AZ Day 5 - Lava Rivers, Littles Cousins, and Looking Into Outer Space
Today was an exciting day for me, because I learned that my younger cousin and two of my aunts were gonna be in Flagstaff for a college visit. I wanted to see Flagstaff, and I wanted to see my family so it was really a win-win for me. Before I set out though, I needed some coffee so I went to a place called The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. They’re a west coast chain that looks pretty bougie because they’re very sleek with lots of open spaces and wooden cabinets, but their coffee is good and cheaper than Starbucks and the service was really friendly so I was into it.
It was a little bit under three hours to Flagstaff and between the drive and the coffee, the first thing I needed to do when I got there was go to the bathroom so I stopped at the first gas station I saw. I liked my choice though because the firewood outside was apparently very excited to be there.
I liked Flagstaff, because it kind of reminded me of Vermont. It was very woodsy but also had lots of hip little shops, cafes, and restaurants to appeal to the college kids. My cousin was still doing her college visit when I first got there, so I decided to do a little solo adventuring. My first stop was Coconino National Forest which surrounds Flagstaff and nearby Sedona. The forest is largely filled with towering evergreens and between that and Flagstaff’s more mountainous terrain, it looks like an entire world apart from the deserts of Southern Arizona.
My primary destination was the Cocnino Lava River Cave, an ancient cave created naturally by the lava that used to flow naturally to a long dead volcanic peak in the forest’s San Francisco Peaks mountain range. The coursing lava left the cave a nearly perfect circular tube, as well as making beautiful and unusual patterns along the walls of different mineral deposits. The natural entrance is a totally unassuming small hole in the ground amidst a little outcrop of volcanic rocks, but once you’re in the lava tube expands to about 30 ft in and extends for a little under a mile underground. There’s no natural light at all, and it’s left totally in its natural state unlike some more touristy caves so amateur spelunkers are strongly advised to bring a flashlight. I used my phone, and as amazing as it was down there my flash photography couldn’t really capture it.
Luckily some professional photographers have also gone down there with more well suited equipment than I had access to.
When I got back to downtown Flagstaff and got out of my car, I realized that I may have taken a bit of the forest with me.
I was still a little early for my cousin so I went to get some more coffee at a place called Campus Coffee Bean. It was a cozy, artsy spot for college kids to hang out and do work while enjoying lots of good looking food and espresso drinks. I sat there for a bit enjoying my coffee and getting some writing done which was nice.
When my cousin was done with her visit, we all met up at a place called Oregano’s Pizza Bistro because we were all a little bit overdue for lunch. Oregano’s is a bit of an Arizona tradition with locations all over the state, and I have to say it was some mighty good pizza pie. They also had salads, pastas, and sandwiches though the pizza was so good I don’t know why you'd want anything else. I got a slice of classic cheese for a baseline, and then a slice of one of their specialty pizzas, the truly monstrous Numero Uno, which had a little bit of everything with sausage, bacon, mushrooms, peppers, onions, a little bit of spinach, and some prime fresh Wisconsin cheese. It was perfect.
We ended up sitting in the pizza place just catching up and sharing stories for a while and it was really nice. My cousin was just wrapping up her junior of high school, so she’s been visiting colleges trying to figure out where she wants to head next. She seemed to like Northern Arizona University, but I don’t know if it’s top of her list. She’ll be the last of my younger cousins to go to college so it’s weird seeing how grown up everyone’s becoming, but I’m proud of her.
While we were walking back to our cars we noticed something that I would come to see a lot more of in the rest of the country: West Coast Arby’s have oddly nice looking art deco designs.
I said goodbye to my aunts and my cousin, but they were nice enough to book their hotel room for an extra night so I’d have a place to sleep in Flagstaff. I went to the hotel room to drop off my stuff, and I sat on the comfy bed, and the next thing I knew it was several hours later. I had planned to see some of the college museums in town,but I had now missed my shot so I went to grab some dinner instead.
I went to a place called Beaver Street Brewery. It was a cozy family brewpub located in a historic train station, and it was popping on a Friday night. It was a fun mix of young people there more for the drinks, and families there more for the food, but the size of the crowd gave me high hopes for both. I was still mostly full from the pizza earlier, so I just got an appetizer called the Arizona Quesadilla. It came with melted cheeses, diced scallions, a hot and sweet poblano chili, and some truly excellent guacamole. It was pub food of the highest order. To wash it all down I got a flight of 6 of their house beers: a Mexican lager, a shandy, a raspberry ale, a chocolate raspberry ale, a stout, and a red ale. The shandy and less chocolatey raspberry ale were a bit sweet for me, personally despite a nice flavor, but all the darker beers were really great. I was particularly fond of the stout and the red ale.
After some quality pubbing, I decided to check out one of the coolest historic spots in Flagstaff, Lowell Observatory. The observatory was founded by Percival Lowell, of Boston’s famous Lowell family (a wealthy dynasty that gave us several politicians, poets, actors, playwrights, a Harvard president, and unfortunately Dick Cheney) in 1894. Lowell was an amateur astronomer who wrote several books supposing that there were civilizations on Mars, and he used his family’s wealth to create a state of the art astronomical viewing and research center to further these pursuits. He chose Flagstaff because of its natural elevation, low cloud coverage, and distance away from cities all of which are now common tenets of any large scale telescope site, but were all pioneering ideas in Lowell’s time. Unfortunately in his own lifetime, Lowell’s observatory wasn’t much of a success. He never found Martian civilizations and his sketches of Venus were, in hindsight, most likely drawings of the reflection of the blood vessels in his own eye in the telescope. But he was also one of the first astronomers to posit that there might still be another major celestial bodies past Neptune, and his theories were posthumously vindicated when his observatory made the discovery our favorite dwarf planet, Pluto! It’s a pretty awesome claim to fame and it was cool getting to walk around such famous grounds. The first thing I did was go to the little museum on campus where I learned all these facts about Lowell’s life, space in general, and the observatory’s role in advancing scientific knowledge. They had some interesting artifacts and ephemera belonging to Ol’ Percy, but my favorite piece in the museum portion was a massive chunk of meteorite from Meteor Crater near Winslow Arizona. While this chunk weighs over 500 lbs, it represents only a tiny fraction of the original meteorite that created the over 1 kilometer wide and 170 meter deep crater. It’s amazing and more than a little terrifying that things like that are just hurtling through space all the time.
As cool as the museum was, the major draw of the place was actually getting to look through these bad boys. There were actually two different large observation stations on the campus, one housing the very telescope that discovered Pluto and the other containing the historic Clark telescope the Percival Lowell himself used. Unfortunately while the night sky was good for stargazing, it didn’t exactly do wonders for my already shoddy photography. Both stations are still fully operational and are used for research and education. There were also smaller portable telescopes that volunteers would set up and host demonstrations at, and the Observatory also owns five other more research oriented stations across Arizona that aren’t open to the public. Through the Pluto Discovery Telescope I got to glimpse several light years away at a wholly different Solar System. It was incredible and deeply humbling to really see just how cast the universe is. While that telescope captured the grand scope of astronomy, the Clark telescope showcased the vivid small scale details these fantastic telescopes are able to capture by focusing at several degrees of magnification on the craters of the moon.
Almost as limitless as the space being observed was the ingenuity that went into building the actual buildings around the telescope. The dome surrounding the Clark Telescope was designed and built entirely out of local Ponderosa by local bicycle repairmen and handymen in the area named the Sykes Brothers in only 10 days! In order to protect the telescope while also allowing it to view multiple points of sky, the entire dome was built to rotate. The original metal tracks that allowed for this rotation were one of the only original pieces of the dome not to survive all the way from 1894, so in a more recent bit of creative problem solving the dome now rests on a few dozen 1954 Ford tires. I got to actually watch them rotate the dome, and it was breathtaking how smooth it all went.
Before I left the observatory, I got one last beautiful look out over Flagstaff from its elevated vantage point. Not a bad way to end a night at all.
Favorite Random Sightings: Celebrity Tanning (pretty sure they don’t all come to Flagstaff for that); Drive-Thru liquor stores (how could that go wrong); A billboard reading “Quality Inn: No Train Noise, Martians Welcome” (the two things I look for in a motel)
Regional Observations: Perhaps it was the season or the proximity to the forest, but my aunts, my cousin, and myself were all very taken aback by how many flies there were in Flagstaff and how persistent they were. Every time we stepped outside, we’d be covered.
Albums Listened To: Secrets of the Hive (Disc 2) by Procol Harum; Section.80 by Kendrick Lamar (an underrated gem if only because he topped it so hard himself); See America Right by the Mountain Goats; See the Light by Less than Jake (just Do the Math): Seeing Things by Jakob Dylan (just Will it Grow)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
I didn’t get any today so here’s one from the internet:
A doctor and a lawyer were attending a cocktail party when the doctor was approached by a man who asked advice on how to handle his ulcer. The doctor mumbled some medical advice, then turned to the lawyer and remarked, "I never know how to handle the situation when I'm asked for medical advice during a social function. Is it acceptable to send a bill for such advice?" The lawyer replied that it was certainly acceptable to do so.
The next day, the doctor sent the ulcer-stricken man a bill. The lawyer also sent one to the doctor.
Songs of the Day:
The outfits, the psychedelic backdrop, and dear sweet christ the hair, yup it’s 1971 baby!
Baby K Dot
“My love for you is 98% pure”