Off Road – Page 12 – On the road with Jim

Dean Peak Picture of the Week

There’s a Prime Video series Queen Anne, and I watched this month called Good Omens. We enjoyed it so much that we watched it a second time, and caught a lot of the subtler jokes that we missed the first time. The main characters—an angel and his demon buddy—aren’t very good at their jobs, and consequently, they screw up Armageddon. This riddle was in an episode, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” It’s a trick question because as God—the voice of Frances McDormand—explains; Angels don’t dance, that’s something the devil conjured, and there’s not a substantial enough number to count them all, because demons can line-dance in the spaces between the pin’s atoms—funny stuff. When I visited this month’s photo location, I thought about the show’s riddle.

For my August pictures, I only had to walk across the street—as such. My new subject is the mountain range on the west side of the Big Sandy River and U.S. Highway 93—the Hualapai Range. They’re part of the parallel mountain ranges making the Basin and Range Domain which runs from Utah to the California Sierras. From space, these formations look like a pack of caterpillars stampeding across a sidewalk.

The Hualapai’s are a twin to last month’s Aquarius Mountains, except they are high enough—7,000 to 8,400—for pinion and ponderosa pine to grow. That means they are often snow-covered in winter. They fill the area between Wikiup and Kingman.

When my folks lived in Kingman, I heard of a park up on the mountain, but never visited, so last week I loaded Archie and drove up Sawmill Canyon Road (alas, if there was a sawmill, it’s gone now). The DW Ranch Road exit on Interstate 40 is a handy shortcut to use if you’re coming from the valley. It’s less than 10 miles from the Interstate to the County Park which is situated in a tiny valley at the top, and where Kingman residents have packed summer cabins into every available space. As I drove along the deeply rutted streets, I wondered, “How many Ford executives can camp on the top of Hualapai Peak?” In the village’s center, there is a concrete catch basin that’s called Pine Lake, but I couldn’t find public access to it, and—from its color—I’m not sure you would want access anyway. I got frustrated at having to back out of each street I tried and decided to check out the Hualapai Mountain Park and campgrounds.

After paying a day fee, I parked in the trailhead parking lot and checked out the maps. It was already after five when I started on the path to Stair Step Overlook, about a half-mile hike. I was never athletic, and I don’t claim to be in great shape today. I grew up uncoordinated, and when I was a kid, I was always the last pick for team sports. But, I regularly walk now, and my average speed is over two miles an hour. I figured a 15-minute walk at the most, so I grabbed my camera and left my water in the truck. I was wrong. It took 10 minutes—coming back down the mountain. The trail climbed four-hundred feet in that half-mile. As I hiked, I followed a group of two men and a woman who were in their early thirties and equipped with day-packs. I followed them inch-worm style; they walked out of my sight and then they’d be resting when I caught up.

When I finally got to the overlook, my new hiking friends were lounging on large granite slabs and taking in the view. As I climbed up the stairs, I looked up to see six of them before my eyes could focus again. The woman looked concerned and asked, “Do you need water?”

“No,” I replied. “I only wanted to get here and take some pictures. I’m going back down right after that.”

Then the guy with the beard drove a stake through my heart, “Man! I hope that I can be hiking up and down some mountainside when I get as old as you are.”

I did get a shot from the overlook, but I took this week’s featured image on the drive home. I call it Dean Peak because that’s what this point’s name is. When I took this shot, the sun was almost down, and the lower part of the mountain was already in the shade. I hope you enjoy viewing it.

You can see a larger version of Dean Peak on its Web Page by clicking here. Be sure to come back next week when we’ll be showing more from the Hualapai Mountains.

Until next time — jw

Clay Hills Picture of the Week

July is soon ending, and I’ll be writing about a different mountain range and its backroads next month. In a way, I’m not ready to move on. The Aquarius Range has more that I’d like to explore, and it may be a while before I get a chance to come back. I could use an extra Sunday to squeeze in another story. Oh well—a promise is a promise.

So, this week, we’ll finish up at the beginning or end—depending on your direction of travel—of the Aquarius Range, its south end. Here, there’s no sharp boundary that identifies that we’ve arrived. The mountains just taper into low hills then gently deliver you into the Burro Creek Valley at Six-Mile Crossing.

Depending on the source the Clay Hills or Hell's Half Acre — Depending on your reference these are the Clay Hills or Hell’s Half Acre as viewed from the south end of the Aquarius Range near Burro Creek Crossing.

As you descend from the higher mountains into the valley, you’ll notice a cluster of small hills with buckskin-colored cliffs for which I found two names. On the valley floor, there are Bureau of Land Management (BLM) signs saying these Clay Hills were restoration protection. On my TOPO Maps, however, they’re called Hell’s Half Acre. It amuses me that when pioneers found land that wasn’t flat and plowable, they called it Hell’s This or Devil’s That. I once had a friend who was an Ohio farm boy who told me, “… the Grand Canyon is a wasteland. You can’t grow crops there.”

I took this week’s image after I poked around the Six-Mile crossing for a while. I looked for a pretty shot of the creek running under the Cottonwood trees. The water was slow, stagnant, and choked with algae. It resembled a cesspool, so I gave it a pass, although the shade was pleasant.

As I began driving up into the mountains, I stopped to capture the scene that I call Clay Hills. It was already late morning, and the pretty light was quickly disappearing. The glare of the harsh desert sun would soon replace the warm colors. The camera is pointed west in this perspective and highway US 93 crosses Burro Creek Canyon on the far side of the cliffs. The pointy mountain eight miles in the distance is Burro Peak, so the air was pretty clear considering the recent fires near Prescott. For a cherry topping, I threw in a young saguaro with fresh buds sprouting from its top like the hairdo kids wear these days.

~~Click here to see a larger version of Clay Hills on its Web Page~~. Be sure to come back next week when we set off for another adventure exploring more Arizona back roads.

Until next time — jw

Burro Cliffs Picture of the Week

In my effort to bring you photos from this month’s Aquarius Range Project, I returned to the crime scene last week and explored more of the Mohave County mountains. According to my trusty DeLorme Gazetteer, there are two roads—meeting my requirements—that cut through the Aquarius Mountains: the Trout Creek Road that I covered over the past couple of weeks and a second road called Burro Creek Crossing, which is nine miles south of Wikiup.

If you’ve ever driven to Vegas on US 93, you’re familiar with the twin bridges spanning a 400’ canyon at Burro Creek. It’s one of the few desert creeks that run all year. Its headwaters are at the foot of Mount Hope on the San Louis Baca Land Float No.5—the Spanish Land Grant I mentioned last week. From there, Burro Creek flows in a canyon between Goodwin Mesa and Bozarth Mesa, under the bridges, and eventually into the Big Sandy River and Lake Alamo. There are several places where the roads cross the creek; the campgrounds on Highway 93 and the Six-Mile crossing are two that I’ve made. Six-Mile is the ford you make on Burro Creek Crossing Road.

Burro Cliffs at dawn. — Burro Cliffs – Not far from Highway 93, Burro Cliffs rises from Box Canyon as you drive up Burro Creek Crossing Road.

Immediately after turning off Highway 93, Burro Creek Crossing begins to climb into the Aquarius Mountains. The first few miles run along the south wall of Box Canyon and past a small mountain-like structure called Burro Cliffs—the subject of this week’s photo. When I got there, the sun had barely cleared the horizon and bathed the hills in a warm yellow color. The light’s low angle pulls out the luscious curves in the mountain while the vertical walls of basalt show as dark fortresses along its flank rising from Box Canyon. I liked the backlit trees along the ridgeline in the foreground, so I included them for detail, contrast, and scale. Palo Verde and Mesquite appear as bushes, reaching 10-20 feet—well over a person’s head.

After I took this shot, I continued along the road to Burro Creek crossing, and guess what? I found it there. Burros! I saw about a dozen of them along the way. That’s the only wildlife I saw on this trip (besides the dead snake in the road that a roadrunner killed). The wild burros have become a systemic problem in Arizona. Spanish prospectors first abandoned them in 1690, and each subsequent generation of prospectors contributed to the situation by releasing them after their claims ran dry.

Most people find them fuzzy and cute, but the mules don’t have a natural predator. They aggressively defend their young and will gang up to chase off a big cat. They can survive by eating anything and everything. Unlike deer, antelope, and bighorn that eat grass shoots, the donkeys pull the plant right out of the ground; roots and all—try that on your lawn. They kill trees by stripping off the bark and branches as food. According to BLM, Arizona has four times the amount of burros that the land can support. I think Shrek should have clubbed Donkey in the first reel and we would all live happily ever after.

~~You can see a larger version of Burro Cliffs on its Web Page by clicking here~~. Be sure to come back next week when we set off for another adventure exploring more Arizona back roads.

Until next time — jw

Mohan Range: A Lost Horizon in Arizona’s Bermuda Triangle Picture of the Week

Have you ever looked at an Arizona road map and noticed the big empty swaths—entire regions with no towns, no intersections, no welcome signs? A third of the state looks uninhabited. That’s not cartographic laziness—it’s the truth. Some places were never meant for people. Look at a land-ownership map and you’ll understand why. Much of the terrain south of I-8 is military proving ground (because what better use is there for a desert than dropping bombs?). To the north, you’ve got the Grand Canyon and vast stretches of tribal land. And over in the west—well, welcome to the Bermuda Triangle of Arizona.

Three roads trace its edges: U.S. 93 on the west, I-40 to the north, and Arizona 89 on the east. Unlike the Sahara-style sandscapes you might expect, this isn’t a wasteland. The land rolls between 3,000 and 10,000 feet in elevation, a mix of grasslands and mountains. It gets summer monsoons—thunderheads stack up there most afternoons. It looks like it should be dotted with towns.

But it’s not.

This month, I decided to poke around this odd no-man’s-land. I set my sights on the Aquarius Mountains, taking Upper Trout Creek Road—a little loop that climbs over a saddle and drops down the far side before ending at a quiet religious retreat. There’s a parking area where I stopped, took in the view, and turned around. That’s where I captured this month’s image: Mohan Range.

Mohan Range-Very few know or have visited the Mohan Mountains in Arizona. — Named by the scouts of General Crook, the Mohan Range whispers of forgotten trails and undisturbed land—where silence stretches further than the road.

The Mountains You’ve Never Heard Of

I hadn’t either. You don’t see the Mohan Range from U.S. 93—it’s tucked behind the Aquarius Mountains. But it’s real. Mohan Peak stands at a respectable 7,500 feet, putting it in Arizona’s top 100 summits. From Interstate 40 or some spots in Prescott, it’s visible—if you know where to look.

Naturally, I came home and Googled it. I expected to find a line or two. Instead, I struck gold.

One of the first search hits was from the Peakbaggers website. These folks climb the top 100 mountains in each state—for fun. (No, I don’t understand them either.) But their post was solid: detailed, well-written, and packed with photos. That page led me to something even better—a beautifully photographed article by Kathy McCraine about the O RO Ranch.

A Quarter Million Acres of Off-Limits

So why aren’t there any towns in this triangle? Because nearly all of it—over 250,000 acres—is the O RO Ranch. It’s private, and it’s vast. This is cowboy country, in the old sense of the word. The eastern part of the ranch stems from an original Spanish land grant—the Baca Grant, which the U.S. government actually honored. Later, the Mohan Ranch to the west was folded in, and the two became one: Arizona’s oldest and largest cattle operation.

According to McCraine, life here hasn’t changed much. Cowboys still ride the range on horseback and sleep in teepees. There’s no town, no road system, and definitely no Starbucks. And they don’t want company.

I loved one line she wrote:
“Cowboy wannabes need not apply.”

Take the hint. If you’re driving through, heed the signs. This is not a place for sightseeing unless you’ve got an invite, a saddle, and some serious grit.

The Road Less Photographed

~~You can see a larger version of Mohan Range on its web page here~~. And as always, we hope you’ll come back next month for another installment of Arizona’s overlooked corners and dusty crossroads. There’s something special about these places—where history lingers, maps go blank, and the silence stretches for miles.

Until then, keep your spirits high and your humor dry.
—jw

Mine Tailings Picture of the Week

With this posting, we’ve completed this month’s photo excursion of Castle Hot Springs Road. The detour north of State Route 74 started with almost prairie-like flat desert adjacent to the Wickenburg range. Then the road ascended into the Buckhorn Range with a magnificent view of the Bradshaw’s. Next, our back road dropped down to Castle Creek through the Hieroglyphic Mountains past the hot springs resort. Finally, we returned to asphalt at Lake Pleasant where we saw vast groves of saguaros growing on the mountain slopes (I put that in my mental filing cabinet for a future outing).

There was one scene along the way that wasn’t quite ripe enough to shoot when I first drove by it, so I wanted to backtrack and see if it improved with the warm afternoon sun. It did, and it is this week’s featured image which I call Mine Tailings.

Mine Tailings - Tailings comprised of red soil caught my eye because of the color and erosion pattern. — Mine Tailings – Tailings comprised of red soil caught my eye because of the color and erosion pattern.

I don’t know if there are an inordinate number of mines in Yavapai County, but it seems like they’re everywhere. A few hearty souls—that either suffer from unrelenting gold fever or have nothing better to do—still work the claims, but most of the mines are abandoned. When the ore runs dry, the prospectors move on in search of the next elusive bonanza. Because there’s no economic incentive to restore the claim, abandoned mines are left unposted and are often dangerous. Just this year, rescuers have pulled a couple of people trapped in mine shafts. It’s a growing Arizona problem.

One of the tells of an old mine is the tailings. As prospectors tunnel into a mountainside, they have to remove the diggings and pile them somewhere. In massive operations, fleets of trucks build hundred-foot-tall dikes, like the one that used to line Highway 60 in Miami, Arizona. But with smaller claims of one or two men, they will fill a wheelbarrow and walk it outside and dump it over the edge, building a tailings dump; the deeper the mine, the bigger the tailings.

The thing that makes the tailings in this week’s photo interesting to me is that they’re red, and the late afternoon sun exaggerates that color. The red against the blue sky vibrates my eyeballs. There’s more that we can learn from the image, like how old it is. The erosion patterns are deep from many seasons of heavy rain, and its fan pattern is reminiscent of what you see in the Painted Desert. In both cases, water easily cut through soft soil. Finally, dirt and rock that comes out of a shaft is well below the topsoil level, so it’s not rich in nutrients. Here, the desert Mesquite has begun to colonize the hillside, so the soil contains some organic material already.

You can see a larger version of Mine Tailings on its Web Page by clicking here. Be sure to come back next week when we set off for another adventure exploring Arizona’s back roads.

Until next time — jw