to rain in the afternoon for an hour or so and cool things off and then there's a refreshing evening. Well, that hasn't happened so far but I'm hoping.

Because of the lack of rain in the spring and early summer, this area is dry. I mean parched, crunchy, crumble-when-you-touch-it dry. The plants are shriveled, the animals are scruffy, the dust is inescapable. And life depends on water. So anything you want to live has to be watered. Every day. Regardless. Every plant and animal we have here gets watered every day by running a hose from water tanks. We have plastic tanks in the back of a pickup that we take to town to load up.

We have a sky-pond, around here it's called a "tank", down the hill for watering the horses but it's been nothing but baked clay for months. We need several days of hard rain to fill it up. Yesterdays rain just made it muddy but we're supposed to get more rain today and tomorrow so we've got hopes. The wells here just don't flow enough to provide for more than the house. Even then, it's a matter of running the well water on a twice daily basis into large holding tanks and then using that for household needs. The wells themselves can't handle the straight house demand. Back East, we wouldn't build unless we had a copious water supply but out here, water is so scarce that working with meager supplies is commonplace. We have to go to town to wash our vehicles.

The whole weather pattern is so different from the East that it's disorienting. I'm used to looking to the sky and reading the clouds, but the patterns I'm used to finding in the East don't happen out here. They have the same cloud types of course, but they don't act the same. At home the rain comes mostly from frontal passages. Everything along the path of the front get wet, often several states at a time. Out here the clouds form and dump rain on a specific spot without much movement. So it rains over the hill but not on us. We can watch it happen day after day. The other night we watched an electrical storm for over an hour that barely moved twenty miles. It was 80-100 miles away from us and the lightning was spectacular but we couldn't even hear the thunder.

When it does rain, it comes down hard. Yesterday it was raining at the rate of 2" per minute while it lasted. This means that there's lots of runoff. There lots and lots of dry ditches in the West, called "washes". When it rains miles away these ditches fill up with walls of moving water. These Flash Floods in the washes are enormously dangerous and we're constantly warned to watch out for them in rainy weather. Many washes cross roads and can sweep vehicles away in an instant, much less anybody walking in one. A wash can become dangerous in an instant from rain falling miles and miles away, even if where the wash is is sunny and clear. And a flash flood can move boulders the size of small cars. I've never witnessed one but I've seen the pictures and they are impressive.

So, we're hoping for more rain and watching the weather. I expected this trip to be quite an experience and it sure is so far.

Flagstaff

After we left the Grand Canyon area, we were invited to spend a few days camped at my cousin's daughter's place on the outskirts of Flagstaff. That's the sunset from their front yard on our first night there. Flagstaff is famous for being the cool part of Arizona. Hundreds drive up to the area from Phoenix for the weekend, returning to the heat in the valley on Sunday night. This makes traffic on I17 pretty heavy on Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. Flagstaff has trees. Big Ponderosa Pines. And elk and deer. I saw three dead elk at the side of the road on the way home. Of course, my tale of trying to see live ones is well told by now.

Around the corner from where we stayed is a prairie dog town. I have no idea why since they are universally considered a nuisance in these parts. But they sure are cute.

On Thursday, we went into town to see the shops.. er sights. We started with the train station which is now also the visitors center in addition to being a working Amtrak station.

There's also quite a mural facing the station.

Flagstaff is a smallish city maybe about the size of Burlington back home that has a country feel to it. It has an old time, classic section of town dating back to the stagecoach days. It also is large enough to have a couple of malls and all the big box stores and brands. It's also a college town with that attendant vibe. We cruised the shops in the old town section looking at Indian jewelry and baskets and rugs. There were also crystal and incense shops and a wonderful gallery of photo work. Lots of hiking supplies as well. The eateries are on the border of the college section and feature breweries and pizza shops. We opted to eat out of town a ways at a little Italian place in a mall called Mama Louise's. It had a mixed write-up in Yelp and we took a chance but it was very disappointing. Then back to camp for elk watch, an exercise in futility.

On Friday, we had arranged for my cousin and her husband to come up from Dewey to meet us and go on the Sky-Ride, the chair lift up the Sno-Bowl ski area just West of town. It was free for seniors over 70, which three of us are, and I had a discount coupon for Diane so it was going to be a cheap ride.

When we got there, my cousin looked up at the chair lift ascending the hill into the distance and decided to sit it out. Diane and I had ridden chair lifts in the past and weren't bothered by it so off we went. The lift goes up to the top of Humphreys Peak, one of the San Francisco peaks just Northwest of Flagstaff and a popular skiing, hiking and camping destination. On the way up the mountain we discovered that it seems to be the thing to do for riders of the lift to throw strings of beads or ribbons with bells on them to decorate the trees below.

After we had passed a certain level on the way up we also saw quite a few of these pretty yellow flowers. I looked them up when I got back to camp and found out that they are Yellow Columbine.

At the top, we elected to ride the lift around and not get off, but I did get this shot of the upper lift house. The board on the front reads "Coconino National Forest, Elevation 11,500 feet".

When the lift started down we were treated to a magnificent view extending for miles and miles. And right at that time, may camera batteries decided they'd had enough, so, no pics of that. But it was worth the ride. The temperature down in Flagstaff was 85 but at the top of the mountain it was 51. We had brought our winter jackets for just such an event so we were fine.

We stopped at a Cracker Barrel for a late lunch, meeting my cousin's grand-daughter on the way. Then it was back to camp for the night and back into Dewey on Saturday. On the way back, I noticed that the batteries weren't charging on the coach so that meant another trip into the shop for more repairs. That turned out better than I had hoped for. They fixed the dash AC after finding a leak and recharging the system and they fixed the charging system after finding a broken wire. No we're hunkered down back at my cousins place trying to outlast the heat.

More Grand

When I made our reservations for the Grand Canyon, I could only get two nights. That meant we had to pull out of the campground on Tuesday. But it did not mean we had to leave the canyon. I had consulted one of the guides I have for alternative camping spots and had discovered that there was dispersed camping available in the Kaibab National Forest. It was accessed from a road that started in the park and then exited it into the forest. After pulling out of Mather around noon, we proceeded to Grandview Point.

It is aptly named, containing a sweeping panorama of a bend in the canyon. From there we found the forest road a few miles later and drove down almost two miles to find the spot in the opening photo. While I have used dispersed camping in the Blue Ridge, where there are actual campsites, this was just open woods where you can pull off the road anywhere it makes sense. The woods have a very open under- story and you can see through them for a long ways. This is a wider view which may give some notion of what it was like. We were almost completely alone.

There was a little traffic on the road we came in on but not much. Since it was our anniversary, I cooked a steak and we had some potato salad we had picked up at the camp store and then some cake we had purchased for the occasion, all washed down with some wine. All very good.

The next day, July 4th, we pulled out at about 6:30 to finally leave the park. But we still had about 15 miles to go in the park and several overlooks to stop at. One other stop was at the Tusayan Ruins. This early pueblo site is preserved as an example of how the early native population managed to live in this area. It includes a path around the ruins and a neat stone museum that was closed at the early hour we visited.

When we hear about Indian ruins, we think of the pictures we've seen of Mesa Verde or other complete ancient housing with walls and rooms and ladders and maybe a pot or two sitting around. The truth of it is that most of the ruins are simply a ring or two of stones laid in the ground. Many of the early buildings were built by first digging a shallow pit in the earth and lining it with stones cemented together with a mud mortar. Then an upper part was constructed with limbs and branches and covered with a mud roof. In most cases, only the pit remains. There are literally thousands of these remains around the west but it takes some imagination to visualize the buildings.

The last stop in the park was the Eastern entry visitors center. While we got there just as the center was opening the big attraction was the watchtower. built in the 1930's as a replica of an Indian tower.

The tower has four interior levels which can be climbed via a stairway surrounding the inside. The center is hollow so you can see all the way down from each level. The walls are decorated with Indian painting and there are windows showing the view from various points on the way up.

The rooms at the base of the tower are a gift shop (what else?). But they have a lot really nice Native made ware.

After leaving the park, we traveled East on Rt. 64 out to Rt. 89. Along the way we saw many stands where the Navajo sell there crafts but most were empty. We traveled along the canyon of the Little Colorado, which is pretty impressive in its own right. When we reached 89, we turned left and went North one mile to the Cameron Trading Post.

This is the site of a famous stage/trading stop from the 1800's. Today it is one of the largest places offering both authentic Native American jewelry and rugs and lots of imported Chinese baubles. They also have a AAA rated motel, a post office, a gallery of really beautiful high end art work and a restaurant. We got there at about 10:00am, in time for a great breakfast. The walls of the dining room are decorated with hand made rugs.

One of the unique things about the trading post is that they feature local Navajo actually weaving rugs so you can see how it's done. No one was weaving when we were there but they did have one in progress.

These are not rugs for the floor. They are exquisite works of art meant to be displayed on the wall.

From Cameron, we traveled down to Flagstaff where we were invited to camp at my cousin's daughter's place. They have a lovely place in the country and they have a side yard that works just right for boon-docking. We ran power out from their garage and we were good to go. They have a wrap-around deck that overlooks a small fish pond with plants and flowers. They sit out on the deck at night and watch a local elk come in to the fish pond for water. They have named her Gertrude. This was to be my chance to see an elk close up. Well, you just know how that turned out. We were there three nights and Gertie never showed.