The Arb’s spa columnist, Anna Selby, ditches her towel robe and dons her stetson as she heads for the Copper State, a place synonymous with cowboys and cacti and a few contemporary touches besides…
If you think Arizona is all Stetsons and cowboy boots, you could be in for a surprise. Scottsdale – a town that’s almost adjacent to Phoenix, the state capital – is as cool as Clerkenwell. Well, except for the temperatures. We arrived at the end of May and the forecast was 107F. But then you are in the desert. Even on the way from the airport you see the gigantic Saguaro Cactus (the one with the arms outstretched that looks disconcertingly human) that reaches heights of 50ft and is Arizona’s state flower.
So what’s so cool? Well, this is a city devoted to art and the place is full of galleries. There are art trails. There are sculptures all over town – lifesize bronze statues, especially of horses or women with outspread eagle wings. The art covers a very wide range and includes a lot of very expensive bronzes as well as native American art – not cheap either. Outside the galleries, shops and restaurants (away from the formidable air con) there is misting – the air is gently infused with water to keep that dry desert heat from shrivelling you up. There is landscaping everywhere, even manicured grass at the roadside – it must cost a fortune in irrigation. Then there’s the fashion. At Scottsdale Fashion Square they have every big US and European name as well as smaller boutique-style stores. They also have a guest services department for everything from fashion advice and recommendations to dinner reservations.
That brings me on to the food. Richard Sandoval is a big name in American cuisine. Brought up in Mexico City there is a definite hot-chilli flavour going on, and he happens to be a connoisseur of tequila too. At his La Hacienda restaurant Fairmont Princess Hotel it all starts with guacamole. But this is nothing like the green paste you get in the supermarket. The waiter brings a big stone bowl of raw ingredients – avocado, tomato, onion, cilantro – to your table and asks if you prefer it smooth or chunky and mashes it accordingly. This was so delicious I could have happily eaten nothing else.
We by now had had time to relax and take in the surroundings – wood-beamed ceilings, flagstones and beehive fireplaces. The Major (who travels with me as self-declared bag carrier and driver) is not really a man for fashion and shopping so the evening was coming as quite a relief. He also proved to be of sterner stuff on the next course – three kinds of tequila, the one local to this region, a smoky one from Oahaca and another from Chihuahua where the dogs come from. There was a fourth glass that was described as a “palate clearer” but turned out to taste like neat Tabasco. All four made me cry but the Major coped manfully and even had some of mine. The rest of the meal was equally eventful – pan seared sea scallops with truffle butter and plantain pineapple salsa; steak with cactus pico; home-made chorizo.
The next day, the Major and I hit the road and headed north towards Sedona through red desert and red rocks that have formed the backdrop to a thousand westerns. This is a mountainous state and everything changes rapidly with the altitude. At 3000 ft, the cactus and the desert begin to disappear and at 4000 ft cattle ranching begins. By the time we get to Coconino National Park we are well and truly in the wild west. Out there around the red rock formations there are vultures and coyote, roadrunners and rattlesnakes. A friendly ranger (who tells us he used to live in Preston – what?) warns us about wild fires on the road ahead and worries about the Ponderosa pines he fears could be destroyed forever. This is a landscape that keeps getting ever bigger, ever more magnificent. We round Bell Rock – one of the most extraordinary formations – and see the smoke from the fires ahead.
We head on to Flagstaff and see signs warning us to “Watch out for Elk” – they have a tendency to loom out of the trees at dusk, we’re told, and will win hands down against your car. At 6000ft, our ears start popping. At 7000ft we reach Flagstaff. We continue on to the Hopi Reservation and the Moenkopi Inn where we have to sign a pledge not to bring intoxicating liquor in to the hotel – and the damage it’s caused is not hard to see in this town of abandoned hope.
More than a quarter of Arizona is native American reservation and this is definitely High Plains Drifter territory. The plateaus (mesas) are high, arid land and you can drive for miles and see nothing there at all, not a settlement, not a farm, not even an animal. But this desolate landscape is not empty. Bertram Tsavadawa is a Hopi artist and took us to see the petroglyphs that are carved into the rocks of the high plains and tell a story of the traditional Hopi life and its legends. There are sun gods and genealogy, histories of migrations and farming methods, moon cycles and animals.
And then there are the cowboys. So, yes, there are Stetsons after all and you find plenty of them in Flagstaff and Williams. These are wild west theme towns with trading posts and rodeos that grew up around the old Route 66. If you go to Flagstaff you have to go to the Museum Club, otherwise known as “The Zoo”. This is not defamation of the clientele, it refers to the walls covered with stuffed animals left by the place’s founder who was also a taxidermist. Reputed to have the best music in Arizona – country rock, naturally – it also has $2 drinks every Wednesday night and proper dancing where people have partners they hold on to. Lots of the men wear their cowboy hats (not for the Major, of course, who prefers a panama) and quite a few have long beards tied up in a kind of ponytail for the face looking like escapees from ZZ Top. But they do dance proper steps albeit it there are only two of them (hence the two-step?). I did offer but the Major declined (perhaps it was men wearing their hats indoors that did it?) and as the evening went on you would have had to be a professional to compete with the standard. Girls are flung around to drop down with their heads two inches above the floor, or swing round the man’s waist to somehow end up on his shoulder. There are even back flips going on. It’s quite a night.
We stayed the night in Williams at the Wild West Junction – a motel with an Old West theme – in the Movies room which had a number of classic westerns you could watch and was decorated with sheriff’s badges, movie posters, Clint Eastwood’s hat (yep, no escaping him round here) and a Winchester rifle over the bed. You can imagine the Major’s delight.
But this is all on the way to the Grand Canyon and however many pictures you’ve seen, nothing prepares you for the real thing. In a huge country like the States, you get used to things being big but the sheer scale of this takes your breath away. The Colorado River is almost a vertical mile below you. The eagles fly where you stand on the rim. The Hopi tribe believe it was the birthplace of all mankind.
The Major, being a man for mountains and climbing them, was entranced. And people do get overwhelmed – apparently bursting into tears or hysterical laughter. (I’m glad to say the Major did neither of these.) We stopped at every viewpoint and gasped. It comes almost as a shock this landscape of gnarled metamorphic rock formed nearly two billion years ago. Its colours change with the light and the high scudding clouds. Its strange eroded shapes look like fortress and palaces.
There are, of course, a lot of tourists – if you want an ice cream to cool off, prepare yourself for a half hour queue. But then it is the most often voted Eighth Wonder of the World. There is another aspect of the Grand Canyon, though, and you can have a little piece of it all to yourself. Grand Canyon Caverns are actually a two-hour drive from the place itself but the air comes from there via 65 miles of limestone crevices. You take the lift down 220ft and once inside you find caverns more than 65 million years old with huge chambers 200 by 400ft and 70ft high. You can walk through (no crawling required) for an hour to see the remarkable coral-like formations and the mummified bob cat that fell in around 1850 and – by breathing the air that is as dry and clean as it can get – solidified into rock.
Weddings have been held down here – and the flowers never fade. One bouquet dating from 1977 still has a pristine white ribbon. And, most amazing of all, there is now a bedroom down here. There’s no need to be afraid of creepy crawlies – nothing lives here, not a fly, not a bat. For your entertainment, there are old books and magazines dating back to the 1800s, an old fashioned record player with music, games and you can have dinner down here too. (The Major and I played the American version of Trivial Pursuits – hopeless on the sport questions.)
When the lights go out, it is absolutely dark, absolutely silent. It is, in fact, the largest, deepest, darkest, oldest, quietest motel room in the world. I can’t remember when I slept so well. Just don’t oversleep, though – the first tour comes through at 10am.
For a similar trip, America As You Like It has an eight night fly-drive holiday to Arizona from £1345 per person (based on two sharing), including return flights from London Heathrow to Phoenix on British Airways, eight days fully inclusive economy car hire, two nights at the Fairmont Princess Scottsdale, one night at the Moenkopi Legacy Resort in Tuba City, two nights at the Best Western Pony Soldier Inn in Flagstaff, one night at the Drover’s Inn at Wild West Williams, one night at the Caverns Inn at the Grand Canyon Caverns in Peach Springs and one night at the Royal Palms Resort in Phoenix. For more information visit the website or call +44 (0)20 8742 8299.
For further information on holidays to Arizona visit www.visitarizona.com.
