3-22-07 Sheila visit

My friend Sheila who lives in Michigan has been snow shoeing around and was in NEED of some warm sunshine, so she came down for a visit. She was flying in to Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix and I decided to take the bike in to pick her up. The weather here had finally turned warm, well, actually HOT and I knew she would love it for a change. The day I went in to get her it was in the 90’s and perfect weather for a bike ride.

When I made it into Globe I went by the art center, that in its past life was the courthouse. It was nice to see the trees in full bloom on the street. This is a really nice art center and there are lots of local artists in the area. They have the courtroom made over into a theater and they have plays and music there. As you can see it is an imposing building and right down town in the center of activity.

I started for the airport fairly early in the morning so I decided to take the Apache Trail from Roosevelt Lake to the Apache Junction that is near Phoenix. I stopped at the Roosevelt dam to eat my lunch and snapped this photo. Years ago when I was here I loved this dam as it was made with hand quarried rock and you could drive across it. Over the years they raised the level of the dam and made it look just like any other concrete dam. It doesn’t seem like they have been able to capture enough water to ever fill the damn thing since they did this. This is on the Salt River, which feeds water into the Phoenix farm area. It appears that the entire west is short of water.

The Apache Trail follows along the river for a ways. The road is dirt/gravel and there is a lot of traffic by tourists so they keep the road well graded. Most of the road is fast although they want you to travel 25 miles an hour or so. There sure are spots that were slower than that but nice road mostly.

The road wasn’t all along the river and this is a view of it where it crosses the mountains to get to Apache Junction.

I have to admit that I broke the speed limit most of the Trail.

I made it almost exactly at the right time. I think Sheila said she was only outside waiting for five minutes or so. There was some amazement that I would be taking my motorcycle in to pick her up but I assured everyone that she packs light and it shouldn’t be a problem. I was right as she had her backpack, which we mostly unloaded into the empty panniers along with the yummy specialty breads that she had packed in her riding helmet. The mostly empty backpack I strapped to the luggage rack on the back. I had figured that since there were so many bikes on the highways that it wouldn’t be a problem with a bike down town on the freeways. It was interesting that when I came in, there were lots of bikes on the highways, but when I got in the thick of the city freeway system, I never saw another motorcycle. On the way out of town a loud Harley motorcycle dude passed us with a silk scarf on his head and flip-flops on his feet. Evidently I was just as dumb as he was to be on the freeway downtown on a motorcycle.

We took a ride over to the Arboretum just the other side of Superior by way of Winkleman and Kerney. It was a beautiful day and little traffic on the roads. I was pissed that they had the overlook of the big pit at the Ray mine closed again. I did stop up the road a little ways so Sheila could see some of the huge pit but it sure isn’t as good a view as the ‘official’ one. I’m not sure why they have it locked now but maybe the pit is getting so big that they had to abandon it.

We stopped in the visitor center of the Arboretum and I found this Raven painting. My buddy Bob the BMW mechanic likes ravens, so this has to go in here for Bob as a get-well gesture. As you can see Bob, the raven wasn’t amused that I was going to tickle him.

There was a range of cactus that was for sale in the lobby area as well as some small trees out in the parking lot.

These Saguaro’s are the ones that grow to be the big huge ones with the arms. They can live for two hundred years.

We finally made it out on the trail around the site but stopped in to see some special ones that must be more frost tender than the outside ones. It has been a cold winter down here and it was about a month ago that there was snow here and I am sure it froze hard. You can see the little heater just over the door in the background.

 We went back through Globe and had something to eat and picked up a few groceries. The pass from Globe to camp was just as wonderful as ever. I’m not sure which trip over that pass I stopped to take this photo but it is a common sight at the top where there is a pull off. Trucks hauling copper ingots from the copper mine/smelter like to stop at the summit and take a nap before heading on down the long road to where ever this copper is headed. It looks like they don’t have a full load but I talked with one trucker and he said they had a full legal load. That copper is heavy stuff and with copper about $3 bucks a pound, they have a few bucks chained down.

I read in one of the free local papers that the Tonto Cliff Dwelling were going to have an open house and we would be able to climb up to the upper cliff dwellings by ourselves. Usually you have to have a park employee accompany you up to the upper dwellings. It turned out that they had a whole crew of volunteers to keep an eye on us as we walked up the trail.

It is a long steep switch back trail up to the dwellings but Sheila and I are in pretty good shape. I had tried her out on the little road up past camp and she handled that well although she said she was about to inquire how much further the road went as she was about done. That road is all I want to do too so I guess we are pretty well matched on trail walking endurance. This is the same road that Mark Weeding and I walked when he was visiting here at my ridge camp. Mark is in great shape and I think he could have gone further as he wasn’t even breathing hard. I however am blowing pretty hard by the time I get up to the gate where I turn around. That trail is probably over two miles and steep in spots. This trail up to the dwellings was not that far and we took it fairly easy on the way up and back. The view of Roosevelt Lake is great and when you realize that these Indians farmed down at the bottom of this lake where the river ran, you realize that they must have been in pretty damn good shape. There is some water in the draw we walked up but even then it was one long walk up hill to bring water to make this mud mortar for the rockwork done here.

I found a nice little room still in pretty good shape and since it was hot and I was sweaty I went in and sat until I cooled off. It was really nice in there and we had several kids from a Boy Scout pack that was touring the dwellings come in and inspect it. Very few of the grown folks wanted to enter and maybe get dirty. I got pretty dirty sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall.

The roof of this room is the floor for the room above.

Good times for sure…..

I have been coming to this upper cliff dwelling since 1969 when I had to sign up for a private tour with an archeologist. At that first visit there was no trail and up at the dwellings the ground was covered with broken pot chards, little corncobs and the quids that they had spit out after chewing the good stuff out of the food they ate. I think it was in ’92 that Susan and I went up with a small group to the upper dwellings and there were a few pot chards on a rock and they had a handful of corncobs and quids in a viewing place. This time there was nothing but tracks it seemed but Sheila found a small piece of charcoal and when I poked around under a support pole, I found a small corncob and two quids. If I come again in ten or fifteen years, I would expect it will be paved, hell maybe even wheel chair accessible, which I may need…..

We were well watched by the Park Rangers and there was NO stepping off the trail.

Down at the bottom of the trail by the parking lot there was a demonstration area where they had some folks that made fire, threw atlatals, made clay pots, wove baskets and napped flint arrowheads. My favorite guy was the fire guy. He had quite a display of fire making tools found all over the world. This photo shows the four steps in making a fire starting stick. I have tried to make fire before but I guess I never did know the ‘secret’ of how it was done.

1. Make an indentation for the rod.
2. Start burning a hole.
3. Cut a notch in the stick.
4. Continue burning the hole and let the dust collect in the notch on a chip of wood.

The ‘secret’ is that notch which I never knew about which is critical. Here he is making fire with a long stick. The board in back of him has samples of different kinds of wood that he has made fire with. It appears that you can use almost anything but I am sure some are better than others.

He cut the notch with a piece of rock that had been kapped to a saw edge

See the little chip of wood under the notch? That will catch the dust and ember that will form in the notch. He makes the notch wider at the bottom so when he lifts the stick it leaves the ember on the chip.

See the smoke? When it is smoking good and the ember starts to glow, he said it was stable and would continue to be glow until all the dust was consumed which gave you plenty of time to get it into some nice dry tinder.

A bow drill makes it easier than a long stick with just your hands.

He carries a fire making ‘kit’ with him in his pocket. Around his neck he has a little stick he uses in his teeth for a top and the fire stick and notch stick wrapped in the little leather string. It doesn’t take this guy long to make fire.

I asked about all different kinds of fire making and he demonstrated several different ways. One way was by using the upper layer of a fungus that grows on birch trees and a hunk of iron pyrite struck with a stick tipped with flint. Here he shows the layer of the fungus that is needed.

These little pieces of the fungus are what catches the ‘fire’.

I actually thought that the ‘fire’ was made by a spark from the iron pyrite caused by the flint hitting it but he said “no, it is hot sulphur that is scraped off with the iron. He said that iron will not spark and the iron pyrite is something like 60% sulphur. He did have a piece of flint and steel that he easily make fire with too, but he said that in the new world, they never did use it since there was no carbon steel. He said when the Indians first saw them use flint and steel, they wanted steel right away.

He would take either a little piece of the smoldering fungus or that little smoking fire stick dust and put it in a handful of cotton wood bark and blow on it to make it blaze up into fire. This is the inner layer of dry cottonwood bark, or the Cambrian layer.

There was an Indian Pow Wow held just the other side of Globe on the Apache Indian Reservation next to the gambling casino. We went and ate and watched for a while. There were quite a few folks selling jewelry and findings for making the outfits that they wear.

This little kid was next to us and his sister came over and let him have a lick of her ice-cream cone.

This is a drum circle where they sing and beat the drum. There was a competition and the flyer said that there was $10,000 in prizes for drumming.

When we got up from naps one day I found that the cows had come back to my camp. By the amount of dung under the trees I can tell that this is a favorite hang out for them as well as for me.

As we watched them we were amazed to see that they were grazing on the little pad cactus that grows around here. You can see this gal has found a tasty pad and will pluck it off and chew it up. These little pads are just covered with spines but it didn’t seem to bother these cows.

Sheila had day after day of nice warm sunny weather and to think that a week before she was snowshoeing around making trails to walk with her dog. It was nice to have the Palo Verde trees to sit in the shade when it got hot in the afternoon if we were in camp.

Today is has been cloudy and there have been off and on little thunder showers that so far haven’t amounted to much, but has cooled thing off to the 70’s. When it gets like this I think of heading back up north to my camp in Montana, but then I remember those spring snow days and reconsider………….