Author Archives: Jill and Bud

Yesterday we took a drive up in the Jemez Mountains to see two national preserves. They were only about 25 miles away, as the crow flies, but there are no paved roads directly there. We had to drive over 85 miles in a huge backwards “C” to get there.

First we drove up a steep and twisty road over a 9,000 foot pass and down into Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Most of the preserve is a huge alpine meadow that was created by a series of volcanic eruptions about a million years ago. We’re still at 8,500 feet and snow lingers here.

It is hard to grasp the size of the eruption that could make this 89,000 acre caldera. It’s estimated that the material ejected was 500 times greater than that spewed out in the May 1980 eruptions of Mt. St. Helens.

We tried to take a mile and a half hike around a the smallest of the hills formed from magma that leaked to the surface thousands of years after the eruptions, but the trail was covered with crusty snow.

Matey liked rolling in it, but didn’t do too well walking on it.

We drove down the one open road and Bud spotted this coyote, it stopped a minute and I got its picture.

We couldn’t get far, when we returned…

the coyote was still there. We saw it pounce on the snow and thought it caught something.

We then left the snowy caldera and drove about 11 miles and 2500 feet down…

to Bandolier National Monument. This is looking into the lower canyon of Rito de los Frijoles. (Interestingly I found a source who pointed out that the stream should be Riito de los Frijoles, Bean Stream; Rito means rite or ritual, so the name with one “i” as it’s now spelled means Bean Ritual.) There was no snow here and the temperature in the canyon was 15 degrees warmer than up on the meadow.

Whatever its name, the stream carved a canyon through hardened volcanic ash, called tuff. This is much softer than most rocks and erosion has created fantastic shapes.

The canyon is full of caves and the tuff lends itself to cutting and shaping.

So this beautiful valley with plenty of water…

has been a place of human habitation for thousands of years. This is a very large kiva.

There’s the remains of quite an extensive building.

You can see the outline of many rooms.

From above you can see its shape and size.

People also enlarged and shaped the natural caves. These modified caves are called cavates.

There were also structures built right up against the canyon walls.

This would be a cozy place in bad weather.

This is a very popular place.

Unfortunately, not all visitors are respectful.

That makes the canyon sad.

Besides all the interesting ruins,

just walking the trail was fascinating.

Up, down and around,

and past the strangest formations.

It is a beautiful place.

I’d love to live here myself,

and am very glad we got to visit.

This is our site at Cochiti Lake Recreation Area, Pena Blanca, NM. It’s a Corps of Engineers facility. We have a pretty level paved site with water and 50 amp electric.

We have plenty of room, good wifi and TV, so we’re set. We are here for nine days, until the 19th of March.

The lake is pretty,

there are a couple of trails,

and some early wildflowers. (Of course this is an invasive, Common Stork’s-bill; but it’s been here since the 1700’s and is decent food for native animals, so that’s not so bad.)

There are a few disc golf courses around, including this one about a half hour away.

So all in all this is a fine place to stay for a bit. Oh, and it’s $10 a night.

The original pueblo of the Acoma people is perched 375 feet up on the top of a mesa. I had heard about it when we came this way in 2021 and wanted to tour, but it was closed because of the pandemic. So this year we planned to visit.

The morning of the day we planned to visit was a bit cold! I called to see if they’d be giving tours in the afternoon when it was supposed to warm up and be sunny, but could only get a message. The message said they would be closed February 17, and open again on the 18th. Their website said tours were offered every hour on the half hour.

We decided to arrive at about one for the 1:30 tour. The valley is stunningly beautiful, with huge rock formations and their small mesa. You can just pick out the mesa with adobe houses on top to the left side of the photo.

The approach was spectacular. Unfortunately, when we got to the Sky City Cultural Center and Ha’aku Museum we found the next tour wasn’t until 2:30. Oh well, we’d wait. But when we got on the bus to go up to the mesa they told us this was a condensed tour because they had a cultural activity that evening.

The bus took us up and we got out in an open area, though this wasn’t their main plaza. The road up was built by a film company in the 1970’s. Before that everything had to be brought up by hand or by mule.

There still is no water or electricity in the village.

There are, however, beautiful views. We didn’t get to go to any lookouts on the side of the mesa with the rock formations, I guess the condensed tour didn’t have time for those.

The Acoma people first settled this mesa in about 1100 and people have been living here ever since. Now there are only 5 caretakers that stay, those rotate every year. The rest of the tribe comes up for special celebrations. Along with a Hopi town in Arizona, this is the oldest continuously inhabited village in America.

This is a matrilineal tribe. Houses are passed from the mother to the youngest daughter.

The men are tasked with their upkeep.

If there is no daughter, niece or granddaughter to inherit the tribe assigns the house to a family that needs one. This is true for all the houses, fields and livestock off the mesa, also.

The main focus of our tour was the San Esteban del Rey Mission. This was built as a gesture of “peace” under Friar Juan Ramirez starting in 1629.

The men of the people were forced to bring all of the building materials, including huge trees for the roof beams, up to the mesa. These trees were brought from 30 miles away. Our young tour guide told us the four carved trees incorporated into the altar had to be carried without ever touching the ground. If one tree touched the ground all four had to be abandoned and four new ones brought. The mission was finally completed in 1640.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but the walls were painted incorporating Acoma images, including representations of the sun, moon, stars, rain and corn. Eventually the Acoma took possession of the mission. Now it is only used in celebrations in September and on Christmas. The tribe invites a priest to come, since this isn’t part of the Dioceses.

Their religion still centers in kivas, the buildings with the white ladders for entry. These kivas are square, not round, because after the Spanish forced the men to destroy their round kivas they built them again disguised as houses.

Our guide introduced this as the Acoma National Forest. It is the lone tree on the mesa, a cottonwood planted in the 1970’s. The rock lined depression behind it is one of three cisterns on the mesa. These used to supply drinking water, but after the Spanish allowed their horses to drink from them they were contaminated with algae and could no longer be used.

There is no love lost for the Spanish. Someone asked the guide about names in the cemetery in front of the mission (also off limits for photographs). She explained that as the Spanish recorded names they would use a Spanish equivalent for the names, as they couldn’t pronounce them. She has a Acoma name she was given at birth, but it is only used for ceremonies “and when my mom is really mad at me”.

After less than an hour we had to return to the bus for the trip back down the very steep road off the mesa. An interesting tour, but far too short!

We had been hearing a lot about Chaco Canyon and the Chaco culture so thought we should check it out. It is just over a hundred miles from where we are now, at Sky City RV Park on the Acoma Pueblo land on I-40. Today was cold and cloudy and a long drive seemed okay.

It wasn’t that the drive was just long, the last 20 miles was a dirt road; “rough dirt…may be impassable in increment weather” according to the brochure we picked up after we got there.

And, oh yes, please share the road.

It was beautiful country…

but 20 miles is a long way on a rough dirt road.

When we finally got there I was surprised to find this nice entrance sign. I figured we’d come in a back way. At the welcome center they told me that the route we took was the best way in from the south. If you’re coming from the north there’s only eleven or twelve miles of unpaved road.

But, oh my, was it ever worth it. In 1987 this was designated a World Heritage Site. There are twelve sites in the park. We only had time to visit three. The ones we saw or drove by were all “great houses” built from 800 to 1250 CE. That is a huge red rock cliff, at the bottom you can see the brown structure.

This was Hungo Pavi, occupied from 1000-1250’s, and up close it was massive.

To build such large, multi-story buildings the Chacoan people used thick walls. The center cores were roughly shaped pieces of sandstone in a mud mortar.

The veneer on either side was made of intricately fitted stones, some large, but many small. As beautiful as these walls are, in use they were plastered, inside and out.

Logs were fitted to hold the floors. It was amazing to see the ends of these thousand-year-old logs.

The building was precise, still squared off 800 years after they left.

Next we visited the largest structure, Pueblo Bonito. It had over 600 rooms. The rubble lying to the right is part of the canyon wall, Threatening Rock, which collapsed in 1941.

These were some mighty boulders! This canyon wall must have been already split when the great house was built. They built a supporting masonry terrace against it and there were prayer sticks in the crevice between Threatening Rock and the canyon wall.

The only way I could capture all of Pueblo Bonita was with a video.

Some of the towering walls were stabilized.

But a lot of it was sturdily intact. You could go through the rooms…if you could fit through the doorways.

That’s a stone for grinding, probably corn.

That’s an unusual corner opening. This one let in the winter solstice sunrise.

The rooms went on and on.

There were large courtyards…

and many kivas. Having a round kiva in a square space was typical Chacoan architecture.

These structures on the kiva floor are also different from other culture’s kivas.

This is awe inspiring as a ruin, imagine what it would have been like a thousand years ago.

To see our last ruin we walked up this trail that Matey was allowed on, though he couldn’t go in the ruin. We had thought we’d go further to see some petroglyphs. The map had them marked at 0.8 miles, but a sign at the start of the trail said it was a 4 mile round trip, and we didn’t have time for that.

While Bud toured the ruin Matey and I checked out Chaco Wash, that runs down the center of the canyon.

It was dry now, with just a path of hoof prints down the center, but after a rainstorm it can run full, right up to the banks.

Tree ring data shows that the climate during the time of occupation was much as it is now. At its peak a thousand people might have lived here, while many more would have come for ceremonies. Those people must have known the land, water and weather to be able to sustain themselves.

Then it was my turn to explore. This site was Kin Kletso. A trail behind it let you get a bird’s eye view.

It may not look it, but this was also a huge space. Here’s Bud descending the trail.

Neither of us took the trail to the rim. It went through this crevice, you can see the trail marker at the base of the dark crevice.

You could only look inside this one,

but it had a bonus of petroglyphs on the boulder next to it.

On our way out we stopped at the Chacoan Stairway. This once must have been the trading or religious center for a huge region. Traces of these roads extend west almost to Arizona and north almost to Colorado.

I found the stairs! That’s taken at 15x; according to the sign those are 30 feet wide.

Then there was nothing left but the road back out. The only things that could have made this visit better were more time and Kenny Bowekaty as a guide!

Tuesday afternoon we went with a tour guide to see an ancient village site. I immediately asked our guide, Kenny Bowekaty, if Zuni was the name the people gave themselves. No, the people refer to themselves by the name of their religion, Ashiwi. The symbols on Kenny’s business card, the intertwined spirals, are found in rock art and on pottery throughout the area.

It turns out that this is a symbol also found throughout the Aztec world, and Kenny believes it was carried south by a group of Zuni who went south in their search for the Middle Place, the center of the chest of Mother Earth, and never came back.

The site we visited was occupied by Ashiwi coming to Halona:Wa from the Chaco Valley. They had moved there in their quest to find the Middle Place, but having received word that a group of the people had found the correct place they came to join them. Kenny, who is an archaeologist as well as a traditional Ashiwi and holds membership in religious societies, said their religion had changed enough over the long separation that the Ashiwi in Halona:wa didn’t immediately accept them, so they settled here, upstream in the Nutria valley.

First we visited the village, but the part we walked through was not where anyone lived. This was a ceremonial place. There were a few dwellings further west where the religious leaders lived. What you are seeing here is a central ceremonial plaza.

The rest of the people lived on the top of the mesa,

on the mesa across the valley, or in the valley itself.

It was incredible to do this tour with Kenny. He had done excavation and stabilization here. In the 1930’s when Frank Roberts had excavated he identified this room as being living quarters, as it was bigger than the other rooms. But Kenny said he was wrong. This was most likely a room where older society members, who could no longer do the physically demanding dances, could watch in privacy. That wall in the back of this room was reconstructed by archeology students learning about ancient construction techniques.

What looked like piles of stone came alive as Kenny described the passages and tunnels that were here to allow the religious ceremonies to proceed.

When Kenny was born his paternal grandfather chose him to be the one to take his place in the religious societies. Since Kenny’s father was in the military and his mother was attending college Kenny was sent to be raised by his grandparents. His grandmother spoke no English. The Zuni were never forced to go to boarding school. His grandmother chose not to go. His grandfather went and learned to speak, read and write English. But he was not forbidden to speak his own language or to participate in his own culture. The Zuni people say they are still practicing their religion the same way they have done for millennia and feel their culture is the most like the ancient ways of all the nations.

There were pottery shards here, too. Some collected on a rock,

and this one, just laying in the dirt for a thousand years!

After we walked through the remains of the village we followed a path up the side of the mesa to see petroglyphs. These predated the village, you could tell by the technique used to make them. They were pecked out with two stones, one that acted as the hammer, the other the chisel. These are images of centipedes. The Ashiwi came from the center of the earth. Their ancestors were salamanders. They came from the water world to the wind world where they found the centipedes. They could see light through the cracks, but they were too large to fit through them. One salamander talked a centipede into going up to see if that light was the daylight world. The centipede did and came back to report that it was the daylight world, but he had not liked all that light and he bit the salamander. He told the salamander that he would die after as many days as he had legs.

To this day the Zuni do not kill centipedes, but if they are going to kill one, they make sure it has lots of legs!

This petroglyph was a geometric design, like many you see. Kenny had a theory that these were made by women who accompanied the men on their fall and winter hunting trips, but stayed in camp during the day. He thought that the women might be trying out designs for future pots. He gathered pictures of petroglyphs and compared them to pictures of ancient pottery and found that the majority of the designs were on both pots and rocks.

The largest image here is the ancestor salamander.

Off to the right are the flute player (Kokopelli) and the horned toad. The horned toad lives in the southern desert but he always is in a place with water, a lush oasis. Horned toad came to the Ashiwi and asked to join their Rain God society because he could bring the rain by playing his flute. The people didn’t know him and didn’t trust him and so said no. Horned toad went back to his desert. A terrible drought came and the Rain God society could not get it to rain. Crops were dying, rivers and even springs were drying. In desperation a delegation went to the desert. They found horned toad and told him if he would bring the rain they would let him join their society. He played his flute and the rain came and since then the Ashiwi changed their rain ceremony. The people in the society have a procession into the kiva, they are singing and dancing as they come. But when they reach the kiva there is already one man inside. The rest enter silently while that man plays the flute. When the others are all inside they resume their rain dance. I think Kokopelli is the human version of the horned toad.

This site also had a solar calendar. Kenny came up when they were doing work in the summer and saw that on the solstice the edge of the sunbeam created by the smooth rock, which sits out from the rock with the spirals, just illuminates the crack between the spirals.

The quality of the petroglyphs was exceptional and Kenny had stories about most of them.

These were the only images there that were made by grinding rather than pecking, and so are probably more the age of the village below than the other, much older figures.

In the 1960’s the Zuni dammed the Nutria to make a more reliable water source. Some of the crew that worked on the dam would climb the side of the mesa on their breaks. They collected minerals they found…

and created these gorgeous pictographs of the Zuni gods. Normally you are not allowed to photograph any religious items, but Kenny said these had long ago been photographed and compromised so we could. I noticed that he did not tell us anything about what these images are.

Kenny wanted to include these pictographs on the tour, but there was no easy way down the mesa from there. Kenny asked some young people working in the Youth Conservation Corps if they would make a path down. They made a very nice path.

In one place they removed all the small rocks wedged between two large boulders to make this tunnel.

There is so much more information that Kenny shared. I will not forget this tour; a beautiful and fascinating place and a beautiful and fascinating man.

We’re staying at a commercial RV park off I-40 in Gallup. It’s not much to see and yesterday was fairly cool and windy so we decided to try the off-road app again. We made it just over the brink of this hill on a forest road in Cibola National Forest. The road ahead was steep and muddy so Bud backed into this turn-around and we decided to survey on foot.

The road was thick, sticky mud and although we could get down this hill if we had to go up a hill like this we wouldn’t make it with our tires.

Too bad, since the land ahead was inviting.

Matey enjoyed our short walk. He freaked out a bit at the mud. We walked back through the trees because the road was so thick and slippery we didn’t think we could even walk up it. Matey was happy to get out of the mud, and was delighted to find a couple of snow patches to roll in.

So we turned back, another aborted off-road attempt, but at least we know the app works well. I was running on off-line maps because we were out of cell service, but it still gave me a bread crumb trace of our route. You can see from the red dots how far we went.

Rather than give up for the day we decided to do a paved route north of Gallup. I saw a route that went up the valley between the Defiance Plateau and the Chuska Mountains. Then it went over the mountains and back down the desert on their eastern side. This is just as we turned north into the valley at Window Rock, Arizona.

I wasn’t expecting a divided four-lane highway for Indian Route 12.

The valley turned out to be pretty spectacular.

It was hard to remember to take photos as we were driving along these beautiful red rock cliffs.

We passed miles of this red rock.

Then we came to a section with green rock. This is all Navajo Nation, what a spectacular place to live.

We stopped at a gas station. Bud talked to a local who at first thought Bud was a man he was meeting. When he found we were just sightseeing he told Bud to make a right about three miles up on a paved road. This is as we drove into the bowl surrounded by cliffs that he said was there. Sorry, I could not get a shot of this without the flare of the sun, but I still thought I should include this picture.

We stopped at a little pull-out to eat our lunch.

If you play this video with sound all you will hear is a bit of wind.

What a gorgeous spot. It was so nice of that man to share this.

Not too far north of that we crossed the mountains. This was a picnic area close to the pass. We were above 8000 feet and it was closed due to the snow.

There were trees and plenty of snow…

and another huge cliff of that grey-green rock.

Coming back down on the east side you could see a huge expanse of the desert.

You could even make out the Colorado Rockies in the distance.

I’m sure glad we decided to take that road trip!

When we came back from our windy day attempt to go off-roading in our Ram we saw a sign in the town of Springerville for Casa Malpais. I looked it up on-line and found that it was closed for the winter. Too bad – but wait, the listing said it opened in March, weather permitting. Well Friday was March 1st so I called. Yes, if the “feels like” temperature was above 40 they would have a tour. So I signed us up for the afternoon tour, as mornings have been well below 40.

We started at the Heritage Center in Springerville. After an introductory film featuring Zuni and Hopi elders, a bus took us a few miles outside town to the site.

Happily, Bud and I were the only ones on the tour. That’s our tour guide, Beth leading the way. Besides us there was her son, who was learning how to be a tour guide. It was great, a one to one guide to participant ratio! There are definitely compensations for being out of season.

Beth explained that when excavation started here the archaeologists had built a fairly direct trail up to the ruins, we would be returning that way. But while working they figured out that this was one of the original paths the people who lived here used. It was more winding but less steep.

On one of the lower terraces the people grew crops, including this small bush. This is desert wolfberry. Beth said it doesn’t grow here on its own, the farmers had to have planted it and it doesn’t grow from seed. So these little bushes are centuries old!

This curving wall was built along the first level.

Since this was a trading center and is mostly hidden from the river plains from which travelers would approach, some think the wall was built to help guide visitors to the pueblo.

As we approached the pueblo we passed this petroglyph. This is the one Beth said was a water strider. The rocks it was on were volcanic and porous. They hold water and there might have been standing water near this petroglyph. The sign announced “safe to drink”.

We continued up and came to the Great Kiva.

This is a better view, looking down on it after we left it.

We entered and exited through this passage. Beth explained that this was for the performers, probably holy men. Around the walls you can see benches. Sitting and standing here would be the participants, up to 200 men. They would have come down a ladder from the roof. Many of the participants would have traveled from other villages, as far fewer than that lived in this pueblo.

There were plenty of shards visitors had found here. These were laid out on a flat rock, like the ones at Rattlesnake Point. Beth told us the unglazed fragments were from everyday pottery. She called them their Tupperware. The glazed pieces were from trade or ceremonial pots, the special dishes.

This is the main part of the pueblo. The town of Springerville employed an archeological firm to excavate. They consulted both the Zuni and Hopi people, who live nearby and hold this ancestral home sacred. The Zuni and Hopi representatives asked that excavation be halted after fourteen of the sixty rooms were dug up. Thousands of artifacts were found, and all agreed they had enough information to answer the basic questions of who lived here and how they lived. Many artifacts are in the museum in town. Others are being held for research. The rooms were back-filled, and now the only work done here is stabilization and preservation.

We came to another rock with petroglyphs. See the large figure that is mirrored spirals meeting in a line? An archeoastronomer spent three years at the site and this is one of several solar calendars he found.

These are his pictures back at the museum. On the summer solstice a shadow is cast that follows the line in the spirals when the sun is at its zenith (which by the way, is not at twelve noon for everyone in a time zone).

The whole site is built on the lava outflow of an ancient volcano. The basalt is fissured. At the level of the main pueblo the fissures were plugged to form the floors of the rooms. Large fissures had openings in the plugs so the space below could be accessed for storage, a cool dry basement protected from vermin. This fissure, on the face of the cliff behind the village, had been made into a staircase. Beth said we could go up the stairs if we chose. We did.

The steps were uneven, but certainly sturdy as they have been carrying people for over 700 years.

It was a narrow space. This is Bud descending. These are one of only three such ancient staircases in the southwest. Two of them are at Casa Malpais.

From the top you could get a look at the fissured surface just north of the pueblo.

After we descended the stairs Beth pointed out the tall rock column separated from the cliff. Evidence shows that a young bird, probably eagle or owl, was tethered there. Once it was raised to adulthood the bird was sacrificed for its feathers. There is no evidence of any other animal sacrifice.

As we came down from the rooms we came to another large courtyard. This was thought to be a trading place and perhaps where the women and children gathered while the men were in the Kiva. This had an elaborate opening in its western wall that also served as a solar calendar. One side of the opening would cast a shadow on a prominent rock at sunset on the winter solstice. The other side on a different rock on the summer solstice.

The people who excavated and now preserve this site have great respect and a good relationship with the native peoples nearby. That’s fortunate because Beth was able to correct this sign. Not too many years ago a woman from the Acoma Pueblo came on a tour. The guide was explaining that this point on a lower terrace may have been a lookout as it gave a perfect view of the plains to the west. “No,” she said, “we have this at our Pueblo. It is a shrine to the Sunset God. There should be another place like this on the other side of the ridge, facing east, for the Sunrise God.” And there is.

We’ve been to a lot of ruins, but never before gotten the wealth of information from a guided tour. We loved it and are grateful to Beth and the town of Springerville for making it happen.

The wind finally died down on Wednesday and we could enjoy this park. I love that it has large, well made spaces. Each site has a roofed lean-to and a grill.

And each has a nice fire pit.

Matey and I have at least started all of the trails. He sometimes refuses to go further, and I don’t make him. He’s almost fourteen, has a heart murmur from a thickened valve and consequently an enlarged heart. I try to give him opportunities to walk, but if he wants to turn around I let him. We generally manage to walk two or three miles a day.

I am so impressed with how well these trails are made. They are all cleared of rocks and the native materials are used for steps, water diversions and little bridges.

There is a trail cutting across this hillside but since it’s made by rearranging the rocks that were there you can hardly pick it out.

Once you get to it, it’s easy to see and pretty easy to walk on, considering the hilly, rocky terrain it’s crossing. The construction here reminds me of the work done years ago by the CCC, and I appreciate it.

The trails wind around the flat topped hills here and afford some nice views.

There are mountain bluebirds here that I see almost every day. What a treat.

Wednesday we hiked up the petroglyph trail again. We found we had seen most of them. We found this rock with what are probably clan signs on it. The square with diamonds and 5 protrusions is a bear track, symbol of the Bear Clan. The rounded tracks below and to the upper left of it are probably for the Badger Clan.

There were nice views from there, too.

We noticked a ledge of rock that looked like it might have petroglyphs but didn’t see a trail. This morning (Saturday) I was looking at the trail map and saw there was one, so since the wind hadn’t started up yet we walked up there. I was excited to find this petroglyph I think looks like what we learned yesterday is a water strider and was carved to show places where there was drinking water. (More on that in my next post.)

Thursday we drove to the far end of the park to the Rattlesnake Point Pueblo ruins. The flat area that Matey and Bud are standing on is all part of the structure, but only the area under the roof is excavated.

Drifting sand has built up around the partially collapsed walls, but when this was built around the 1320’s it was built on top of the ground.

Today it sits near the edge of Lyman Lake,

but this would have been a floodplain of the Little Colorado River, giving the people land for crops. They grew the three sisters here; corn, beans and squash.

There were signs to help you interpret what was there, although I could not find the stone with the design pecked in it. There were also signs asking that you not take anything you found and not dig. Otherwise you were free to wander about.

The rooms were interesting. (Notice the tumbleweeds that have blown inside. I was unhappy to learn that tumbleweed is Russian thistle, an invasive species. So much for the nostalgia of the old west.)

What I liked best were the pottery shards and bones folks had found and left lying on flat stones for us to examine.

700 year old pottery that you could pick up and examine! There’s also a part of a modern cup and handle in there, but I wasn’t going to remove it. The site is being treated with respect, that’s great.

This afternoon the wind is blowing again. There is a wind and dust advisory for today and tomorrow, and tomorrow we leave so our exploring here is done.

We arrived Sunday afternoon at Lyman Lake State Park in eastern Arizona just as the wind started blowing. It has been blowing relentlessly ever since.

This is another pretty park…

and must be very popular in the summer with a huge beach,

boat ramps, and at 6,000 feet above sea level, summer temperatures in the eighties and nineties.

We are enjoying the wide open spaces but with the wind we’ve done very little exploring so far.

There are very well made trails…

and even petroglyphs and the ruins of a pueblo, but we have only been on part of two trails so far. We walked a bit Monday morning but the wind made it hard.

We’re trying out a new app for off-roading. We found this road that seemed appropriate for our four wheel drive pickup. It was about an hour away. Unfortunately, as the app says, the best times for this trail are spring, summer and fall.

That’s because it’s up in the White Mountains. In fact, Escudilla is Arizona’s third highest peak. There’s snow in those mountains, and though there was no snow on the road when we started, the melting snow had made the road solid mud. Fifteen or twenty miles through mud did not appeal. We tried a second road back down on the high desert. That was supposed to be on Bureau of Land Management land. After a mile or two we came to a fence and a cattle guard and a sign saying “Private Road, Written Permission Required”. So that was a bust.

The wind is supposed to stop tonight, so maybe we can get back out there and explore.

On Wednesday we had some rain so we decided not to try to see any archaeological sites. Instead we drove up to the little town of Jerome, perched on the side of Cleopatra Hill just west of us. Fortunately for us the rain stopped just as we arrived, the last of it making a rainbow.

Jerome was a mining town and the hillside it sits on is so steep the road to it fits tightly against a wall on the side of the hill, while the sidewalk hangs out in the air. There are no trucks over 50 feet allowed on the section of State Route 89A that goes through town. In the 1930’s erosion and the vibrations from the explosions in the mines caused many of the buildings to slip, including the jail which slid 200 feet across 89A.

Our first stop was the Audrey Headframe Park. A headframe is a structure that sits over a mining shaft. This one is made of wood and held three sets of pulleys over which cables ran to lift cargo cages. There were three sets of pulleys because the shaft itself was in three segments. The shaft was 1900 feet deep and the three segments were joined at horizontal hubs at several levels. The shaft and headframe were built in 1918 after James S. Douglas finally found an incredibly rich copper deposit.

The park lets you walk over the westernmost segment on a glass floor.

The floor flexed when Bud stood on it, so he moved to the edge to read the information.

The glass was cloudy so I took this picture through a grate at the edge of it. That’s what it looks like to peer down 1900 feet.

Even though it’s cloudy it is still pretty spooky to stand on the glass and look down.

Just so you know what you’re dealing with, this little drawing is posted inside the shed over the shaft. The line in the middle represents the depth of the shaft.

This shaft was used for ore, but similar shafts up to 1000 feet deep were used to transport people in contraptions like this.

The Audrey Headframe was the largest built by the United Verde Extension (UVX) Company. Ore hauled through this shaft yielded 320,000 tons of copper, 190 tons of silver and 5.3 tons of gold. The company made better than a 70% profit until the 1930’s when the price of copper dropped.

As went the mine, so went the town. At its peak there were 15000 people who lived here.

After the mine shut down the population dropped to less than 100.

Then in the 1960’s the hippies moved in, setting up art studios. People began to promote tourism and the Jerome Historical Society bought up much of the old downtown to keep it intact.

The Historical Society operates a Miners’ Museum in town and the hippie influence is there. Where else would you see an unvarnished exhibit on the prostitution that was prominent in the heyday and an authentic “sanitary car” from the mines? I highly recommend it, well worth the $2 admission. And it supports the 465 people that live in Jerome today.