On Thursday, November 19, I collected my last pass port
stamp for this trip. We left I-10 north of Tucson and took AZ70 and 79 to
Coolidge AZ where Casa Grande Ruins National Monument is located. This is a
place sacred to several tribes of Native Americans who trace their ancestry to
the Ancestral People of the Sonoran Desert (sometimes called the Hohokam). They
lived and thrived farming in this part of the desert by building irrigation
canals from the three major rivers in the area. They grew to a large population
and built many villages with walls and buildings of caliche (a concrete like
mixture of sand, clay, and limestone). Casa Grande is a 4 story building built
towards the end of their era. It is still standing in its ruined condition, but
that attests to its original brilliant construction. No one knows why the
population disbursed in the mid 1400’s, but these ruins tell much of their
story.
One interesting thing is that we noticed cotton fields as we
were driving to Coolidge. There were also irrigation canals. And it turns out that
one of the major crops from the early Indians was cotton – so almost 600 years
later, not much has changed!
We then chose to drive the belt line around Phoenix, which
was not quite as straight forward as it looked on the map. However, we saw some
new territory on the outskirts of Phoenix and eventually got back to Buckeye to
spend the night.
And here we are on Friday the 20th staying in
Palm Desert. We spent most of the day driving here, stopping for potty breaks
and a little shopping. The desert here is not nearly as beautiful as that
further east and south, being mostly rocks, sand, and barren hills.