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.
Under normal circumstances, I can readily find the origins of weird things in Arizona, but there’s one north of Flagstaff that puzzles me. No one seems to know anything about what it is, why it’s there and who put it there. It is three weathered tree trunks (they look like junipers) standing next to each other, and someone painted strange faces on them. The images on the two smaller trunks are badly faded, but the face on the tallest one is still in relatively good shape. It resembles “The Scream,” the famous expressionist painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893.
Two huge Celtic crosses keep silent watch over the landscape of Cochise County. One graces the Holy Trinity Monastery, a Benedictine community just south of St. David. The second is on a hillside overlooking Our Lady of the Sierras Shrine near Hereford. Both tower more than 75 feet over their surroundings, and both are the result of a journey Pat and Gerry Chouinard made to a shrine in Medjugorje, in what was then Yugoslavia. When they retired in 1995, the couple decided to build a similar shrine on their property near Hereford.
The Pima County Courthouse has been a Tucson landmark for eight decades, but it took a long time for the community to accept it because of a lingering controversy over the colors and style. But over the years, the Spanish Colonial Revival structure has become became a city icon.
The building, designed by Roy W. Place and built by Herbert Brown, is the third courthouse to occupy the site.
