Hello Sherwood Howlers
A fine Friday it is. A chill in the clean Shenandoah Valley air. People on the move.
Tonight I’m howling for Frances McDormand, who as it turns out has wolf blood coursing through her veins.
Join me to howl for this marvelous actress.
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AMERICAN TRAVELS
Day #18 – #21, April 16 – 19, 2021 – A Map of Our Travels
AMERICAN TRAVELS
April 16, 2021 Connor Pass, Nevada to “Little Creek Station Chevron”, Utah
After an excellent cup of coffee at “The Cup” in Ely we head southeast on route 50 through 7,729 foot Conner Pass in the Schell Creek Mountain Range, then south on route 93 after descending to the east side of the range. Thirteen thousand and sixty-five foot Wheeler Peak soars in the clouds due east in the Great Basin National Park. Wheeler is the tallest mountain in the Snake Mountain Range and second highest mountain in Nevada.
We pass through miles and miles of sage brush country and suddenly spot a herd of 200 to 300 hundred magnificent Elk, feeding around a natural lake, of which there are very few in this hot dry country. No doubt spring fed. We drive by many dispersed camping sites on BLM land on this lonely route, with very few other travelers.
Next in the line is unincorporated Pony Springs (population 0) which comes with a natural spring and, at one time, served as a watering hole for early ranchers in the area.
Pioche is next, also an unincorporated town, where about 1,000 folks live today. In 1864 would be millionaires open a silver mine nearby and along came François Pioche who bought the town in 1869. Settlers abandoned the area when local pesky Paiutes launched a series of raids and massacres. Gun slingers stopped the Indian raids and more settlers moved in. By the early 1870s, Pioche had grown larger, to become one of the most important silver-mining towns in Nevada. Pioche also had a reputation for being one of the roughest towns in the Old West. Many gun fights occurred over mining claims.
Historians say that nearly 60 percent of the homicides reported in Nevada during 1871–72 took place in and around Pioche. They report that 72 men were killed in gunfights before the first natural death occurred in the camp. The famous, original Boot Hill is a landmark in the town.
Panaca (population 1000), near the Utah border is up next. Brigham Young decided to set up a hide out there in case of a U.S. military campaign, which never materialized. But the Mormons had a foothold and did set up a colony in 1864. Today, Pioche, probably because of Mormon influence, is the only community in Nevada to be “dry” (forbidding the sale of alcoholic beverages), and the only community in Nevada, besides Boulder City, that prohibits gambling.
Damn Mormons and their notions.
Ever onward, passing through the Dixie National Forest, to the farming community of Enterprise (population 1,800) which sits on the south rim of the Great Basin. South of Enterprise on route 18 we come to the Mountain Meadows Massacre Memorial. On the hills around this memorial site during the period of September 7–11, 1857, Mormon settlers calling themselves the “Utah Territorial Militia” attacked a wagon train of mostly immigrant families from Arkansas, who were bound for California. Mormons did not like outsiders especially godless Arkansans.
The immigrants had come through Salt Lake City and stopped to rest at Mountain Meadows. William H Dane, the ruthless leader of the militia, enlisted local Paiute Indians to engage in the fight along side the militia members, who vainly tried to disguise themselves as Paiutes. This was a ruse to get the immigrants, and ultimately outside authorities, to believe that the immigrants were under attack because of an Indian uprising. Certainly don’t want the truth to come out, that this action was raw Mormon aggression against innocent workfarers. Better to blame it on the local Indians.
The immigrants fought back and held their ground during a five-day siege, but eventually ran out of water and provisions. They allowed some militia members to enter their camp under a white flag. The militia assured the emigrants they would protect them, and after handing over their weapons, they escorted the emigrants from their camp.
After walking a short distance the militiamen, with the help of auxiliary forces hiding nearby, opened fire and killed all the adults, men and women, and older children in the group, sparing only seventeen young children under the age of seven. All in all, 120 human beings died that day in a horrific hour of pure naked brutality.
Following the massacre, the perpetrators hastily buried the victims, ultimately leaving the bodies vulnerable to wild animals and the climate. Their bones are still scattered about over a two mile area in the hills nearby. Investigations into the matter resulted in nine indictments during 1874. Prosecutors only tried one man: John D. Lee. A jury convicted him and imposed a death sentence. A Utah firing squad shot him on March 23, 1877. William H Dane went scot free.
Scholars debate whether senior Mormon leadership, including Brigham Young, directly instigated the massacre or if responsibility lay only with the local leaders in southern Utah.
This is a guy who has a major university in Salt Lake City named after him.
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On that sad note, grimly lost in our thoughts we traveled on to Central (population 613), and Veyo (population 483) and finally to Hurricane (population 14,000) known for its peaches, pecans, and pistachio nuts, with Zion National Park just to the east. At Hurricane we are coming to be on the Colorado Plateau and the ensuing cities and towns are all at about 5,000 feet above sea level.
Finally, finally, we pulled into the “Little Creek Station Chevron” in Apple Valley and camped alone in a spacious parking lot away from the action thanks to the kind folks running the Chevron show.
Tomorrow onward toward Arizona and warm weather., we hope.
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4-17-21 “Little Creek Station”, Chevron, Utah to our Coconino National Forest Campsite near Flagstaff, AZ
Off we go, after breakfast at the Chevron, to Colorado City, AZ (population 5,000), founded in 1913 by Mormons who had broken away from the Salt Lake City bunch and who wanted a remote location where they could practice polygamy. They got that going, but in 1953, Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle sent troops into the settlement to stop the practice. The two-year legal battle that followed became a public relations disaster that damaged Pyle’s political career and set a hands-off tone toward Colorado City for the next 50 years.
In January 2004, a new polygamy leader, Warren Jeffs, expelled a group of 20 men, including the mayor, and gave their wives and children to other men. This is how these extreme Mormons treated women. Jeffs gave them away to his “chosen” men like livestock.
Jeffs told authorities he was acting on the orders of God. All in all, Jeffs expelled 400 young men from the “church” during the period 2001–2006, for failing to “follow my rules, or for dating women without my permission.” Many of these expelled men and boys were very naïve and sheltered. They often wound up homeless in nearby towns such as Hurricane, Utah and St. George, Utah.
Jeffs was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and eventually arrested on August 28, 2006 and is now a convicted sex offender. He is incarcerated in a prison in Palestine, Texas.
Lets hope this guy does not see the light of day anytime soon.
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Soon after leaving Colorado City we entered the Kaibab Indian Reservation, home of the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Southern Paiutes. As of the 2000 census about 100 natives live with an equal number of white people on the reservation.
Next up, Fredonia (population 1,324) where we ascend to the Kaibab Plateau, part of the larger Colorado Plateau, and travel through the Kaibab National Forest. The Grand Canyon borders the Kaibab Plateau on the south. The plateau reaches an elevation of 9,200 and its appearance stands in sharp contrast to the arid lowlands encircling it. The elevation provides more moisture so it supports aspen, spruce-fir, ponderosa pine, and pinyon-juniper woodland. The cool forests of the plateau are home to the Kaibab squirrel, which is endemic to the region. Other fauna includes deer, turkey, cougar, and bobcat and an occasional “Eagles” fan looking for a flat bed ford.
Fredonia means “land of free women.” Good thing, since the Mormon’s were not interested in freedom for women. Fredonia is the gateway to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I wonder if the hordes of people that visit the Grand Canyon each year has any notion of the Mormon history of the area.
We drive on, headed right at the Vermillion Cliffs Nation Monument, a spectacular series of steep, eroded sandstone, siltstone, limestone, and shale escarpments rising 3,000 feet from the valley floor. Millions of years of wind and water erosion have exposed hundreds of layers of richly colored rock strata. Mesas, buttes, and large tablelands are interspersed with steep canyons adorned with sculptured arches, balanced rocks, spires, pinnacles, and slickrock domes. What the heck is the difference between a mesa and a butte? Most geographers say a butte is taller than it is wide, while a mesa is a much larger, slightly less elevated feature. Buttes are created as streams slowly cut through a mesa or plateau.
This country is every bit as spectacular as Arches National Park.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument lies further to the north, the Grand Canyon to the south, with the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument to the west of it.
Spectacular western canyon country.
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Next up Cliff Dweller’s Lodge, where local river guides get together, drink large quantities of beer and make jokes about the rookie easterners they escort down the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon.
A short distance further we come to Marble Canyon and use the route 89A bridge to cross the Colorado River. Just beside this new bridge is the old “Historic Navajo Bridge”. One can walk out on and peer straight down 467 feet to the Colorado. And that we did. It was breathtaking. Looking straight down on two fully equipped river boats with ant people scurrying about getting ready to hit the river.
I became mesmerized with the dizzying heights and watching those brave souls get prepared to shoot the powerful rapids in the Grand Canyon, and that is just the precise time that a California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) showed up and began to lazily soar close above our heads. What a marvelous creature!
With its 9.8 foot wingspan it is the widest of any North American bird, and its weight of up to 26 pounds nearly equals that of the trumpeter swan, the heaviest among native North American bird species. The condor is a scavenger and eats large amounts of carrion. It is one of the world’s longest-living birds, with a lifespan of up to 60 years.
Condor numbers dramatically declined in the 20th century due to poaching, habitat destruction, and poisoning from eating carrion laced with lead shot, a product of the senseless slaughter wild animals which are left to rot in the hot Colorado Plateau sun.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service lead an effort to bring back condors. They developed a conservation plan and captured the remaining 27 wild condors. Twenty-seven. They bred these surviving birds at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo. Slowly numbers rose and, beginning in 1991, condors were reintroduced into the wild, each assigned and wing-tagged with an identifying number. We are looking at bird #19 today. I am going to call her Lucy, although I don’t know whether this bird is male of female. “She” just looks like a Lucy to me.
Lucy hung around for a photo shoot and showed off for our small crowd of very luck travelers. Emily thinks Lucy had her eyes on Sawyer, who was with us. A condor is not above eating a small, plumpish, white, pig-spotted dog.
The California Condor is one of the world’s rarer bird species. As of 2019 there were 518. Three hundred live in the wild today. From 2010 until 2016 wild numbers increased from 181 to 276, a 53% increase. Marvelous wildlife biologists and trained volunteers continuously check every bird by cam, including nesting sites. They know precisely how many eggs are in each clutch. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists this magnificent creature as Critically Endangered.
What a marvelous success story. But we must be vigilant. A wildlife biologists told me there are still people living among us who don’t know this story and would kill this bird in a minute.
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We head south on 89A with the Colorado River just to the west, flowing ever closer to the Grand Canyon, through Bitter Springs (population 452), a native Navajo village. Onward through Cameron (population 885) and finally to our campsite, tucked away amongst towering Ponderosa Pine trees in the Coconino National Forest. We are in the San Francisco Peaks range, near 12,637 foot Humphreys Peak just to the west, a complex stratovolcano that blew its top 1.5 million years ago in a series of violent eruptions. Scores of smaller volcanos dot the landscape, all of which had blown their tops in the distant past. Just to the east is the Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, a smaller version of Humphries.
As usual with the names of natural features, the Hopi and Navajo indigenous people named this volcano hundreds of years ago and called it, in Hopi: Aaloosaktukwi and in Navajo: Dookʼoʼoosłííd, names having to do with religious symbology. Then white men came along and renamed the mountain after Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, a career United States Army officer, civil engineer, and Union General in the American Civil War, who may very well have never seen the mountain.
A great campsite, all alone we are. It snowing and blowing, and we are tucked away like little mice with the Aliner Furnace roaring. So much for warmer weather.
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4-18-21 Coconino National Forest Campsite to Socorro, NM
We got up this morning to discover that Sawyer’s water bowl was frozen solid.
Circumventing Flagstaff, we head east on I-40 along-side the famous Route #66, through Two Guns, a ghost town on the east rim of Canyon Diablo, then Winslow (population 10,000).
“Well, I’m a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona
Such a fine sight to see
It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flat-bed Ford
Slowin’ down to take a look at me
Come on, baby, don’t say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is gonna save me
We may lose and we may win, though we will never be here again
Don’t let the sound of your own wheels make you crazy
Come on baby, don’t say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is gonna save me”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2z06OLwXMY
Next up, Holbrook (population 5,053). This area was inhabited first by the Anasazi, then Puebloans, then the Navajo and Apache. In 1540 (some seventy years before Jamestown or the Pilgrims) Spanish conquistador and explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado camped some 60 miles east of Holbrook. Coronado sent an expedition west to find the Colorado River, and they crossed the Little Colorado some twenty-five miles east of Holbrook and found a wonderland of colors they named “El Desierto Pintada” – The Painted Desert. The Hopi Indians living there at the time led Coronado to the Grand Canyon. I bet he peed his pants when he saw that.
The Petrified Forest National park lies just to the east of Holbrook.
St. Johns up next (population 3,480) then Springerville (population 1,961). Just east of Springerville we cross over into New Mexico in a snow and sleet storm. Volcanic flows dominate the landscape from Springerville to the next spot on this lonely highway, which is Red Hill, a ghost town, with one ghost hanging around looking for gold.
That ghost’s name is Adams, so the tale goes. In 1836 Adams staggered into the town of Piños Altos, 200 hundred miles south of Red Hill. With multiple arrow wounds and close to death, he told several people gathered around him that he had been prospecting off in the north. When they opened his knapsack they found a fortune in gold. He said more gold was lying around everywhere in a field with a red hill in the distance. Adams died before he could give more details, and nobody ever found the gold he mentioned, but some people died trying to find it.
Quemado (population 200) is next then Pie Town, (population 186). In the 1920’s Clyde Norman started a bakery there and made dried-apple pies. To this very day, on the second Saturday of each September Pie Town residents celebrate the “Pie Town Pie Festival” where they gorge themselves on all kinds of pies, wash them down with peach brandy, then go back for more pie, repeating that cycle till they all turn into pies.
Pie Town is close to the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, that consists of twenty-eight 25-meter individual radio telescopes, each mounted on double parallel railroad tracks, so the radius and density of the array can be transformed to achieve maximum “listening” ability. VLA Astronomers observe radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, supernova remnants, gamma-ray bursts, radio-emitting stars, the sun and planets astrophysical masers, black holes, and an occasional member of the Grateful Dead, making love to their Fender Stratocasters while bringing joy and happiness to the constellations.
Next up Socorro, New Mexico (population 11,000). Spaniards founded Socorro in June 1598, but not without the help of Piro Indians in the area. The Spanish would be settlers had just crossed the Jornada del Muerto, an inhospitable patch of desert that ends just south of Socorro. There local Piro Indians of the pueblo of Teypana gave them food and water.
The Spaniards, as white folk are wont to do, renamed the pueblo Socorro. At least they honored the Piro in a way because Socorro means “help” or “aid”, which the Piro has given, probably saving some lives.
Fast forward, to 1964, when Lonnie Zamora, a local policeman, told authorities he “heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky to southwest some distance away—possibly a 1/2 mile or a mile.” Upon investigation Zamora claimed to have seen a shiny object shaped like the letter “O” and two people in white coveralls beside the object, who he later described as “normal in shape—but possibly they were small adults or large kids.” He went on to say he heard a roar and saw a blue and orange flame under the object which then rose and quickly moved away, so he concluded he had seen a flying saucer and two little beings.
The press reported on this event, called it the Lonnie Zamora Incident, then went back to reporting on local high school football games.
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We checked in to an EconoLodge for the night and after getting settled I decided it was time to visit the Super Walmart just across the road for a fresh set of under ware, always a good thing. In the check out line I experienced a life defining moment. I was using the automated system and was having a bit of trouble. The nice young man running the show assisted me a bit then went on to help other “challenged” folk.
At the end of the transaction the machine asked me if I wanted to make a donation for a good cause which threw a loop because I could not figure out how to finish up. A lady waiting patiently in line for my machine saw my angst and called out to that nice young man and said, “Sir, this elderly gentleman, I think, needs some additional assistance.” I had a good laugh. The lady smiled. Life defining moment.
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We came to Socorro to visit with the daughter of a beloved friend of mine, Mr. David Gipson who lives in Virginia. His daughter Liz Gipson on the other hand is now a true westerner, having lived out here from some time. She is a weaver and teaches the art – sort of a weaver whisperer. Her husband, Christian (Kip) Carrico is a professor, in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.
The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology offers over 30 bachelor of science degrees in technology, the sciences, engineering, management, and technical communication, as well as graduate degrees at the masters and doctoral levels. Professors and students pursue areas of research and teaching include cool stuff like hydrology, astrophysics, atmospheric physics, geophysics, information technology, information security, Earth Science, energetic materials engineering, and petroleum recovery. Kip’s focus areas are air quality, aerosols, climate change, direct and indirect climate forcing (whatever the heck that is) and energy and environment.
A wonderful visit it was. The day after our arrival we toured around this lovely little hamlet stuck out here in the Rio Grande Valley and had lunch with Kip and Liz.
Back to our grand EconoLodge after lunch to do some laundry and other chores. I decided to to a bit more shopping and upon leaving noticed what I thought was suspicious activity. A man came to the door of the unit next to us and knocked, then walked away back to his truck. He did this three times. I was observing from behind our camper parked a few yards away. After a while another man finally came out, they passed a few muted words, then man #1 got in the truck and drove away.
Not one to question other people’s business I went on to do my business. Upon returning, a wide-eyed Emily told me that not long after I had left 2 police cars and 2 ambulances showed up and that the authorities removed a female from the room on a stretcher. She reported she heard the word “overdose” once as she listened with a glass to her ear intently from in her locked room. She was not sure if anyone had been arrested. I suppose I should trust my intuitions. This is the only time, in all our travels out west that we experienced tense moments like this.
We had dinner that night with Kip and Liz in their beautifully “desert-scaped” courtyard. Good beer and cocktails, which went well with chips and Kip’s own homemade salsa and a delicious “New Mexico” salad with prosciutto prepared by Liz. The air was cool and crisp as evening turned to night. The stars danced in the heavens and my heart skipped a beat.
Kip and Liz live in a very nicely converted church, which explains the walls cracking as I entered for a tour.
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The next day, April 20, 2021, we drove by to say our farewells to Kip and Liz and show them our cool little camper. Then away we went headed ever eastward for more adventures. Next up Dalhart Texas, the “Pit of the Panhandle”.
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Mikakuye Oyasin (To all of my relations)
Travel through life with a smile on your face and two bits in your pocket.