road trip

Good morning.
We've just returned from a little road trip.
This trip took us a little southeast of Vegas to Northern Arizona,  Specifically Flagstaff, Sedona, Cottonwood, and Prescott. The weather in Flagstaff was nearly 30 degrees cooler than Vegas due to the 7000 ft elevation that Flagstaff sits at. And it reminded us of northern Michigan with a lot of hills and pine trees.
We arrived Thursday afternoon and spent 3 nights there. The first day was a short drive to Walnut Canyon National Monument.

You can't see well enough in these pics, but there are numerous cliff dwellings in this canyon. One is just next to my shoulder in the above pic.

There is a trail that goes by some of them but we declined to do it as it would have been  273 steps back up out of the canyon and we didn't feel that energetic.   :-)
We then went back to town and explored the downtown having a late lunch/early dinner at a sidewalk cafe at an old hotel.
Next day took us a little farther north to see Sunset Crater, and Wupatki National Monument.
Discovered that the trail to the craters edge has been closed for some years to protect the fragile environment, but we did walk the lava trail....

This is actually a very young volcano erupting only about 100 years ago. So the lava flows haven't had enough time to get covered by vegetation and such. It was a very surreal sight. And for miles around the area, there was visible thick areas of black ash covering the ground. The entire one side of the volcano still didn't have hardly any vegetation growing because of the thick layer of ash. And they get very little rain here to help it break down.
After seeing this we headed on to Wupatki. It has some fairly well preserved ancient Pueblos.
I'll post more about them tomorrow.