Since I didn't have time in yesterday's post of the many photos I took during the drive from Globe to Show Low and then on to Pinetop, thought I'd describe the changes in the vegetation as the elevation changed.
Most of the flora around Globe consisted of Mesquite trees or bushes, prickley-pear cactii, and some large cottonwood trees in some of the damper dry creek beds. The first change as I drove north was that I saw fewer cactii as I gained elevation. Then juniper trees began to appear; a bit higher, and some oak trees were mixed in.
Once I got past the Salt River Canyon and back up to c4500-5000' some ponderosa pines began to appear. At first they were a bit spindley from lack of moisture, but as I got closer to Show Low (as well as nearer 7000') the size of the trees began to increase.
I drove from the Show Low Library to the Hon-Dah Casino thinking I'd see a lot of trees along AZ260. Not so! Instead, I saw a tremendous amount of new building along that corridor of new sub-divisions as well as businesses to support them. In fact, there were some relatively new towns such as Lakeside as well as others such as Pinetop, which had grown.
Stopped at several RV parks along the way, but all had closed their offices except one with a fair amount of snow and muddy roads with directions to see the assistant mgr at the very back of the park. Continue on to the Hon-Dah Casino, but it had closed at 5 p.m. Took 1 of the last 2 flyers from their box and headed back to Pinetop where I had seen a motel which also had RV spaces. While looking at the hours on the door of the Blue Ridge Motel and RV Park I wonder why there was no one there. Finally, a women yelled. "The door's unlocked!"
Since the sun was beginning to set, I wasn't looking more than for a site with electricity. While the site had a full hookup for $25, I told the woman I likely wouldn't used anything but AC power. When I said, "I don't suppose you have WiFI," she said that she did and suggested the closest site to the office.
After I connected up the 30amp power cord I fired up my laptop, but got a message to click a button on the router. Went back to the office, but she didn't know much about the WiFi other than that several others had fooled around and gotten it to work where they stayed or parked. Send 1 of my sisters a message using my Yahoo acct and returned to my camper.
Soon discovered that if one clicked on the bottom of the screen for the Access Point on the router where it said "I prefer to enter the passcode myself," that the router, which had no passcode, got on-line. And the signal was strong enough to allow me to listen to jazz form a couple of different streaming sources until I went to bed at midnight.
Here are a couple of photos I took this morning. The first shows my rig under a good-sized ponderosa pine -- the largest one I saw in the area. The second shows a meadow across AZ260/North Mountain Rd. (Irene remembered the trees and meadows from her visits to Show Low. [Second photo from Pinetop as well as another taken during the drive to Holbrook to follow later.]
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The drive to Holbrook saw another change in the vegetations. Since Show Low is c7000 and Holbrook is c5000 the pine trees disappear, being replaced by juniper trees with an occasional Mesquite tree or bush. The further north I got, the sparser the vegetation. Since the Arizona equivalent of CalTrans was working on Arizone Route #77, the primary route from Show Low to Holbrook, I wasn't able to stop & take many photos other than the one to the right. There were some small towns along the way such as Taylor and Snowflake, but they weren't very big.
However, Holbrook is on I-40, which in many places replaced the subject of the song written by Bobby Troup especially for Nat King Cole, "Route 66." In Nov 1961 when I was headed for Augusta, GA, and Fort Gordon, I drove from Kingman, AZ, to Santa Rosa, NM, on that famed route. Just to the east is the Petrified Forest Natl Park. Can't recall if I took any 127 Ektachrome slides on my Kodak Starflex camera back then, but I'll now be able to take some higher-quality photos with my digital camera.
Link to a Wikipedia article on Holbrook.
Th 3 Mar Route: Holbrook - Petrified Forest NP - Holbrook - Joseph City - Winslow
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