Salt River Weekend

We took a Friday off, left Nazar the wonder-dog at home (with a sitter), and drove north down the San Pedro valley, past Globe (Copper Country) and the Salt River Canyon to the White Mountains, then to Payson (Rim Country) where we spent a night. The next morning we headed southwest to Scottsdale where we spent the day and our second night. Sunday we headed east, up Highway 88 and the Salt River to the Salado cliff dwelling ruins that are the Tonto National Monument, then back home.

There is something about the vast country of the Southwest and its ancient history of peoples, cultures and civilizations that made what we saw and experienced profound.

View of the Tonto Basin of the
Salt River (Lake Roosevelt) from
the cliff dwellings.

We were in a different space by the time we got home. We saw our little acre of the Sonoran Desert in the light of a new appreciation.

Salado cliff dwellings, Tonto
National Monument.

The most lasting memories are of the Salado cliff dwellings and their view of the Tonto Basin of the Salt River (now Lake Roosevelt). We stood in the homes of a culture that had farmed that area for three or four centuries until their way of life was abandoned mysteriously. Just like the Hohokam who had farmed the Tucson and Phoenix basins for over a millennium, the Salado disappeared from history in the early 1400's.

Salt River Gorge north of Globe. The river is no more
salty than the other rivers of Arizona. It got its name
from some ancient salt deposits near its source in
the White Mountains.

We begin on a cold and rainy Friday, unusual weather for June; the remnants of a tropical storm that had hit Mexico. But the clouds and drizzle could not diminish the drama of the Salt River Canyon in the San Carlos Apache and Fort Apache Reservations just north of Globe.

We took lots of photos, but it's impossible to capture such scale in a snapshot.

We continued north through ponderosa pine forests until we reached the town of Show Low. No, Show Low isn't an adaptation of an Indian name. It's a card game. In a real life version of the stock cowboy movie dialogue ("This town ain't big enough for the two of us"), a marathon card game ended with a winning deuce of clubs in a show-low game and the loser agreed to quit the settlement. The name stuck.

Salt River gorge.

Show Low is in an area now frequented by the well heeled who build cabins in the White Mountains to escape from the summer heat in the Phoenix and Tucson basins. It was cold and rainy when we were there, so we left the upscale shopping malls and drive west to a much more rustic town.

Payson, outside our Indian (as in India,
not Native American) motel.

Payson boasts the world's oldest continuous annual rodeo. We didn't see any cowboys, per se, but the clientele having dinner with us at the Buffalo Bar & Grill was plenty colorful enough. The rain continued overnight and into Saturday. As we ate our breakfast eggs at the Beeline Cafe, we gazed at the downpour that flooded the street outside. Occasionally, as if someone were taking flash photos, our faces lit up from nearby lighting strikes.

We didn't stay for the Mogollan Monster Mudder that was scheduled for that same morning. It's an annual 5k race through mud and obstacles that is part of Payson's Mountain High Days. The local newspaper, the Payson Roundup, wrote about running and wallowing in mud to cool off in the summer heat. There was no summer heat that day, and I suspect many contestants forfeited their $70 entrance fee rather than show up.

Shari and her new Scottsdale hat (Tony Bahamas) in Old Town.

We drove west to another erstwhile cowboy town. Scottsdale, especially its Old Town, boasts of its cowboy heritage. Heck, in Arizona, even Democrats pack guns and ride horses. But it's also Scottsdale, which is really synonymous with wealth.

In years bygone, Shari scoffed at the idea of Scottsdale, so it was a bit of a surprise that she finally wanted to for there, spend a night and do some Sunday exploring and shopping. We liked the place.

The Arizona Canal brings water from the Salt River through Scottsdale. The Indian Bend Wash is the occasion for a lush and beautifully manicured park that stretches for miles. Our hotel was next to Chaparral Park. The flowing water, man-made lakes, trees and grass watered daily made me jealous and inspired. Heck, if an old and giant Mexican palo verde is happy growing in grass as wet as a golf course, I need not worry about overwatering the stressed Mexican palo verde by my shed.

We drove by the state capital building in Phoenix so we could disparage the nutter Republican legislators, then we visited Pueblo Grande which I had seen once before. (See Underlying Phoenix.) It's a very small remnant of Hohokam culture, but an eye-opening reminder of the ancient history of the Southwest.

This fellow had a half a dozen vehicles
waiting in the ditch of a steep, one-lane
precipice as he inched his wide trailer
slowly past. We backed up a few
hundred yards where there was more
room to pass.

Sunday morning, instead of driving straight home, we decided to head east past places named Lost Dutchman and Superstition Mountains. Arizona Highway 88 is a short stretch on the map between Apache Junction and the Tonto National Monument.  What we didn't notice was the dashed lines along the second half of Highway 88. They mean a dirt road.

Not only was it dirt — hard packed, washboard rutted dirt — the road was steep, switchbacked and often one lane. Plus there was no shortage of pick-up trucks hauling speed boats on wide trailers. There was even an oversized motor home whose driver probably regretted not reading his map more carefully.

A roadrunner crossed the dirt road in front of our car. A few miles later we saw a rattlesnake slowly making its way across the road. We slowed down each time to marvel.

Century plants blooming by Hwy 88.

That country is spectacular, made even more stunning by numerous century plant stalks in full bloom, each a cluster of deep gold-colored flowers. They dotted a countryside so harsh that other Apaches named the local Apaches fools (Spanish, "tonto") for living there. But their predecessors, the people we now call the Salado, had scores of farming settlements along the Salt River.

Now the Salt River is dammed in three places, creating three lakes in the desert that are popular with the speed boat crowd. The largest is Lake Roosevelt in the Tonto Basin, just below the Salado cliff dwellings that were discovered by workers building the Theodore Roosevelt Dam. The dwellings were quite intact, preserved by the dry climate. But treasure hunters in the 1920's and 1930's demolished much of the structures. What's left is preserved as the Tonoto National Monument.

The ancient Salado, Hohokam and Anasazi cultures all mysteriously collapsed around the same time, which was a few generations before Columbus "discovered" the New World. I wonder if on some cosmic level, they knew what was about to happen and decided to check-out and reincarnate in a different culture.