Needles, California to Flagstaff, Arizona

As we were leaving Needles the temperature was around 100 degrees, and it was only mid morning.  A local informed us that the high for the day was going to be 112 degrees and last week the high was 126 degrees.  I find it hard to imagine living with those temperatures on a daily basis!  We were quite happy just knowing that on that day day, Friday, we would be climbing into higher elevations and just maybe finding cooler weather!

Not many miles down the road we were in Arizona, crossing Lake Havasu and into the city by the same name.  We saw signs directing us to London Bridge, that was tempting, but we had to stay on schedule with no side trips.

We noticed as we had traveled through different deserts that certain types of cacti were more common than in other regions of the hot dry land.  On Thursday we saw cholla cacti, today it was ocotilla.  The latter is a  shrub with long cane-like branched spiny stems which grow from a short trunk.  It can grow to 20 feet tall, but we saw only a few which had any length to them.

Until we drove into higher elevations, this was what we pretty much saw- large rocky prominences barren of any life except for the desert sage brush and cacti around it.

What a difference a few thousand feet make!.  This was around Kingman, and now we were seeing cattle in the fields as well as many signs warning that there may be elk on the road.  All we saw were deer placidly lying under shade trees.

Pictured above is the Kalibab National Forest.  Now we were at 6,000 feet elevation seeing pine and aspen trees.  A very nice change!  We soon arrived in Flagstaff and stopped for a grocery run.  I got the latter done while John did some research as to where we were going to park for the night. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the temperature had changed, dropping down to about 65 degrees.  A storm had just passed through the area which also helped.  It is now monsoon season in the southwest, which runs from July to mid September.  Brief showers pop up in the late afternoon and night hours.  Probably explains why the desert areas looked fairly green for this time of the year.

We stopped  at Meteor Crater rv park for the night.  Off in the distance we could see a red rock wall.  Those same red boulders dotted the landscape around our motor home.   Not too far down the road was the Meteor Crater, which we had seen in the past.  About 50,000 years ago a meteor passed through the earth's atmosphere and crashed into a rocky plain with about an explosive force greater than 20 million tons of TNT.  This resulted in a giant bowled-shaped cavity.  Information provided by our park brochure.  The crater is impressive to see and if you have not seen it, put it on your bucket list!   Saturday we moved on to Albuquerque, New Mexico