3 Cool Day Trips From Scottsdale

If you’re moving to Scottsdale – or if you already live in the city – you’ll be glad to know that this area is a short drive from some of Arizona’s most amazing attractions. These are three of the locals’ favorite one-day getaways.

 

Hop in the car and enjoy one of these three amazing day trips:

 

• Havasupai Falls
• Meteor Crater
• Pumpkin Spring Pool

Here’s a closer look at each.

 

Havasupai Falls, located in Supai, is a decent drive from Scottsdale – it’s about 268 miles away, so it may be better-suited for a weekend trip rather than a one-day excursion. But one thing’s for sure: This beautiful location is pretty hidden, and not a lot of people visit. You’ll need to obtain a camping permit before you go (you can get one from the Havasupai Tribe’s website), and you can hike, take a mule or horse, or even a helicopter ride down into the canyon. The falls are over a hundred feet, and you can (at your own risk, of course) jump from the top of the falls into the water below. And once you’re in the water, you can swim to a rocky cave behind them. There’s more than one waterfall in Supai, as well; the other three – Mooney, Navajo and Beaver Falls – are equally beautiful.

 

 

File Arizona’s famed Meteor Crater in “Weird and Wonderful.” This massive scar on Earth’s crust, caused by a meteor about 50,000 years ago, has a story to tell 35 miles east of Flagstaff. Technically, it’s called Barringer Crater; it was named after Daniel Barringer, who first suggested that it was caused by a meteor. Barringer was a mining engineer and ran Standard Iron Company, which staked a claim on the property in 1903. It wasn’t until the 1950s that his idea gained any traction, though; scientists discovered coesite and stishovite, which only occur in places like meteor craters. There’s a museum to enjoy before or after the stroll around the crater’s massive rim, and while you’re out looking through binoculars (bring your own!), you can see the wreckage of a 1964 plane crash that resulted from two commercial pilots in a Cessna trying to buzz the crater’s rim. (Both pilots surivived.)

 

The Grand Canyon’s Pumpkin Spring Pool is beautiful – but it’s toxic. Still, it’s worth a trip to Littlefield to get a good look at it. The pool looks like it’s full of mineral-rich spring water, but really it’s a blend of lead, zinc, copper and a significant amount of arsenic, which means it’s probably one of the last places on Earth you want to swim. The pool is at mile 212.9 on the Colorado River, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon – and the only way to get there is by boat on the river. You can schedule boat tours or take on the river yourself.