Tag: rock formations
The Legend of Apache Cave
On Dec. 27, 1872, Army troops trapped a group of Yavapai Apaches who had taken refuge in a cave carved into a hillside located in the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers began firing from below. Upset by the wails of women and children wounded as the bullets ricocheted off the cave's roof, Maj. William Brown ...Sedona’s Damfino Canyon Named After Mix-up
SEDONA -- Many of the red rock formations that surround Sedona have earned their names by resembling such common items as a teapot, steamboat, merry-go-round and lizard head. But there's nothing in official city history that explains Damfino Canyon. According to local legend, however, it happened this way...Meteor Crater is One Big Roadside Attraction
NEAR WINSLOW – Just a short drive off I-40 between Flagstaff and Winslow, remnants of a 50,000-year-old collision are visible. “Visible,” I suppose, is an understatement. A massive crater – nearly one mile across and 2.4 miles in circumference – was created here when an asteroid traveling some 26,000 miles-per-hour smashed into the Earth. ...Time Stands Still in Supai
SUPAI -- This small village may be one of the few places left on Earth where time actually has stood still. It is the home of the Havasupai Tribe and it looks much the same today as it probably did more than 700 years ago. Located in a side canyon off the Grand Canyon, the ...Know the Origin of the Frog Boulder near Cherry?
Some creative landmarks dot the landscape around Yavapai County – the Hwy 89 frog, the SR 96 duck and the Date Creek skull. Each delicately painted boulder is visible roadside. The latest landmark on our radar is this frog rock located near the ghost town of Cherry.Can You Fall Through the Earth’s Desert Crust?
Q: I say the desert is just sand and dirt and rocks and desert plants, but my husband claims he read somewhere that it is really covered with a hard crust that you can fall through. What’s he talking about? A: You people...Oddities Need Updating, Too
It is not unusual that some Arizona Oddities have differing stories behind their origins. Take, for example, the big sign made of rocks on Signal Butte in the Usery Mountains. The most common belief is that in the 1950s, Boy Scouts scouted up the rocks, painted them white and arranged them to spellPoetry on the Rocks in Tucson
TUCSON -- The poetry of Ofelia Zepeda is literally cast in stone. As part of a Tucson drainage project, several of her poems were etched into large boulders along North Mountain Avenue. They include odes to the desert, tributes to Native Americans, and rhymes about flora and fauna.Caving at the Coronado National Memorial
The Coronado Cave at the Coronado National Memorial takes you deep inside a majestic wonderland of limestone formations, which began to take shape some 300 million years ago when Arizona was covered by a shallow sea. It’s believed as much as 50,000 gallons of water once flowed through this cave per minute, from east to ...Giant Arrow Points to Phoenix
PHOENIX -- More than 50 years ago, the Valley of the Sun was a whole lot of desert sprinkled with a few towns, mostly of them small. Phoenix had the only airport and it was also small and, because it was in the middle of some pretty barren landscape, it was sometimes hard to spot ...
