Apr 30, 2009

Shoshone Falls

Last fall I drove to Twin Falls, Idaho, with a couple of key council volunteers for a meeting of the top leaders from the three Scout councils in Idaho. (The others are in Boise and Twin Falls.)

On our way back to Idaho Falls we stopped by Shoshone Falls “The Niagra of the West” to check them out since none of us had been there before.

Here is what we saw:


Yesterday I brought nine of my professional staff members to Twin Falls for a training conference on expanding Scouting into multi-cultural markets.

On our way back to Idaho Falls we stopped by Shoshone Falls to check them out since the water is flowing at peak volume due to the spring run-off.

Check out the difference in the falls:


Now THAT looks more like Niagra!

Casa Grande

Boy Scouts sell popcorn as a fundraiser like Girl Scouts sell cookies. (But the girls sell a LOT more cookies.) Every year the major vendor of Boy Scout popcorn, Trails' End, a subsidiary of Weaver popcorn, hosts a training seminar on the latest and greatest information on popcorn. This year I attended the seminar in Tucson, Arizona. I found it was much cheaper to fly into Phoenix and drive to Tucson than to fly direct to Tucson. So David, my popcorn sales manager, and I flew to Phoenix, rented a car, and drove to Tucson.

After the seminar was over we drove back to Phoenix but we had a few hours to kill before our flight. On the road map I saw that Casa Grande Ruins National Monument wasn’t too far out of our way and we decided to make a detour and visit the Ruins.
I like ruins. They’re cool. I like to try to imagine what things were like when the ancient people lived there and built them. I have spent many days hiking and exploring Anasazi dwellings and ruins in southern Utah and New Mexico. I probably should have been an archeologist.

Here's what an artist thinks Casa Grande looked like.

So, there we were at the Casa Grande Ruins in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Years ago I visited the Casas Grandes Ruins in northern Mexico, a.k.a. Paquime, and was very impressed with what I saw there—thousands of adobe rooms.


Casa Grande had an impressive multi-story structure but the rest of the ruins were in bad shape or had not been excavated yet. Here are some photos I took of the main Casa Grande ruin.




The entrance fee included a walking tour of the ruins and the interpretive guide was very good, but a little long winded. As he went on and on and on I started to get a little worried about catching our return flight and finally we had to walk out on the tour and hightail it back to the Phoenix Airport, return the rental car, and check-in at the ticket counter with 45-minutes to spare.

But when we got to the counter the ticket agent said, “Check-in has closed for this flight.” I asked her when it closed, “Two minutes ago.” (We had been standing in line for at least ten minutes.) I asked her if there wasn’t some way she could still squeeze us in. “The computer automatically closes the flight forty-five minutes before takeoff and you are too late. You have to wait and take the next flight.”

So, we got to sit in the Phoenix Airport for four hours to repent for our two-minute tardiness and reflect on the wonders of Casa Grande and ponder if the ancient bureaucrats were any more customer friendly than their modern US Air counterparts. I wonder if that is a clue the answer to the great mystery of why the ancient ones suddenly disappeared?