3-18-08
Young, Pow Wow, Stage line road

I decided to take a ride, as these days are what I consider “perfect” days. I headed up to Globe and then on up to the Roosevelt Lake. I took the road toward Young and see they have a new sign telling this is the highway from the desert to the tall pines.

The road goes down to where a bridge crossing the Salt River comes into Roosevelt Lake. I had to take this photo of the water coming down for Cactus Jack who used to guide rafts down the Salt River. As you can see Jack the water level isn’t that high but I could see where the water level was way high from all the trash in the bushes along side the river.

This is just down from the bridge where there were several rafters that were just getting out. The Lake is almost full and I heard on the radio that it would be full by the end of the month. This lake hasn’t been full since they raised the level by adding on to the original dam. Someplace back in my dog logs a year ago I had a photo of the low level of the water at the dam. I heard on the same radio that they would have plenty of water for at least two years…. No reason to conserve water now!!!

There were three Harley’s ahead of me on the road to Young and I knew I would be pleased to pass them when the pavement quit not far up ahead. Boy, was I disappointed when the pavement just kept going on and on. Bummer, they finally paved the damn road.

I saw a little gravel trail down off the road and rode on down to this nice little cabin overlooking the desert and lake way down below.

I got back up on the paved road and was very pleased to see the Harley guys parked buy the side of the road where it turned into a nice dirt highway. Yippee! These gravel highways down here in Arizona are really nice. There is even a highway maintenance station about half way up to Young.

I didn’t take any pictures of Young but did stop and take a couple of pictures of this iron art someone is making up there. you can see the scrap pile this guy works out of in the background.

I stopped in at the little library up there and checked my email. It is so nice now that all libraries seem to have Internet service for patrons now. There were a few nice straight stretches and you can see some snow on the mountains in the background. Young is 5280 ft elevation and the passes I came over to get up there are about 7000 ft the librarian said.

This is about the worst section of the road. I wish I had dressed a little warmer of this trip.

This is that stretch of paved road on the way down. It was nice to not have those dumb dashed lines on this little highway.

The weekend was the Pow Wow held at the casino area just east of Globe. I went on out there for a couple of hours to see what was going on. It was a little different than when I was there before. It seemed to be run on a better time scale and some of the outfits that were worn were better than I had seen before. This woman had the finest dress and bead work I have ever seen. Nice looking from both sides.

This brings a whole new meaning to ‘feather head’. I had never seen this before. I have another photo of one of these feather hats below.

The announcer was calling for a special section of dancers and said “tie on your bustles and get out here”  This guy had his tied on already and strolled out to take up a place to dance.

Feather head. Really nice guy.

The next day started out really nice. I changed the rear tire and took the Texas Blue Tick on up past my camp on the road I like to walk in the morning. I only saw one of these red flower plants and had to stop and take its picture.

This is at the gate where I usually stop my walks. It is about two miles up past camp but there is a little trail of a road that goes on way up the mountain. Here I opened the gate and had to ride through a field of the lilies to get on that trail.

Here I am at almost the top of the mountain looking on down. It had started to snow a little and the trail was getting really steep, difficult and dangerous.

The next day Lowell asked if I wanted to go up in the hills with him on his quad and he would show me around some.

This road we took was the old stage line road to Globe and here you can see some nice rockwork that they did in the old days.

We stopped at several ‘tanks’ along the way. This was the biggest one and Lowell said he had never seen it this full. He said some of the other smaller ones he hasn’t seen water in them for years.

The view from the top of these hills are wonderful.

This is an old uranium mine that is now getting some new drilling activity. The price of uranium is way up as are almost all commodities. There is a big push for ‘clean’ energy now too which some are saying nuclear energy can help with green house emissions. We can let later generations deal with the waste and accidents. 

The road got washed out here but Lowell got way over to the side and made it across the little stream. It wasn’t a problem with the motorcycle. On the way back Lowell almost tipped his rig in the creek when he hit a rock on the uphill side.

We stopped at this area where there are several of these walnut trees. Lowell says that walnut trees are indigenous to the area. We found some small nuts but they were all empty. I would imagine the javalinas find and eat the good ones.

I just love the big sycamore trees.

Flowers, flowers and more flowers……

geez, more flowers…..

dezertk9@