Forest Life

We’re slightly north of Flagstaff near Sunset Crater Volcano.   Our plans were to stay at the campground at Sunset Crater, but it turns out it doesn’t open for 5 days.  Luckily there is boon docking available in the national forest just across the street.  So, instead of staying in an expensive campground with other RV’s ten feet from us, we’re camping free in a forest of wonderful smelling Ponderosa pines with a view of Sunset Crater in the distance, in sight of Abert squirrels and deer, and with the nearest RV over 100 yards from us.  It’s a tough life.

Our little RV is pretty big compared to others camping here.  About half of the people are in tents even though it’s getting down to freezing temperatures at night.  Most come in for just a night.  Others, like us, stay for several days.  The limit at a spot is 14 days, but normally you can stay longer by just moving to a different site.  Since the west is full of places like this, I wonder how many people spend all year camping for free.

Sunset Crater is a volcanic crater with lava flow and other volcanic rocks.  One of the hikes was short, but very steep up a cinder cone.  It’s really weird.  The trail looks like it’s been covered with cinders, but it’s the whole mountain surface.  The crater you see at the top looked like a parking lot.  Similar cinder cones outside the park are being mined for cinder so that soon they won’t exist. 

BTW, since I’d just spent a week at lower elevations, the 7000’ elevation steep trail was very tough for me. Afterwards we heard on the news that Olympic swimmers come to Flagstaff to train in high altitudes.  One of them died this week, though they aren’t sure what caused it exactly.

Our second hike was on a lava flow.  While we just hiked on a lava trail in El Malpais, this was different.  This is newer (1000 years versus 3000 year), but the lava was much more broken up.  I guess this is why Hawaiian has so many names for lava since it can vary so much.