Arizona Desert is Dessert for Some with This Awesome Talent

Mary Deal: Life In The Desert:

Phoenix and surrounding towns and suburbs grew up from desert sands and caliche clay. The gorgeous spring and fall weather makes this a golf haven, though avid golfers also brave the cold winters and the sweltering summers. Many mountains and foothills can be found in and surrounding this expansive valley known as the Phoenix Metropolitan area. Hiking trails abound on those hill. One golf course I know of has five tee areas at different levels up the side of a hill.

It has snowed several times over the years in this Valley. In the higher elevations on the Mogollon Rim, in Flagstaff, Prescott. or Sedona, to name several places, it snows each year. But it’s always amazing to see snow in these lowlands.

A great feature that attracts many sightseers in Scottsdale, where I live, is Old Town Scottsdale. Here you will find art galleries, western motif shops, and eateries. Much of the western art is influence by the Native Americans and the Hispanic traditions. The town’s buildings are made up mostly of old western single or two-story architecture.

Presently, there are twenty-one Native American tribes that inhabit the state. Their influence is all around and is distinguishable by tribe. You can see and purchase beautiful artworks, paintings, pottery, blankets, and turquoise jewelry. You need not go only to Old Town to find the Native American flavor. Every town has shops to investigate.

Another interesting place is Taliesen, which was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate. The grounds and buildings are open to the public.

Though cities have taken over the desert reaches, we still have cactus. Five common types are found here: Prickly pear, Saguaro, Barrel, Golden Hedgehog, and Jumping Cholla. Yet, so many more thrive here. Most cactus put out gorgeous delicate blooms in stunning colors. The Desert Botanical Garden Arboretum, near our monster Zoo, is where every type of cactus is grown and thrives.

The Arbotetum also maintains a Butterfly room that people can enter and walk with the butterflies and photograph them.

Arizona is filled with incredible interesting cities and towns. All have a distinctive flavor of their own. Tucson to the south is where many western films have been made. Sedona is considered a spiritual center, with its stunning rock formations. The Grand Canyon is in northern Arizona. The huge Hopi Reservation occupies almost the entire northeastern corner of the state including the junction called Four Corners. That is where the Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado borders meet. Other smaller reservations dot the state. They are private lands. We have huge forests too. If you thought the desert was barren, please come visit.

Mary is offering a free eBook of your choice to one person picked at random from her list of books. Check her books on her Amazon Author page.  Leave a comment to win-don’t forget a form of contact or click the contact info tab and send your contact info to Annette. 

Mary Deal is a bestselling, award-winning author of suspense/thrillers, romance, a short story collection, writers’ references, and self-help. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Artist and Photographer, and former newspaper columnist and magazine editor.

Find her at these locations:

Amazon Author Page - https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Deal/e/B0035B02X6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

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Joyce Ann Brown’s Arizona Saga:

When I was a child, my grandparents wintered in Tucson, Arizona. Grandma had arthritis and had been advised by her doctor to move to a drier climate. My folks drove us out for a visit during our winter break—air travel for five not being in the budget. What a great break! Mountains, desert, cacti…not to mention the Petrified Forest National Park, the Painted Desert, and Sedona and Jerome, artist villages back then, built along narrow roads through the mountains. In Tucson, we played shuffleboard OUTDOORS on Christmas day and later took a trip to Mexico where we bought piñatas, sombreros, and maracas to bring back and bedazzle our snow-besieged friends.

Fast forward a couple of decades—more Arizona vacations as I visited friends who had moved to Scottsdale, marveled at the desert and mountains along I-40 on the way to California to visit extended family, and took my kids to the Grand Canyon.

So…Arizona meant vacationland, beauty and fun, escape from everyday life in Kansas City, where I lived as an adult. It wasn’t until my daughter and her husband moved to Tucson for their careers, had children, and settled down for the long haul, that I thought of Arizona as a place to live. I stayed with them several times to help with the babies. My husband and I visited the kids and grandkids, eventually bought a camper, took our cats with us, and stayed for several weeks at a time. We began extending our trips to visit long-time friends after they moved to Scottsdale. It was still vacation, except we were cooking, changing diapers, sitting at kitchen counters to visit with people, and learning to know the streets and neighborhoods.

Four years ago, our Scottsdale friends told us about a sale home in their complex. We could get it for a good price, and it needed only a “little” renovation. We wrung our hands, ruminated, sold rental property, and took the plunge. After two years leasing the property out and a year living in our camper while we gutted and renovated the new place, we moved here last fall—a fall filled with furnishing and decorating our home, as well as exploring the neighborhood.

Now, I can’t claim to know as much as a native Arizonian would know. And, I won’t say I know as much as the folks who moved here years ago as access to air conditioning helped grow some of the sleepy towns and villages into mega cities. A desire to learn as much as possible, though, has required research and travel—and taught me more than a Wikipedia overview of this beautiful and diverse state.

It was several years ago, when I started writing my Psycho Cat and the Landlady Mystery series, that we first started staying at an RV resort in southwest Tucson while visiting my daughter and her family and helping with the kids. Back in Kansas City, where the series is set, I used my impressions of the resort at the beginning of the second book, Furtive Investigation. In it, our sleuth, and her husband are called back to Kansas City from a winter trip to Arizona after they learn from the pet sitter that Psycho Cat has discovered a skeleton in the attic of one of the landlady’s rental properties.

Since then, I’ve checked out the Tombstone corral, Arizona wine country, cotton fields, olive groves, citrus groves, hiking trails, and the huge Talking Stick casino and resort on the Salt-River Pima Maricopa Indian Reservation bordering Scottsdale. Arizona is home to over twenty-two tribes on reservations covering about twenty-seven percent of the state. Another fifty-nine percent is controlled by the federal government—national parks, forests, and military bases.

Speaking of forests and parks, the great northern Arizona landscape deserves more of my future exploration time. The Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and Antelope Canyon outside of Page, an awe-inspiring surprise in the desert—those and more make the drive worthwhile. I’ve seen only some of the canyons, craters, preserved pueblos, and ski areas in Arizona. Ski Areas? That’s right—winter sport areas—near Flagstaff and on Mt. Lemmon near Tucson.

There’s much to see and do in Arizona, don’t you think? Comment for a chance to win an e-book copy of one of my books.

See more about the author and her books at: http://joyceannbrown.com  https://www.amazon.com/Joyce-Ann-Brown/e/B00OL6JH08/ or http://www.facebook.com/joyceannbrownauthor