The Saguaro'd Sunset

 10-17

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This morning I packed Jane up and got ready for the drive to our next destination. Now, a thing that I’ve been trying for this trip is to not do quite so much driving between stops… not that I don’t like driving (clearly, I do), but really I want to get back in the habit of doing more seeing than transporting. So, today’s drive was only a short hop – less than two hours, in fact. That’s hardly even enough to get Jane warmed up!

We hit the road about mid-morning, navigating the (actually pretty friendly) Tucson highways and popping out onto a more rural drive – Highway 79. After a lot of time on big interstates, it was nice to get back on the little two-lane roads. But man, after departing Tucson, with its abundant outcrops of cool rocks erupting from the valley floor, this drive was certainly a boring one. The landscape stretched towards the horizon in an endless flat plane, sometimes populated by sparse low scrub, but more often cleared for farming. In some fields, crops had begun to make an appearance, but others remained empty, nothing but swirling dust. Distant mountains, always present on the horizon but seemingly never getting closer, taunted us from afar. Not the most beautiful drive, but one with a kind of desperate desolate beauty to it nonetheless.  

Yikes

As we approached the end of the drive, the mountains finally ceased their taunting and allowed us to draw closer. In short order, we arrived at the Superstition Mountains.

I had booked a campsite at Lost Dutchman State Park, located on the western margin of the Superstitions, for a luxurious three night stay. Luxurious in that I wouldn’t have to pack up camp every day, not luxurious in accommodations. Although, Lost Dutchman does have flush toilets AND showers, which is pretty luxurious indeed!

I pulled up to the entry station and went inside to speak with the rangers. Inside, I found that the park doesn’t have a visitor center or any exhibits – just a few souvenirs and a few rangers wrangling crowds and handling the odd guided walk on the park’s trails. Nevertheless, I found the girl who helped me to be enthusiastic and highly forthcoming, which is really all you need anyways.

According to her, I had arrived at a kind-of-good, kind-of-bad time. There was recently a major wildfire in the Superstitions, and because of how erratically the fire had spread, firefighters were having a hard time tracking down and eradicating the remaining hot spots. So in response, authorities had closed the range to hiking. Definitely falls under the “bad” connation – but the caveat was that hiking was slated to reopen tomorrow! So, I just had to find something else to do for the day.

The ranger suggested that I go visit the Lost Dutchman Museum, where I would be able to see old historic movie sets and mining equipment and learn some about the history of the area. And because I had the rest of the afternoon to noodle around, she also suggested that I take a drive to Tortilla Flat, a kind of ghost town that was at one time a critical stagecoach stop in the early days of the development of the Salt River Valley. So off I went to do exactly what she had suggested.

The Lost Dutchman Museum was only a couple of minutes back down the road – a charming place with a small museum and a large gift shop. But more attractively, it also houses a number of very cool historical buildings arranged in a nice walkable compound.

I started with Apacheland. “Apacheland” was a “movie ranch” – a 1,800 acre movie set – originally located near Gold Canyon just to the south. It was used extensively during the 60’s during the peak era of spaghetti Westerns, and was the site of numerous buildings which later became iconic in these movies. If you’ve seen an old Western, you’ve probably seen Apacheland. Anyways, it burned down not just once but twice, and ultimately in the early 2000’s the surviving buildings were donated to the Lost Dutchman Museum and transported to their property.

The “Elvis Chapel”, called such for reaching iconic status as a feature in the movie Charro! starring Elvis Presley, cut a striking figure against the background of the Superstitions.

Next to it, a small building contained a few old Western-styled businesses including a bank (for robbing, of course), a train station, a jail, and a barber shop.

In the background, the impressive Apacheland barn loomed large against the mountains, looking as if it had always belonged. This barn has been featured in dozens of Westerns of the 60’s and beyond; it’s a miracle it was spared both fires, given its fully wooden construction and its size. Now, it houses a general store as well as examples of old Western transportation – wagons and harnesses, buggies, and trains.

I continued my walk around and got to the section of the compound that demonstrates old mining efforts in the Superstitions. Lost Dutchman got its name from a man (who was Dutch, obviously) who met his unfortunate demise in the western Superstitions at the hands of Apaches. When his body was found, he was in possession of some samples of exceptionally pure gold ore, which sparked a gold rush in the Superstitions (much to the Apache’s chagrin). Ultimately, no one ever found gold of any quality approaching what he had been carrying, and the location remains a mystery to this day. But for a while there were a lot of mining operations in the area, and the Lost Dutchman Museum was able to acquire a lot of the old equipment – and, they even went to the trouble of making it all functional! Amazing.

I am not a mining-type geologist so most of this is all lost on me, but I still found their ore processing machine – which, again, is in actual WORKING order – to be pretty incredible. They’ve got a 1914-built Cossak 20 Stamp Mill, which was used to crush gold and silver bearing ores into fine sand for processing. I imagine that it must make quite a cacophony when it’s running!

I popped into the gift shop to see about a postcard, and happened to talk to the lady manning the cash register. She informed me that I should come back in a couple days as there would be an alien convention hosted on-site on Saturday, promising for lots of… interesting… attendees. We both wiggled our eyebrows at each other and I promised to definitely not show up.

Then I slid back into Jane and cruised towards Tortilla Flat. I must say, the drive to (and from) Tortilla Flat is probably the best thing about this particular venture. The road is a lovely winding narrow affair that twists through the canyon north of Lost Dutchman, skirting Canyon Lake and its feeder creeks and providing fantastic views the whole way.

There were several one-lane bridges, which I'm sure are sometimes subject to an interesting game of chicken...

When I arrived at Tortilla Flat itself, though, I have to say that I was disappointed. The town was never really very much, having humble beginnings as first a simple camping spot and then a stagecoach stop on the Apache Trail in the 1800s through the early 1930s. Now, it consists of a saloon, a restaurant, a gift shop, and a very small (as in, maybe 60 sq ft) museum. But for some reason there were a ton of tourists there!

I couldn’t fathom why, as there is not a lot in the area to pull people in. But I suppose it’s a nice drive and it’s something to do that’s close to Phoenix, so maybe that’s enough. I asked a worker at the ice cream counter – of course I was getting ice cream – and he just kind of shrugged at me. So that was that.

We cruised back out of the canyon, at least having a very nice drive, and scooted back to Lost Dutchman to set up camp.

Wow I am just super glad that they put that telephone pole in that fantastically conspicuous spot

Every time I’m reserving campsites, I play this game where I try to figure out which site is the absolute best in the campground. I don’t really care if it’s level or not – I can and have slept on all kinds of odd inclines and surfaces – but the really critical thing is having a great view. And man, I picked a great one this time.

Jane up close

Jane from slightly further away

Jane from even further away

Jane from further away but vertical this time

I set up my gear and then wandered out from the campground along one of the park’s trails to see the sunset. The craggy volcanics of the Superstitions glowed first orange, then red, bathed in the fading light of the Arizonan sun. Looking to the west, though, was even more breath-taking, as the sky burst aflame with the most classic of Southwestern sunsets.

Amusingly enough, while out on my walk I passed no less than a dozen photo shoots – engagement photos, pregnancy photos, family photos, formal photos, the whole spectrum. Apparently, Lost Dutchman is a very popular backdrop for these kinds of things. Everyone had found their own little niche with a nice cacti-laden foreground, the Superstitions rising strikingly in the back. I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of all of these people dressed in their best – suits, dresses, high heels, the works – set against the chaotic, untamed wilds of the desert.

Maybe I should have brought my finest for a photoshoot as well!

I returned to camp and looked to the stars as night descended. Stargazing is always a worthy pursuit when out camping, but tonight I was looking for something in particular: the comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, which was supposed to be large and bright and highly visible at this time. Unfortunately, it was visible to the west... and the Phoenix metro is also located to the west, so the halo of light pollution kept me from really seeing much. I texted my Dad to commiserate, eventually jokingly sending him a photo of a plane's contrail as the "comet". But when I reviewed the photo later, I found that I had unwittingly actually successfully taken a (bad) picture of the comet! So here it is in all its glory:

(look to the right of the large contrail and above the smaller one)

A happy accident, even if I didn't know it at the time. 

Kelly signing out.