Christine spent a few nights in a great AirBNB in Tempe while I flew north to see Mott the Hopple! Before I flew out we got to see the incredible “Electric Desert” exhibit at the Phoenix Botanical Garden. This video summarizes it well, and the photo link below has some of our videos. I’m looking forward to see what Klip Collective, the company that does these sorts of shows, does next. The Heard Museum in Phoenix is also recommended if you want to learn more about the area’s Native Americans and their art. We also checked out Don Parks collection statues and stuff and got to meet Don.
When I got back to Phoenix I did an amazing AirBNB experience in a biplane, a Stearman, used for training in WWII. Wow!
Then on to Sedona area for a week. We found an incredible free camping area along Forest Rd 525 in the Coconino National Forest, about 25 minutes from town. There were at least 100 RVs, vans and a few tents scattered along this road camping.
Sedona is incredibly beautiful with all the red rocks everywhere. There must be more hiking trails per square mile around Sedona than anywhere on earth. Highlights for us included Baldwin Trail, the Plataki Heritage Site, and the West Fork Trail. We also went to the historic copper town of Jerome (we did a great history tour of the town), and treated ourselves to fantastic massages at Page Spring Cellars winery.
Then on to the Hopi Reservation for a full day tour with “Hopi Tours“. This was very interesting and informative, and highly recommended if you want to learn more about the slowly dying Hopi culture. Most parts of the reservation require you to be with a registered tour guide, and Micah our guide was fantastic. Photos not allowed in the villages, but we could take some of the petroglyphs site. Many homes on the Hopi reservation do not have water, sewer, or electricity.
We were there the day of the bi-annual women’s “basket dance”, where some of the village women wear traditional ceremonial clothes, dance, sing, and throw out a variety of items. Traditionally they would throw handmade items like woven baskets and pottery to the crowd, but now it looks like they just did a huge Walmart shopping trip and bought as much cheap crap as possible. There were lots of plastic laundry baskets, plastic kitchen items, junk food, toilet paper, children’s toys, and more. Around 8 women busily danced around tossing baskets mostly crap to the 500 or so onlookers. Our guide said there was still a good amount of traditional handicrafts in the mix, but we didn’t see any. It was fascinating to observe, and I think we were the only tourists there. They do their ‘dance’ every couple hours from dawn till dusk, tho we only watched about 30 minutes of the late afternoon dance. It reminded me a lot of Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, where everyone is trying to grab the throws from the floats, most of which are even more useless crap, with 1% good stuff mixed in.
Photos:
- Phoenix area
- Sedona area
- Hopi Reservation (some pics are from the internet, as we could not take photos)
