Arizona Trivia & Tidbits - Page 14

Looking for Arizona trivia? Try our list Arizona little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

The Tohono O’odham tribe of Arizona celebrates its music, dance, and culture at its Waila Festival, held annually in Tucson. The all-instrumental Waila tunes are likened to German polka music.

first appeared: 1/12/2003

The Bill Williams Mountain Men formed in Williams (pop. 2,842) in 1953 to honor Arizona’s buckskin-clad mountain men of the 1800s. Each spring, the group rides on horseback from Williams to Phoenix, sleeping camp-side along the way. They are official ambassadors of Arizona and have ridden in five presidential inaugural parades.

first appeared: 1/5/2003

Interesting town names in Arizona include Bitter Springs (pop. 547), Carefree (pop. 2,927), Goodyear (pop. 18,911), Many Farms (pop. 1,548), Show Low (pop. 7,695), Surprise (pop. 30,848), Top-of-the-World (pop. 330), and Tuba City (pop. 8,225).

first appeared: 12/29/2002

Established in 1880, Willcox Commercial in Willcox (pop. 3,733) is the oldest store in Arizona still existing in its original location. Its famous patrons have included Geronimo and country music’s Tanya Tucker.

first appeared: 12/29/2002

Kerri Strug—that pint-sized dynamo who sealed the first ever Olympic gold medal for a U.S. women’s gymnastics team—was born and raised in Tucson. On July 23, 1996, Strug, now a second-grade teacher in California, nailed her performance on the vault to bring home the gold.

first appeared: 12/22/2002

Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park in Superior (pop. 3,254) is Arizona’s oldest and largest botanical garden. Its 323 acres feature plants from the world’s deserts, as well as sheer mountain cliffs, a streamside forest, a desert lake, and a hidden canyon.

first appeared: 12/15/2002

The 1920 Phoenix Little Theatre is the oldest continuously operating theater west of the Mississippi and has one of the oldest theater companies in the country. Actors Nick Nolte and Beverly Garland got their start on its stage, and Steven Spielberg aired his first film, Firelight, there.

first appeared: 12/8/2002

The Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona is truly a cosmic collection, featuring not only minerals from around the world but meteorites from outer space. More than 2,000 minerals are on display.

first appeared: 12/1/2002

The state record northern pike was caught in Upper Lake Mary near Flagstaff in 1981. It was 47.5 inches long and weighed 25 pounds. The world record, caught in Germany in 1986, weighed 55 pounds.

first appeared: 12/1/2002

The Hayden Flour Mill in Tempe ran for well over a century and was the earliest important local industry during the city’s development. After Tempe founder Charles Trumbull Hayden built the mill in the early 1870s, it burned down twice before being replaced by a concrete structure that operated until the late 1990s.

first appeared: 11/24/2002

Tubac Presidio, established by the Spanish in 1752 at Tubac (pop. 949) in southern Arizona, is the oldest European settlement in the state. A state park there exhibits remains of the original fort, along with the 1859 hand press used to print Arizona’s first newspaper, The Weekly Arizona.

first appeared: 11/17/2002

The Colorado River, which forms most of Arizona’s western boundary, varies in width from 76 feet to 18 miles and flows more than 1,400 miles from central Colorado to the Gulf of California.

first appeared: 11/10/2002

A Saguaro cactus, the state flower, grows only an inch a year but can reach heights of 50 feet. The largest are thought to be 200 years old.

first appeared: 11/10/2002

More than 600 miles of a proposed 790-mile Arizona Trail from Mexico to Utah has been officially designated and open to the public. The hiking, bicycling, and horseback riding trail is the dream of Dale Shewalter, a schoolteacher from Flagstaff who envisioned the project in the 1970s while hiking in the Santa Rita Mountains.

first appeared: 11/3/2002

If you drive northwest from San Luis (pop. 9,539), you will reach Mexico.

first appeared: 11/3/2002

The Grand Canyon Railway ferried its first tourists on a 65-mile trip to the Grand Canyon from the nearest town of Williams (pop. 2,842) on Sept. 17, 1901. The historic steam railway closed in 1968 due to competition from automobiles on a new interstate but was reopened in 1989 by its new owners to bring “an important piece of Arizona history back to life.” The train’s second inaugural trip occurred 88 years to the day after its first.

first appeared: 10/27/2002

Diné College (formerly Navajo Community College), established in 1968 in Tsaile (pop. 1,078), was the first community college in the United States administered by American Indians. Today, 32 tribal colleges exist nationwide. Diné (meaning “The People”) and its seven branch campuses serve the 26,000 square-mile Navajo Nation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

first appeared: 10/20/2002

Turquoise is the king of gemstones for the Southwest. In addition to being proclaimed the official state gem for Arizona in 1974, it is the official state gemstone for New Mexico (1967) and was named Nevada’s semi-precious gemstone in 1987.

first appeared: 10/13/2002

The nation’s third-largest concentration of American Indians—about 256,000—lives in Arizona. California has the country’s largest American Indian population (333,000), while Oklahoma ranks second, with 273,000.

first appeared: 10/6/2002

Monument Valley, with its stunning sandstone formations, has long been a favorite place of movie directors. More than 35 movies, many of them popular Westerns, have been filmed there since 1925—including such epics as How the West Was Won, Stagecoach, Eiger Sanction, Forrest Gump, Back to the Future II and III, and scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

first appeared: 9/29/2002

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