When you think of the American Southwest, what comes to mind? Windswept plains of deserts and cacti? Chilies and Mexican-inspired cuisine? Although I’d briefly visited northern Arizona in 2013, I didn’t have much time to explore. I visited Sedona and Flagstaff. Spent a long and strenuous day hiking in the Grand Canyon, and then a quiet day in the piney woods recovering from said hike. With some places, a few days are enough to give you a sense of what is there, of what possibilities and richness a locale can hold. Not so in northern AZ. Like east-central Texas, this is a place that commands attention and requires more time.
Driving west towards Payson, we were unprepared for the stunning way the land suddenly drops away and the view opens up onto forested hills for miles and miles below. Although we’d known our approximate altitude, without any noticeable visual landmarks to mark the changes, our awareness of this space was obscure at best. Our morning walk/skate on the Mogollon Rim trail provided some context for our positioning in space and marked the beginning of some of the most stunning vistas we’ve seen on our trip.
With two nights to kill before our reservations at the Fort Tuthill County Campground in Flagstaff, we debated how and where we should spend that time. The Crooks fire in Prescott, though partially contained, was still burning on the southeast side of the city and many of the campgrounds were closed. I may have mentioned in a previous post Honey’s near fanatical obsession with Trader Joe’s and the lengths to which he’s willing to go to shop there. Mostly, it’s a question of cost—short of going to WalMart, which I despise, we’ve found it to be much less expensive to shop there for the things we’ve come to rely on as our staple snacks than other grocery stores. After a couple of days of him incessantly dropping “Trader Joe’s” every third sentence I caved and agreed to drive the 100 or so miles to Prescott to do a big shopping trip and spend the night. My caveat was that we hit up a Planet Fitness for a well-deserved hot shower—our first since leaving Elephant Butte, NM many days prior.
Weather has become one of the most important parameters in our traveling life. This was a topic we discussed at length during our hike with my cousin and his partner. When you live and work in climate-controlled environments, you don’t think much about what the weather will be unless you spend a lot of time exposed to the elements between house-car/transport vehicle/office. Unless you walk or bike to work, you might spend at most an hour being uncomfortable if it’s windy/raining/ cold/hot/humid. When you stop living and working in climate controlled spaces, the question of weather takes up a lot more of your mental space and becomes a much more immediate physical experience. One which you cannot always escape, or from which you cannot always find relief.
Chérie! has an a/c unit which we have resorted to using a couple of times when we were hooked up to shore power—most notably in Big Bend when the intensity of afternoon temperatures drove me nearly to desperation—but it is very noisy and we both have a deep dislike of air conditioning. Even on the island, we used the one in our apartment sparingly, mostly to avoid sweating buckets at night during the seasons of high heat and no breezes. We’ve noticed a huge difference in our sinus health since we stopped living in a/c (although we’re still struggling to adapt to the dryness of this arid southwestern climate). Living in our camper in high altitudes in late spring has so far meant chilly mornings, breezy days, and cold, sometimes near freezing nights—which are much easier to deal with than hot south Texas weather. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve gotten into the bad habit of sticking Goya under the covers at my feet to serve as a mini heater. She loves it (chihuahuas are burrowers) and as long as Honey keeps his legs to himself and doesn’t inadvertently kick her, we all spend a cozy and relatively restful night!
With our stocks replenished from a successful run at TJ’s, we turned our attentions to dinner and a place to sleep. As expected, official campsites were in high demand, so we found a pull off in the Prescott National Forest with a great view of Prescott well away from the Crooks fire area and settled in for the night. Many cars popped into the lot and we had some concerns that we might get the dreaded knock from National Forest staff, but either they were busy with other things or we just got lucky. Our morning explorations sadly revealed lots of party related trash, so it must be a popular spot for locals on the weekends.
In the morning, we packed up and headed up the winding road north towards Sedona by way of Jerome. For Honey, who spent several years of his childhood and adolescence in the Southern French Alps, driving on mountain roads brings him a deep sense of enjoyment. Jerome is an old mining town about mid-distance between Prescott Valley and Cottonwood and the way the houses and streets are set up reminded me instantly of those little French villages perched on the steep hillsides around Nice, where Honey is from. The architecture is not at all the same, but the retaining walls, terraced gardens, and small shops and cafés were all reminiscent of that atmosphere.
I had a translation to do for the Youth In Permaculture Prize 2022 (if you know of any youth 25 or under who would be interested, please share!) so we set up at the Flatiron café and Honey chatted with the other patrons while I worked. Through his conversation with the groundskeeper of the Surgeon’s House B&B, we got permission (and encouragement!) to let ourselves in through the side gate and visit the gardens of the b&b when I finished my task. What a joyfully lush space that garden turned out to be! We didn’t tarry long, but our quick tour revealed many surprises and cozy nooks for relaxing, enjoying the views, or simply being in a setting clearly very lovingly tended.
There are lots of great little shops, galleries, cafés, and tasting rooms in Jerome and we spent an enjoyable morning popping in and out of them as we strolled through the town. We started early enough that we didn’t have to deal with the crowd that later swarmed the town. After a delicious and airy lunch at the ASYLUM Restaurant located inside the historic Jerome Grand Hotel, we took one last walk around and then headed north towards Sedona.
For our second night of wild camping we had high hopes of finding a spot in Oak Creek Canyon between Sedona and Flagstaff. I had my reservations because it was a weekend, so I knew it would be busy, but neither of us expected the human zoo that greeted us as we drove through Sedona. My last visit in 2013 was in November, admittedly not the height of tourist season, but I was frankly shocked at how packed and busy the city was as we drove through. It felt like Disney, minus the giant cartoon characters and thrill rides. The drive through the canyon offered no relief and Honey and I gritted our teeth as we made our way through the traffic and the mass of humans congregating all along the creek banks.
The only benefit we got from driving up Oak Creek Canyon (aside from some of the best views in northern AZ) was a free water fill at the spring about two thirds of the way up. Lots of locals collect their drinking water from this spring and we witnessed entire families turn out to fill up their jugs for the week. Honey is very sensitive to the taste of his drinking water and finds that most of the water in the US tastes strongly of chlorine. He finds it very off-putting. Unless the water is particularly sulfury, I don’t notice as much, but we both very much appreciate getting spring water when we can.
Since the canyon was a madhouse, we simply continued on, Honey navigating the curving road with Chérie! following sedately behind and I scrolling through the various camping apps on my phone looking for something that would work for us for one night. I found us a free camp site on a forest road just north of Flagstaff, that although packed with other campers, allowed us to spend the night with minimal disturbance. The next day we checked in early at the Fort Tuthill County campground and parked Chérie! beneath the pines. As we were in the process of unhitching we noticed that the post on our manual jack was a bit smashed up. In our search for free campsites we’d driven on some rough roads and we must have hit a rock with the post. Normally we set the post into the socket on a wheel that came with the camper when we bought it, but despite Honey hammering some of the edges back down, the post no longer fits, so we had to come up with a new set up. We hemmed and hawed and ultimately decided to use one of the wooden wedges we usually set behind the camper wheels as a temporary stabilizer block for the post. Not great long-term, but we needed something immediate until we could buy or order an actual stabilizer block.
We stayed in Flagstaff seven nights and were able to get together with my friend there for our first two nights. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years, and had only kept in touch very sporadically in that time. Over dinner at his house the first night, we covered all of the topics you discuss when you haven’t seen each other in a long time and you’re trying to reconcile the person you used to know with the person they are now. We also talked about the challenges currently facing the hospital industry (my friend and his wife are both trauma nurses), but we also covered more joyful things: our respective families, the progressive remodel on their house, our trip and hopes for finding a place we love as much as my friend and his wife love the Southwest. We’re hopeful, and our time here so far has brought us more clarity and many opportunities for frank discussions of our needs and aspirations.
There are a great many things to do in the Flagstaff/Sedona area including a lot of beautiful hikes. Since it was such a madhouse during the weekend, we waited a couple of days before driving back down to hike among the famous red rocks. It was a blustery day, but we seem to have gotten more used to the wind and don’t find it as unpleasant as we did in New Mexico. Honey’s reaction to the astonishing colors of this landscape reminded me of my own awe the first time I was here. The swash of red amidst the more muted tones of the desert are simply surreal and even when you’re standing among these rock formations, it’s hard to believe what’s in front of you.
It’s not difficult to love this place, to spend every second out in nature mesmerized by our surroundings, to believe, however briefly, that this is a place we could live. From an ecological standpoint, it’s hard for me to make the case that the Southwest needs more people to move here. The water cycle is broken at so many levels, and the massive overallocation of water from the Colorado River Basin (as exemplified by the current state of Lake Mead) is directly driving the current and future droughts in this area. Not to mention the fires. Human settlements in the Southwest are some of the least sustainable in the country, but there are many things we could do at small and large scales to change this.
Switching from flush toilets to compost toilets, like most of the state parks and national forests we’ve visited in Arizona would save a tremendous amount of water and enrich the soil and enhance it’s ability absorb every single drop of rain or snow that falls here. Filtering and reusing household grey water could provide most, if not all of the water for domestic gardening needs (as long as people get rid of their obsession with green lawns). Planting more trees in and around desert cities, or installing rooftop gardens could help lower the temperature of urban spaces, reducing the need for air conditioning. The list goes on and on, fettered only by our imaginations and limiting beliefs.
The places we live should be able to furnish us with what we need to live. If they can’t, or if humans can’t live within the ecological limits of a place, we probably shouldn’t live there at all. And yet, people have been living sustainably in deserts for millennia. It is entirely possible to do so, but it requires that we fundamentally change our relationship to place and land; that we choose to abscond what is comfortable and easy and convenient for what is ecologically sound and regenerative. I know how insurmountable it sounds, but deep change is only ever the accumulation of small changes added up over time. If each one of us changes one small thing consistently, that is far from insignificant. If every household in a neighborhood recycled their grey water and sank it into their landscape, would that not, over time, return some of what’s being pumped out of the aquifers beneath them, closing the loop? We have to not simply believe that change is possible, but recognize our power to implement solutions that make a difference at any scale.
I’ve started compiling a list of books that have brought me hope and inspiration on these topics, among others. My reading wishlist is endlessly long, but if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.