2006/03 Southwest USA trip (AZ-MN) - Casa Grande national monument |
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We weren’t sure where the road we came in on actually went, so we retraced our steps and went back south to Gila Bend, and then east through Sonoran Desert National Monument. This is a recent addition to the national parks system, and it has no facilities yet. Our guess is that it might be thirty years before it’s recovered from a century of ranching and looks anything like the original desert and is worth visiting. It still looked like it was suffering from a major cow attack.
On the other side of the monument was the town of Mobile, Arizona, which looked like a heap of junk. Even the roads were festooned with garbage, plastic bags everywhere.
After a few changes of road we came to Coolidge and the Casa Grande National Monument. We’d expected to see an Indian dwelling embedded in some mountain face, like we’d seen at Gila Cliff Dwellings, but this time the ruins were in flat desert, across the road from Wal-Mart!
We went in and joined the last tour of the day. The story was familiar: a thriving community in the 1300s but then a disappearance of the people around 1450. The Hohokam people had built an elaborate network of irrigation canals depending on the Gila River, but the theory is that these failed because of flooding that deepened the river and then an extended drought which prevented the river from feeding the canals. Starvation probably caused the people to abandon the Casa Grande complex. Or, maybe, it was because they’d heard that Wal-Mart was coming?
Although we call them the Hohokam, that’s just a more recent Indian word that means “Those who have gone”. We have no idea
what they called themselves. Their buildings have almost melted away but are still very impressive for a 550 year-old ruin that had been vandalized for a century before it became a monument. The park service has built a ramada or roof over the largest ruin to slow down the erosion. The pictures show a great horned owl that lives up in the ramada and a ground squirrel that lives inside the building and keeps an eye out for the owl.
The speaker was quite good but hard to hear as we were all battling with a strong southwest wind and the hail of sand and grit that came with it. He said that when the first white settler came to the area and dug a well he hit good water at twelve feet. Now, you might be lucky and hit it at 900 feet. None of this seemed to be slowing down development, and there were acres of new houses going up along the main road to Florence. The Tom Mix memorial is nearby. He was a bit before my time but I remember his cowboy movies on Saturday mornings at the Arcadia. He died in a car crash near Florence, so I guess he should have stuck to horses.
We had about an hour’s drive to a forest service campground in the Tonto National Forest. “Tonto” means stupid today in Spanish, but I must assume that it had a different meaning a century ago and in the times of the Lone Ranger. (Tonto, time to go into town and get beaten up again by the townspeople. Yes, Kema Sabe.)
The climb out of the town of Superior through the Queen Creek Canyon into the Pinal Mountains was 
spectacular. We’d have liked to take a longer look but we were running out of daylight. The Oaks Flat campground is at the top of the hill, and a good spot to spend the night. It is situated in a maze of volcanic rock, great lumps of porous rhyolite. We found a spot partway up a track labeled “High clearance vehicles only”, and that was a fair summary as the track just followed the lava flow, lumps and all.
To our surprise, we had lots of TV channels, including some showing people prancing around on skis. Seems the Olympics had started over there in Italy without anyone telling us. The USA seems to be doing OK without me. Just as well, as I’d get amazed by how much my skis would vibrate under stress. I’d think “This is impossible!”, and of course, then it would be, and I’d crash. With two bad elbows and a bad heel I’m probably not going to compete this year.
There seemed to be a few Australians and Canadians doing well, but I don’t think anyone had told Britain about the Olympics. Where is the generation to take over from Eddie the Eagle?
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