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Kofa Mountains Weren’t Always the “Kofa Mountains”

July 30, 2010 By 1 Comment

Q: What happened to the SH Mountains? I can’t find them on any maps anymore.

A: Nothing happened to them. It’s not like they disappeared or something. It’s just that over the years they got renamed, and rightly so. They are now known as the Kofa Mountains, located about 70 miles northeast of Yuma.

The SH Mountains were so named back in the 1800s either by miners or soldiers who noticed that from a distance they resembled outhouses. I will leave it to you to figure out what SH stood for. Suffice it to say, it is not a word one would expect to read in this newspaper.

In the interest of delicacy, the SH range was also known over the years as the Short Horn or Stone House mountains until the mapmakers finally settled on Kofa.

Filed Under: Natural Surroundings, Southern Arizona Tagged With: , ,

The Big Indian Head of Winslow

July 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
39 head

Peter Wolf Toth arrived in Winslow in 1979, intent on adding one of his art works to the city’s landscape. When he left about four months later, he had turned a single ponderosa pine log into a 30-foot tall Indian head, and he left it there for posterity. The work was one in Toth’s series of giant heads that he carved in every state and four Canadian provinces. He called the effort “The Trail of the Whispering Giants,” and dedicated it to what he considered the mistreatment of Native Americans by early settlers and the federal government.

Filed Under: Art, Northern Arizona, Odd Observations Tagged With:

Why Don’t Palm Trees Blow Down in the Wind?

July 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Palm Trees

Q: Why don’t palm trees blow down in strong wind as often as other trees do?

A: I thought this was going to be an easy one, and I was prepared to pad it out with a lot of cheap jokes about my masters.

Instead, it got kind of complicated, so I had to cut out the jokes, which is just as well because I would have had to explain them to my masters anyway.

This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots.

Kim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, went to some pains to explain the differences to me. He is a very patient man.

Filed Under: Natural Surroundings, Weather Talk Tagged With: ,

Arizona Geography Trivia: Can You Pass?

July 11, 2010 By 5 Comments

Test your knowledge of Arizona Geography with this short quiz, originally published in Marshall Trimble’s Official Arizona Trivia. Don’t scroll down too quickly. The answers are posted shortly below the questions. When you’re finished, leave a comment with your score. Did any answers surprise you?

1. Name one of three Arizona dams named after U.S. Presi­dents.

2. What mountain range is north of Tucson?

3. What Indian reservation is located completely within the boundaries of another?

Filed Under: Dose of History, Natural Surroundings, Odd Observations Tagged With: , , ,

Why Does Downtown Phoenix Seem to Have Two Downtowns?

July 6, 2010 By 2 Comments
City of Phoenix Downtown, AZ

Q: Why does Phoenix seem to have two downtowns — one “downtown” and then another grouping of high-rises farther north along Central Avenue?

A: Because many years ago, the city fathers and mothers thought big.

Unfortunately, they also thought wrong, or at least incorrectly.

The result is today we have a downtown downtown and downtown uptown, although we know of people who think of anything south of Northern Avenue as being practically the inner city.

According to Dave Reichert, head of the Phoenix Planning Department, back in the 1960s, when we only had one downtown and it was downtown, the city’s leaders had dreams of grandeur.

Filed Under: Odd Observations, Valley of the Sun Tagged With: ,