Very
long ago in a place far away, J. J. Parsons would define places by their rivers
and watersheds… To me this makes sense… and today I will leave the Mojave
River, and head east over the Colorado… The great river of the Southwest…. Earlier in the trip I found I was talking to
a fellow graduate of UC Berkeley’s department of Geography…. We had similar
views on landscape and the world… It made sense...
First breakfast
at Penny’s… then up to Calico, the fake ghost town… it’s a good fake ghost town… What it lacks in authenticy, it makes up in
good clean restrooms… I call it Knotts
Berry farm in the desert, but that is unfair… Walter Knott did a good job of
recreating the one time silver boom town… and San Bernardino treats it like a historic
place and interpets it for school children in a good way and signs say which
buildings are recreations with photos of the original and the new…
After
Calico I dropped down hill a bit to walk the unmarked ruins of a silver mill
and Marion, the borax plant before heading east, first on Rt 66, then onto I-40….
After a hard fast run, In Needles I dropped off I-40 heading towards Oatman… 10
miles out I traded pavement for a BLM dirt track… near the old railroad grade… it can’t be
called a road… it was washed out, and occasionally hard to follow… It took a
full hour to go less than 10 miles…
Oatman
is another tourist ghost town… with scheduled gun fights and such… Oatman has “wild”
burros wandering the street (singular, there is only one main street….) but at least the burros are really cute…
Then
over the pass and on to Kingman… I am staying at the La Trovatore motel… an old
motel, said to the be the first in Arizona with baths in every room… Notable celebrities stayed here… The current owners have rehabilitated what had
become a rundown place, using a Rt 66 theme…
The rooms are tiny but nice… the people are better… its not the Hilton…
its better and more authentic in a weird wacky way…
On
arriving in Kingman I found the road had been hard on the Jeep and I had to
tighten the latch bolts on the tire carrier...
I will likely have to address other issues… This was the worst dirt road
I have ever traversed. It was wonderful...
Today I
spent the morning doing research… on the local railroad… the Superior court had
a case file on their bankruptcy… generally bankruptcies are Federal court cases
but this was territory, not a state and things were done differently… The County Courthouse had the railroad mortgage
and other records…
Having
spent time inside court houses I drove east back to near Oatman… in search of
the Leland and Mitchell and Vivian Mines… I had coordinates… longitude and latitude…
and it turned out the day before I was two canyons off… I found the location,
but it was fenced off with “No Trespassing” signs… I found the railroad headed
that way and could see the mines on the hill side… I am happy…
Back in Kingman, I had a
beer at the local brewery… then BBQ at a joint across the street… Now back at
the motel, sitting outside, listening to music and writing… It’s a bit breezy
and cloudy… it appears a monsoon is blowing in
Goodnight…
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