A good walker used to high altitudes can do the round trip from Flagstaff to the summit and back in a day of 12 hours, but he should be sure to carry water. For the average tourist, however, horseback is recommended with a guide (procurable at Flagstaff). Added interest will be secured by arranging to camp over night upon the mountain, for in this way the superb light effects of early morning and evening may be enjoyed at leisure. Owing to snow on the peaks most of the year, the ascent must usually be made between mid-June and mid-October. June is probably the best month, if snow is absent, as the atmosphere is then apt to be at its clearest; after that, September or early October is the choice. July and August are months of frequent, almost daily, thunderstorms, which, of course, are disturbing factors in more ways than one. Flagstaff, by the way, is credited by the United States’ Geological Survey with a greater rainfall than any other station in Arizona, and this is attributed to its nearness to the San Francisco Mountain. Should you desire a closer acquaintance with that harlequin of wastes, the Painted Desert, there are from Flagstaff two trips you can take across an end of it with reasonable success in a motor car. One is to the Hopi village of Oraibi by way of Tolcheco, and the other to Tuba. The distance in each case is about 70 miles. To Tuba there is a semi-weekly automobile stage (with shovel and water bags strapped to it), making the round trip usually inside of one day. It is an interesting excursion, taking you close to Sunset Peak, with its remarkable rosy crest, and over the Little Colorado River by a bridge that makes the traveler independent of the sudden rises of that erratic stream. You will pass here and there mounds that are the crumbled remains of prehistoric pueblos, and again stone chips and bits of trunks of petrified trees, the scattered fragments of vanished forests of which the Petrified Forest of Adamana is our most perfect remnant. Sometimes we pass beneath ruddy cliffs eroded and weathered into such grotesqueness of face and figure as would make Alice out of Wonderland feel at home, squat toads and humped camels and ogres with thick grinning lips. Farther away, mesas jutting into the desert present the semblance of cities with towers and ramparts in ghostly tones of pink and yellow and cream.[74] Occasionally an auto-truck, hauling goods to or from some desert trade-post, passes you, and sometimes a wagon train of wool, horse-drawn, in charge of Navajo teamsters. Approaching Tuba, you cross the Moenkopi Wash, and are refreshed with the greenery of the farms of the Hopis, who from time immemorial have occupied this haunt of moisture. If you have time to visit the little pueblo of Moenkopi, 2 miles from Tuba and perched on the mesa edge overlooking the farms, it will interest you. It is the westernmost of all the Hopi villages, its population of a couple of hundred enjoying life in Indian fashion with