Finally, after two weeks on the road, our destination was in sight. On Monday, March 1st we could officially check in for our month long stay in Arizona. We took Monday off of work in order to make the 4.5hr drive from Hurricane, Utah to Munds Park, and since we had all day to get there, didn’t hit the road particularly early. One thing we had been learning about hiking as a hobby is that you don’t really get to sleep in on hiking days, so we seized this rare opportunity to wake without setting an alarm. It was glorious.

I don’t have too much to say about the drive, except for that it was flat and… remote. Every time we passed a house or a ranch we’d say “I wonder who lives there?” and speculate about the personality and backstory of someone who could make it so far away from a city and all the associated amenities. It genuinely felt like the two closest cities were the ones we were driving to and from. We saw a billboard with an arrow pointing east advertising a McDonald’s ONE HOUR AWAY. I think the last time I was further than an hour away from a McDonalds I was in a plane over the Atlantic ocean. Must be a hardy people that choose to live out in the middle of the desert like that. Oh, and we also thought that we would stop by the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on our way down to Munds Park, since our route would take us right past it, but alas, the North Rim was closed for winter and would not be opening up until May. Not a huge blow to our master plan or anything since we would still have pretty easy access to the South Rim from where we were staying, but still notable about the drive.

The Accommodations

Our Airbnb was a smartly appointed 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom home in the only neighborhood in Munds Park (more on that in a second). It was a permanently affixed mobile home in a neighborhood that was a mix of mobile homes, cabins (the most adorable A-frames you ever did see), two-story houses, and massive estates; a combination of styles we were not used to seeing in the same subdivision, let alone the same street. But our little home had everything we could want for a month-long stay. We had a bedroom with plenty of space to store our clothes, a nice bathroom with a tub/shower that had hot water and great water pressure, the world’s tiniest washer/dryer combo, a large kitchen with everything required to make a meal, dependable wifi for working from the Airbnb, and a fenced-in side yard for Dog. Everything else was a bonus. The extra bedroom and bathroom also allowed us to host guests in the event that anyone from our real life back home wanted a very cheap vacation to Arizona (M and I tried to convince all of our siblings to make the trip out, but no dice). We quickly unpacked and settled into a comfortable rhythm of life in Munds Park.

There were some quirks with the listing we had chosen, although they were minor compared to the value we got from the list of necessities above. Basically, the home was not particularly well-constructed. The floors and countertops were crooked, which means that doors would hang open or swing closed unless someone intervened, and we watched many-a-roma tomato wobble toward the edge of the counter before snatching it back. For the first week of our stay, we’d take our noise-cancelling headphones off from work only to hear Dog crying softly from the bedroom where the door had swung shut and locked him in (after that, he learned to stay close on our heels when we left the room). The kitchen sink had the pressure and splash capacity of a fire hose when the handle was cranked all the way on, but when you tried to dial the force back at all, the weight of the handle itself would slowly force the piece all the way down into the off position. This meant that if you wanted to do the dishes, fill up a cup, or even wash your hands at a comfortable water pressure, you had about 1.5 seconds before the faucet turned itself off, or else it was a two-man job – one to hold the handle in place, one to operate in the basin. And for some reason, all the heat vents in the entire house were smack dab in the middle of the room that they controlled – in the middle of the FLOOR of the room they controlled. So in the middle of the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, the bedroom, there were metal grates with metal levers that stuck up into the air like stubby little knives. It took us less than an hour of cutting our feet walking over these grates to move all the rugs in the entire listing over the edges of the grates (or sometimes over the entire vent) in order to protect our piggies. And I mentioned the tiny washer and dryer previously, but it was really, really small. Like we had to do a load of laundry every other day because 4 outfits is all that would fit, and if you wanted to wash towels or blankets or sheets or anything else, it was almost guaranteed to need its own load. This ultimately meant that we could have packed way less stuff because we were expecting regular-sized machines and to do laundry once a week or so. We ended up liking our daily laundry routine, but it was still something a bit weird that we weren’t initially prepared for.

The “City”

Munds Park is technically not a city, but a “census-designated place” of 631 people, which I didn’t know was a thing before getting there, and had to look up. According to Wikipedia (don’t tell my 7th grade English teacher I’m citing Wikipedia), census-designated places exist only for statistical purposes, so Munds Park isn’t even real! It is basically a statistical mirage presenting as a city. But it fooled me well enough because it has a labeled highway exit and a town Outpost (kind of a DIY post office), so you know, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (“…you can call it a city” is how I think that phrase ends). I feel very confident that I can name every single compositional element of Munds Park because I saw it all with my own eyes. Off of the single freeway exit you will find two gas stations, an RV park, a motel, a golf course, three restaurants (no chains), the Outpost, a playground, a volunteer fire department, and the one neighborhood I mentioned before. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Amazing.

The Location

We weren’t staying in Munds Park for the amenities, we were staying there for its proximity to outdoor adventure! A quick look at a map before booking showed us a town that was close to Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, and even the Grand Canyon to the north and Phoenix to the south. Since we didn’t have any ideas about where we wanted to hike in Arizona, picking a home base with a ton of options for day trips was one of the smarter things we did. We figured we would sample all the drivable areas in our first week or so, and then have a better idea about where we wanted to focus the rest of our hikes. It was actually really stressing me out that we didn’t have more hikes on the calendar before we arrived – those that know me would be willing to attest that I’m not really a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of gal – but in hindsight, it was nice to have the flexibility to make day-of calls for particular hikes. We learned quickly that aside from the national parks, it was pretty futile to try and stick to any kind of hiking plan. We had lofty goals of planning hikes days or weeks in advance and then had to toss most of them out the window due to weather, timing, inaccuracies with AllTrails, crowds, etc.

Munds Park is also positioned squarely in the middle of Coconino National Forest, which was amazing, but also slightly inconvenient. Because there are protected lands on all sides of Munds Park, there aren’t a ton of roads connecting our little city to other cities. Interestingly (and frustratingly), our Airbnb was only 8.62mi to Sedona city center as the crow flies, but it would take us about 50min to drive there, since unlike the lucky crow, we would have to go around a major portion of the forest and descend more than 2,000ft to get to the central elevation of the city. All those pesky natural wonders we were there to see really got in the way of our driving! Sedona wound up being our primary stomping ground, which meant that we had about 2hrs of driving every day, but it was a beautiful commute, so we’ll bite our tongues. As for the other major destinations for us in Arizona, we were about 20min south of Flagstaff, which is where we did all our shopping and errands, 1.5hrs from Prescott where we did a couple hikes, 1hr 45min from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, which we knew we for sure wanted to visit, and 2hrs north of Phoenix where we had family and friends that we could meet up with on the weekend. All in all, a perfect location, but a LOT of driving.

The Weather

A great thing about traveling to Arizona in the springtime is that we get to escape the Wisconsin cold. While all of our friends were shivering and shoveling, we would be steaming and sunning ourselves in the beautiful American Southwest. Or so we thought. One bit of critical information that we failed to look up before actually crossing the state line into Arizona was the elevation of Munds Park, which we now know to be 6,590ft. While we weren’t surrounded by craggy peaks or anything, that is definitely high enough for the region to be considered mountainous. And do you know what happens in the mountains in spring? It snows. The first snow day we thought was kind of funny and ironic, but we had a total of seven snow days during our stay, and the novelty definitely wore off. There didn’t appear to be a clear strategy for snow removal either besides just “let it melt” (which, admittedly, it did do remarkably quickly by our standards). Our Airbnb didn’t have a snow shovel, just a garden shovel, so on days where we got a lot of snow, we couldn’t get out of the driveway and had to settle for a neighborhood walk instead of a red rocks hike. We were so baffled by the consistent flurries that we looked up the average annual snowfall for Munds Park. In a regular year, Munds Park will see around 12in of snow. At its deepest, the snow on the ground while we were there was 8in. A cruel joke.

On days when it wasn’t snowing, it was still pretty chilly in Munds Park. Looking back in the national weather service archives (there is no dorkier start to a sentence – don’t even try), it appears that our March was one of the cooler Marches in recent years. But luckily, our little cold patch didn’t extend too far beyond our census-designated area. The temperature in Sedona – which is less than 10mi away, remember – was regularly 10-15° warmer than at our Airbnb. Whenever we were traveling south on the freeway, which is basically a downward sloping ramp all the way into Phoenix, we would play a little game where we would try to guess how many miles it would be before the thermometer had climbed 20°. Usually it was an appallingly short distance. We chalked it up to the elevation and low humidity mainly, but the weather definitely plays by different rules in the mountains.

A Real Time Update

In real people time, we are actually already back from our trip! Time flies! The blog posts kind of got away from me as we did SO MANY cool things that I want to give proper time and attention to in writing about them. I’ll try to do a post or so a week until we round out the trip, but now instead of hikes and drives and time zone changes, my blogging will be competing for headspace with my daily life events, which right this very moment are building and planting a vegetable garden, fostering more puppies (two at a time this time!), and enjoying the beautiful Wisconsin springtime! But you can rest assured that we took diligent notes and logged all of our activities from the trip so that we can share them with you 🙂