Phoenix : Features

Strange State By Eric Rumble Oct 1, 2007

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Soleri’s experimental project—a sort of proto-futuristic compound right out of Tatooine—was launched in the early ’70s. The grandiose vision still has a ways to go: Soleri planned some 5,000 residents living, working and playing harmoniously in an expansive urban utopia; today, less than 100 occupy dorms on the premises and the build-out is a fraction of the original model.

Residents take part in four-week workshops that also employ them as labourers, tour guides and craftspeople—thereby creating one of Arcosanti’s funding channels: the annual production of more than 30,000 signature art pieces (mostly bronze and ceramic wind chimes) that start at $28 and top out at almost $20,000.  Still, Arcosanti’s isolated 4,000 acres are an oddly compelling detour in a beautifully unkempt landscape, especially in contrast to Phoenix’s relentless swelling an hour to the south.

Arcosanti ( Interstate 17 exit 262 at Cordes Junction; 928-632-7135; arcosanti.org) is open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with tours running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.


MYSTERY CASTLE

There’s little actual mystery left to this hodgepodge house in the foothills of Phoenix’s South Mountain Park, but there’s still plenty to marvel at—not least its lore.

Once upon a time, Boyce Luther Gulley had promised his daughter, Mary Lou, a fairytale castle. Upon learning that he had tuberculosis, Gulley abandoned Mary Lou and her mother in Seattle and headed south. He spent the next 15 years in relative seclusion, all the while improvising Mystery Castle out of found and recycled materials from trips to places near (the city dump) and far (Mexico), until his passing in 1945. When Mary Lou learned her fairytale had come true, she moved into the castle (and lived happily ever after).

The four-storey, 18-room castle—complete with crenellated parapets, turrets, a tower, chapel, cantina and dungeon—is allegedly held together by mortar, cement, calcium and goat’s milk. The interior is peppered with customized features like an eye-level oven and a hide-a-bed on mining rails, and otherwise crowded by a surreal collection of stuffed animals, pet rocks, offbeat art and bygone flea market finds.

“People aren’t inspired to do things like they once were,” observes the spry, sharp-tongued Mary Lou, now in her 80s and still pitching in some oral history on tours. As unintentional proof, she often admits that she hasn’t changed a thing about the place since moving in about six decades ago.

Mystery Castle ( 800 E. Mineral Rd., Phoenix; 602-268-1581) is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday to Sunday from October to June, except on rainy days.


GHOST TOWNS GALORE

Twice in the late 1800s and again in the first part of the 20th Century, Arizona enjoyed a streak of mining bonanzas. The transient camps left behind from those eras of grit and grindstone freckle the state, numbering nearly 275 by some accounts.

Their corroded (and sometimes shamelessly reconstructed) treasures include creaky boardwalks, ramshackle porches, cartoonish tools, hollowed-out rail cars and graveyards of hulking mining equipment. But as Philip Varney, author of Arizona’s Ghost Towns and Mining Camps: A Travel Guide to History (and five similar titles pertaining to other states in the western U.S.) points out, “My first Arizona book, which was [published] in 1980, has far more sites in it than the new one.”

In other words, mine these gems from the state’s iconic past before they’re gone—whether by the hands of time or the hands of insolent visitors.

“My favourite ghost town in Arizona probably is Ruby, which is down along the Mexican border,” says Varney. “It has a schoolhouse that still has a blackboard, it still has a slide for the schoolchildren, backboards on the basketball court—you know, things like that. And yet it’s essentially been unoccupied since World War II.”

Figure out where to get your spook on in Arizona’s ghost towns at azghosttowns.com or ghosttowns.com/states/az/az.html.


SAGUAROS

With your neck crooked upward at the towering humanoid form of a saguaro cactus, a nest of flowers cresting its tip like a shock of hair, it’s tough to imagine it beginning as a tiny green bud sprouting in the shade of a creosote, mesquite or paloverde bush.

An adult saguaro turns a grown man into a child; they can stand 50 feet tall and can weigh 15,000 pounds. If you squint your eyes, a tall cabal of them may even seem a bit like rigid, pocked monsters made of waxy pipe cleaner, waving their boomerang arms at one another, no doubt curious about the short, camera-wielding creature in their midst.

Saguaros (pronounced suh-WAHR-ohs) don’t put out their first branch until age 75 or so, and are able to survive in the sun-blasted Sonoran Desert (and only there) because their pleated, spongy flesh can store more than 750 litres of water, or enough to last a whole year without rain. Their white and yellow blossoms—the state’s official flower—appear nocturnally in April and May (bats are their primary pollinator) and produce a juicy red fruit in June that feeds various animals and which the native Tohono O’odham have harvested for centuries to make jam, syrup and candy.

Both the east and west sections of Saguaro National Park ( nps.gov/sagu), which bookend the greater Tucson area, are open 7 a.m. to sunset daily. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum ( desertmuseum.org), about 25 km northwest of Tucson, is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, with extended hours in the summer.


THE THING

The wide sky over Interstate 10 as it heads towards New Mexico from Tucson is frequently punctuated by yellow and blue billboards asking: “Have you seen The Thing?” And as you cross the motley desert that pierces the Coronado National Forest to answer this odd (yet strangely endearing) invitation, you may feel a little like you’re hurling towards an unknown, ominous nook on the very edge of human civilization.

When you reach The Thing, located at a gas station/trading post/Dairy Queen in a middle-of-nowhere landscape that yawns toward every horizon, you’ll wish you’d brought Quentin Tarantino with you to help explain the site.

Spread between three long corrugated-steel sheds behind the gift shop is a collection of unsettling antiques and cultural artifacts, like props from an epic sci-fi horror fantasy. The first shed holds mostly old vehicles (including a 1937 Rolls Royce alleged to have belonged to Adolf Hitler, an 1849 Conestoga Wagon, and a 1921 Graham Page truck) and a cage filled with wood-carved torture victims. The second is lined with glass cabinets that contain mostly relic rifles and other retired weapons, as well as a few lithographs, oddball tools and more peculiar woodcarvings. Inside the third shed, among more bizarre bric-a-brac and orphaned heirlooms, is The Thing itself—encased in a concrete and glass box under another yellow sign asking yet another curious question: what is it?

The answer is yours to contemplate once you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

The Thing ( 2631 N. Johnson Rd., Dragoon; 520-586-2581) is open from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily; admission is $1 for adults, 75 cents for kids aged 6 to 18.


THE WORLD’S LARGEST ROSE BUSH

The town of Tombstone is famous for its iconic 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (re-enacted daily), but the isolated town’s main drag—which, on the surface, still looks like it’s only missing a few rolling tumbleweeds—has now mostly succumbed to gift shops. But there’s one weathered facade you shouldn’t skip, especially if you happen to be here in April.

Through a creaky doorway in an old adobe building is an enclosed patio covered almost entirely by a trellis and the shade from its overgrowth, and what appears to be a large, sinuous tree trunk. But you need to walk to the far end of the property and climb a wooden landing to see what you’re really looking at: a corsage fit for King Kong.

“It’s absolutely gorgeous,” gushes an employee describing the rose tree in full bloom. “It has these white, small roses that grow in clusters, and the whole 8,000 square feet is covered. And the aroma is wonderful—you can smell it almost all over town.”

A young Scottish woman named Mary Gee—who lived here with her husband, an employee of the Vizina Mining Company that owned the property—and the landlady, Amelia Adamson, planted the now-massive white Lady Banksia Rose bush at what was then known as Cochise House in 1885. (Gee had received several shoots from her family overseas.) When the Macia family bought the property in 1919, Mary Gee shared the story of the rose’s origins and the new owners went on to add almost another century’s worth of growth, the ever-expanding trellis and an engaging little museum inside.

The Rose Tree Museum ( 4th and Toughnut streets; Tombstone; 520-457-3326) is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and blooms in April. Tombstone’s Rose Festival runs in the middle of the same month ( tombstone.org).


KARTCHNER CAVERNS

Discovered in 1974 by two spelunking geologists, these two football field-sized, 100 foot-tall caves under a sloping foothill in the Chihuahuan Desert were kept a secret for 14 years. It was another 15 years before the treasure trove of rare dripping calcite formations inside these wet “living” caverns was unveiled to the public—and only after US$28 million in state-of-the-art additions, such as five airlock doors that seal out the dry desert air. (Two of those years were devoted to building tunnels, burrowing 1½ inches per day at a cost of $3,000 per square foot.)

Today, knowledgeable guides lead tours down a wheelchair-accessible paved pathway lit by computer-controlled halogens and into a labyrinthine palace of soda-straw stalactites and beehive-shaped stalagmites, poised like contorted rows of teeth in a giant limestone mouth. The subterranean climate is kept constant at 20°C with 99 per cent humidity, which keeps it evolving—one drip at a time.

The two caverns are open to tourists in separate seasons to accommodate the resident myotis bats’ hibernation habits. The Big Room (open October to April) explores strange and rare calcite formations—which, to these eyes, become wax icicles, flypaper drapes and huge, congealed bacon strips. The Rotunda/Throne Room Tour takes in a lagoon-like section choked by mud that sinks at least 20 feet deep (with the consistency of peanut butter), and is capped with a somewhat hokey light and music routine that shows off an otherworldly 58-foot-tall column.

Kartchner Caverns State Park ( azstateparks.com; 520-586-2283 for reservations) is open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., with cave tours running approximately every 20 minutes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.


PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK

If the gorgon monster Medusa hailed from the States (as opposed to Ancient Greece), this coagulated slice of desert at the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon’s psychedelic painted rocks would have been her hometown. First clue: stone logs, scattered like her victims around the stark terrain.

Some 225 million years ago, this massive national park was part of a steamy swampland forested by huge, now-extinct trees. Those that fell washed downstream, collected in still backwater and were gradually buried in silt, mud and volcanic ash. Over time, seeping water dissolved the silica from the ash, which eventually replaced the wood cells in the saturated trees and crystallized into stone—coloured by iron, manganese and carbon minerals.

In its present form, the 35-year-old park—possibly the world’s largest collection of petrified wood—is split by a scenic 45-kilometre drive dotted with 20 lookouts. The largest concentration is in the south end, as are the longest trunks—reaching more than 150 feet at Long Logs, and with dense pockets of 100-footers around Crystal Forest (where evidence of quartz and amethyst scavengers, looting before the park was protected, is also plentiful). Ancestral Native remains are also abundant and include the 900-year-old, eight-room pueblo-style Agate House, built entirely from chunks of petrified wood.

Entrances to Petrified Forest National Park
( nps.gov/pefo; 928-524-6228) are at its south (off of Route 180) and north ends (off of Route 40), both about 40 km east of Holbrook. Admission is $10 per vehicle, and the park is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in summer).


YUMA TERRITORIAL PRISON
 
In the sun-blasted southwest corner of the state, just shy of the California border on Interstate 8, is a small town called Yuma—once known as the Rome of the Southwest because all roads crossed the shallow stretch of the Colorado River where it was founded. And between 1876 and 1909, Yuma also brought together the Wild West’s convicted criminals, putting them to work building a fortress-like prison around themselves on a bluff above the river.

A colourful cast of more than 3,000 spent time behind the jail’s 18-foot-high walls. One woman was pregnant when she was sentenced, gave birth behind bars and raised her child for two years before receiving a pardon on the condition that she left the territory. A man named John Clay spent 104 straight days in the dark cell—a small room with a cage about five feet high and 10 feet long, wherein your legs were chained to iron rings, you were stripped to your underwear and fed bread and water—and then later left a model prisoner. A dangerous heartbreaker named Pearl Hart spent some time here after flirting her way out of a stagecoach robbery charge, prompting the annoyed judge to try and sentence her for stealing the stagecoach driver’s gun.

Although the prison was considered a model institution—even progressive—for its time, further tales of self-destruction, corruption and calamitous redemption buoy the tours that run daily through what remains of Yuma.

“When you’re walking down the cellblock, you can imagine the men at the doors lookin’ out,” says park manager Jesse Torres.

Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park
( azparks.gov/Parks/parkhtml/yuma.html; 928-783-4771) is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $4.


THE WHOLE (ECLECTIC) ENCHILADA

Second only to California in its ecological diversity, Arizona’s elevation leaps from about 200 feet above sea level to more than 12,600 feet at its highest point, ranging from desolate desert to cold alpine meadows above the treeline.

The array of captivating, often eerily beautiful terrain between those two plateaus is staggering: the scorched Sonoran Desert, desert grasslands and scrubland, the northernmost swath of Mexico’s oak woodlands, the southwestern extension of a pinion-juniper woodland that begins in the Rockies, and motley mountain ranges.

“We’re at the confluence of a variety of [ecological] sources from the north and south, and then a lot of elevation and soil variation gives these organisms a place to live,” explains Mitch McClaran, a professor of natural resources at Tucson’s University of Arizona for more than two decades. “If we were flat like Florida, you wouldn’t see anywhere near the variety of organisms that you see here.”

The diversity can be jarring, but it’s ultimately a boon to locals and visitors alike.

“From Tucson, in an hour and a half, I can go from 100-degree [Fahrenheit] desert to a 75-degree Douglas fir forest if I drive up to the top of the Catalina Mountains,” says McClaren. “In a year with enough moisture, you could ski on the top of the Catalinas in the morning and play golf at the bottom in the afternoon.”


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