Apache Leap Hike

Time is getting short before I head back to Dillon Beach for the summer season at the Landing. And we hadn't gotten to climb up Apache Leap yet. So yesterday, we took up our (still new) walking sticks and set out on a two and a half hour walk up towards Apache Leap. The first shot shows how far we actually got. No, we didn't get to the top of the mountain itself. The odd thing is that the mountain peak which looks so nearby here from town, is actually a far piece when you come to walk it.

We got on the old Raymert Mine Road that winds up toward the bottom of the craggy bluffs themselves and walked it for an hour and a half. The walk was rocky rubble in places and mostly straight up. At times, I'd have to stop and try and catch my breath. We thought we were in pretty good shape from our daily thirty and forty minutes walks, but a hike uphill for four or five times that long tends to let you know what kind of shape you're in! And it wasn't as though we finally ran out of road to walk on. No, it continued on up, towards the bluff's base. While we felt we could still go on, we weren't sure we'd have much energy for the rest of the day, so reluctantly we called it quits and came down.

Coming down was quicker, by far, but in some of the rubblier places I was glad to have that third leg of the walking stick and it caught my fall at least two times. We paused on several overlooks to get some good shots of the town and Queen Creek canyon below us. Resolution Copper Mine, the old mine north of town, showed up real good from that elevation. In that second picture there, we climbed a ridge of rock jutting up from a peak to get a view of Highway 60's Queen Creek bridge just north of Superior. I was surprised by how agile Chuy was, able to perch on rocky shards like a little mountain goat.

At the end of the walk, though, Chuy flung himself into the shade under the car and panted. I put my walking stick into the car and picked him up. He was covered with big stickery burrs from the plant he'd been lying in. Docilely, he allowed me to clean him up and he curled up in my lap for the ride home. We didn't get a lot more out of him the rest of the day and today we purposely didn't walk anywhere. We thought we'd give the puppy (and ourselves) a day of rest before we find somewhere new to explore.

Why Can't I See One Too?

My aunt saw one in her bedroom. A realtor saw one in a house she was selling. Last week, a friend told me about seeing one in a old hotel he was visiting in Bisbee. Gosh darn it, I'd like to see one too! What do I have to do?

I'm talking about ghosts. Spirits. Entities that aren't exactly of our realm but still have some connection to this life here. And the more folks I talk to this year, the more commonplace it seems to be to have seen one. There are shows on television about trying to prove or disprove the existance of ghosts. And didn't I have a ghostbuster visit me too this spring? Well, gee, being's as how interested I am in the supernatural and open to all of this, why haven't I seen one?

I'm certainly not a skeptic. Maybe I embrace the thought of spirits far more than most people. It's not as though I haven't communicated with them. In my meditations, I get messages from those that have died and pass the communications on to their loved ones. That part, to me, seems perfectly plausible and understandble and doesn't "cweep me out!" (Thanks, Sage, for that line). But the thought of actually getting to see one, to communicate on that level. Yeah. That "cweeps me out" a bit. Maybe that's why I haven't been privy to seeing one yet.

The one the realtor saw, she looked out a window in an old house she was selling and saw a man dressed in old time-y clothes sitting at the bottom of the garden with his hat on. She was a far piece from town, out in the country and was waiting for clients to show up and there was nobody around. But here sat a gentleman, who turned to her and nodded his head and raised his hand in a salute. At that moment, the client's car turned into the driveway and she watched the man vanish into the morning air. She felt he was the original owner of the house. And she figured he was there to make sure that whoever bought his home would be good to it. Truth to tell, she was rather blase about it. I was the one who got goosebumps over her story.

So okay, maybe if I were to have an 'encounter', I'd be blase about it too. I could hope. I might be just a touch too 'hyper' to be that cool with it. I'd probably be running around telling everyone I saw what just happened and blogging about it too, of course. So.... now I've opened myself up to the Universe with this request, haven't I? I'm ready for my Encounter. Let me see one and then I'll report to all of you. Hey, if nothing else, it will liven up the blog, won't it?

The Back of Beyond

Last Friday we took a trek up to some property we own outside of St. Johns, Arizona. It was the second time I've gone there and the third time Bill has visited. St. Johns is an active little farming community in the eastern corner of Arizona about forty miles west of New Mexico. It's fairly high, around sixty eight hundred feet and is officially in the White Mountains. The hills are sparsely covered with small junipers and grass is sketchy. Even the cactus are few and far between. While the temps have been in the low Nineties around Phoenix, it barely reached sixty degrees the day we visited and the wind blew. I guess the wind blows a lot up there.

It's a part of Arizona that you could call desolate, or at least remote. Depending on how poetic you want to be. The first time we visited was four years ago when we drove out with my parents trying to find these forty acres Bill had bought on EBay. We didn't have a real good plot of the land and thought we'd found the area, rather than the actual acreage itself. There are few fences and fewer houses. Here and there, someone has parked an RV. And there are a few windmills for pumping water. Basically, in the four years since I've seen it, nothing much had changed. It's wide open spaces and windy prairies come to mind. So it is far different than the colorful mountains we live in now or the frothy breakers of the Pacific we left behind. I don't know as though I'd like to make a steady diet of this 'remote' part of Arizona for long.

I did discover one thing unique about this place. It didn't hit me right away. We'd been there for half an hour before it registered. Bill parked in a sandy wash that might actually have been on our forty acres and immediately we began finding pretty red iron pyrite stones. There was also some unusual white rocks that looked like dead coral, which I guess it is. Evidently, eons ago, this area had been underwater too. We were basically walking around with our noses stuck to the ground when it came to me: the absence of sound. I mean that literally. There was SILENCE. No highway noise. No barking dogs. Not even buzzing insects. It was dead quiet. No, I take that back. Every once in a while, you could hear the distant call of a bird. But in the middle of the day when we got there, even they were strangely quiet. You don't find that very often anymore, do you? The complete absence of sound. A lot of folks anymore even wear their Ipods for exercise or running around and aren't even aware of the regular sounds around them. But to be hit with complete silence.... Hmmm, it's almost eerie.

Well, after a while, a National Guard jet flew over and the air was crowded with that sound for a bit. Then I heard a quail call out for its family. But for the most part, it was just the rocks and the trees and the sigh of the breeze through the junipers' branches. And it sounded pretty good to me.

We found a lot of rocks. A lot of rocks with some type of jasper in it, stuff we don't find in abundance here in Superior. Bill found another streambed on the drive back towards town and we spent another hour poking around. To our astonishment, we found some lovely chunks of flower agate that had tumbled down from the surrounding hills. So it was a good day. A long day. And Chuy was a dustball by the time we got home. You couldn't pat him but that a cloud of dust rose up from his caramel brown fur. So, Chuy got a bath that night and then slept like a log. (Or one of those rocks.) And since it was about four hours each way, Bill and I slept pretty good that night too.

But the silence.... It's hard to ignore how profound that was.

Similiarities

There's a lot of differences between Dillon Beach on the Northern California coast and Superior in the Sonoran Desert mountains, but yesterday we found something that ties them together. The howling angry spring winds. At the beach, we get the March and April and May (and sometimes February and June, too) gales out of the northwest. Here in the mountains, we get them out of the northeast. Whoo boy! It's April, I guess the wind's going to blow.

At "home" (Dillon Beach) we used to equate the spring winds with the opening days of salmon season, whether it was April 1st or 15th or whenever, the winds could be counted on to scour the beach when the season opened. It doesn't look like there will be much, if any, salmon season this year, but the winds were still blowing the second week in April for the opening of abalone season and they probably will do their duty off and on through May and perhaps in June as well. They usually disappear by the tenth of July, if we're lucky. They make the sand dunes nice and smooth, but the endless days of blowing winds take their toll on one's mental health, it makes your teeth set on edge. They just go on for too many days and get old real quick. So... I was glad, at least, to escape that aspect of spring. I thought.

The weather called for ninety degrees this week-end. Plenty warm, yes, but I figured we'd find something to do in the mornings and late afternoons when it wasn't too hot. Friday night, the wind started howling out of Queen Creek canyon around ten PM. All night long the palm tree outside our bedroom was slashing its fronds in the relentless wind. If you imagine hard enough, you can make the slashing fronds sound like rain at times. Otherwise, if your brain is fully engaged, it sounds like a palm tree getting the bejesus shaken out of it. A few times, there were thumps and bumps against the house. But by ten or eleven Saturday morning, the wind calmed down somewhat. Now, at the beach, the winds calm down (usually) during the night and the dawn is the quietest time, then by mid-morning they get pumping again and really scream by afternoon.

So I found this phenomenon to be pleasantly different. Even if the screaminess of the wind is much the same. Oh yeah... the temperature is different too. Even with the screaming wind, the temps were still around eighty-nine degrees. Kind of like a heater left running wide open, hot air blowing into your face. At the beach, it'd be more like low fifties with a wind chill in the low forties. So yeah, there is a difference.

But then, Saturday night, darned if the wind didn't blow up again. There were even more thumps and bumps all night long and it was still howling in the morning. We found shingles from our roof scattered in the neighbor's yard and one hanging from a tree branch. One of my outside bird cages for the parrots had been blown across the deck and was on end. The palm trees didn't look like they needed to be trimmed any longer. The wind had taken care of that for them. When I walked downtown later in the day, Route 60 was littered with broken shingles from hapless homes. Normally, on a Sunday, there would be a raft of bikers riding up the canyon but the road was pretty quiet yesterday.

Today though, on another walk through a different part of town, we found more damage. A lot of the miner's cottages in this town have these quaint aluminum clad roofs. One such cottage at the foot of our street that faces the eastern Apache Leap had a third of its aluminum sheeting roof skinned right off. Like a big banana peel, it was just skinned back. I gawped at it. The winds had blown in the neighborhood of forty plus mile per hour, but I didn't know they could do this kind of damage!

No, we don't have the kinds of wind damage like tornadoes. And no, we don't have the North Coast howling winds. But yeah.... we're not immune to spring winds, I reckon. I'll just have to stay tuned to see what other "goodies" the weather has in store for us here in Superior.

Wild Life

We took a trip out to the desert this afternoon, looking for flowers and rocks and found something we didn't expect to see. A bright green iguana sunning himself on a red rock. He was a hundred feet from the car when we spotted him and from the distance, I thought maybe somebody had placed a kid's plastic toy on the rock. But no, he was alive. While I studied him with a pair of binoculars, Bill fit a telephoto lens on his camera and snapped this picture of him before he took off. His head was camouflaged browny tan but the rest of him was way off. Maybe he'd just crawled out from under a mesquite. The desert is fairly brilliantly green these days. I don't know how much longer that will continue. Already, the grasses are heading up and it looks like a nasty fire season.

The ocotillos were in bloom today too. When you get to a 'forest' of them, they look spectacular waving their orange wands in the air. So I had to get some pictures of them too. The little hedgehog cacti are still blooming magenta and pink but the prickly pear are only just beginning. We imagine in another week to ten days they will be gleaming with yellow and golden blooms.

It's fun because each week some other desert wildflower is blooming its heart out. They are all taking turns. So if you only get to make one desert wildflower trip each season, you're going to miss out. Several weeks ago, it was the blue lupine and yellow poppies covering hillsides. Then two weeks ago, it was the spreading orange blanket of mallows. This week, the light pinkish desert ceanothus and the purple fountain grass drew a spotlight. The Mariposa Lily that was so brilliant three weeks ago is almost finished as are the ruby red penstemon, but you can still find a few. So for this next month, it looks like it will be blooming cactus. I'm getting better at identifying some of the plants, but it was great having my sister come along on Sunday and tell me what they were.

We still haven't seen our first rattlesnake yet. I've been keeping my ears open for a distinctive noise. I talked to a lady on Saturday who ran into a big one three weeks ago. She said it sounded like a garden hose sizzling with water. She said it was so big, she thought its head looked like a cobra. So she and her kids and dog backed away from it. But no, we haven't seen any 'hide nor hair' of a critter. I guess we're just working our way up to it. If we do find one, I hope Bill still has his telephoto lens with him for I'm not getting up close and personal for a shot with my camera.

One of those "feelings"

We had a chance to look at a house for sale in our neighborhood last week. We certainly don't need another house. The one we've got now needs quite a bit more work, but with spring here, we've been doing more things outside, like gardening and sunning. And the yard we've got now is certainly minuscule. So that's what prompted us to look at a house with a big yard about half a block away. The yard was certainly something. You could have had patios and gazebos and even a deck with a lap pool on both sides and the end of the lot. It even had a huge two car garage. But the house itself? Incredibly tiny, and boxy and...sad.

What do I mean by sad? Well, when you entered, you were gripped by a heavy feeling of depression and hopelessness. It might have been just the dark paneled walls. Hey, I've spent thirty-five years in a wood paneled home and yes, it is depressing! But this feeling went beyond the walls. Trust me. The living room was big-gish, for an eight hundred square foot home, I'd guess it was maybe twelve by twenty feet. A hallway divided the house in half, with a small bedroom on either side. Then it entered into a long kitchen at the back of the house with a smallish bathroom located off the kitchen. That was it. Yes, it was built back in the twenties, when one wasn't expected to have so much room to do one's living in. So it certainly wasn't just the dinkiness that caused the sadness, was it?

It was more. Evidence lay in the hallway and the bathroom indicated a person with disabilities had dwelt here, by the hand holds and wide doorways. Yes, the real estate agent said, the widow who lived here was confined to a wheelchair. I got the feeling that there had been a husband but he'd been gone for several years, ten years to be exact. I asked if that were so. It appeared I was.

We stepped outside and continued looking and the oppressive feeling subsided. Yes, the lot was certainly big enough. Yes, you could really fix up the yard and have a humdinger party up here. But, oh yes, you still had to get past the unbearable sadness in that house. Oh my! After looking around, we took our leave and went back to our house. I sat down and started thinking about that house and promptly burst into tears. "We can't buy it!" I told Bill, wiping my eyes and blowing my nose. "It's just too sad a place."

We called the agent and told her we'd changed our minds. She asked why and I told her how sad it made me feel. She agreed. (I was surprised by this.) She said when she'd entered the house to open it up for us, she too, had burst into tears. The lady with the disability had to enter a rest home and the house was to be sold for her care in the rest home. That was certainly depressing news.

But the next day, I got a feeling. I wasn't meditating exactly, but I might as well have been. The husband was protecting the house. He's been gone for ten years, sure. But he's been right there protecting his investment and keeping watch over his wife in all that time. He thought his house would take care of her until she passed and came on to join him. But it wasn't enough. And he's grown incessantly sadder watching her grow weaker and sicker until she had to enter a rest home. Now his precious home, that he and his wife had lived in since the mid-Forties is up for sale. It just shouldn't be happening and the sadness he feels has permeated the house.

I hope the house sells soon so that the lady's medical expenses can be paid for. I hope the people who buy it aren't super sensitive to the feeling coming from the house. I hope the lady gets to join her husband soon and this pervasive sadness will lighten up. But for now, we're going to concentrate on getting our own small yard in order and not go searching out other troubled stories in our neighborhood.

Questionable Strategy

I attended a long town council meeting last night. It was so long that I ended up going home before it was completely over and regret that... in that, now I might not know ALL that ended up happening. But the two and a half hours I attended, I learned a lot! I'll write more about the meat and potatoes issues that were discussed in a future blog, but for now, I just have to (rant) over an incident that happened.



A group of extremely dedicated women had their agenda come up for a hearing. These ladies are trying to get a new humane animal shelter built in Superior. (I mentioned the current one in a blog about two months ago: "The Subject is Dogs" February 18). Normally, an agenda item takes about ten to fifteen minutes for the presenter to present AND the council to confer. In this particular one, the ladies brought some Gung-Ho groups out of the Valley (Phoenix, meaning: money) to do the presenting. What they were asking the council for was about five acres of land to build a new state of the art facility for the animals. The animal rights lady spoke for thirty-five minutes and then wanted a second lady to make her points, but the mayor said he was sorry, her time was up (and besides the crowd was getting restive after hearing the same points hammered three or more times). So the ladies, in a bunch, got up and trooped out, leaving the rest of us tired and wondering when we'd get to hear our agenda items.



The ladies were making good points about which they spoke. Yes, there's a crying need for a more humane, bigger facility for abandoned animals in this town. Yes, it's far better to try and place unwanted animals and get them spayed and neutered and returned to good loving homes. But it was their tactics that left me cold! At the end of the presentation, before the ladies even knew if they had swayed the councilmen or the mayor in getting their five acres of land, they threatened the town! The threat was that they would expose to the state the poor underequipped (malfunctioning) animal facility the town already has. That IF the town allowed them to have the land they need to build their new building, then they'd hush up the current situation and "get on with it". But if the town ignored their requests, they were going to raise a ruckus and boy, would the town would be sorry!



Goodness me, Ladies, but your tactics are harsh. If it was me asking for something from the town, I think I'd be as pleasant as possible when I asked for something. Then, if I got stalled or derailed, I'd get a bit critical and haul out my "You'll be sorry!" scenario. You aren't going to get what you ask for by this method. I'd say eighty per cent of the councilmembers (maybe more) were deciding to ignore your request a) because of the length of your presentation and b) because you were using implied threats against the town.



If I were God of this town (or had any say in the matter, which I don't) I do have a solution however. The animal group needs land. A small industrial group wants to settle in Superior and build a facility that would use roughly three acres of land. The City of Superior has a block of industrial land (Lot 3) for sale that is nine acres in size. The small industrial group has made a bid on the property that most of the council members were privately sneering at since the bid was so low. But the Win here would be that the small industrial outfit would be hiring up to thirty mostly unskilled workers and training them at a rate of $15. to $30. per hour (and that's nothing to sneer at!). So my solution would be this: The town subdivides the nine acre parcel and sells three acres to the small industrial part to the new plant that will be built and hires thirty nonskilled people. Then they give the remaining six acres to the animal people for a new facility that would bring good Ju-Ju to the town for being so humane and state of the art. The town looks good from both an economical and humane point of view. What's not to like about this scenario?



But that's just my opinion.