Westairing

WESTERING WESTAIRING in and out of Arizona

Those who have always insisted that the quest for gold was the most significant factor in America's century of western exploration and settlement may have second thoughts as they peer through David Muench's lens and discover the existential qualities of a land and its people. They may then consider that possibly the greatest draw to the old West was not just a glittering mineral in the sand, but the land itself and the glitter of possibility; that westering could be an end in itself, a questing which only an ocean could physically halt.

Today, more than a million square miles comprising eleven western states represent the fastest growing region in America, thereby continuing to justify the faith of men and women whose vision transcended known limits of their time, and whose courage and recklessness pushed back a frontier 3000 miles across a continent of mountains, plains, deserts and white water, every mile contested by nature or hostile tribes. For some the westering wasn't done until, like "stout Cortez," they "stared at the Pacific . . . Silent, upon a peak in Darien." But others, satisfied by an ocean of big sky, gave us a few tame corners in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

The westering goes on perhaps as a single characteristic of a people still too young and dissimilar to have developed a single national character. But inquisitive and questing we continue to be, asking in the last decade some pretty tough questions about our world, a technology we have invented to modify it, and our place as a species in the scheme of things; pushing forward frontiers of thought as well as space until at last we are confronted with the Pacific Ocean of ourselves. And then the westering becomes a private trek for which a man needs a context of infinite possibility and some rule of measure for challenging his knowledge, philosophy and achievements. You will find these in the West, in the big sky country where space is palpable because it's real, and precious not because it's scarce but because it's revered; where the past, already an epic chapter in our history, was only yesterday, but it's the future that begins and counts today.

About the only valid generalization one can safely venture about all the western states is that each has many faces, many personalities; about as many in fact as the whole United States of America. The Pacific Northwest is not, for instance, all green rainforest, filigreed coastline and capricious fog, but grasslands and hard lava country east of the Cascade Range which bisects Washington and Oregon into opposite physical and psychological entities. In Jordan Valley in eastern Oregon there are even descendents of original Basque settlers still herding sheep and playing their traditional game of Pelota. Nor is Nevada a desert moonscape between two gambling towns, but a state varied with ranches, forests, lakes, and caves fringed with stalactites.

For the outdoorsman the West is a paradise unexcelled anywhere in the world, offering hunting, fishing, boating, mountain climbing, trail riding, skiing, sky diving or what you will. There isn't a state among the eleven that hasn't its national, with the La Sal Mountains back-ground, along the Colorado River Gorge in southern Utah.

parks, spas, camping grounds, resorts and convention centers. The intellectual life of western cities is complemented by university towns and museums, not only of the traditional type for the display of art and artifacts, but living museums for the botanist and student of natural history. For arm-chair archeologists and anthropologists there are ruins and digs, usually attended by a staff to welcome and instruct the visitor. And for the geologist, we offer our million square miles of open laboratory. Western buffs will find the Mother Lode and Comstock Mine, ghost towns by the dozen, rodeos, dude ranches, and reconstructions of historic towns, gunfights and wagon trains. Admirers of the original Americans can study Indian tribes and customs firsthand from living descendents of the people from whom we stole the West. One enterprising tribe more tuned in to modern times, the White Mountain Apache, owns and operates a thriving ski resort in Whiteriver, Arizona.

Southernmost of the western states but centrally located, Arizona makes a natural base for safaris radiating in all directions. Both Tucson and Phoenix boast modern international airports serviced by eight scheduled airlines including one foreign carrier, Aero Mexico. In addition, there are six reliever airports with general aviation facilities for private planes in the suburbs of Tucson and Phoenix: Ryan Field and Avra Valley near Tucson; Deer Valley, Falcon Field, Litchfield and Scottsdale municipal airports surrounding Phoenix. All major western cities are accessible by air from either Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix or Tucson International Airport, and between Tucson and Phoenix twenty flights shuttle back and forth daily.

When you start your westering in Arizona you're never more than a meal away from the farthest point in the western states. Even the longest direct flight to the Pacific Northwest, leaving Tucson after lunch, will land you in Seattle in plenty of time to make a dinner reservation. Safaris within the state are never longer than an hour by air, so that you can spend a winter morning snow skiing and the afternoon of the same day water skiing.

In addition to the well-known larger carriers like American, Continental, Delta and TWA, there are four airlines extending service throughout the West with either direct or connecting flights: Cochise, Frontier, Hughes Air West and Western Airlines. Unique among them for versatility of scheduling is Cochise, a small commuter service airline averaging 45 flights a day and currently servicing eleven Arizona cities and hoping to extend its regular service to include San Diego as well as more cities within the state. The great thing about Cochise is that they are able to arrange tours to any place you might want to go, either inside or outside Arizona, for as few as four couples. Year-round regular service includes daily flights to Grand Canyon, Tombstone and Lake Havasu. $77 will buy you a round-trip ticket to Grand Canyon, including your Park entrance fee and lunch and that's quite a bargain.

Sooner or later everyone goes to California and there are more daily flights to California cities from Arizona than to any others in western states. Los Angeles is only an hour away by air, and San Francisco less than two. American and Western Airlines have regular service to San Diego, and Cochise will join them after its new schedule is approved. No one has to be told what to do in a city and sometimes I think no one has to be told what to do in California. But to the uninitiated traveling to the Golden state we submit that no where else in America will you find such a combination of simplicity and sophistication, civilization and wilderness, and an urban sprawl so massive, but utterly dwarfed by its natural setting. The Monterey Peninsula, a refuge from the big cities and charac-terized by Robert Louis Stevenson as "the greatest meeting place of land and water in the world," is also a refuge for the rare southern sea otters who share the coastline with sea fions and migrating whales. And after you have 'done' Hollywood, Disneyland, Marineland, the San Diego Zoo and San Francisco, remember the wine country, the Spanish missions, Steinbeck's Cannery Row, the giant sequoias and 1200 miles of coastline.

Mining, mountains, hunting, skiing or just plain westering may draw you to Idaho and Colorado and the big sky country of Montana. Hemingway lived part of his life and died in Ketchum, Idaho near Sun Valley, and Steinbeck loved Montana so much he became almost inarticulate trying to explain why. Perhaps the paintings and sculpture of Charles Russell communicate better than words what Steinbeck could feel but not say. Frontier, Hughes Air West and Western Airlines will fly you to Idaho and Montana, and Frontier and Western will take you to Colorado where you can ski in Durango in the winter, and in the summer months join a real wagon train for a weekend's adventure into the San Juan National Forest. Or maybe you've always had a hankering for dinosaurs in which case you'll find 100 miles of dinosaur beds near Grand Junc-tion.

The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi sits proudly high at 7000 ft. altitude. Better known simply as Santa Fé, this oldest of state capitals in the United States remains the only western capital without a functioning airport. Nonetheless, there is an airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico's largest city, serviced by Frontier and American airlines and it's not much of a drive from Albuquerque to beautiful Santa Fé. Together, New Mexico and Arizona have more full-blood Indians living a basically Indian life than other states in the union. The annual shows and auctions of exquisite Indian crafts in Santa Fé draw collectors from around the world.

If sheer age impresses you, then see how old the earth is at Grand Canyon. But the oldest living things are the Bristlecone pines, thought to be more than 4600 years old. Some of these still grow in Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah, a state described by one writer as 96% scenery. In physical plan the villages remind you of New England, but the com-parison doesn't stop there because much of the Mormon conservatism is not unlike the Puritanism of New England. But Utah remains true to western tradition in its variety of terrain: snow-covered mountains, salt flats, and lush valleys irrigated with canals. The Mormon capital of Salt Lake City is deservedly notable for its physical beauty, its dignity, prosperity and the Tabernacle Choir. Snowmobiling and skiing are growing winter sports in Utah along with ice fishing. Frontier and Hughes Air West have connecting and direct service to Moab and Salt Lake City respectively. And if you are curious to know what's in Moab, then go to the museum there to see their fine exhibits of uranium geology and Indian artifacts.

Three great river systems the Columbia, the Colorado and the Missouri have their sources in Wyoming's mountains, but more than the rivers it was the fertile grasslands that determined the course of Wyoming's history. Some sections of the state are overspread by more than 150 different kinds of grasses, and it is grass that built and today sustains the cattle industry. Wyoming is high country with an average altitade of 6000 ft. It is also very sparsely settled so that as Hamilton Basso said, "you can hear the land." You can also climb the Grand Tetons, ride, hunt, fish and ski when you aren't sitting still to hear the silence. Frontier and Western Airlines will fly you to this very special state whose spirit seems to have changed but little since the days the covered wagons came through Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail.

Travel agents and airline personnel familiar with westering have tours to fit every pocket and satisfy every whim. There are tours of capital cities, coastal tours, wilderness tours, tennis tours, golfing tours, skiing tours... the list never ends. But we think the best tour begins and ends in Arizona with a lot of side trips to the other ten western states.

A. B. Guthrie, Jr. who describes himself as a "passionate expatriate Montanan" asked himself what bound him to the state. Was it "scenery, space, the opportunity for solitude?" He might have been speaking for the whole of the West when he answered. "It is all of these: It is mountain water over shining rock. It is the riffle of the west wind in the redtop. It is stars like campfires in the sky. It is clouds among the peaks It is a cottontail at the edge of a thicket. It is a pack trail and the Continental Divide. It is a horseman and a bronc... It is limpid fishing streams It is the aching roll of badlands. It is Lewis and Clark and the things they saw that I see now It is the wild geese V-ing before a storm. It is the cool summer nights with the coyotes crying. "It is the informal cordiality that a man encounters from border to border It is the unknown rancher in a pickup who stops to ask if he can help with a flat. "It is all of these and it is more than these It is a freedom from or an ascendancy over the anxieties that press so hard elsewhere. Montanans (and he might well have said Westerners) somehow stay on top of life."

DOT's Grand Canyon Airport

The new Arizona Department of Transportation exercises an active interest in air travel throughout the Southwest through its Aeronautics Division. In addition to licensing private aircraft, providing long-range airport development plans and making local airport improvement grants in Arizona, the Aeronautics Division represents the State in all hearings before the Civil Aeronautics Board on applications for passenger service that affect Arizona either directly or indirectly.

If you were asked to name the three busiest air facilities in Arizona, you'd most likely rattle off the top two in short order -Phoenix and Tucson-only to flunk out completely on No. 3.

The surprising answer is Grand Canyon Airport, nestled in the pines just seven miles south of the National Park itself and operated by the Arizona Department of Transportation's Aeronautics Division as a public service.

Not only is Grand Canyon Airport the third busiest on the basis of passengers served by regularly scheduled airlines (72,400 last year); but it ranks No. 1 in the State when rated on its air taxi and charter flights. Last year these totaled 4,200 operations annually with 25,200 passenger boardings.

State Aeronautics Chief James Vercellino, who mid-wifed Grand Canyon Airport into being in 1967, points with pride at the only airport in Arizona operated by the State and for good reason. It not only pays its own way, but in a modest way helps provide aviation in Arizona with other services the State provides. Income last fiscal year was $90,000 against expenses of $85,000.

But even more interesting than these statistics is the "human side" of Grand Canyon Airport. For instance, it is not unusual for the 707 sporting the Presidential Seal to land and taxi up the runway and that's just a start.

Private airplanes with VIP's from all over the world have a habit of just dropping in. Passengers are as varied as a bevý of Russian astronauts, the Shah of Iran, the Nelson Rockefeller air force, Oriental and European potentates, African bigwigs, and Governors from just about every state in the Union.

On the distaff side, Ladybird Johnson and the Nixon daughters have all been seen gracing the runway and picturesque terminal building.

Grand Canyon is an active, full-facility airport open for service around the clock, seven days a week, all year 'round. It's the hub of routine flight activities, a recovery site for aircraft in distress, a base of operations for serial search and rescuemissions, and jumping-off point for fighting forest fires in northern Arizona.It is served by two scheduled airlines and numerousair taxi and charter airlines. Scheduled airlines make seven landings daily during the summer season and five in the winter.

In addition to records already cited, the airport ranks fourth in air carrier operations, and under present estimates will pass Yuma International airport in 1975 with 7,300 total annual air carrier operations.

The 72,400 air passengers handled via commercial lines last year does not include the considerable number carried on private air and corporate aircraft. Last August, one Las Vegas air taxi operator completed 586 flights to the airport.

The installation consists of one 9,000-foot runway capable of handling jet aircraft such as the DC-9's. Improvements planned for the near future include a runway extension to 10,000 feet to accommodate the big 747's and installation of a radio-controlled instrument landing system.

The facility already has a VOR homing device, a radio navigational aid for landing and take-off safety. In addition, there are two runway VAPI's (Visual Approach Path Indicator) which show pilots the correct approach path to the runway, provide safe clearance over obstacles, and help prevent over-shoot and under-shoot at touchdown. The airport includes an FAA control tower, a terminal building, hangar, a rotating beacon and parallel taxiways. Rental cars, aviation gasoline and jet fuel are available through concessionaires.