Being on the road isn’t always predictable. When everything is right, you’re filled with a sense of adventure and invincibility when you begin your journey. That’s the way Magellan must have felt when he sailed around the world for the first time. Then there are the other times when you wonder why you ever left the house. The item you forgot to pack, the door you forgot to lock, or the thing you just had to bring and is now driving you nuts are examples of times that make you want to stop and turn the car around.
This article is about one of those times and it comes from our friends—the Poteets—who set off last week for a summer in Minnesota. Deb unwittingly wrote this summer’s first guest post when she sent me emails about their trip. Her comments made me smile, so I thought I’d share them with you.
Wayward Canoe – “Eight times tied down and it isn’t going anywhere now!
“Adventures in Traveling With a Canoe
Thought you would find this interesting. So we left North Ranch and were barely 500 feet when the wind moved the canoe. Yikes!!!
We slowly drove to a place to pull over and Fred readjusted the straps and off we went again. This was to reoccur three times! Do you think we could have picked a windier day to leave?
Got to Meteor Crater RV Park and one more time Fred redid the straps on the canoe. Let’s see, that’s 4 times.
Monday we went to see the crater. On our way, it felt like we crawled to stay on the road with the canoe still on the truck. Once there Fred decided to check straps again and his hat—his favorite hat—flew off his head and over a fence.
Well … to get his hat, he has to get over the fence somehow. Hum … his Good Wife reminded him that he had a step-ladder in the back of the truck. He managed to get his hat and we continued to the crater. (Editor’s Note: Fred has already injured himself three times via ladders.)
We watched the film inside the discovery center which was interesting. Tour was canceled due to the wind. I might add that I could barely stay on my feet. Hold my hat, hold the rail, and try to see the crater … big hole!
Gourmet lunch at Subway and we purchased a tee-shirt before we headed back to the RV Park.
OK, adjustment number 6—adding more straps.
Windy, windy, windy!!!
We are off to Santa Fé today. Ugh! It’s still very windy. Fred says it will be a tailwind. Fingers crossed that we don’t have a canoe sail!
Share this with Anne as I am not typing this again.
Hugs Deb”
I think it would be a great Christmas gift idea if everybody went to Harbor Freight and got Fred another ladder or more sets of tie-down straps.
Blooming Palo Verde – When the Palo Verde Trees bloom in the desert it means that spring is at a crescendo and summer will be soon.
The Palo Verde are in bloom. Spring in the Sonoran Desert is at its pinnacle. It’s sort of like the finale at a fireworks show and when the desert is the best. In wet years—like last year—the wildflowers carpet the floor with cacti sprouting surreal and almost garish flowers soon after. Then, starting in the lowlands, the native Palo Verde turn yellow in a succession that works its way to higher elevations, like a Technicolor wave. Finally, the giant saguaro put out dinner-plate sized white flowers at their arm tops.
There are, of course, other signs of spring around us. Male doves try to attract a mate by cooing from perches then furiously flapping into the sky as high possible before they stall and glide back to their starting place. I suppose it’s their equivalent of doing push-ups to impress the girls. Queen Anne and I spot more quail while on our morning bike ride. Soon the adults will be shepherding multi dozen covey of chicks from one shrub to the next. Other birds like the Cardinals, Cooper Hawks, and Turkey Buzzards have returned from their winter retreats. Sex is in the air and I might as well break out my copy of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as a soundtrack.
Here at Uncle Ernie’s Holiday Camp another spring ritual has begun. Each day, another fifth-wheel or motorhome pulls out of the park and begins a journey north. Our friends and neighbors are leaving for their seasonal excursions or summer homes which are beginning to emerge from snow banks. Pretty soon our neighborhood will be empty again with only a few of us hearty souls standing guard.
Although Anne and I don’t have a Montana home, even we’ve put pennies aside to escape the heat that comes after all of this desert beauty dries and shrivels up. This is a travel photography blog after all and—like last year—I want to report of some exotic far-off land. This year, our Shangri-La is … Utah (I know, I know. You don’t have to rub it in).
We’re going to make camp in a valley somewhere between the high plateaus that flank U.S. Highway 89. It’s been a while since I’ve photographed Utah and with several National Parks located within a day’s drive, I’ll be building on my projects. Equally important is that I will be able to blog about our adventures just like we did on past trips. We haven’t settled on where, when or exactly how long we will be on the road, but we have a couple of months to work that all out. Until then, we need to scrape the dust off the Ritz, buy fresh linens, and maybe even fix the microwave.
Since it’s travel season again, and we will only be on the road part-time, I’m going to open the blog for guest posts as I did last year. We had a positive response from those articles and they provided interesting content. So, if you’re out on the road, here’s your chance to share your stories and photos with our readers. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send off some guidance.
This week’s new image shouldn’t be a surprise. I sort of previewed it in the last post. It is the row of houses that I took while visiting the ghost town of Stanton last week. If you missed the post you can scroll down to learn more about the gold and the shady characters that lived there. Maybe not as exciting as it was, Stanton, is now an RV Park where baby boomers like me can spend their vacations panning for gold.
Stanton Homes – Only three houses have survived the years of abandonment. They line a street surrounded by campers.
It was late in the day when I finally got to Stanton and the light was low with long shadows. I had watched the sky during the day thinking I may not go because it was gray and uninteresting, but in the afternoon, the clouds broke up into puffy finger-like shapes with a good light underneath. I started shooting the front buildings first, frankly because of the old signs on them, and when I satisfied myself that I had got what I wanted, I walked up the dirt street where this row of homes is. I loved the soft light falling on the white-washed buildings. The light wasn’t too harsh that it blocked up the shadows, yet it still showed off the building’s dimensions. Because the sky was so striking, I backed off from the homes to include the clouds. I think this shot came off as more than a house picture. I see it as a specific instant of time when the light was weird and the clouds were right. I’m very happy with it.
I named this shot Stanton Street and now you can see a larger version of it on my Website by clicking here. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below and don’t be bashful about clicking on the Like button if you enjoy what we’re doing.
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.
