Show Low to Yuma
This day was astonishing. There is a magazine called Arizona Highways that began as a sort of tourist brochure, and ended up being a really high class glossy with extraordinary pictures of the mountains and deserts of AZ. Usually at sunset with blazing colors. It made me wonder if any state could be that beautiful, or if they were gilding the lily a bit to promote this place.
We began the day by driving through ponderosa forests at 6,000 + feet, miles and miles of it. The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest is enormous, it covers ver two million acres of mountain country in east-central Arizona. The sad part was a fire, called the Rodeo-Chediski that was the biggest in AZ history, burning 467,066 acres. We drove for a good hour and a half beside and through it, the whole world seemed to have burned up. I guess that year, not only did they have that fire, but a lot of others. A little west of Show Low, they were doing a controlled burn, so I guess they are pretty jumpy about fires now, although with the strong winds, it made me a little nervous.
After a long drive through the tall pines, with some very green ups and downs, the sky cleared up a head, no trees, no hills showing, and then the steep grade signs began. We came down a long steep grade of red rock, climbed and descended some more naked hills, and then we were in desert. My first sight of the cartoon like saguaro cactus was oddly thrilling. It is such a cliché on napkin rings and flower pots and as earrings, and innumerable pieces of tourist rubbish, that it is almost hard to believe the real ones aren’t put there by the Chamber of Commerce. But they are still tall and bravely imitating trees in a totally desiccated landscape. Rocks and sand, and creosote bushes, like the desert I learned in Big Bend in TX. It is of course the same desert, the Sonoran, that starts in Mexico and runs right up into Canada, so the plants and the landscape are very familiar.
We go up and down a series of steep grades, in all cocoa powder colored rock mountains. This is yet another enormous national forest, the Tonto National Forest, almost 3 million acres. On the map, the whole area between Show Low and Phoenix is one huge national forest, although some of it isn’t what I would call forest. The two and sometimes four lane highway is the only thing we see for hours and hours. If anyone did anything out here, made a human mark, the desert has eliminated it, blown away, dried up. Now and then the ruins of a gas station, or a single burnt out trailer. But really one huge dried out nothing. Even the occasional road kill has dried up to nothing but bones and some hair. Once we get out of the mountains around Payson ( home of Zane Gray) it is all pretty flat, with brown mountains set around in a decorative manner. South of Phoenix there was a stretch where there were no hills to be seen , but usually there is some thing to look at. With nothing else to judge by, you can’t tell if the ragged and raw string of peaks ahead or to the side are really artistic dirt piles or real mountains of maybe 1000 feet above the desert floor. Today, with the very strong wind, dust is in the air, and anything further than ½ mile away takes on a pastel hue, blue and more purple the farther away, and paler.
Some where off to our right is the Gila River, and I can see green in the distance around Gila Bend, and south of Phoenix, there are miles and miles of irrigated fields, 90,000 acres, a lot of them making hay, but also cotton fields. The green is almost an eyesore in the desert. Certainly it is an agricultural feat, but also so unnatural and wasteful of water that it is a bit offensive. This is why the Colorado and the Rio Grande are dry, all gone to make the desert look like Kansas.
The last two campgrounds have only gravel and cement underfoot, as is proper in the desert. This camp ground in Yuma is one of many, as the perfect weather here in the winter draws retired people from all over the country. The 2006 estimated population of the Yuma is 187,555, but that doesn’t include the more than 85,000 winter visitors that make Yuma their winter residence. The fact that the desert land is cheap probably helps too.
This day’s drive took us from over 7,000 feet to about 300 feet. Don has an altimeter on his new fancy GPS, but I could tell we were dropping by the temperature. We left Show Low with a temperature of 37 degrees and by the time we got to the flats east of Yuma, it was a perfect 78 degrees. Shorts !
At a rest stop, we met our first palm trees, imported of course. My experience with palm trees is in the Caribbean and in FL, and it was kind of strange to hear the wind in the fronds. They make an aggressive rustling noise that is distinctive, but I have always associated it with humidity. The trees don’t care, they are probably happier in this true desert, but it was an odd sort of mental slippage. We passed a place called Date Land, with one large grove of date palms and invitations to stop and have date ice cream and cactus smoothies. The palm tree is such a symbol of vacationland that planting them is almost a law wherever you want to attract folks to play in the sun.
The news is full of the fires in CA, the one in Potrero is just down the road from Campo, and the high winds, called the Santa Ana around here are fanning the fires into a rage, closing roads and eating up multi million dollar homes on Malibu. Apparently, the highway we would use to get to Campo is closed in CA because of the wind, which we drove in all across AZ with no problem. We will have to wait until it reopens, but it still seems sort of wimpy.
I wrote that on Sunday, now today, Tuesday, southern California is burning up. Campo is on the windward side of the nearest fires in Potrero, so our destination is not burning. The vicious winds continue, the TV is in a frenzy but tends to show only the mansions burning, and the DC10’s dropping red fire retardant or helicopters with their huge water buckets. All the web sites that might give us a map of the fire’s location are too swamped. As of noon today, 500,000 people have been evacuated, no one knows for sure how many homes have been burned. People are in the big football stadium in San Diego, but since it is CA, they have gourmet catered food and massage therapists. Wonderful the difference too much money will make.
And the highway is still shut down west of Yuma, so here we are still. Since the internet costs here, I am limited to after 9PM on my phone.
I’m wondering how many RV’s are here in Yuma. One of the development types here are 1/8 and ¼ acre lots, surrounded by a 2 to 3 foot masonry wall, like the adobe walls one sees around houses in Mexican towns. A pretty unequivocal property line marker, and useful for keeping the chickens and pigs in which are probably NOT allowed here. There is apparently little zoning, so you can put up a little house, or a large stationary RV or a modular home, or you can just put up a metal shed roof to give your RV some shade and put in regular RV hook ups. Some of the RV ones have small buildings too, for storage. If I did this, I would have a laundry room, and maybe a covered patio area. That would be just fine for the winter here. The summer is impossible. I wouldn’t even leave an RV here unless it had the AC going all day. The sun would fry the whole thing into a pile of melted metal and shattered plastic, kind of like what road kill looks like out here.
We began the day by driving through ponderosa forests at 6,000 + feet, miles and miles of it. The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest is enormous, it covers ver two million acres of mountain country in east-central Arizona. The sad part was a fire, called the Rodeo-Chediski that was the biggest in AZ history, burning 467,066 acres. We drove for a good hour and a half beside and through it, the whole world seemed to have burned up. I guess that year, not only did they have that fire, but a lot of others. A little west of Show Low, they were doing a controlled burn, so I guess they are pretty jumpy about fires now, although with the strong winds, it made me a little nervous.
After a long drive through the tall pines, with some very green ups and downs, the sky cleared up a head, no trees, no hills showing, and then the steep grade signs began. We came down a long steep grade of red rock, climbed and descended some more naked hills, and then we were in desert. My first sight of the cartoon like saguaro cactus was oddly thrilling. It is such a cliché on napkin rings and flower pots and as earrings, and innumerable pieces of tourist rubbish, that it is almost hard to believe the real ones aren’t put there by the Chamber of Commerce. But they are still tall and bravely imitating trees in a totally desiccated landscape. Rocks and sand, and creosote bushes, like the desert I learned in Big Bend in TX. It is of course the same desert, the Sonoran, that starts in Mexico and runs right up into Canada, so the plants and the landscape are very familiar.
We go up and down a series of steep grades, in all cocoa powder colored rock mountains. This is yet another enormous national forest, the Tonto National Forest, almost 3 million acres. On the map, the whole area between Show Low and Phoenix is one huge national forest, although some of it isn’t what I would call forest. The two and sometimes four lane highway is the only thing we see for hours and hours. If anyone did anything out here, made a human mark, the desert has eliminated it, blown away, dried up. Now and then the ruins of a gas station, or a single burnt out trailer. But really one huge dried out nothing. Even the occasional road kill has dried up to nothing but bones and some hair. Once we get out of the mountains around Payson ( home of Zane Gray) it is all pretty flat, with brown mountains set around in a decorative manner. South of Phoenix there was a stretch where there were no hills to be seen , but usually there is some thing to look at. With nothing else to judge by, you can’t tell if the ragged and raw string of peaks ahead or to the side are really artistic dirt piles or real mountains of maybe 1000 feet above the desert floor. Today, with the very strong wind, dust is in the air, and anything further than ½ mile away takes on a pastel hue, blue and more purple the farther away, and paler.
Some where off to our right is the Gila River, and I can see green in the distance around Gila Bend, and south of Phoenix, there are miles and miles of irrigated fields, 90,000 acres, a lot of them making hay, but also cotton fields. The green is almost an eyesore in the desert. Certainly it is an agricultural feat, but also so unnatural and wasteful of water that it is a bit offensive. This is why the Colorado and the Rio Grande are dry, all gone to make the desert look like Kansas.
The last two campgrounds have only gravel and cement underfoot, as is proper in the desert. This camp ground in Yuma is one of many, as the perfect weather here in the winter draws retired people from all over the country. The 2006 estimated population of the Yuma is 187,555, but that doesn’t include the more than 85,000 winter visitors that make Yuma their winter residence. The fact that the desert land is cheap probably helps too.
This day’s drive took us from over 7,000 feet to about 300 feet. Don has an altimeter on his new fancy GPS, but I could tell we were dropping by the temperature. We left Show Low with a temperature of 37 degrees and by the time we got to the flats east of Yuma, it was a perfect 78 degrees. Shorts !
At a rest stop, we met our first palm trees, imported of course. My experience with palm trees is in the Caribbean and in FL, and it was kind of strange to hear the wind in the fronds. They make an aggressive rustling noise that is distinctive, but I have always associated it with humidity. The trees don’t care, they are probably happier in this true desert, but it was an odd sort of mental slippage. We passed a place called Date Land, with one large grove of date palms and invitations to stop and have date ice cream and cactus smoothies. The palm tree is such a symbol of vacationland that planting them is almost a law wherever you want to attract folks to play in the sun.
The news is full of the fires in CA, the one in Potrero is just down the road from Campo, and the high winds, called the Santa Ana around here are fanning the fires into a rage, closing roads and eating up multi million dollar homes on Malibu. Apparently, the highway we would use to get to Campo is closed in CA because of the wind, which we drove in all across AZ with no problem. We will have to wait until it reopens, but it still seems sort of wimpy.
I wrote that on Sunday, now today, Tuesday, southern California is burning up. Campo is on the windward side of the nearest fires in Potrero, so our destination is not burning. The vicious winds continue, the TV is in a frenzy but tends to show only the mansions burning, and the DC10’s dropping red fire retardant or helicopters with their huge water buckets. All the web sites that might give us a map of the fire’s location are too swamped. As of noon today, 500,000 people have been evacuated, no one knows for sure how many homes have been burned. People are in the big football stadium in San Diego, but since it is CA, they have gourmet catered food and massage therapists. Wonderful the difference too much money will make.
And the highway is still shut down west of Yuma, so here we are still. Since the internet costs here, I am limited to after 9PM on my phone.
I’m wondering how many RV’s are here in Yuma. One of the development types here are 1/8 and ¼ acre lots, surrounded by a 2 to 3 foot masonry wall, like the adobe walls one sees around houses in Mexican towns. A pretty unequivocal property line marker, and useful for keeping the chickens and pigs in which are probably NOT allowed here. There is apparently little zoning, so you can put up a little house, or a large stationary RV or a modular home, or you can just put up a metal shed roof to give your RV some shade and put in regular RV hook ups. Some of the RV ones have small buildings too, for storage. If I did this, I would have a laundry room, and maybe a covered patio area. That would be just fine for the winter here. The summer is impossible. I wouldn’t even leave an RV here unless it had the AC going all day. The sun would fry the whole thing into a pile of melted metal and shattered plastic, kind of like what road kill looks like out here.
posted by Thistledown24 at 4:37 PM
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