“Yosemite’s mountains are calling me, and I must go back, ” John Muir wrote.
He’s right.
Yosemite haunts you with its beauty, until the memory of it gets into your mind so that you have to go back.
I was lucky enough to return to Yosemite, but I felt disappointed because it was raining.
After all, the reason you go back to Yosemite, as Muir said, “is to hear the waterfalls and birds and winds sing … and to get as near the heart of the world as you can.”
This is hard to do when you’re standing under a waterfall and getting soaked.
In fact, it was raining so hard that the Upper Yosemite Falls merged into Lower Yosemite Falls, creating one giant gush of water falling 2400 feet.
I climbed up to Glacier Point where the incredible view was so squishy and obscure with rain that the tops of the High Sierra disappeared into gray brume. I watched a dragon cloud slowly sneak up on a darkened peak until he embraced it with his gigantic arms and wrapped his fingertips around it until the peak itself vanished.
It kept raining and raining. I felt disappointed until I thought about Ansel Adams.
Ansel Adams was the first to photograph Yosemite. He took his pictures in black and white because they did not have a color process in the 1920s. I found out that when it rains, Yosemite becomes a black and white image. Now I could see it the way Ansel Adams did.
Ansel Adams had an intention of how every picture should turn out. “I had been able to realize a desired image, not the way the subject appears in reality but how it feels to me and how it must appear in the finished print.” He captures the beauty of the High Sierra in bold contrasts, dark and white lines, and white images of misting falling water. His Yosemite pictures are beautiful, emotional and unforgettable, even though they are in black and white.
Ansel Adams with the perfectionism of a real artist would sometimes sit in front of a mountain for hours, waiting for the right moment. But on that rainy day in Yosemite, it occurred to me that perhaps he was sitting there because he liked to, because he was listening to the waterfalls and birds and winds sing, and getting as near to the heart of the earth as he could.
Ansel Adams’ pictures are copyrighted so they can’t be reproduced here, but key collections are stored at the Center for Creative Photography here in Tucson.
Tombstone’s Gunfight at the OK Corral
by Jane St. Clair
Tombstone, Arizona, where the cowboys live, sets in the mountains. It’s the Town Too Tough to Die.
It’s down the road from Bisbee, where the hippies live. Bisbee is the Town Too High To Die.
Tombstone today is part history
and part Halloween party.
It’s famous for the Gunfight at the OK Corral and Boothill Cemetery.
Boothill’s got many cool grave markers …
As well as net graves like The Tomb of the Unknown Cowboy — Killed by Indians, Found Dead in a Mine Shaft, Killed in a Card Game, and such.
Tombstone was full of cowboys in the 1880s who worked the mine on Toughnut Street
and then drank all night at the 116 saloons in town. The slogan was Good whiskey and tolerable water!
The very cool citizens of Tombstone brag that other towns have histories but their town has a LEGEND. The guns, violence, and brave dead cowboys inherent in this LEGEND are so very American that it just makes you feel proud.
Everybody in Tombstone takes their LEGEND very very seriously. The actor who plays Doc Holliday quotes Shakespeare, while they play opera music during the reenactment. There are actually statues of all eight participants in their exact spots.This is serious stuff.
Doc Holliday was actually drunk during the Gunfight, but luckily he had a shotgun whereas the others had pistols.
The McLaury boys and the Clantons were feuding with the Marshall Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Holliday. It started over a hold-up of a Wells Fargo stagecoach, and just kept getting worse until the afternoon of October 26, 1881. Snow was falling. The good guys wore black dusters. The bad guys had red sashes round their waists.
The feud finally climaxed at the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Legend has it that they fired 30 shots in 30 seconds.
When the first shots fired, Ike Clanton ran tail and pleaded for his life.
Bam bam bam Bam BAM – !!! Within a few seconds, Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton were dead. Doc Holliday got himself a permanent limp from a bullet hole to his knee.
The Earp brothers ended up just fine.
Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton ended up in Boothill Cemetery
With a great view of the mountains…
That night there was a party in the Bird Cage Saloon, which today is haunted by ghosts of cowboys and saloon women.
If you’re psychic, the images of ghosts will appear in your pictures of the Bird Cage. The ghost of Wyatt Earp’s lady/friend is in the little mirror in this picture.
At night you can still have a great time in the saloons of Tombstone, and you feel all goosebumpy and part of history.
So pardner, it’s true — old cowboys and their legends never die,
They just ride off into the sunset and live in technicolor movies forever and ever.
Netflix has a terrific new series called “Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War.” For more information, go here.
The other day it rained in the Sonoran desert. It took perhaps a month to build up to it; the desert is not a place for rain.
The sun shines 360 days a year, it hardly ever rains. Desert rain comes inbetween great lengths of sun; waiting for rain is like walking on pebbles that are too far apart.
Without rain, the plants in the desert grow brown. They lose their tops first — their tops shrivel up and fall off and then the whole plant goes into shock and struggles to survive. The big saguaro cactus turn into drying watermelons; the paws of the prickly pear go from thick and chubby and childlike, to old and dry and thin.
Meanwhile, the sun keeps shining in its fake-friendly way, forcing the animals into panic. They drink every bit of standing water left; when that disappears, they suck water from cactus; when that dries up, they must go without water. Snakes, lizards, turtles – they are the most fortunate because they can go without drinking for the longest time. The liquids in their bodies become so concentrated as to be poison. The mammals –bobcat, pack rat and coyote — are less fortunate. A local mountain lion, so desperate for water, comes to a children’s park to drink from the swimming pool.
A terrible tension builds up in the desert as the plants struggle against wilting, drying and premature death, and as the animals slow themselves down to survive. There is no water, no water anywhere. Arizona has great beds of dry sand where rivers can run, and long stretches of dry creeks that run from the mountaintops to the valleys, but they run dry between rains.
Then one day, the storm begins to spin itself! Big dramatic white clouds take days and days to form in the clear turquoise sky like the overture of a grand symphony.The Navajo call the spirit of rain Yei. On his body are bars of rain, on his wings hang bags of water, his legs are dark clouds, his hands and feet are lightning. At first Yei brings his gifts slowly, gently.
Then the whiteness turns strange unearthly colors: –grey, black, blue, pink, orange– like a horrible gigantic bruising wound in the heavens.
Thunder roars – something has to let loose and something must crash and shake down the sky! there’s too much tension! So it rains, how it rains, rain like you’ve never seen before!
The people of the Tohono T’oham Nation, the Native American people here, say the desert smells like rain. Now as the desert rain comes down in great solid sheets of water, it does. The desert has the musty odor of wet creosote, and it smells like rain.
Then two great arcs of color form over the Catalinas: a double rainbow: red, yellow, blue, violet. Bright light of color, lighting the soft pastels of the desert into the colors of jewels: emerald, citrine, ruby, sapphire.
The riverbeds fill up and develop currents that drown automobiles and people. The little dry creeks run again.
It’s dark and very cold for us outside, but we run out barefoot anyway to see the desert rain. Everyone is out for the party – bobcat, snake, lizard, coyote, puma – everyone’s out for a drink – just because it rained.
I don’t think there is a place as quiet as the Sonoran desert in summer noon. The temperature is an impossible 119 degree inferno in the shade but then, there is hardly any shade. I call it “white heat.”
It is the white quiet heat that rises and radiates above the quick licking tongues of fire. White heat, a white aura rising from the desert ground. White heat bleaching away the colors from the desert so everywhere you look, it is faded and brown.
Noel Coward said only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun, and he was right. It is madness to stand out here. No one and nothing is out here, which is why it is so quiet.
The silence is all encompassing – nothing stirs, not even the tips of trees. Desert colors are subtle, mostly a series of pastel greens, but the white heat and the silence fades them.
I can see for miles and miles and miles past the mountain ranges and into skies a hundred miles away, and nothing moves, not even a leaf. I can see for miles and miles, but I can’t hear anything at all.
Why listen for a leaf? — cactus don’t have leaves – their leaves have shriveled up into prickly needles eons ago, sturdy little stubby things that stand up and bloom in the noonday sun. I admire them.
Where is everyone? It is so silent here, it is so quiet. Nothing stirs, not even the tips of trees.
Everyone has gone underground where it is cool or else they are sleeping under cool rocks. They are sleeping and they will do their foraging by moonlight.
A kitfox ..
…
A puma …
A Mexican wolf
A bobcat …
Even a centipede…
They are sleeping, sleeping past the noonday sun. It is so silent, it is so quiet as Brother Sun casts down his white heat rays. Summer heat, white heat, so very very hot.
Finally the sun’s cruel rays slant and wane in late afternoon.
Mercifully, Brother Sun is walking to the other side of Mother Earth.
Now the creatures will come out and they will dance by the light of the moon. They will dance all night until the desert sleeps again, until she sleeps in the white heat of summer.
“May you walk in beauty” means something like shalom in Hebrew or being in a state of grace in Christianity. Walking in beauty is being in harmony with everything around you – recognizing the beauty and connectedness of everything you see, even with those things that may not seem conventionally beautiful. It is a heightened state of consciousness.
May you walk in beauty all your days.
NAVAJO BLESSINGWAY POEM OF BEAUTY
In beauty may I walk
All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk
Beautifully I will possess again
Beautifully birds
Beautifully joyful birds
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk
With beauty before me may I walk
With beauty behind me may I walk
With beauty above me may I walk
With beauty all around me may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk
Bisbee, Arizona, sits on top a hill in colorful pieces like a kid’s jigsaw puzzle. It was once the biggest city between the Mississippi and the Pacific, but it shrunk and it is still shrinking even as you read this.
Bisbee is arty and has a love-and-peace 1960s vibe, but don’t you believe that one minute! Bisbee is full of ghosts and the paranormal investigators and ghostbusters who track them!
Scared yet?
Bisbee has always been and still is about copper. Today the Big Lavender Pit Mine uses bulldozers and technology ….
But back in the day, the miners rode little railroads into the cruel darkness of the underground caves blasted open by the Phelps Dodge Corporation. Back in the day Bisbee was full of violent men who’d shoot each other and hang each other over women and cards or because they were too drunk to know better.
Today people come to Bisbee from all over the world with ghostbusting thermometers and proton packs. You can even take a Bisbee ghost tour while riding in a hearse. Ghostbusters look for spectres and ghosts of cheating card sharks, murdering cowboys, zombie miners, and dangerous women you don’t want to know.
Scared yet?
The Oliver House alone was the scene of 26 murders.
It’s so creepy that its neighbors put up gargoyles as a feng shui measure to keep those ghosts in their usual home.
Scared yet?
City Park at Brewery Gulch looks peaceful enough, but it’s a place with extreme readings of paranormal activity. It used to be a cemetery. The legend is that all the bodies and caskets floated down this innocent-looking hill during a flood.
Scared yet?
A miner’s ghost turns on the jukebox at St. Elmo’s Bar, another ghost climbs into bed with guests at the Bisbee Inn, a prostitute-ghost roams the streets of Bisbee looking for the cowboy who killed her accidentally while cleaning his gun, and a Madam refuses to move out of Opera Drive Brothel. The Lady in White shows up at the top of the staircases,
and once she scared three little boys so badly that they ran away — accidentally saving their lives as the ground behind them collapsed in a sudden torrential rain.
Scared yet?
Even the Bisbee prom has a zombie theme.
Every night teams of ghostbusters go looking for spooks and spectres and the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man! Aha! We have a reading here by the Copper Queen Hotel on our ghost detector that shows a non-repeating phantasm or a class-5 free roaming vapor circa 1912 ….
Scared yet?
Lions and Tigers and Bears and things that go va voom in the night.
Scared yet?
But now …Yes! Oorah!
We’ve made it to dawn —and— Bisbee’s not a bit scary in the morning.
I have a snooty friend who says Ted DeGrazia was not much of an artist. It’s true that his most famous work is a UNICEF Christmas card. It sold in the millions, but it’s not like it’s the Mona Lisa or something.
To me, DeGrazia’s art is not just about his paintings. His art is about how he lived his life here in Tucson. That is why I like to go up to where Swan Road almost ends under Fingertip Rock. There I can see how an artist truly did it his way.
DeGrazia built everything himself – his little house, his chapel, his studio and his art gallery. Because everything’s hand-built adobe, the buildings are small and primitive.
There are nutsy-putsy decorations everywhere – crucifixes mixed with beer cans, candles on cactus, and old Singer sewing machines used for planters. Nothing’s wasted, like the way poor people do things. There’s art in every corner. Everything’s art.
The chapel, dedicated to Padre Kino, could hold maybe ten people on its little benches.
Drawings are all over the chapel walls, and some you wouldn’t expect – like a clown brightening up a dark corner in the back.
DeGrazia liked to go up Superstition Mountain on horseback and visit the Yaquis. Sometimes they would come to his house and hitch their horses in this handmade corral.
DeGrazia did paintings, but he also worked in metals. I picture him working on this stove outside,
fashioning the copper door to the art gallery.
or making a beautiful crown.
He put a lot of humor that shows in many of his works.
But DeGrazia believed the artist’s role was to feel deeply and express emotions for people. Here is the resurrected Christ in glowing white, yet His face says so much more about what He is feeling.
DeGrazia famously took 100 paintings up a mountain and burned them to protest unfair tax laws. That’s a Western thing — to not much like the government.
When he came toward the end of his life, DeGrazia designed his own grave. Like I said, he did things his way.
I like to go up to where Swan Road almost ends not just for his paintings, but inspiration. DeGrazia’s place is sacred because it shows you what it’s like to lead an authentic life. His house, his chapel, his studio, his grave, his way. Adios, amigo.
Arivaca feels authentic. It doesn’t have a touristy vibe. It’s not trying to be quaint but it is. Arivaca’s a real Western town that’s been there since the 1840s.
Native peoples have been living there for centuries.
Arivaca has a really interesting bar and café, La Gitano Cantina It’s a place where people have always a good time – even today, they have music and dancing. You’re supposed to be able to find bullet holes and bloodstains on the walls. Since the bartender not only used to serve drinks but also pull teeth with his pliers, the bloodstains may be from dental work.
Who knows.
Apparently one of the owners of La Gitano loved being at his place so much that he had his ashes put into the barroom wall.
The school house dating back to 1870 is the oldest standing one in Arizona. Then there’s the general store, Arivaca Mercantile, where ranchers still get supplies. A Catholic church, the usual post office, library, and medical clinic. A few houses.
A REALLY Wild West-looking grill just outside of town.
Believe it or not, the biggest problem that held back the development of Arivaca was mosquitos. After some residents got malaria in the 1930s, the State Department of Health investigated. By introducing Gambusia fish in various ponds and other water areas, the authorities got the mosquitos under control.
The ruins of the Ruby mine and ghost town are about six miles from Arivaca. You can visit it if the caretakers are around (they keep weird hours). However, the road to the mine is very rough and not suitable for a regular car – you’d need a truck or some such vehicle to get through patches of rocks and ravines.
What’s really interesting about this area is the scenery. It doesn’t look like your classic Arizona landscape. No castle mountains like Sedona. No jagged outlines like the Catalinas. And nothing like the forests of Flagstaff. This part of the state, very close to Mexico, has a rocky ruggedness of wilderness that’s beautiful in its own way.
If you like exploring wilderness, you can hike in the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge. You may be lucky enough to spot animals and birds you probably won’t see in other parts of the state.
The hiking’s great, the scenery’s wonderful, and Arivaca’s interesting.
I can’t think of anything as lovely as a late day afternoon by a lake. The way the long light slants and creates reflections. The way the color of shore flowers spill into the water in water colors.
And then there’s how night is looming, approaching, and leaving behind the last visages of daytime. It is that lazy time before wildlife finds shelter, a sensual and emotional part of the day.
I am remembering such a late afternoon by a lake in Pinetop.
The light was so transformative that even a lowly puddle seemed magical, just as a simple weed turned into a fairy skirt.
The sparkle of the water reflections lit up this ordinary little lake in lazy little movements that only gentle currents bring, creating gentle waves tipped by light like little fish scales.
Melville wrote about going down to the sea whenever he felt like chasing funerals or stepping into traffic. He believed that the cure for “pausing before coffin houses” was going down to the sea.
The sea reminds us, again as Melville wrote, that we have inside our souls a tiny paradise island, fully of peace and joy. Whether we stand in front of the Great Atlantic, as he did, or just a lake in Pinetop, we can travel to “that one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy …”
I think if you have no sea, you can still find your island. Even a little lake in Pinetop will do.
For more about visiting Pinetop, try here. For more posts about nice walks in Arizona, try here, or you could try here, or you could even try there.
Hole in the Rock Mountain in Phoenix is easy to miss. The reason is two bigger attractions, the Phoenix Zoo and Phoenix Botantical Gardens, are right near Hole in the Rock Mountain.
Personally I like this little roadside attraction very much because it’s unique.
Usually when you hike in Arizona mountains, you’re on some trail that goes sideways, up or down. It’s rare that you come to a big hole with a view.
It’s like your own personal window in a big red rock. How cool is that?
The climb to this window is pretty easy. Some manmade steps go up the trail, which is less than a third of a mile. Your award for climbing is a truly neat view of the city of Phoenix and its surrounding desert.
Especially at sunset.
Archelogists tell us that ancient people not only enjoyed messing around in Hole in the Rock Mountain, they made it into a science project. The Hokoham figured out that a ray of sunlight coming into the Hole from its ceiling changed position based on the sun’s movements. By marking the changing light, they’d track summer and winter soltices as well as the equinoxes. Equinox happens twice a year, when night and day is the same length of time.
This mountain is probably over two million years old.
Although people like to climb for the view, I just like looking at these strange gigantic rocks. They’re bright red because they’re made of sandstone. If you look hard enough, you can see all kinds of patterns that turn into faces and other things, sometimes spooky, sometimes playful.
Hole in the Rock Mountain is in Pagago Park, 1500 acres for hiking and biking. That’s not counting the zoo, botanical gardens, Hall of Flame Museum, a sports complex, and a golf course.
but how it feels to me and how it must appear in the finished print.” He captures the beauty of the High Sierra in bold contrasts, dark and white lines, and white images of misting falling water. His Yosemite pictures are beautiful, emotional and unforgettable, even though they are in black and white.
The riverbeds fill up and develop currents that drown automobiles and people. The little dry creeks run again.
…
Arivaca has a really interesting bar and café, La Gitano Cantina It’s a place where people have always a good time – even today, they have music and dancing. You’re supposed to be able to find bullet holes and bloodstains on the walls. Since the bartender not only used to serve drinks but also pull teeth with his pliers, the bloodstains may be from dental work.
Who knows.
go to 
