Skull Valley

Yesterday afternoon was very pleasant with white billowy clouds in the sky. We were caught up on other activities and so we decided to go for a little ride. We went into Prescott and down Whiskey Row, which happens also to be route 89 out of town. We followed 89 Southwest for about thirty miles or so over a mountain ridge that is in the Prescott National Forest. This is a hilly, curvy road with terrific views that would be just great on a motorcycle but not so much in a motor home. Since we were in a car, it was just fine. We headed down as far as Kirkland Junction and then turned West about 5 miles to Kirkland. Kirkland had a bar and hotel and restaurant all in one building right on the corner. It looked at least a century old. It was the only building in town. We turned right just before the railroad tracks and then drove North through Skull Valley.

When I saw the name Skull Valley I pictured the old cartoon of the two vultures sitting in a tree where one says to the other "patience, hell, I'm going to kill something". But Skull Valley didn't turn out to be the desolate wasteland I had anticipated. There is a stream that runs through the valley, albeit underground, that provides water for irrigation and there were many green fields and large cottonwood trees that gave the valley a lushness that has been hard to find. Of course, away from the valley bottom it was still rocks and sand and desert.

The village of Skull Valley has a few buildings, including a school, a garage (above) and a general store.

This is an old time general store that has been here for ages. It serves the community as a convenience store with a few common items and several coolers of cold drinks. One guy came in while we were there and said "I need an energy drink" and grabbed an oversize can of Bud Light. The store plays up the community name with an assortment of t-shirts and other items but it still is a community hub with local ads and announcements. It has the old wooden floors and a reminder of the time when the local store was also the post office.

The walls were decorated to enhance the effect with some stuff you don't see in a Cracker Barrel.

They had a couple of freezers stocked with grass fed beef from a local ranch just up the road. They even offered free recipes to go with the various cuts. And they had this gorgeous old chopping block.

We bought drinks and ice cream and I couldn't resist a shirt and then we continued on up the valley and back home through Prescott. A very nice drive of about three hours through some varied and beautiful country with good road all the way.

Oh, the name? It was acquired in the 1860's when the first white men entered the valley and found lots and lots of bones and skulls that were the remnants of a savage battle between the resident Pima Indians and some opportunistic Yavapai Indians who sought to rob the Pimas of their food stores during a drought.

In the morning, I had finished up with a project that had occupied us for the last several days. We hung a screen door on the back entrance of the house. My cousin had bought this screen door earlier and painted it but wasn't sure how to get it installed. I figured that with my woodworking and carpentry skills, this would be a way in which I could help out. I'm used to working with power tools and hand tools but this was a project with almost no tools. The first thing was that the existing doorway is about 1/2" out of square and plumb. So, the best approach seemed to be to apply the door to the outside of the existing casing. OK, no big deal. I went to the local Lowes and the young man I talked to had never heard of brick molding. But they had some none the less. I brought it back and proceeded to figure out how to cut the miters on the ends. All we had was a plastic miter box and saw that looked like it came from Dollar General. Fortunately, we also had an old Sears Craftsman contractors saw. First, I had to tune up the table saw so that it would cut and then true up the miter gauge so it would give me the correct angle, but I got the corners cut and the molding fitted.

That did it for the frame but I still needed a threshold. I tried a pre-made aluminum unit from the big box but had to take it back because there just wasn't room for it. That meant I had to make one. I searched all over Prescott and finally found the last piece of white oak in town, a really pretty piece of 1 x 5 with curly figure that was barely straight enough to use. A new blade for the table saw cut it off to length and then struggled to taper one edge, leaving some burn marks. The burn marks just laughed at a palm sander so I knew it was time for a scraper. So how do you scrape without a scraper? I ground a burr on the end of a farrier's rasp and away we went. With a coat of maple stain and some urethane it looked pretty good.

So we hung the door and installed some spring hinges and a closer and a diagonal rod to keep the door from sagging and a handle to open it with. Then we needed a catch. We had gotten one of those external catches that are hinged and have rollers on it and the door hits a roller and the thing then rotates around and holds the door shut. It looks like it was made in China from recycled beer cans it's so flimsy, but it gets the job done. But, it needed to be mortised into the brick mold to be in the right position to work. That means we needed a chisel. No problem, there are four chisels out in the shop. Boy, I have screwdrivers sharper than these chisels. I picked the best of the lot and worked on it with a grinder. This thing had 6" wheels, well rounded, no dresser and something that only vaguely resembled a rest. But with the grinder and some SC paper stuck to the table saw table, I managed to get a pretty good edge on it. Mortise done, catch installed and everything works like we knew what we were doing. We called it Cowboy Carpentry.

Town and Country

We had a fun day on Saturday. We started out with a trip into the country to a little town called Walker up in the Northern Bradshaw mountains. They were having a community yard sale for the benefit of the fire department. Mr. Happy Feet was one of our acquisitions.

It was really a small affair with the sale lasting form 8-11 in the morning followed by a BBQ lunch. But it was very friendly and they had some neat old cars.

Although small now, Walker has significance in that it was the first settlement to be able to persist in the Apache Triangle in the late 1800's. If you draw a line from Kingman in the Northwest of Arizona diagonally down to the Tombstone area and then vertically up to around Winslow and then back West to Kingman, you have what was known as the Apache Triangle. This was the last stronghold of the native population and they managed to kill any outsiders who dared to venture into the area. In the 1880's a group of trappers and miners led by mountain man John Walker established a camp in the Bradshaws. They were resolute enough to defeat the residents and led to the army coming into the area and subduing Geronimo and opening the area up to further settlement.

Today, the area is populated by either summer campers or residents hoping to escape the heat of the lower elevations. It reminded me very much of the Adirondacks and their camps. There were signboards directing the way to camp.

The suburb of Pine Mountain had this row of mailboxes. I was only able to get about a third of the string in the shot.

There was another suburb that called themselves Pink Car.

That made sense when you turned around and looked at the creek bed.

The area is quite beautiful but also quite vulnerable. It's just over the hill from the massive Gladiator fire that burned just a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, people flock to it and construct everything from very modest camps up to very impressive homes with gated access and concrete driveways, a rarity in this land of dirt roads. We saw a sign advertising two acres for sale for only $249,000.

Having exhausted downtown Walker, we turned our sites onto downtown Prescott. This weekend they are hosting an annual bluegrass festival on the town square. There was no charge to attend and it was a well staged event with bleachers and a big sound stage and vendors selling all manner of souvenirs. The town square is adjacent to an area known as "Whiskey Row". Now, this is a line of a couple of blocks of restaurants and gift stores, but it once was a line of saloons that stretched from the center of downtown out to the railroads tracks that ran through town. There were over 40 such establishments and the cowboys would come to town and attempt to move down the row, having a shot at each bar along the way. As you would expect, many did not make the whole row before they were escorted to temporary quarters for the night.

We had driven through the downtown area before but had never walked Whiskey Row and so we decided this would be a good time to see the sights and listen to the music. As luck, or providence, would have it, we found a place to park right on the row. As we took our place on the sidewalk, we saw these characters.

The town really takes this Wild West thing seriously. We looked in the windows and visited an indoor mall area where there were some really nice offerings. One shop was run by a Navajo craftsman and was really striking.

Since it was nearing lunchtime, we seized on the excuse to make our way into the Palace Saloon. This authentic establishment commenced business in 1877 and was just lined with historic mementos and pictures.

Today it is a very nice bar and restaurant with an atmosphere that just can't be beat. We really enjoyed our lunch there.

The saloon was used in the production of the film "Junior Bonner" starring Steve McQueen which was released in 1972. There is a mural in celebration of the fact and also an impressive mural by a local artist depicting many of the historical elements of the bar.

While we were in the restaurant area a group came into the bar area and whooped it up. When some came to use the restrooms, we saw that they were all dressed in very well made superhero costumes. There must have been twenty of them and it was quite a contrast to the rest of the surroundings.

We continued on down the row and visited all of the shops we could while listening to the music from the performers across the street.

On another note, I picked up the  motorhome on Friday after being without it for almost a month. While the cooling and exhaust issues have been well repaired, we now find that the dash air is not doing its job. The mechanic thought it was the compressor finally gone bad. I'm going to consult an AC specialist on Monday for a second opinion. But at least we can now plan for some more extended sightseeing excursions.

Up In Smoke

Yesterday we had the sobering experience of watching a neighbor's house burn. This makes the second house fire we have witnessed since being in this area, this one and one on our first trip to Sedona. In both cases it took the fire department about 15 minutes to arrive on the scene. The fire house is about six miles away from yesterday's fire and by the time they got there, the house was fully involved. It looked to us as though the fire started as vehicle fire in the back yard and then quickly spread to the house. We have no news of the fire other than just watching it so we don't know if anyone was injured, but there was enough time to get anyone out of the house and the ambulance that responded stayed all day.

This house is located in the White Horse development adjacent to the area where we are and they have city water and hydrants, but it appeared that the closest hydrant was over 1/4 mile away and it took a long time to set up a water supply. The fire department and the Forest Service that responded just mainly kept the fire from becoming larger and spreading to the community and the landscape. It wasn't until several hours later that we saw them actually spraying water on the house itself. Of course, the house is a complete loss with the roof caved in and parts of it totally consumed.

We were struck by the complete sense of vulnerability that comes with living in an area of little water and a long distance from help. There just isn't anything that can be done to fight a fire like that. The local ponds are all dry. We are reminded to be extra careful in our daily habits, making sure that we reduce the risk of fire to an absolute minimum.

The other inescapable thought is how fleeting our lives are. Gone in a puff of smoke. We accumulate treasures and "stuff" and surround ourselves with things that can be gone in a flash. We need to de-emphasize the "stuff" and concentrate on the things of real value: our family and our relationships.

Today is the birthday of our daughter and grand-daughter. Happy Birthday to them. We miss our family back home while enjoying our family here and on our travels. The trip is fun and we're having some great experiences but the most important things to us are still the people in our lives.

Keeping Cool

I really should have taken that picture in the afternoon when the temperature was up. We have this on the wall in the kitchen and it tells us the temp and the humidity and also the last high and low, among other things. You can get one at Wall-Mart for about $50. I watch the weather here and also what it's doing back home. Many times the temps are quite similar. This week, it's in the 90's in both places. The difference is that it's also supposed to rain for a couple of days back home and it hasn't rained here since February. That low humidity, shown here at 16%, is the key to being comfortable out here. Any moisture from sweating immediately dries and cools us off, so while it can be in the nineties or better, we stay reasonably comfortable, as long as we don't spend too much time out in the sun.

The low humidity also makes possible the use of an evaporative cooling system, otherwise known as a "Swamp Cooler". This is what ours looks like.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia description of them:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evaporative_cooler_annotated.svg

Basically, they use a squirrel cage fan to draw air through a wood fiber filter that is saturated with water that is supplied through a delivery system of tubes and troughs. In a low humidity environment such as we have out here they work incredibly well. A couple of weeks ago, it was over one hundred degrees outside. We had the cooler going and I was sitting at the kitchen table about 30' away from it and I had a fleece jacket on just to be comfortable.

This is all most older homes have out here. Newer, more modern homes have AC but places like my cousin's daughter's place up in Flagstaff, have no cooling at all. Just last week, the nightly lows in Flagstaff were in the mid thirties. They just open the windows at night and then close them in the daytime.

The coolers do have drawbacks. They consume water in an area where water is a precious commodity. Since much of the water comes from limestone aquifers, it is often hard and results in a scale deposit. This reduces the effectiveness of the filters and they should be replaced every year. The filters look like furnace filters but the media is wood fiber or excelsior as it wets better than spun glass.

Most of the coolers also are run from just an on or off switch as well. There's no thermostat or other regulation. You just run it until you get cold and then turn it off until you get warm. There are somewhat more sophisticated models available but the simple ones are what most people have. They run them into a window or cut a hole in the side of the house like folks back home do with room air conditioners.

Another problem is similar to that of heating with a wood stove. The heat, or in this case the cool, is all generated at a single spot, so the further you are away from the unit, the less effect you feel. And it's tough to get cold air to run up the stairs to the bedroom area. So we still want fans around to move the air. Ceiling fans are the norm and they're on most of the time. The capture of the cool night air is a critical part of keeping the house comfortable through the day. Open at night and closed during the day, shades on the windows, and awnings or porches to create shade over the window areas are all common techniques.

It all results in quite a comfortable environment inside even if it does mean some extra attention to detail. I still like the AC in the motorhome, however.

The Streets of Jerome

On Friday we decided to return to Jerome and walk some of the streets. We had driven through this side-hill town a few weeks ago and we knew that we wanted to return. Jerome is an old time mining town built on top of huge ore deposits of copper, silver and gold. The mines ran out years ago and the business of the town now is to mine the tourists. There are a couple of hotels and several restaurants. We started at the lower edge of town at a shop that specializes in solid copper household items with some other stuff thrown in.

You would think that since Jerome is the source of millions of tons of copper that this stuff might be local, but actually most of the contents have been collected in Europe over the past thirty years. They did have some copper nuggets and copper ore that was neat, but even that came from Michigan. We resisted the high prices and kept on going.

Parking can be hard to find but we made out pretty well, finding spots in a couple of places which let us see about two-thirds of the town. But this is a town that is absolutely not wheelchair friendly. Rough roads and sidewalks and a lack of curb cuts combined with high thresholds made visiting a real chore. Of course, that didn't stop us from catching the high points. One of them is the Mining Museum.

It had quite a selection of copper souvenirs, as you would expect, but it also has an excellent collection of historical memorabilia arranged in a timeline display. The museum part cost $2 ($1 for seniors) and is well worth it. They even have a darkened area made out to look like the inside of a mine, complete with drill and powder magazine. They had an old deck of cards that was printed before they put the numbers on them, the first I'd seen.

Another museum is the old movie house. That's an old projection camera out front.

Inside, it's mostly a tourist mine. Interestingly, we found that most of the shops, especially this one, had merchandise catering to the biker crowd. Skull motifs were in abundance.

The town is really an artist colony now and it shows up in some of the shops. There are some really great local artists evidenced by the wide variety of excellent fiber, wood, metal and glass items offered.

After pushing the chair all over town, I was hungry. We had managed to park just around the corner from the Mining Museum and when we returned to the car, the sound of jazz was coming from the restaurant that we had parked by. The sign said it was the English Kitchen but inside they called it Bobby D's BBQ. One look at the bar was all I needed.

We had the place to ourselves. They featured lots of BBQ dishes so I had a BBQ melt with fresh hand made slaw and an excellent dark stout.

We sat for quite a while enjoying the food and the music and the atmosphere and then it was time to go home. But we'd sure like to come back. For all the difficulty, Jerome is a neat town to explore and we haven't seen all of it. Rumor has it that there is great local fudge and ice cream up there somewhere.

Saturday we rested up and got some groceries and today we're going up to Flagstaff for a party in honor of the couple whose wedding we just attended. The adult? members of the group are looking forward to a paintball war afterward.

The Last Roundup

Last Wednesday we had the opportunity to observe an old time cattle round up. My cousin's husband is an old time, honest-to-goodness cowboy and they have lived in the West for over 50 years. The ranch that he worked on for many years was recently sold and he retired. When a ranch is sold, the cattle are sold with it but since they are out on the range, they have to be rounded up and counted and identified. The ranch consists of four pastures and covers over 20,000 acres, most of it Forest Service land. The cattle are rounded up by driving them from horseback. These aren't your ordinary dairy cows. They are beef cattle and have been on their own out on the range and can dangerous if approached on foot. In addition, there are several bulls present in the  herd.

This guy was part of the herd and was separated from the rest when they were put in the corral. He stayed about a hundred yards away the whole time waiting to get his cows back, but he didn't give us any trouble.

The cows and calves are contained in a corral complex so that they can be processed in small groups.

After the cattle were in the corral, it was time for lunch. My cousin had left the house at 3:00 am and they were all on the range by 5:00 am. They had already worked all day the day before, putting in a 12 hour day. Lunch was brought out from the ranch house by four wheeler. They had sandwiches and salad and fruit and lots of water and Gatorade to drink.

While this was happening, the horses stood waiting patiently by. A day's work is tiring for the horses and the riders choose a fresh mount each day, letting the others rest.

Most of the horses have names. Many times the horse carries the name of the man who sold it. So, there's a horse by the name of Bud because that was the previous owner's name.

This horse is Goldie, because of her color.

And this is Rainbow. A little girl named this horse and when she was asked why she named him Rainbow she replied " 'cause I like rainbows".

After lunch, the cowboys, there were about 8 of them, moved the cattle from pen to pen. They lined them up in a chute and guided them into a device which held them still so their ear tag could be read, they were given two different innoculations and  the hair at the tip of their tail was trimmed off square. This allowed the cowboys to see at glance which cows had been processed and which hadn't.

In a few hours it was over and we left the dust and the noise behind and followed a jeep trail back out of the ranch. There just is no good way to travel the back country. This area is littered with volcanic rock. The horses have to pick their way through it and it's almost impossible to drive anything, even a four wheeler, across it. The roads wash out when the rains come so it's like trying to drive down a dry creek bed.

It was a long day but a really unique experience. I took lots of pictures so that my cousin can look back on his Last Roundup.

Walnut Canyon

On Tuesday, we visited Walnut Canyon. Located about 10 miles East of Flagstaff, the canyon was populated by the Sinagua people at about 1100 AD. Sinagua means "without water". These were people who lived on a gallon of water a day. The modern resident of Flagstaff uses about 155 gallons of water a day. The canyon is composed of three layers of rock. The top layer is limestone, the middle layer is called the Toroweap formation and the lowest layer is Coconino sandstone. Over time, the soft limestone layer developed eroded pockets back into the cliff. The natives finished the excavation and then walled up the resulting opening to create rooms.

The rooms are about 8-10' deep and 10 to 20' long.

The Park itself was developed as a CCC project back in the early thirties. Prior to that time looters had destroyed many of the rooms and carried off much of the historical material. The degree of damage inspired local historians to argue for the preservation of the area.

There is a really nice visitor center which overlooks the canyon. Although it is on three levels there is a wheelchair transport that allows handicap access to the view.

Upon exiting the visitor center, you descend 185' to a trail that goes around a section of of the canyon that was formed by a loop in the stream, making almost an island. The island is oriented so that part of it is exposed to the sun on one side and mostly shade on the other. So there are warmer rooms for the winter and cooler ones for the summer. The trail is unique in that you can actually go into most of the rooms and imagine what life was like in those times. It's very sobering to sit there and look out and try to appreciate the difficulty of life in those times.

The trail around the island is quite good and not very difficult at all.

Along the way there are some neat flowers and plants.

Then begins the trip back to the top. There are 240 steps, not counting the paved inclined areas. The trick is to stop often and drink plenty of water. We thought the gift shop should have had a T-shirt that said "I survived Walnut Canyon" but they didn't.

And if you're wondering about the name, they really do have walnut trees.

This is an Arizona Walnut. There were actually small walnuts visible on some of the branches. There used to be quite a lot of them along the bottom of the canyon but they have declined in recent years as an upstream dam has drastically reduced the flow of water. There was no water at all visible during our visit.

Walnut Canyon is an excellent stop. It's very dramatic and impressive and yet small enough to not be overwhelming. Plus, it's a good workout but not too difficult. None of us were sore the next day and saying something for us old farts.