Dispatches From The Road - Day 8 and 9

Friday morning brought sunshine to The Grand Canyon.  Still pretty dang chilly (32 degrees).  We took the opportunity to make a couple stops before heading to Flagstaff. 

Absolutely beautiful

 

 

For lunch we stopped at Twister's 50's Soda Fountain in Williams, AZ.  Burgers were very good, maybe a little pricey, but very good.  Quite a little find.  They had lots of Route 66 and Coke memorabilia. 

Our next stop took us to the Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monuments in Arizona.  Erupting sometime between 1040 and 1100, Sunset Crater is the most recent in a six-million-year history of volcanic activity in the Flagstaff area.  The force of the volcano created more than 600 hills and mountains in the San Francisco volcanic field.  The Wupatki Pueblo was built and occupied during the 1100s.  By 1180 thousands of people were farming on the Wupatki landscape.  By 1250, the volcano had quieted and the pueblos stood empty.  The people of Wupatki had moved on and established new homes, some to the high deserts of the Colorado Plateau.  Those that did stay, their descendants still live nearby, including Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo people.