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I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
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I finally snapped. I had to get out and do something different. But how to stay safe in this time of nail chewing uncertainty and heartbreak? It hit me. Go to the middle of nowhere.
So up we went, out of the Verde Valley on 18 mile Cherry Road that takes an hour to drive.
Dropping down to the Agua Fria River drainage, we shot across to the town of Humboldt. This where the smelter was located that processed all the gold and silver ore that was mined in the area. The Bradshaw Mountains are a giant lump of Precambrian rock that bulged up in the earths crust millions of years ago. Over time the overlaying softer strata has eroded away, leaving the hard mineralized core jutting up 8000 feet in the sky.
In the map below, you can see a great big blank spot on the map in the middle of the screen. That’s the Bradshaw’s. No paved roads. One town with a bar/restaurant, but no gas station. Clearly it’s the place to be alone.
Surrounded by desert or high grasslands, it is an island of cool temperatures, trees and wildlife.
But it wasn’t always that way. There were plans for railroads that common sense said could never be built through such rough country. But a man did. One of my favorite personalities in Arizona, Frank M. Murphy built an incredible engineering feat to haul out the millions of dollars worth of gold and silver. The line to Crown King that featured five switchbacks and two tunnels to reach 5,700 feet up on the top of the southern range.
But this day I was off to explore the scene of a story that I’ve heard since childhood.
While digging and blasting their way to a tunnel approach on the Poland branch line, the workers opened up a vein of gold that was 400 feet long and six to twelve feet wide. There were 1,500 employees on the railroad that morning. By evening there were 50, with rest quitting their jobs and becoming instant miners.
They cleaned it out and went into Prescott to hit infamous Whiskey Row and spend it all that weekend. Whiskey Row at one time had 40 bars next to each other. You weren’t a veteran until you walked from the top to the bottom of the hill doing one shot in each bar… and back again. When I was a freshman in high school there, I had just left the hobby shop around the corner when I walked by Matt’s Saloon. There was a hysterical woman crying that Bruce Springsteen was on stage jamming with the regulars. I hung around on the side walk and listened. But here’s the part that I didn’t know until writing this diary.
On Sept. 29, 1989, Bruce Springsteen rolled into Prescott aboard a motorcycle and wound up in Matt’s Saloon. After speaking with bartender “Bubbles” Pechanec, who shared with the Boss her eight marriages and recent cancer diagnosis, Springsteen hit the stage for a 40-minute jam session before vanishing into the night.
It wasn’t long before Pechanec received a $100,000 check signed by Springsteen to help pay her expenses. The photos and newspaper stories from that night are still tacked to the wall of the biker bar, the bartender happy to point them out.
I had never taken the Poland Road that follows the old roadbed up into the mountains. Even though I have USGS topo maps of the area, I had no idea where this tunnel was. So up Big Bug Creek we ventured. Soon everything changed from grassland to forest as we wound our way, following the ghosts of the past.
I found a neat little trickle of water that looked worth while to explore. I followed it up a little bit before I ran out of real estate.
My ex was poking around down below when she called out that I had to come see this neat cave. I thought, no, you must have found a glory hole. I followed her through some brush and lo and behold,
Clearly, the local kids know where it’s at. Campfire ashes and graffiti marked the spot where men stumbled upon months worth of wages in gold. i had to explore the other side when I discovered it had caved in over the years.
I spent some time looking at the strata and faulting of the immediate area, trying to imagine a vein of gold bearing rock twelve feet wide. There certainly was a lot of geologic activity in the area that made for some neat contrasts.
According to recent literature precious minerals develop over time, starting off dissolved in super heated water that bubbles up through cracks in bedrock. Slowly cooling and accumulating, that’s the reason they are found high up in the mountains. It wasn’t a mountain at the time, but everything else above it has eroded and exposed the areas to the elements. That’s why you don’t find precious minerals just anywhere.
But we hadn’t reached the top. So off we went. The road got steeper until we topped out at around 7,500 feet above sea level. Mount Union is the highest peak in the Bradshaws at 7,988 feet. It got it’s name from the beginning of the Arizona Territory, which was founded in 1863. We had our own political version of the Oakland Raiders when it came to capitols. Check it out, it’s pretty wild.
On the northeast slope of the mountain there’s a view that made it worth the trip alone. In the above picture, the farthest away point I could see was Horseshoe Mountain up in Coconino County, 62 miles away as the crow flies. It would take three hours or more to drive there.
Looking to the southeast I could see the Mazatzal Mountains and behind them, the Sierra Ancha’s , 94 miles away. It would take 5 hours to drive there.
Satisfied that we found some peace, quiet and cool, not to mention beauty, we headed home.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?