Gallup to Scottsdale

The morning in Gallup was really frigid, with the temperature in the single digits. The altitude is again over 6,000 feet. It is dry as a bone here and the mountains look like massive rock piles that were deposited by some capricious giant. The landscape is magnificent in an austere way. Crossing over into Arizona the topography changes again, flattening out. It is perhaps the most inhospitable and charmless landscape I have seen. I left the interstate to join a two-lane secondary road headed south. For the first hour I sped through a vast emptiness; there was no one and nothing to be seen. I would have felt utterly alone had not a Mozart Piano Concerto been playing in the radio to console me. Rising in elevation I passed a sign announcing the Tonto National Forest. First there were only widely spaced juniper trees which are more like bushes than trees (you call this a forest?) but then there were pines and eventually nothing but pines. At the top of the ascent a vista opened up of snow-dusted, forested peaks, unexpected and glorious. What a change in flora in just two hours of driving! The gradual descent went through the town of Payson (which has grown a lot since the last time I was here) and then began the steep descent to the valley floor. The pine forests disappeared and were replaced by suguaro cactus, first a few, then countless specimens. These are the iconic cacti of the desert that grow to thirty feet in height with arms curved upward. It takes a suguaro 75 years to produce its first arm. Reaching the sprawling megalopolis of Phoenix/Mesa/Scottsdale there were palm trees, blooming bougainvilea, orange and lemon trees hung with a bounty of fruit. It was surprisingly cool, only in the fifties. The pic is taken outside of Payson, on the way down the mountain. Note the splendid prickly pear cactus specimen.