A Dummies Guide to Northern Arizona

Monument Valley Mittens

For our money (which ain't much, let us tell you!), some of the most... troubling? freelancers on the 'net are the armchair travelers. We're talking about the people who posted hundreds of reviews of hotels, restaurants, museums, and other destinations on sites like epinions.com and the many content farms out there. For some, it was obvious that the reams of information they posted were merely distilled from guidebooks and online sources. And then there were the "helpful" types, such as Helium travel channel manager Isabelle Esteves, who didn't actually claim to have been there – they just gave "suggestions"... suggestions like "Places to Visit in Northern Arizona," which Iz reposted to WritEdge.com¹ after Helium died.

Esteves managed to squeak out a whole 485 words on the topic, about a third of them on Grand Canyon National Park: well, duh. You'd think that, with perhaps 50,000 square miles of land to investigate, Isabelle would have come up with more than just "meteor crater [sic]" and Canyon de Chelly – such as, for instance, Monument Valley (see the "Roadrunner" cartoons), Wupatki National Monument, Painted Desert National Monument, Petrified Forest National Park... as well as mention some of the more urban sites like Flagstaff (Northern Arizona University) and Sedona (more crystals than you can shake a stick at). But no, according to Izzy, she's just pointing out "the tip of the iceberg"... Well, no.

No visit to writing by Esteves would be complete without acknowledging some of her more... interesting constructions. This, for instance, is from her description of  Meteor Crater:

"There is a visitor center that will fill you in on what was happening 50,000 years ago when this collision occurred."

Never mind that the crater is an impact feature, not a collision feature... of which Izzy suggests that "Just imaging [sic] that something that big came hurling toward the earth is mind boggling." Not only does Iz manage a typo, she never says word one about how big this "something" was! For the record, the nickel-iron meteorite is believed to have weighed about 300,000 tons, something like the size of a post-Panamax freighter. And then there's this bon mot from her blather about Canyon de Chelly: "...if you want an in depth [sic] tour you must have a guide. This is the way to get to see the wall dwellings and other sites in the valley."

Weird: we'd never heard of a "wall dwelling" before, although we've seen more than a few cliff dwellings at places like Canyon de Chelly and Mesa Verde...

As is typical in travel material posted by Esteves, this article is poorly written and fails to touch on the most important points. It's not edgy enough for millennial travelers, nor does it cover the favorite spots of Boomers in their giant RVs. In short, it's just a few words thrown at the page, a hallmark of the sort of "travel review" one could expect from a Dumbass of the Day.

¹ This website is now defunct, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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