Anyway, at Flagstaff, I got on Interstate 40 at mile marker (mm) 195, and started going westward. That mm 195 means I was 195 highway miles east of the California border, or, again, east of the Colorado River. I’d be in Cali in about 2.5 hours.

Of course, north of Flagstaff rise the San Francisco Peaks, which are Arizona’s tallest mountains. Two peaks – Humphries??? and Fremont – rise above 12,000′. Humphries and Fremont – the men themselves – were West Point trained topographic engineers. They were two of an elite group of men who helped map the paths from the Great Planes to the Pacific Ocean. These US Army engineers played quite the unique role in American history. Few Americans know anything about them, but their story is fascinating.

And, of course, the name “San Francisco” has nothing to do with the city in California. Franciscan missionaries in the 1600’s headed west from Spanish colonies from what’s now New Mexico to proselytize unto the Hopi and Zuni Indians of what’s now Arizona. In their zeal to replace pagan place-names with good, Catholic ones, they renamed the Kachina Peaks – the Kachinas being the gods of the Hopi – to San Francisco.

As a Grand Canyon guide, I’ve explained this hundreds of times.

I had also driven from mile-markers 195 to 165 hundreds of times. This stretch of 40 is all fairly unremarkable ponderosa country, which, nonetheless, is interesting to see for those who formerly thought that Arizona’s nothing but a desert. Here’s where the monotony of guiding could sometimes produce a headache. However, here, I’d blabber on about Old Route 66, and why it was built in the 20’s, and why Steinbeck named it the Mother Road in The Grapes of Wrath, and how it was the Highway of American Dreams taking people west to the promised land.

At 165 – at Williams that is – is Arizona state highway 64 which goes north to the Grand Canyon. That drive is kinda’ boring too. However, once you get to the Grand Canyon, God’s artistic prowess makes guiding easy. I’ll not digress much, but I will say that, of all things I’ve seen out West – and I’ve seen a lot – Grand Canyon’s number one. I rank it above Yosemite, Zion, Brice, Yellowstone and the other otherwordly landscapes begging you to take a road trip out West.

If there’s one thing America’s federal government got right – and they’ve whole lot wrong – it’s highways and interstates. Many go through marvelous scenery. I’ll not list the best ones now. However, many hours of my life have been filled with a lusty pleasure for beholding endless purple mountains on federal roads.

East of Williams I wasn’t feeling it. West of Williams, however, that road-trip-to-California feeling started to come on. Again, I do love it. I’d only driven west from Williams once before, on a 2017 trip to Sequoia National Park, but that was at night. Today I’d see the full change from cool, ponderosa plateau to scorching Mojave Desert.

At mile-marker 155, the ponderosas disappear. Here you drop 2000′. The power of orographic lift to foment clouds and rain diminishes, which leaves the hills running along 40 studded only with junipers, or, as those from east of the Rocky Mountains call them, cedars. Here the land looks like a little like the Texas Hill Country. However, thousand and two-thousand-foot volcanic crags rising here and there make it feel uniquely Arizona. If the rain’s been falling, the ground’s green, and the scenery literally shocks those driving eastward and upward from Cali or Vegas to Flagstaff

Somewhere along the way, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears came on the radio. It’s got a happy sound I like to hear on road trips. A sweet, coffee buzz was accentuating the pleasure of driving with windows down on a still-cool, late-spring morning, though, I knew swamp-butt was coming.