We’re still hanging in Aguila for the new Photo of the Week. Although I drove twenty-five miles to the little town because I had wanted to shoot a specific sign, I then poked around town to see what else I could photograph, and I found the number one reason—if there is such a thing—to visit Aguila. Here’s my shot of the natural window in the hills south of town formed by eagle-head-shaped rocks. Aguila is the Spanish word for eagle; hence, you have the town’s name source.
Eagle Eye Window – Rocks form this window in the shape of an eagle’s head and is in the hills south of Aguila, Arizona.
I’m sure there’s a way to climb up to the window because I’ve seen people there. I didn’t take the time to find a way on this trip, but I saw on Google Maps that there was a trail from the cemetery south of town. As I said last week, there is a good view from the window along US Highway 60 by the working fields of Centennial Ranches. Even a moderate telephoto lens will bring the Eagle Eye closer.
I followed dirt roads between the fields to get closer for this shot. They had street signs, so I assumed the roads were public. It was late in the afternoon when I snapped this, and the beautiful streaky clouds were beginning to get color. I should have waited for sunset, but I wanted to get to another scene that I saw along the trip (which was a bust). You can see the larger version on my Website – Here. I hope you enjoy viewing it. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.
Motel Aguila – A faded sign marks the location of a motel on US 60 in Aguila Arizona.
This week’s new picture I call Motel Aguila, and it’s another faded motel sign for my collection. Located as you would expect, in Aguila—a farming town some twenty miles west of Wickenburg. It’s also across the street from last week’s shot, which is how I spotted it. The paint on this sign is so faded that I don’t see a business name, and there’s only a whisper of letters left to show it as a motel.
As the sign suggests, there is no longer a functioning motel here. The buildings seem to be converted to apartments sheltering migrant farm workers. With less than a thousand permanent residents, there aren’t enough people to work the melon and lettuce fields surrounding the hamlet. The workers have to sleep somewhere and I suppose an old motel is better than the improvised lean-to sheds I’ve seen elsewhere.
Aguila isn’t a destination. There’s a café, gas station, a Dollar General store, and that’s about all. In 1973, Interstate 10 diverted traffic twenty-five miles south, so there isn’t a motel to stay at even if you wanted to. Besides, the only thing to see here is the eagle-eye window in the hills south of town and that’s a fifteen-minute investment along the side of the road (I’ll talk more about the eagle-eye next week).
You can see the larger version on here on my website. I hope you enjoy viewing it and tell me what you think.
“Now for something completely different,” if you didn’t already know, that’s a quote from Monty Python and it’s relevant to today’s post. I’m adding a feature to my blog that I think you’ll like. Since I switched from a monthly newsletter to this blog, I don’t have to post my new images on a monthly schedule. Consequently, I’ve been adding new ones each week and that’s the pace that I like, so I’m going to also write a companion blog post to announce those pictures. When I was doing that in the newsletter it was successful and I hope it works well here on the blog.
Palm Shadow-The the clapboard side of the Robson Honey Warehouse frames a palm tree’s shadow in Aguila Arizona.
With that in mind, let me tell you about this week’s photo. Over the weekend, I got up enough ambition to load my camera and go out shooting. I wanted to get a shot of the Saguaro Motel sign in Aguila—the little farming community west of Wickenburg on US Highway 60. The sign fits into my collection of old motel signs but after researching the story of Robson’s Mining World I wrote last month, I found out that the Robson family owned the motel and acquired their wealth by selling bee pollen as a miracle cure-all. That fact fits right in with the January photo series of the ghost town. The sign’s not all that spectacular but a shot of it and the accompanying cactus is. Unfortunately, they’re behind a locked chain link fence that ruins the shot, so I’ll have to go back and get permission to get inside the fence.
While I was there, I spotted this image next door. I named the shot Palm Shadow, and it is the shadow of a palm tree cast on the white clapboard side of the Robson Honey warehouse. The building’s green trim serves as a frame for the found wall-art and I included the afore-mentioned fence to give the image depth. It’s a scene that I probably would have missed had I not stopped for my original idea. You can see the larger version here. I hope you like it.
It’s February again and that means that Wickenburg will be celebrating Gold Rush Days this weekend (Feb 9-11). It’s the closest thing that we have to a street party. Wickenburg closes the streets around the city library to make room for carnival rides, food vendors, arts and crafts booths. The rodeo grounds—down by the river—will have a senior pro rodeo—old guys and gals take the spotlight.
There used to be a lot of local places to eat down around the fair, but most of them have closed. Anita’s Cocina—one of our better known Mexican places—is located at the fair’s center so they make a killing over the weekend. Another place that’s within walking distance is Nana’s Sandwich Shop on Tegner. They have a limited sandwich menu, but they bake a fabulous Lemon/Blueberry bread that you have to try. Be warned, it sells out quickly. Next, to the museum, one block over is the Local Press. Here you’ll find hand-made sandwiches with interesting flavor combinations. It’s another one of our favorites.
The event that is important for me is the Fine Arts Show held at the library. I have a couple of photographs that will be on display. One is Piedmont Crossing—the night photo of a crossing guard that was in the West Valley Art Show in Surprise. The second is a brand new print that I made last week called: Mine Mack. It’s of an old Mack truck at Robson’s Mining World. I’m really jazzed at how well the truck’s patina came out in the photo.
Mack Truck – A classic truck that miners used to haul stuff.
To be included in the art show, I also have to volunteer to work it. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing this year, but last year I was Sunday’s guest host. In any case, I’ll be around Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The weather will be great on Saturday with rain possible on Sunday. If you’re in the mood for a day trip, come on up and join in on the fun.
Some would call me a brave man. Foolish; maybe, but I’m not brave. You see, Queen Anne asked me to wake her at 5:00 am so she could see the Super-Blue-Blood moon this morning. It was another 100-year event that she didn’t want to miss. It seems to me that these once-in-a-life things happen often.
Super-Blue-Blood Moon – Another once in a lifetime event that we enjoyed on our walk this morning.
At the stroke of five, I did my duty by cracking the bedroom door and tossing a shoe in. When I didn’t hear bear growling, I entered and announced, “It’s started,” then I returned to my computer. Almost immediately, she was at my office door with her jacket on. “A walk? You want to go for our walk now?” I asked.
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
I put on my shoes and grabbed my coat and flashlight and we set off for our morning lap around the park. Venus was high in the east and Scorpio was rising out of the glow of the Phoenix lights. By this time, the moon already had a good bite out of the top as it began to enter earth’s shadow. As we walked, we watched the illuminated section shrink. It takes us about forty-five minutes to complete the two-mile trip and in the dark, I would shine the light before us checking for vermin. It was interesting to see how much light pollution our little community added with many LED ropes placed under trailers being the biggest culprit. They’re supposed to keep rodents from chewing the trailer’s exposed wiring, but I think their effectiveness is suspect.
By the time we got home the moon was only a red glow in the black sky. Rightly named the blood moon, I can see how our ancestors would have feared its omen. Anne grabbed a couple of lap blankets and me, a cup of coffee from the house. We pulled chairs out to the edge of our rear deck and watched while listening to the hoot of a great horned owl coming from nearby trees. We wanted to watch the moon emerge from the shadow, but it lost a race with dawn and to soon disappeared into the trees along the horizon. After it disappeared, we went inside and made breakfast so we could see instant replays on the morning news. All in all, it wasn’t a shabby way to start the day.
Wenden Sunset – Wispy clouds illuminated by the setting sun near Wenden, Arizona
Because I’m over sixty, I have to get my Arizona driver’s license renewed every five years. Arizona licenses don’t otherwise expire until you reach that age. After sixty, you have to prove that you can still read by taking an eye exam. It’s another example of geezer discrimination. The list of old person bias is long, but I’m not here to complain about that—I have other things on my mind.
On the plus side, there are perks to being grey-haired. We get to wear slacks up to our nipples, we wear white belts any time of the year, we’re allowed to wear black socks with sandals, and we can spend every day on a golf course. Since I don’t play golf, I compensate by sitting around the house whiling-away my time with my idle brain thinking about completely useless crap. Because I do that, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a couple of brain worms get stuck in there, so I need to run them by you and try to drain the swamp to make room for new useless crap.
The worms crawled in after I wrote a post about light and photography (this one) in which I explained that the sun’s light was more pleasing in the early morning and evenings because of the long shadows and the sun’s warmer colors. What I failed to mention was that the morning colors are not exactly the same as sunset’s. Although the color gets warmer because the sun’s rays travel further through the atmosphere then they do at noon; the mornings are yellowish while sunsets are warmer—more orange. I’m not the only one who has noticed this phenomenon as I’ve read other photographer’s accounts on the subject. Since the atmosphere is the same thickness at each horizon, what causes this apparent color shift?
Well … the time I watched PBS, I saw a show about some Einstein guy and his so-called Relativity Theory, so I made up my answer based on the Doppler effect—like how the sound of a train changes pitch as it passes. My explanation is that since the earth rotates on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour, the sun’s light waves are compressed at sunrise relative to sunset. That’s because you’re moving toward the light in the morning and away from it in the evening. The color of the compressed waves shifts infinitesimally bluer and the stretched light waves are redder. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I was perfectly happy keeping my belief a secret until recently.
Another way I waste my non-golfing time is sitting in my Barkalounger 6000 bingeing on Netflix. The newest show we’ve been watching is Travelers. In the show, Will—of Will and Grace, who is suddenly straight—is part of a group of people who travel back in time to change events that eventually lead to the demise of civilization. The show has moral overtones that deal with artificial intelligence and religion that I don’t want to go into now, but its entertaining Sci-Fi.
At the same time, every Wednesday, Queen Anne and her girlfriends get together and watch a show called Outlander and it also has a time travel plot. I really believe they watch it to see the hunk they drool over, but in Outlander, the heroine jumps a couple of centuries somewhere in Scotland. I haven’t watched it and what I know comes from Anne’s babbling when she comes home all flushed and frisky. I have to feign headaches.
Here’s what’s been keeping me awake at nights. Time travel is not just impractical, it’s impossible, and my reasoning doesn’t even involve the Marty Fly Conundrum—dating your own mother. I’m a skeptic solely on the time/space aspects of such travel and I’m surprised someone else hasn’t brought this up before.
So, you’re a hot shoe because you speed down the Interstate at 85 miles an hour, or even better, maybe you’re a jet jockey who flies at the speed of sound. Big deal, I got you beat sitting in my lounge char spinning around the world at 1,000 miles an hour. Think about that: We constantly move faster than the speed of sound. That means that if you got into your time machine and went back just one hour, you’d wind up an hour ago but in a different time zone. That’s only the beginning. While we’re on this supersonic merry-go-round, we’re also zooming around the sun at 65,600 miles an hour. Imagine setting your way-back machine for one hour. You’d pop out somewhere on the orbital path sixty-thousand miles in front of the planet, and you’d better move because you’re about to become a bug on earth’s windshield when it catches up to you in precisely sixty minutes. It gets better. Our solar system is on one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms that orbit the galactic center at 450,000 miles each hour. And if that wasn’t enough, consider this: The Milky Way is moving away from the Local Void each hour by 1.3 million miles. So far, our total speed is only 0.19% of the speed of light so at least we aren’t close to breaking that speed limit, but we don’t know if our universe is stationary or floating through some cosmic Jell-O.
What I’m getting at with these staggering speeds is that to travel in time, you would need to plot and navigate back to a point somewhere in the Cosmos that you were an hour ago and it’s already more than a million miles away. Your calculations would need to be accurate with a precision beyond any computer that we have … and let me remind you how late your last flight arrived. When you think about this complexity, keep in mind how fast your gas gauge moves when your Chevy pickup speeds down the highway. The amount of energy required to instantaneously travel such a vast distance doesn’t exist. As Kelli Bundy said, “The mind wobbles.” I’ll add, “Get over it. It can’t be done.”
Oh, what a relief! I feel so much better now that I got that off my chest. Maybe now I can get some sleep. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my cheeseburger and I are going to jump into bed quickly before Anne gets home from her girls-night-out demanding that I dress up in the kilt she bought for me.
Robson Mining World Sign – The entrance to Robson Mining World is bullet-riddled Yavapai Apache riding a pinto.
I grew up during the era of the TV cowboy. After dinner, my family would gather in the living room and watch shows like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman,Maverick, and Have Gun—Will Travel to name a few. My dad was a tyrant about the shows we watched and we kids were the remote. Maybe that’s the reason I—and perhaps all my generation—have a fascination with ghost towns. We grew up with Tombstone, Dodge, and Virginia City on our TVs, and vowed to visit them one day. Maybe we’re longing for a simpler time—when the good guy wore a white hat.
The ghost towns best known in Arizona are Jerome, Tombstone, and my favorite, Bisbee. All of these places have residents, so they’re not as much a ghost town as they are tourist traps. A mining town’s fortune is dependent on the mineral wealth removed from the ground. The town’s size correlates perfectly with the amount of ore; be it gold, silver or copper. As soon as the ore plays out, people move on to the next bonanza leaving the hovels and shacks they occupied behind. Without maintenance, those relics soon rot or they’re repurposed for sheds, outhouses, or worst of all, firewood. Most often, when you visit a ghost town, the only things you find are a slab or wall. There’s not much interesting left to photograph. Fortunately, there are exceptions where a state or county government acquired and preserved the scene as a park, such as Bodie and Calico in California.
Yavapai County, where Queen Anne and I live, has its share of Ghost Towns—including Jerome—the most famous. Most of the old sites are high in the Bradshaw Mountains, but mining towns are scattered throughout all the Yavapai mountain ranges; including Congress—our hometown. It wasn’t until we moved here a couple of years ago that I learned about the best ghost town ever, and it’s a mere fifteen miles down the road tucked into the south-eastern flank of the Harcuvar Range.
Travel west on Highway US 60 and Aguila is the first small farm community you’ll come to. The name is Spanish for Eagle derived from the eagle-shaped window in the low mountain overlooking the town’s cemetery. The western terminus of Arizona State Route 71 is a mile east of Aguila, and that’s the short-cut you take if you’re heading northeast to Congress or Prescott from California. Just before the road crosses the Maricopa-Yavapai County line is a sign with a bullet-riddled Indian riding a pinto horse. The sign is for Robson’s Mining World—the ghost town you can see at the mountain base. It’s a mining town that no one ever lived in, but has an interesting story nevertheless.
Robson Ranch Booth – When you enter the town’s soda parlor, you’d expect to order a milkshake. You’d be disappointed because it’s all for a show.
The gold mine at the end of the trail was first claimed in 1917 by Westley Rush, an Aguila melon farmer. Rush’s two daughters—Nella and Alameda, for whom the Nella-Meda gold mine was named—managed to hand dig through the first 115 feet of solid rock before Ned Creighton—a Phoenix banker—bought the claim in 1924. Ned hired a crew to work the mine, and over decades he expanded the claim to its present size. His crew worked until World War II when the Feds shut down all private mines. The mining engineer, Harold Mason, stayed on as caretaker and eventually got the property deed after Ned passed.
After the war, Charles Robson was building his fortune by farming, running the Saguaro motel in Aguila, and hustling the health benefits of his local bee pollen. Harold and Charley became acquaintances when Mason let Robson place hives at the mine. There were minerals around the mine that made the bee pollen exceptional and the bees deterred poachers. That informal partnership lasted until 1979 when Charlie bought the mine from the aging Mason. Robson had bigger plans for the place.
Cash Register – What this old cash register lacks in functionality, it makes up for with class.
Meanwhile, in 1922, Wilber T. Johnson migrated from Missouri to Apache Junction—a community east of Phoenix at the foot of the Superstition Mountains—so he could work in the mines. In 1930, Wilber traded his pick and shovel for an engineering degree from the University of Arizona which made him a highly valued employee. Now we’d call Wilber a hoarder because he collected mine junk—lots of mine junk—for the next fifty years. Johnson got his stash from abandoned mines in the Superstition Mountains, the Mazatzal Mountains, and other mines east of Phoenix and because of its size, his collection wasn’t a big secret. He reputedly turned down a multi-million-dollar offer from Disneyland Tokyo because he knew that they cherry pick the best and discard the rest.
Mack Truck – A classic truck that miners used to haul stuff.
After Charles Robson acquired the mine, he offered to buy Wilber’s collection and the two men finally struck a deal when Charlie promised that the collection would stay intact on Robson’s property. The ink on the signatures hadn’t dried yet before more than 250 truckloads moved decades of mining history to its new home. For ten years Charles, his wife, Jeri, and their sons reassembled the buildings and filled them with the collection’s artifacts. After Charlie died in 2002, Jeri carried on the dream, and toward the end of her life sold the place lock, stock, and barrel to Western Destinations Corporation—the present owners—on the stipulation that nothing ever leaves the property.
Water Truck – A GMC truck that was used to haul water up from the well to the mine.
There’s a small garden in front of the Opera House where we sat in a mesquite tree’s shade as Brett Bishop told me this story. He’s the current caretaker and he and his family live on site. He’s a young man, and when he’s not greeting visitors he keeps busy unpacking the remaining crates and creatively arranging the contents for display. It’s easy to tell—from the tone of his voice and the sparkle in his eyes—that he loves his job. He calls Robson’s a living museum and he often must unravel the mystery of the items he finds in the boxes.
If you’re a photographer interested in nostalgia, I highly recommend a visit. The cost is $20.00 per person which goes toward upkeep. Don’t count on food or entertainment and even the restrooms are period authentic—that’s right; crescent moons. The mile-long dirt road is navigable by a sedan, except after heavy rains. I know that Robson’s will become one of my resources.
