mountains – Page 9 – On the road with Jim

AD Wash Gap Picture of the Week

This month’s photo topic is Castle Hot Springs Road—part of my long-term project of getting off the highways to explore Arizona’s back roads. My only restriction is that the roads are accessible by regular passenger cars. That’s because I don’t want to buy some dune buggy for the project (Actual Read: Queen Anne won’t let me buy one).

Since I live on its west, Castle Hot Springs Road starts in Morristown at its junction with U.S. Highway 60—Grand Avenue. It loops northeast from Arizona State Route 74—which we always called Carefree Highway, but I see that it’s officially listed as Morristown-New River Highway—past the Wickenburg Mountains into the Buckhorn Range before it returns to SR 74 via the bed of Castle Creek through the Hieroglyphic Mountains. Its length is less than thirty-five miles, and you can use a pick-up truck because most of it is well-graded and broad. Its roughest section is on the east side, the several miles between Lake Pleasant and the resort, because it travels in the creek bottom. So, if you want to drive your Lamborghini to the Castle Hot Springs resort, take the clockwise direction from Morristown.

As I’ve said through the years, people build highways from roads, roads on trails, and trails from paths, so you shouldn’t be surprised that some of the Castle Hot Springs Road originated from the Wickenburg stagecoach route. “Why travel through the mountains when there’s a straight shot across the desert floor?” you may ask. Remember, stages needed water for both passengers and horses. The trip took all day at best. On the west side, some parts of the original stagecoach road remain, and you can drive them, but you need an ATV or Jeep for that.

AD Wash Gap–The AD Wash drains the local mountain and runs by the road before turning into a narrow canyon and eventually becoming part of Castle Springs. You get a peek of the Bradshaw Mountains in the distance in the gap.

This week’s image comes from the road’s west section, a mile up the road from last week’s photo. On the north side of the mountain seen in that photo, Rincon Spring feeds a runoff called AD Wash—there’s no reference to what the name means, even in my trusty Arizona Place Names. The wash drains the local mountain and feeds the Layton tank before it turns and flows through a canyon between the hills. On the other side, AD Wash drops a couple hundred feet into Castle Creek.

When I shot this photo, I wanted to capture the saguaro grove against the canyon’s jagged edges in the late afternoon light. When I saw it on my computer, I was pleased with the paloverde in bloom and the blue streak running through the cloudy sky. For those unfamiliar with our Sonoran Desert, the saguaros in this photo range from 40 to 60 feet tall, and that should help set a sense of scale to what you’re viewing.

~~You can see a larger version of AD Wash Gap on its Web Page by clicking here~~. Be sure to return next week when we see another beautiful stop I made on my Castle Hot Spring Road outing.

Until next time — jw

Bitter Creek Saguaros Picture of the Week

Queen Anne and I spent yesterday changing the house calendars, and with a new month, it’s time for a new photo project. I’ve been struggling to come up with an ongoing long-term theme—something similar to last years where we took you from town to town within Yavapai County. I considered several options—all of which I crossed off because they involved exercise and the possibility of having my mug broadcast on a Silver Alert.

To find inspiration, as I frequently do, I grabbed my Arizona Gazetteer Map, went into the library, and scoured through it until my legs fell asleep. In the maps, I saw something that would be interesting as a basis for a long term project. I noticed that there are roads—secondary unpaved roads—all over the state. They’re like the ones around my neighborhood that are well graded and can be traveled in ordinary sedans (in dry weather). For Archie—my four-wheel SUV—they’re freeways. These back-roads go to places I’ve never seen, and because they’re not meant for speed, almost all of you haven’t been on them either. Some of them are dead ends, some lead up into the mountains, and some head off across the desert. Haven’t you ever drive past some side road and think, “I wonder where that goes?”

So, that’s what I plan to take on for a while. I’ll pick a back road and see if it leads to something pretty or novel. Maybe I’ll eventually collect enough material and produce a catalog or magazine of sorts, but I’ll worry about that later. I can always suspend this project when I come across something fresh or different. You might say that this blog, newsletter, or whatever you want to call it, is going from On the Road to Off the Beaten Path.

Conveniently, I had a head start, because a couple of weeks ago, I took my camera and headed up Castle Hot Springs Road. It’s the long way between Lake Pleasant and Morristown, and the only way you can get to the newly reopened Castle Hot Springs Resort where Clark Gable stayed (we’ll talk more about that in another post). The road winds its way through the Wickenburg Range, Buckhorn Range, around the Hell’s Gate Wilderness, and past several working ranches, so there’s lots of eye-candy along the way.

Bitter Creek Saguaros–Large saguaros march up the side of an unnamed mountain.

This week’s featured image comes from the area where the road runs through Bitter Creek. The 3700’ mountain is unnamed, and I was struck at how the saguaros grew thick along its flank to the top. At the base of the mountain’s north side, there is a ranch labeled 11 L on my topo map and a water hole named Layton Tank. I like how the vertical cacti resemble the crowds climbing Mt. Everest we’ve seen in the news lately. I’m also pleased that the clouds parted enough to add texture to the sky. I called this image Bitter Creek Saguaros.

You can see a larger version of Bitter Creek Saguaros on its Web Page by clicking here. Be sure to come back next week when we’ll see another beautiful scene I shot on my Castle Hot Spring Road outing.

Until next time — jw

KofA Moonrise Picture of the Week

For the last couple of years, on the drive to see the dentist, we drive past a place that I wanted to photograph. That sounds like it’s down the street, but our dentist is three hours away in Mexico. When we pass by in the morning, we’re on our way to an appointment, and I’m too tired to stop on the way home. I decided that I can’t do it justice with a drive-by shooting. I need to make it a destination.

The place I’m talking about is the Kofa Wildlife Refuge in the far west part of Arizona and near the western edge of the Sonoran Desert, which is the Colorado River thirty miles away. It’s along US 95, a half hour south of Quartzsite. The refuge spans three mountain ranges: the Castle Dome, the Kofa, and the New Water ranges. It supports a herd of desert bighorn sheep large enough to allow limited hunting. The refuge also has a couple of indigenous plants that only grow within its boundaries.

KofA Moonrise – A partial moon rises over the KofA Range in western Arizona.

Of the three ranges, I think the Kofa Range is the most photogenic; at least along its western face. There’s a central mountain—Signal Peak—that is surrounded by shorter—but impressive—needles and jagged peaks. It reminds me of the Superstitions a bit as they’re both volcanic in origin and have a similar geographical setting. Early prospectors called them the Shit House Mountains because they thought the spires looked like outhouses. Mapmakers didn’t care for that name, so they changed the name to Stone House and finally Kofa after the King of Arizona Mine—an operation that pulled millions of dollars of gold from the mountains in the twenty years that it operated.

Besides the rugged terrain and the bighorn, the Kofa has Palm Canyon. The canyon requires a short but steep half-mile hike to see a dozen and a half California Fan Palms growing in a vertical gash in the mountain. I know that you can see palms anywhere in Arizona, but these are the only native ones in the state. They’re a holdover from one of the Ice Ages. I failed to get a good shot on this trip because to get close you would need to be a mountain goat, and the sun shines on them for a limited time. When I go back, I’ll take a different lens.

This week’s featured image was an afterthought. I was driving down from Palm Canyon and stopped to capture an image in the west. When I got out of the truck, I saw a three-quarter moon rising above Signal Peak, so I instinctively fired a couple of shots, but quickly dismissed them as insignificant because of the wide lens I used. Wide lenses make a small moon even smaller. When I saw this shot with those streaky clouds and golden light on my monitor, I thought this would be perfect for an introduction to this month’s topic. I call it KofA Moonrise (I think it’s the way we should spell the range’s name). Incidentally, Palm Canyon is in the dark area beneath Signal Peak.

You can see a larger version of KofA Moonrise on its Web Page by clicking here. I hope you enjoy viewing this week’s post and come back next week when we’ll show another featured image from the KofA Wildlife Refuge.

Until next time — jw