A five-day road trip: from Tucson to the Grand Canyon and Santa Fe

The semester is already a week-and-a-half under way, but S. and I are still feeling refreshed from a little road-trip we took during my winter break. If you have a few days and the weather is good--which it usually is in this part of the country, even in winter--this itinerary might suit you. 

Landscape, architecture, and terroir: a five-day loop from Tucson.

Day 1--Tucson to the Grand Canyon...Day 2--Grand Canyon to Flagstaff...

Day 3: Flagstaff to Santa Fe...Day 4: Santa Fe and environs...

Day 5: the long drive back to Tucson, with lunch in Hatch.

From Tucson to the Grand Canyon--you can do it in five-and-a-half hours if the traffic in Phoenix isn't bad. There are so many worthwhile sights along the way--the ruins of Montezuma Castle, the red rock country of Sedona, the old mining-town of Jerome--but if you just want to get there, drive via the old Route 66-town of Williams instead of through Flagstaff, and you'll be stretching your legs on the South Rim by (late) lunch-time.

In winter, the crowds disappear and solitude is possible even on the South Rim. From December through February, you can drive your own vehicle west on the Hermit Road, instead of having to wait for shuttle buses. Get out to a viewpoint, watch the sunset, and if the winds are right, hear the roar of the Colorado River's rapids, a vertical mile below you...The mild afternoon quickly becomes a glacial night at this altitude, with the thin desert air--winter nights sometimes drop into the single digits, even if afternoons are sunny and well above freezing. Bring layers...

So, the last sunset of 2013...

...and the first sunrise of 2014:

So many visitors come to the canyon, take a few snapshots, and leave after just a few hours at one of the world's greatest sights...Stay at least a night if you can, then wake up the next morning for sunrise. Get to the rim early to see the chasms below light up as sunlight pours into the naked geology...

And maybe, just maybe, Nemo will make an appearance,

as he gets his portrait taken...

(Evidently, there is a 'service' in Japan that you purchase that will allow you to send a favorite stuffed animal to a foreign location so that it can be photographed there before it and the photos get returned to you. Hmm...vicarious stuffed-travel? Perhaps that's what was going on here...)

Driving from the Canyon to Flagstaff you'll pass by the San Francisco Peaks, dormant volcanoes that are the highest peaks in Arizona...

Flagstaff is a mountain/college-town worth exploring. Rather than just pass through on your way from New Mexico to California, or from the Grand Canyon to elsewhere, spend some time here--the 19th-century downtown is compact but vibrant and has become a regional dining mecca, with farm-to-table restaurants and micro-breweries.

In Babbitt's Backcountry Outfitters,

check out the Girl with the Pearl Earring AND the Blue Backpack...

Check out Diablo Burger for lunch;

it's 'all about local.'

And don't forget to tip the cow.

By all means, spend some time in Rendezvous, a coffee/martini-bar in a hotel from the 1920's.

A good place to go for a walk or a run and appreciate the forest-and-volcanic-peak-landscape (Flagstaff sits in the middle of the world's largest expanse of ponderosa pines) is Buffalo Park--on a mesa above downtown, a trail loops for a couple of miles through meadow and woodland...

Driving from Flagstaff to Santa Fe will take about five and a half hours, which means you'll hit the town of Gallup, NM right about lunch-time. This high-desert town, also on old Route 66, is surrounded by the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni nations. Avoid the chain-restaurants along the Interstate and go a few blocks into town. Stop in at Jerry's Café, and as you eat your plate of red-and-green chile, then soak it up with your sopaipilla, Native American artisans might come around to your table, with some of their crafts for sale...

Santa Fe--I could go on and on about this four-hundred-year-old capital of New Mexico. No other city in the U.S. Southwest has as compelling a sense-of-place as this adobe town. At the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, you can come here for the outdoors--skiing! hiking!--or the museums and galleries...and the food is a highlight for all visitors. I'd visited here before in the summer, but my wife had never been, and coming here in the winter, we felt like we had the place to ourselves. Afternoons in the 40's, but nights in the teens...plenty of pinyon-scented coffee and chile-laced chocolate to keep us warm...

Fajitas in the Plaza on a winter morning...Breathe it in...

And just a few blocks away, some of the best chocolate anywhere,

at Kakawa:

This unassuming adobe house in Santa Fe is home to one of the world's 'top ten places' to drink chocolate. (Seriously. It ranks up there with anything in Europe or South America.) Walk the few blocks from the city's central Plaza, open the door and inhale the pre-columbian fragrance of the eight or nine 'drinking elixirs' that will be swirling and ready to serve. Free samples will tempt and educate you...

My wife lingered over the "Spanish" blend, sipping on a blend of chocolate, floral essence, coconut sugar and spices, while I had their version of "atole," a traditional hearty breakfast drink made with blue corn masa, chocolate, honey, Mexican vanilla, and local chimayó chile pepper.

But there's more to cacao here than just drinking; the handmade truffles, caramels and mendiants are arrestingly good! The house-made agave caramels dusted with chile powder (again, from the beloved chimayó peppers from their namesake valley just north of the city) or topped with nuts from the pinyon pines so common in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains--these are treats with a definite taste-of-place.

The adobe Mission San Miguel,

builtin 1610, the oldest church in the U.S.

Along the high road to Taos, the first of the old Spanish settlements in the foothills is Chimayó. It's known for two things: the adobe Santuario with its 'miraculous' dirt (the "Lourdes of America), and its chile peppers. S. stocked up on different chile powders:

...and then, we had dinner at a New Mexico institution:

Just down the road from the Santuario is the century-old adobe home that houses the "Rancho de Chimayó." 

Owned by the Jaramillo family, this restaurant is known for its carne adovada--pork that has been stewed to tenderness in red chile. You may or may not believe in the power of the dirt in the Santuario's floor, but the taste of this valley's chile will have you convinced that the terroir--the taste of place--deserves its venerable reputation. Get the "combinación picante" so that you can sample a tamal, rolled cheese enchilada, beans and posole along with the carne adovada. And don't use all of your sopaipilla (the steaming square of puffy frybread) to soak up the chile; save a corner so you can douse it with local honey as a dessert...

Across the road from the restaurant is a B&B, run by the same family as well.

And then back to Tucson. It's a long stretch--7 1/2 hours--driving along the cottonwood-lined valley of the Rio Grande...The tiny town of Hatch will be your lunch-break. This is the self-proclaimed world capital of chile peppers. The soil and climate have turned this place into a center of pepper-production, and the capsaicin is celebrated every year around Labor Day during the Hatch Chile Festival. 


We had lunch at the Pepper Pot, where, incidentally, Anthony Bourdain passed through several years ago for one his television shows...

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About 1300 miles, this loop through Arizona and New Mexico--

deserts, canyons, forests, valleys of peppers, 

Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American societies...

A drive with a definite sense--and tastes--of place...

from red rocks to red foods...breathing again, and the parks are open...

Three and a half weeks since the last post; pneumonia tends to get in the way of things. 

(The following paragraph is an 'organ recital;' feel free to skip the lung anecdote.)

I thought, at first, that I was coming down with the usual middle-of-the-fall-semester cold--the annual ritual of students bringing their germs into my classroom...and then I thought it was the flu. I called in sick. And then called in again. And again. Then went to the doctor. "You've got pneumonia." Turns out it's been going around school. And so for the first time in my teaching career, I missed an entire week of work. I'm still coughing a bit, but am back to doing some easy runs, and even a bike ride today...

Just as I was getting over the worst of it, my mother flew in from back east for a visit. Her visit coincided with my fall-break, and so my wife and I took her up to Sedona; she'd never been to the red rock country before...and fortunately, this particular corner of scenic geology wasn't affected by the federal shutdown.

We ran into bus groups of French tourists a couple of times--man, how disappointed would you be if you'd traveled halfway around the world to see, you know, the Grand Canyon...but it's closed! Hmm...okay the Grand Canyon's closed, but maybe we can check out nearby Zion Nat'l Park...NON!--CLOSED TOO! Maybe check out some of the cave pueblo ruins down the road at Montezuma Castle? Wait, that's a 'national monument,' so that too is closed. "Welcome to America, visit our natural wonders...except that you can't." Just amazing...(Of course, this past summer, The Eiffel Tower was closed for a couple of days due to a labor strike...)

There was a trail head just behind our hotel, so we got up early...

...and my wife spotted these tracks: hooves and paws--deer and bobcat:

I've played around a bit with the photo below--

('painterly' effects have been my photo-flavor-of-the-month recently)--

but only a bit--the rocks and the dirt really are this red.

From the red rocks of Sedona, it's only about thirty miles up to Flagstaff, which sits in the middle of the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world...and then rising from the 7000' plateau are the San Francisco Peaks, the highest mountains in Arizona. They top out at over 12,000' and their flanks are covered with forests of aspens, which were at their fall color peak:

A bit of Colorado glory here in Arizona...

The next day, it snowed.

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On the way up from Tucson, we took a break from the road, stopping at "Rooster Cogburn's Ostrich Ranch." We've lived in Arizona for six years, but had never stopped. It's just off I-10 at Picacho Peak, and for six years we'd been reading the signs "Feed the ostriches" and "feed the lorikeets" while whizzing by at 75 mph, telling each other: "what a tourist trap!" Well, we finally succumbed, and it was worth every penny of the $5 admission fee as we spent the better part of an hour feeding and laughing at ostriches, donkeys, goats, prairie dogs, deer, and lorikeets in their large aviary.

How can you not love this face?

...so docile...

Lorikeets! 

These comical Australian parrots look, well, almost fake with their technicolor feathers...

It's the highlight of I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson.

And that reveals a lot about that stretch of desert...

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A few days later, we drove my mother down to Sierra Vista so she could spend the day visiting some old friends, and while she caught up with them, S. and I went for a hike in the Huachuca Mountains. Ramsey Canyon is a Nature Conservancy preserve and is one of the best places in the country for birdwatching; 15 species of hummingbird Bears also roam the slopes above this riparian preserve full of agave, pine, oak, maple, walnut, cottonwood, sycamore, juniper, ash...

Fall is just beginning in southern Arizona; mid-November is when the colors peak in the canyons of the Huachuca mountains.

     The cottonwoods in Tucson's lower elevation canyons wait until mid- and even late December to put on their show.

(My mother often says that her friends back east think that Arizona is just a whole bunch of sand, that it's all desert. Not true, not true...the ecological diversity is so striking here.)

And deer. So many deer. 

No hunting allowed in this preserve, so they're completely at ease as you hike by...

A few cabins and relics of homesteads remain, 

from after the Apache wars at the end of the 19th century...

And more deer.

No photos to show, but we also came across a flock ('herd?') of wild turkeys...

From the trail above the canyon, you can look back out over the town of Sierra Vista, 

over the grasslands of the San Pedro valley toward Tombstone

and beyond, the Dragoon Mountains:

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Okay, so, as the title of this post says--from red rocks to red foods.

Korean food--so often so red,

with its fondness for red pepper.

And with my Korean mother visiting us, 

there has been no shortage of red foods in our kitchen.

One of the stand-bys of Korean home cooking,

"soon-doo-boo chi-gye,"

or 'soft tofu stew:'

An outline:

sautée some red pepper powder in a bit of oil, to get 

a roasty taste...add some chopped pork, green onion, 

onion, sautée...add sesame oil...

add water/stock...bring to a simmer...

add mushrooms...

at the end, add the soft ('silken') tofu,

and then just before serving, break in a few eggs

so they can poach.

Garnish with toasted seaweed

Here is one recipe, if you want specifics.

When we lived in Seattle, we had several 'soon-doo-booh houses' to choose from; one of my wife's favorite adopted dishes...and now we know how to make it at home.

"Mahn-dooh!"

a.k.a. 'dumplings,' 'gyoza,' 'wontons,' or 'ravioli coréen'

Good when fried as 'pot-stickers'

and so good in soup...

Not, technically, a ''red food," but an essential

taste of Korea...and of my childhood.

As we sat at the table making them, 

my mother even commended me, saying

 "ung, how come your mahndooh prettier than mine?"

Practice, practice, practice...and, I gotta say, I had a good teacher...

Now, THIS is a red food:

"Tteok-pok-gee" is one (phonetically mysterious) way to transliterate it. Looks scary, eh? "Tteok" is a 'pasta' made from rice--it has the consistency of gnocchi, and this preparation is a popular street-food in Korea--the tteok are stir-fried in a red-pepper sauce with onions and, in my mom's version, meat...

To pronounce "tteok"--think of saying "hoT Dog"--feel the tenseness as you end the word "hoT" and begin the word "Dog"...Now keep that "TD" sound and use it to say "TDawk"...got it? 

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This evening, after work, I went to Sabino Canyon. For most of the year, I'm there at least once or twice a week...but after two weeks of pneumonia and its after effects overlapping with the 16 days of the federal government shutdown (Sabino Canyon is overseen by the National Forest service)--it's been nearly a month since I was last there! 

Ahh, a bike ride just before sunset;

breathing deep on a cool evening...

...and riding out just after moonrise over the desert...