The Luminous Land

 10-18 

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I woke up this morning to dramatic, moody skies, thick with clouds rolling across the mountains in endless waves. A cool breeze tugged at my hair, carrying a scent of dampness that threatened rain. The sounds of the campground were subdued, the usual clangor of pots and pans and early morning cooking and grumpy campers replaced by the subtle shush of the winds, ebbing and swelling with the gusts.

I checked my phone for the local forecast and saw that the day called for rain, and that a large band was moving in. So I set up my grill and scrapped together a quick breakfast, then packed it all up and retired to my tent to start a new book.

Just as I zipped up the flap, it started to rain.

It’s not that often that it rains on my trips (beyond the usual West Texas monsoons, which I always seem to encounter) so it was a bit of a novelty. Fortunately, my tent is a very solid one that stays warm and dry even in terrible weather, so a little drizzle is nothing for it to handle. And the rain was sure to help lower temperatures to more of an appropriately autumn-ish state, and to serve to tamp down the remaining few embers of the wildfire. So I laid there in my sleeping bag, snug as a bug, and descended into the depths of my book, quite content to enjoy a bit of a lazy morning.

At some point, after an hour or so of steady rain, I did begin to wonder if it planned on raining all day.

After 2 hours of increasingly heavy rain, I began to wonder if I would need to worry about my campsite flooding (I didn’t).

And after 3 hours, I was beginning to regret picking a campsite so distant from the bathrooms.

But very fortunately, the rain lifted before I had to do something dire. I crept out of my tent just as all of the other campers were emerging from their RVs and tents and campervans, all of us a little bleary, probably looking like slightly bedraggled owls. By that point I had decided I was tired of my book and laying around, and it was quite chilly, so I packed up my “in town” gear and hopped in Jane to go search for a coffee shop. Rainy days are perfect for coffee shops.

I stopped first by the Goldfield Ghost Town, which purported to have a coffee shop. And so it did – but not the kind where you sit and work on blog posts all day. So I wandered around the sodden grounds along with every other cooped-up family in the area.

I found a couple of souvenirs in one of the gift shops, but beyond that decided that the ghost town had exhausted its entertainment options, so I clambered back into Jane and set off towards town (like, actual town, where actual people live).

I really was looking for a local cozy coffee shop, like the kind where writers and artists hang out, but apparently there were few options in Apache Junction, and most of them were closed. So I ensconced myself in a Starbucks with a hot chocolate and an egg sandwich and spent the afternoon organizing and reviewing photos, writing blog posts, and researching hiking options for the remainder of the trip. A boring day, but sometimes that’s just what you do.

The day remained overcast and rainy, eventually giving way to mist and finally clear blue weather only around 4 PM or so. I headed back to camp, figuring I could just have a walk and be happy with that.

The nice thing about rain is that it does leave the air crystal clear and everything is laser crisp afterwards!

I stopped in at the ranger station at the front of the park to bug the rangers once again about my hiking prospects for the area, now that the rain had probably eradicated the remnants of the wildfire. Then we scooted on to the campsite – but as I went to back into my space, I heard a very interesting tinny rattling sound. The kind of sound that sounds like when I lose a wheel cap and the remaining bracket rattles between the wheel and the brake hub. Hmmmmmm.

I got out and discovered that yes, I had indeed lost a wheel cap, somewhere between the ranger station and my site. No sweat, I figured that I would just walk back until I found it. How hard could it be?

Well, I walked all the way back to the ranger station, keeping my eyes peeled the entire way there and back, and that sucker was nowhere to be seen. It had vanished off the face of the earth. Gone completely. Forever. I left a lost-item note with the rangers at the station but with little hope of recovery. Interestingly, I realized that the cap I had lost is the same one that I lost on my first road trip ever… ten years ago. Call it a gift from Jane, I guess.

It does not escape me that I managed to lose this cap in a place called the Superstition Mountains.

The sun settled towards the horizon and I gave up the search for the cap, instead opting to quickly jack the car up and pull the wheel so I could remove the offending rattling bracket. A man in the site across from me offered to help but I declined his offer as pulling a wheel and putting it back on takes maybe five minutes and only one person’s worth of work. So instead he watched me mess with the wheel, clearly fascinated but having enough tact to not ask me the usual obtuse questions, which I appreciated.

I then remembered that I had forgotten to pick up ice while in town, so I popped back over to the ranger station – for the third time that hour – to grab a bag. They had the grace to pretend like they weren’t getting awful tired of me.

Back at camp, I cooked up the usual Boy Scout dinner as the sky bloomed with the now-familiar fire of a Southwestern sunset.

I looked at this weird saguaro a lot on this trip. So here's a dramatic pic of it.

Jane blended into the twilight, but the narrow sliver of remaining sunlight raked intriguingly across the body lines, creating a unique effect in which the sunset served to both highlight the car, and erase it completely into the landscape.

The light faded to the west as the full moon rose to the east, trading the firey oranges and yellows of the sun for the cool blues and grays of the moon, which were somehow no less bright. The landscape gained an ethereal, ghostly cast as a light mist bloomed into a halo, magnifying the moon’s effect. While some remained shrouded in darkness, other parts were highlighted as if painted in light. And although I have no professional camera for nighttime photography, it was a striking enough sight that I took a stab at photographing it anyways. I’m really glad that I did.

Kelly signing out.

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.

The Crowned Cactus

 10-16

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I may have overdone it yesterday, a little.

Well, probably what actually happened was that I did a long hot hike with a lot of climbing, but then I didn’t drink enough water or electrolytes to replenish what was lost.

But maybe I’m just getting old.

Whatever the reason, I found myself extra hobble-y this morning, my leg muscles screaming in protest as I shuffled through the world’s longest oatmeal bar. So I thought, maybe I should start the day off a little easy.

So I parked Jane out front of the hotel and took some photos. Can’t resist a cool building and other classic cars, you know! Plus, the hotel staff had asked me for some photos. I guess classic Mustangs don’t cruise through their archway very often.

Also pictured: a LOT of Sonoran dust.

Dallying aside, I packed up my gear and headed back east to the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro. It was a beautiful bluebird day, and not quite so hot as before, so a nice little hike was a welcome prospect.

I parked at the Douglas Springs trailhead – a spot at the very end of a very, very long, very, very straight road populated by increasingly wealthy estate-type properties the further you drive – and set out on the Garwood/Wild Horse loops. There’s a large trail network out here in the rolling hills at the base of the Rincon Mountains, with dozens of miles to hike (or ride, in the case of the equestrians). But the ranger I spoke to a couple days ago had specifically mentioned she liked to hike the Garwood loop, so that’s the one I took.

I strolled across the Sonoran Desert, rapidly being absorbed into the landscape. The vast skies of the Southwest hung above me, their crystalline heights crossed by friendly fluffy white clouds that cast dark shadows across the distant ranges bordering the desert. Saguaros stretched tall and proud and eternal, fat and green on this rainier side of the Rincons. Clumps of prickly pears crawled out from beneath bushes, bearing flowers and fruit in abundance. Birds flitted and chirped cheerfully, unbothered by my presence, and all manner of lizards skittered across the trail in search of a bite to eat or a warm rock to lay on.

For all that this is a desert, it never gives the impression of desolation. This is a healthy, lush land, it just doesn’t need as much water as some others might.

I climbed up into the foothills, where I found a number of tanks – that is, areas that hold water long-term, functioning like mini ponds. Usually they’re in rocky draws, where runoff pools and sits after rains. They’re vital for the health of the desert wildlife, so I was pleased to see that even after such a dry autumn, they still held a bit of water.

I also found a massive saguaro, towering well over 25 ft tall with over a dozen arms! I was very impressed with this monster – no other cactus on the trail came even a little bit close to its majesty.

But then I came around a corner, and suddenly THE saguaro came into view. A classic two-armed saguaro… wearing a VERY fancy hat.

So fancy!!!

Just look at it!! The most majestic saguaro I’ve ever seen. The most majestic cactus I’ve ever seen. Possibly the most majestic plant I’ve ever seen!! Well, maybe not more majestic than a redwood. But still.

This is what’s called a cristate, or crested, saguaro. It’s a mutation that occurs in an estimated 1 out of every 200,000 (or more) saguaros, totally at random. I did some Googling later on and found that out of the 2 million saguaros in Saguaro National Park, only about 75 are cristate – so yeah, that’s pretty rare. Biologists don’t even know why some saguaros grow that way. They “just do”.

My theory is that there can only be so many cacti royalty. Maybe the one I stumbled across was the king of the northern Rincons. It certainly looked as if it was holding court, standing commandingly on a small knoll looking out over the valley, arms upraised, crowned head held high.

Sufficiently awed, I finished my hike back to the trailhead, trying my best not to disturb the crowned cactus’s domain. What a fantastic hike. But it had grown quite hot, the early afternoon sun raking out of the sky with a bit more malice than called for in mid October, so I took the opportunity to skedaddle back west.

I stopped to get some bubble tea on the way – there were about eight shops to choose from on this very long road – and considered my options for the remainder of the afternoon. Ultimately I decided that I was feeling very inspired by the day’s scenery, and that I’d like to finish it up with some art. So off I headed downtown to the Tucson Museum of Art.

I used to really dislike art museums, you know. It probably had something to do with my constant rebellion against my art teacher and her rules, and the fact that I didn’t like having to decipher the meaning of various art pieces in exchange for a grade. Either way, I developed quite an aversion to them for a very long time. But in recent years I’ve come back to really enjoy seeing art – it’s a cool way to experience other cultures and other points of view.

Tucson’s art museum is small but mighty, with a particularly impressive collection of Native American, southwestern, and Mexican/Mesoamerican art. My favorite! I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering, giving my legs a break from hiking and my eyes a break from squinting.

Some very cool Hopi kachinas

An interesting juxtaposition of a few styles of Native art.

A pretty terrible photo of a very fascinating collection of traditional basketry... the best of which is front and center.

Yes, that is indeed an armadillo shell used as a purse! Ingenious really. If armadillos weren't so dang cute I'd be inspired to start a new (or rather, renew an old) fashion trend.

A selection of Peruvian pots made around 100-700 AD. I liked this pot in particular because it is absurd in two (or more) ways: first, it would be incredibly difficult to use; second, the craftsman who made it decided to paint people as beans all over it. Phenomenal. 

A selection of large clay sculptures from Mexico around 100-300AD. They were apparently commonly buried in large tombs - amazing that they still exist 2000 years later!

Someone in West Mexico was really into making adorable dog pots... about 2000 years ago (100 BC-300 AD). I would put one of these guys in my house for sure!

So cute! Look at their little smiles.

There was a lot to look at, obviously most of which is poorly represented by a photo through glass. But I highly recommend going to see the collection if you’re ever in Tucson!

I finished the evening off with a stop at El Charro, apparently an old Tucson classic. I ensconced myself in a corner table and entreated my waiter to get me “whatever enchiladas are best”. He very kindly and considerately responded by giving me a plate of possibly the best enchiladas I’ve ever had in my life. El Charro specializes in carne seca, a type of marinated beef that’s dried in the sun for a few days before being shredded and fried up with onions, tomatoes, and chiles. And you know what, it’s incredible. I had it topped with a poblano-cilantro crema, accompanied by a side of refried beans.

To be honest, I think I might crave those enchiladas for the rest of my life. I kind of hate it when that happens. But boy were they good.

Stuffed to the brim, I waddled back to Jane and we took off for home base. It’s our last night staying in Tucson – tomorrow we’ll head up to the Phoenix area!

Until then, Kelly signing out.