Absolutely Arizona--Verde Canyon Scenic Railroad

Most of my long time readers know I am a total train buff. That bit of track from Drake, on the old ATSF (now BNSF) mainline across northern Arizona down to Clarkdale is very special to me. Charlie and I both grew our real rail fan outlook watching it. Under many circumstances, that line would have been abandoned as many odd spur lines and service to semi-rural regions have been in the modern merger days. These days it's gotta make a lot of bucks to stay active. But this one was saved. An investor who is also a big rail fan and has acquired a number of small railroads decided he could make it work and work it does. 

This all happened while I was away from the area from 1969 until I finally made a visit back in 2003. I've been back several times since. I still have some of my photos of the old rail yard and depot back in then. circa mid 1960s. At that time the line served chiefly to haul limestone and dry cement to build the Glenn Canyon Dam and to bring a little other freight into the Verde. It was expensive to maintain so there were work crews in almost constantly to clear rock slides, fix bridges and keep the line in service. The area looks far different now and it is a nationally advertised tourist attraction. I do not think there was ever passenger service in the ATSF days but that is now the big winner.

In 2006 I attended a book fair in Prescott and along with a fellow author and her hubby came over to Clarkdale and took a ride! Although I had ridden horse/mule back up about to the SOB Canyon bridge and even pastured some aniamls in a bend between the track and the river,near there I had never been past the old slag dump by railpower.

In short I was mesmerized. The scenery almost defys description and I stood in awe of the engineering feat required to hang a standard gauge track along the sides of a rugged and often narrow canyon--all done in the late 1800s by man and mule power and a few very small primitive machines. That it is safe for a slow speed and not super heavy train today is miraculous but it is. The owners certainly keep a skilled crew to take care of it.

The route winds up under the eastern edge of the craggy white hills that provide limestone for cement even to this day. Then it soon enters the Verde River Box, a narrow basalt walled gorge that carries the river, still a constant flowing stream above ground, a rarity in these dry times. Gradually the track moves past dusty white to tan and then into the beautiful reds for which central Arizona is known, the same colors you could see around Sedona. Sycamore Canyon joins the Verde about 15 miles out. It is a spectacular canyon too, a Grand Canyon in micrcocosm, one could say. Now a wilderness area, it can only be viewd by horse/mule back or on foot but the route shows the mouth and a small bit of it. On you wind, at times looking right down into the river as little as 30 feet below or as much as 200 or so. There are twists and bends and finally a tunnel. Once through it you break out of the canyon and wind up at Perkinsville, where the train stops. That's about twelve miles south frm the Drake junction. This is a pleasant little vale or park like area, once part of a big area ranch with some old corrals and buildings still standing. 

Riders are not encouraged to get off although it is about a half hour stop. The locomotives uncouple from the front of the train and pass on a siding to hook up at the opposite end for the return trip. Is it tiresome to go back the same way? It wasn't to me. The difference in the view from midday to late afternoon sun is incredible. You will see things you missed going out and have another chance to see big hawks and even eagles as well as other animals along the way.  

There are enclosed regular pasenger cars where some visitors elect to stay but each one has its own open air viewing car with awnings to give some shade since it does get hot up in that closed-in canyon. I opted to spend about 95% of the time on the one for my car and loved every minute of it. I could not look enough to see it all!

I made another trip in the fall of 2017 when I had gone over from NM to Arizona for another high school reunion. I had to miss a day at the old high school in Jerome to make the trip but it was worth it. The first time my digital camera zonked on me and my SLR was slow and clumsy. The last trip I had a good digital and used the heck out of it! I think I downloaded some 150 photos. I erased a few but kept many and still enjoy looking them over. I could go back any time and still enjoy the journey.

The depot and gift shops are well worth an hour or two to see everything too and the well-kept outdoor space and yard are neat and comfy. It is still hard for me to mentally merge the old and the new but both are precious to me in different ways. At any rate, the Verde Canyon Scenic Railroad is Absolutely Arizona for sure and a splendid way to spend a day if you are in that area! I will include some photos here and perhaps do a second post just of pictures to share some more. BTW the  date on some of  the color photos is wrong; I had to swap batteries and did not have time to reset the calendar!

depot and yard 1965

depot and yard 2017

Just out of Clarkdale

Verde River Box

Red and green contrast-with blue

Old corral--Perrkinsville

Absolutely Arizona--The Grand Canyon

Mom and me, maybe 1947

  And what can possibly be more iconically Arizona than this incredible  site, clearly visible from space and one of the world's true wonders? I  have been there quite a few times but it never ceases to amaze and awe  me. I really do not remember the first time but it was probably in 1946- 47, maybe our first summer in Arizona. I'm judging by my size in the  photo, sadly black and white.I think right after WWII color film was  hard to come by because I find no color pictures in slide, negative or  print for a time, say about 1942 to1946/7. There are a number of Grand  Canyon shots at the same time as this one but they are all B&W.

The next visits were many and in the summer of 1951 when my parents ran a Forest Service fire lookout in the Kaibab Forest just outside the park on the North Rim. On low fire danger days we made many trips out to remote viewpoints accessible only by dirt tracks in the Jeep. At eight I was too young to fully appreciate what I sw but it was amazing. Sadly, no photos. I am sure Dad must have taken many but in the whole stash of zillions I have not found a one.

My next visit was in the summer of 1970, not long before I completed my education and moved to Sierra Vista to start my first real job at Fort Huachuca. Two roomies and I went in Carol's new blue Maverick and made it to both rims in one day. I took photos but sadly they are all on the dead harddrive and the negatives and prints are long gone. I stil have hopes to regain them someday. 

I know I meant to go again but it was many years before I did. Finally in 2015 I made a pact to join a friend, Mary Frances Clinton, to meet at Williams and take the train out to the South Rim. It was a fantastic trip and we enjoyed every minute of it. The train was fun with cheerful and knowledgable hosts in each car and some entertainers who sang, played an instrument and joked with us. The bus tour to several viewpoints was of course the highlight and this time I did get lots of photos!! They are all safely stored on more than one medium and I plan to keep them always. 

I may go again, once the current muddle is finally sorted out. Who knows? I also collect a few special pictures on line and save for my slide show screen saver or digital stash. I'll share a couple of favorites! At any rate, the Grand Canyon is truly grand in the best sense of that overused word and I cherish the memories of trips and the fact it is part of my heart's home state, absolutely Arizona.

 

These two spectcular shots are not mine but they are fabulous!! The top looks fake 

but I know it is a true view. 

Memoir Monday-- Absolutely Arizona

Absolutely Arizona--Watching Lightning

New Mexico has the slogan “New Mexico True” which they use widely. Arizona has a similar one, perhaps newer and not quite as established, “Absolutely Arizona.” KGUN 9 TV has a feature every week about some local place, edifice or tradition which they describe as Absolutely Arizona. I like the idea. I'll be using it in what I hope will be weekly posts for awhile on "Memoir Monday."

I call myself a ‘born again Arizona native’ since this state is the first place I can remember as home. My parents arrived with me in tow in February 1946 when I was about seventy days shy of three years old. If John Denver could do it for Colorado at a much great age, why not?  I plan to go back into my memories and highlight things which I feel are absolutely Arizona. One of those is watching lightning in our vivid summer thunderstorms.

I cannot recall doing this in Jerome but it was high on the hills and above much of the show. In addition I was very rarely out at night after dark before age ten. Thus my lightning watching days began about my twelfth summer after we had settled in Clarkdale. The town was near the western edge of the Verde Valley, snug against the Black Hills Range which included Woodchute, Mingus and more named mountains to the south.  Across the valley, the Mogollon Rim dominated the horizon with several named and known landmarks, the Sedona Red Rocks just not quite in sight. The view to the east was limited a bit by the rugged limestone hills that edged the river on the east side but the clouds rose far above that visual limit.

Summer nights usually found me outside, often sitting on one of the trucks in the alley. Sometimes the whole family was there, Mom and Dad and Alex, after he came along, but often it was just Charlie and me or even me by myself.  On clear nights I watched the stars and airplanes overhead but many summer nights were cloudy and that usually meant lightning. I’d watch fascinated until I had to go inside to bed. Sadly I did not have even a cheap small camera in those days to record the sights but they are as vivid in my memory as any photograph could render them.

The four summers I spent in Flagstaff ere not memorable for lightning. I loved the summers there and the nights too but it seemed many of the storms were in the afternoon and we were far above the valley views at some 7,000 feet. Then in 1970 I ended the summer down in Cochise County. I really had no place to sit out and certainly no one to enjoy it with but there were storms. Not for nothing are the mountains to the west side of that valley, the San Pedro, called Huachuca!

Huachuca is a slight corruption of a Sopaburi Indian word. Those native people dwelled in the area long ago, even before the Apache and other more recent groups arrived. They were leaving or dying out by the time the Spanish explorers arrived but it was the latter who picked up the word. It is often translated as place of the thunder, or more poetically, where the thunder walks. And walk it does, rolling and rumbling across the sky among the clouds behind the brilliant flashes of electric fire.

By the next summer I had relocated to Bisbee and then had friends to watch with, my future husband and two future step kids. We saw our share that summer and the next two, often driving out on High Lonesome Road, south and east down the canyon from Bisbee into the west edge of the Sulpher Springs Valley. Then by 1974, we were living in Colorado, a small then rural community called Falcon, about fifteen miles east of Colorado Springs. There were summer storms in that area too and lightning but not to the degree and spectacular profusion of Cochise County, AZ. However I did get a few photos and we did watch some.

The next six years were in the central valley of California—a horrible place to me since there simply were not any summer storms! How I missed that, almost as much as I loathed the pervasive fog that blanketed us all winter. Finally we got back to Arizona in the fall of 1983, settling briefly in Tucson. The monsoon was late that year and barely started when we arrived at the end of August but the fall was very wet--though not much in the way of thunderstorms.

By the summer on 1984 we had settled in Whetstone, an unincorporated village some three miles north of Huachuca City at the junction of highways 90 and 82. And that was a fine place to watch lightning!! Again there were mountains behind us, the Mustang Hills and just to the northwest, the Whetstones. The terrace in front of our house faced out across the valley giving us a grandstand seat as storms made their way up or down the valley, over the Mules, the Tombstone Hills and the Dragoons and on up past Benson. If there were storms more to the north or south, the flat roof of the adjacent garage was a great watching place too. Now I did take pictures, most with either my small 35mm Olympus or an SLR I acquired while in Tucson. Of course those were the old fashioned pre-digital film cameras so I had to take a roll, send it away and hope until the results came back. One of those revealed a surprise, a real gift, in the lightning limned figure I called The Spirit of Huachuca. But I got many other interesting shots too.

After Jim passed away in November 2003, I did not spend too many nights out any more. It was no fun to do so alone. In 2008 I moved over to the SW corner of New Mexico and the next spring, back to Colorado. Finally in 2011, brother Charlie and I moved down to Alamogordo, NM. That area had its share of summer storms and there was often some pretty good lightning displays but I was spoiled by then with digital cameras and too lackadaisical to dig out the old SLR with a timed exposure system and put it on a tripod, so no photos. And it was just not quite Arizona…maybe no one else would notice the difference but we did! 

Then last summer saw us finally head back to Arizona and once again settle in Cochise County although this time landing at the north end of the Whetstones. The first few nights we spent here after unloading the first big U-Haul truck near the end of August, we sat out back and watched lightning. That was when we knew we had come home. It was just as spectacular as we remembered as nature put on her light show just for us, or at least it felt that way.

This past Sunday evening, the 26^th, we watched the first real night storm of the season as it wandered among the hills and mountains to the north and east with blue flares seen through clouds and brighter bolts that came to the earth. I may try for some photos in time but for now it is enough just to watch and go back in memories to so many other summer evenings, each of them absolutely Arizona!

Lightning at Falcon

Whetstone Lightning

Cloud to cloud--bluer when distant

The Spirit of Huachuca

Sadly most of my other lightnng pix are on slides and I have not scanned them in yet! So for another time...

Sunsets

Although sunset does not start with a D, they are and long have been a favorite thing of mine. I have many photos taken beginning when I was using a little Kodak "Brownie" box camera way back in the dark ages and moving all the way to the digital age through several 35mm SLR cameras of varying quality, both slides and negatives! Someday I will get them all scanned.

Arizona and New Mexico, because of the dust in the air I am told, are both known for fantastic sunsets. I'm not sure what season is the best for them as I have seen beauties in every season of the year. Usually the only requirement is some clouds to pick up the colors and their position in the sky so the sun can shine underneath them as it goes down. The picture on the opening of this blog is one I took about a month ago right here in my new home in Alamogordo, NM. I am at the edge of the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains which are the location for several communities such as Ruidoso, Cloudcroft and Capitan. There is a lot of history here but I will save that for another time. Anyway the locale gives me a great view across the Tularosa Valley to the San Augustin and Organ mountains that separate this valley from the Rio Grande Valley.

While there is not a spectacular sunset every evening, they are frequrent and a few are absolutely breath taking. The one on the left was the same evening as the opening shot and the other was last fall shortly after I arrived. In a separate post I'll add a few verses about sunsets that I composed over the years. Enjoy!