The handwritten sign on the shop door got straight to the point. "Tibetan prayer flags stolen. Bad karma. Please return." It was initially alarming, but I soon calmed down. It certainly didn't feel like there was much bad karma around.
A cool mountain breeze was keeping the air almost virginal. The café across the street sold the best espressos I had tasted since I was last in Portugal. As far as I could tell, no one else could sense the impending doom either: native American couples with bouncing children were wandering up and down the streets, pausing and pointing at every other shop window. Students from the University of Northern Arizona were lounging around tables outside the microbrewery. No, it seemed that Flagstaff was still OK, despite the theft.
It would take more than an insensitive new-age shoplifter to shake this town. It lies 270 miles east of Las Vegas, 143 miles north of Phoenix, perched on the ribbon of what used to be called Route 66. Alongside the highway runs the Santa Fe railroad: every half-hour or so, a train hoots from the town outskirts and then crawls into view. The engine, with its 70-plus wagons, takes a good few minutes to amble through the station. Nothing rushes through Flagstaff.
It has the feel of Brighton, forced into a diet to shed excess weight, and then sent to camp in the mountains. The central core is only a few blocks across, but contains the kinds of restaurants, bars and shops that would sit happily in any student or seaside town. And at the centre stands Flagstaff's Grand Hotel: the Monte Vista.
In case you can't find it, look up: its illuminated sign perches 20ft above the roof. But, unlike many things in America, it perches tastefully: this is a hotel with old-fashioned class. Scenes from Casablanca were filmed in its rooms, and a host of stars -Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, to namedrop three - have slept there. And President Truman had his hair cut here.
But, however long you might be tempted to stay at the Monte Vista, don't take too many bags. The elevator is charming, if charming means cramped, rickety and prone to failure. But at least its seizures are predictable: the receptionist (who wore the Flagstaff uniform of faded T-shirt and baggy shorts) cautioned us that it was just about to break down when we arrived. Sure enough, we had to walk three floors down to breakfast the following day.
The hotel's coffee shop was closed, but Flagstaff is not short on places to eat and drink. Within a hundred yards of the Monte Vista you can find a pile of blueberry and banana pancakes (even better than they sound) or a plate of fried sausage and potatoes (strictly for the hard of arteries) to be washed down with fruit smoothies and coffee. Then, if you can get up from your chair, you can go and explore.
Twelve miles north is Sunset Crater, a dormant volcano that performed its last ablutions in 1065, burying its environment in hot rock. It is still surrounded by fields of oddly un-crumbled lava, a vast black skirt of bubbly rock slabs. The crater itself is rimmed with oxidised minerals that glow red in the last light of day.
Further north, the Painted Desert stretches across the horizon, indescribably beautiful on a clear day: the desert floor is coated with minerals that gleam with delicate pinks and mauves that Monet would have liked.
The view is even more spectacular from the Wupatki ruins, an ancient Indian settlement abandoned during the 13th century. Here, there is a hole in the ground through which the earth breathes. Sometimes the earth inhales, and sometimes it exhales. Or that's what the Indians thought: geologists have since come up with rather dreary ideas of temperature affecting the air pressure in the underground caverns.
There is a lot to be said for the Indian angle on the world. The impatient antics of the coyote, for instance, are apparently responsible for the plethora of stars in the sky. First Woman was carefully writing the moral laws for everyone to read when the frustrated coyote took her bowl of stars and flung them all into the blackness. Hence the random patterns in the sky, and the chaotic behaviour of Man. You won't find lessons in moral philosophy in the Big Bang theories.
The local Indian population were probably stunned by their first encounter with modern stargazing. The effort involved in getting "a good look" at the sky must have seemed absurd. In 1894, Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian with an interest in extra-terrestrials, borrowed a huge telescope from Harvard university and somehow got it up into the mountains above Flagstaff. He was looking for life on Mars, probably a little too optimistically. By 1906 he had declared that he could clearly see Martian canals, which proved the existence of intelligent life. He was mistaken. Lowell was not an astronomical washout, though: by his observations he predicted the existence of Pluto, confirmed at the Lowell Observatory in 1930 - 14 years after his death. Sadly, Lowell had actually seen Pluto, though he never recognised it. Once it had been pinpointed, astrono mers went back to his photographs and found the tiny planet gazing out from a myriad of stars.
It's easy to see how Lowell missed it. A tour of the observatory gives visitors the opportunity to compare the two photographs of the sky the astronomers used to spot Pluto. The only difference between the two messes of bright dots is that Pluto has moved by about a centimetre. Fortunately, for the sake of tourists with less than a few weeks to spare, someone has indicated the planet's position with a big white arrow.
Flagstaff could advertise itself as a cosmic experience: within a few days you can hear the earth breathe, see the discovery of a new planet and sleep in the hotel of the stars. Instead, in the winter at least, it prides itself as a ski resort: the doorway to the Arizona Snowbowl. You could ski, if you fancied it. But I'd check that the prayer flags have been returned first. With all that bad karma around, I'd really rather not trust my life to the goodwill of the San Francisco peaks.
The practicals
BA Holidays (0870 2424243) has seven night fly/drive holidays to Phoenix, Arizona from £509pp for departures up to June 30. Price includes return scheduled flights with BA and car hire. Double rooms at the Hotel Monte Vista, Flagstaff (http://www.hotelmontevista.com, 001 520 779 6971) from $40 per night inc continental breakfast.
