[us] [street]

[city, state zip]

The Class

The School

[street]

[city, state zip]

Dear Class,

Thank you for sending Flat Stanley to visit with us here in Arizona. We had a great time showing him around and seeing all the things that make Arizona different from just about everywhere else.

Arizona is the heart of what’s called “The Old West.” We have a lot history here that relate to cowboys. Flat Stanley enjoyed getting dressed up like a cowboy, and going for a little pony ride, too.

Flat Stanley wondered what it was like to be part of a gang back in the Old West, so we took his picture with these guys so he could pretend:

In the Old West, there weren’t any cars or even very many trains. People used to ride in stage coaches. We found one so Flat Stanley could try it out:

He said it was very bumpy and he wished there were seatbelts.

A lot of people came out West looking for gold. There’s a famous story here about the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. The story goes that the Dutchman found a huge stake of gold in the mountains, but then he died mysteriously, and the gold never turned up. After that, people kept going into the Superstition Mountains around Phoenix to try and find that mine. Flat Stanley decided to try his hand at mining, too:

He didn’t have any luck with his cart full of ore, so he tried panning for gold – looking for gold in the sand and rocks of the riverbed – but didn’t have any luck there, either. Prospecting was a hard life. Flat Stanley was glad he didn’t have to make a living that way!

The plants around here are very different from the plants in Pennsylvania. Because it is very hot and dry here, the plants need to store their own water to use during the long dry spells. It is so dry here that it really is a desert – the Sonoran Desert. And saguaro cactus (say it like this: SUH-wah-ro) only grows in the Sonoran Desert, no where else on Earth. You may recognize saguaros from Road Runner cartoons. (Road Runners live in Arizona, too, but we didn’t get to see any while Flat Stanley was here.) Here’s Flat Stanley getting very cozy with some of our cactus, something that would be very uncomfortable for any of us!

This is a prickly pear cactus. You can eat the oval-shaped pads if you pull off all the spines (the spiky things), and you can also eat its fruit.

This looks a little bit like a saguaro, but it’s not – it’s a succulent called Euphorbia (I think.) It’s cool, though. It’s OK for Flat Stanley to sit on it, but not for anyone else!

I had to hold Stanley up so he could see this flower on the top of an organ pipe cactus. It was about 7 feet tall. Cactus flowers that are high up like these ones are pale so they can be found at night by bats!

Here Flat Stanley got to take a short ride in a tumbleweed! Those two little animal sculptures are little animals like pigs called javelinas (HAV-a-leen-as). They live in the Sonoran Desert, too. Tumbleweeds are actually the skeletons of bushes that have dried up. Their roots pull out of the earth easily, and any wind at all will set them moving. That’s they way they spread their seeds around. We do see tumbleweeds growing all over the place.

That’s not a tree that Stanley’s climbed into – it’s the skeleton of a saguaro. It’s weird to think of plants having skeletons, right? Of course it’s not made of bones, but of wood.

Here’s Flat Stanley and most of our family near a small copy of a covered wagon and a big, big saguaro – it was so tall I couldn’t get the whole thing into the picture!

The early settlers who came to live in Arizona moved all their things in covered wagons pulled by horses; they usually walked alongside most of the time. Flat Stanley wondered what it would be like inside one, so put him in the back:

[My kids] were too big to fit! You can see another saguaro and prickly pear cactus next to the wagon there.

Long before the settlers moved here, native peoples were able to survive in the harsh climate of the desert by digging canals to bring the water from the rivers to their fields to grow food. At the Mesa Southwest Museum, Flat Stanley saw a mural which showed what that could have looked like. The painting shows a corn field. The native people also grew beans and squash, and harvested fruit from the cactus that grows wild.

Flat Stanley got to see some other Arizonan wild things, too. At Mesa Southwest Museum, they have a live Gila monster. I think he was going into his little pool for a swim just as we took this picture:

At the Pointe Hilton Resort, Flat Stanley got to see a real rattlesnake up VERY close!

Don’t worry, it can’t bite – it’s frozen quite solid. They keep it in the freezer to show folks from out of town, like Flat Stanley!

Arizona has some really famous landmarks. We didn’t have time to visit them, but we did show Flat Stanley the exhibits at the museum about them.

Here’s the Meteor Crater – it is about 4,000 feet across and 45 feet deep, and was created by a meteor (a chunk of rock or metal from space) falling to Earth about 50,000 years ago.

Allan’s cousins are showing Flat Stanley these pieces of petrified wood from the Petrified Forest National Park. Petrified wood is so old (scientists think these trees actually grew about 200 million years ago) that all of the wood has actually been replaced by minerals, so it isn’t wood at all anymore – it’s rock! But it still looks like wood. That slab on the wall is a slice of petrified wood, too.

Probably the most famous landmark in Arizona is the Grand Canyon. We didn’t have a chance to visit the Grand Canyon with Flat Stanley because it is pretty far north of us, over a 3 hour drive away. The Grand Canyon has been carved out of the rocks in the earth by the Colorado River over millions of years. The museum has some beautiful photographs so that Flat Stanley could get an idea of what it’s like.

It’s hard to imagine how big the Grand Canyon really is. It’s about 280 miles long and ranges from 4 to 18 miles wide., and it’s more than a mile deep.

Last but not least, Arizona is a really fabulous place for finding fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.

This is a new, still unnamed little dinosaur that was discovered about 15 years ago.

Here’s Flat Stanley with the fossil skeleton of a huge prehistoric bird called a Diatryma. It looks very scary but scientists still haven’t figured out whether it was a meat-eater or a plant-eater.

Flat Stanley enjoyed comparing his whole self to the size of a Southwestern Hadrosaur’s footprint. It’s a good thing there aren’t any of those things still wandering around in Arizona!

We have even more pictures with Flat Stanley but I think that’s enough for now! We really had fun showing Flat Stanley all about Arizona. I hope everyone there enjoys reading about his adventures here.

Happy summer, everyone!