Sweet Summer Dreams in the Verde Valley

This story was written for Arizona Office of Tourism's Arizona Insider "Guest Blogger" program. The post, which ran July 14th, 2014, was edited and chopped up a bit strangely, making my story a lil' clunky/klutzy in their version. I thought I'd share my original here:

Sweet Summer Dreams in the Verde Valley

Verde River, Cottonwood, AZ

Brassy big band tunes waft over us from the landmark gazebo, packed full of percussion, strings and horns. Sinking deep into the dark edges of the park's soft summer lawn, we look up at the endless stars that echo the crowd of lawn chairs and blankets below. Cool breezes rolling down from Mingus Mountain add a faint hint of chill to the night air. Though, for a moment it feels we are part of a movie or some bucolic small town dream, in reality, it's the Town of Clarkdale's free Summer Concert Series and just one aspect of this season's magic in the Verde Valley. With live music scheduled on select Saturday evenings through September, it's not at all unusual to witness spontaneous acts of waltzing, two-stepping and foxtrotting in the historic town park.

Summer Concert Series, Clarkdale Park, Clarkdale AZ

The Verde Valley, named one of Lonely Planet's Top 10 US Travel destinations for 2013, is comprised of several historic, high desert communities, each springing forth from the 19th and 20th centuries to utilize some abundant natural resource or fill some urgent local need: mining, ranching, agriculture, military presence and bootlegging. Jerome, Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Sedona, Camp Verde and Cornville each have its own distinct personalities yet remain cohesive. The rivers connect us and flow through us, tangling us together as Oak Creek and Beaver Creek make its way toward the Verde. The region’s ideal climate has long made it an idyllic human habitat as evidenced by ancient dwellings throughout the area, including Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot.

Verde River as seen from Verde Canyon Railroad, running red during summer monsoon season, 

A variety of attractions, adventures, art, wining and dining provides a wealth of intrigue for visitors. 

Cathedral Rock, Sedona, AZ

Scenic Sedona is the best known Verde Valley town, straddling the border of Yavapai and Coconino counties. Highlights include its expanse of national forest girdling the town, its many hiking and mountain biking trails, resorts, world class spas and cafes. This red sandstone wonderland is renowned for its spiritual energy, vortexes and new age sensibility. But Sedona is not just a postcard or a movie set. It's also a real place behind the scenes, where people live and work. It's where we go to the dentist and where we see movies!

Buddha Beach, Oak Creek, Sedona, AZ

Summer is our warmest season, and for this reason the most popular for riparian fun. We locals spend a good percentage of June, July and August along the shady river and creek banks, picnicking, paddling, splashing, floating or just totally submerged neck-deep in the cool water. The Verde Valley is enjoying some fresh renown as a river fun zone, with day-use access areas being improved from north of Clarkdale through Cottonwood, continuing past Camp Verde. Cottonwood’s Dead Horse Ranch State Park provides great trails, camping, fishing and river access. Verde River Adventure Center in Clarkdale rents kayaks, tubes and other inflatables, providing guide and shuttle service for easy day trips.

Verde River, Beasley Flats, Camp Verde, AZ

Another great way to enjoy the river canyon scenery and wildlife, without getting splashed, is to take a train ride aboard Clarkdale’s Verde Canyon Railroad. Running year-round on a varied schedule, this heritage railroad dates from 1912 and provides a comfortable climate-controlled way to catch a glimpse of the very rare ribbon where riparian and desert ecosystems meet. Starlight rides are a sensational seasonal specialty, heading out in late afternoon and returning through sunset and moonlight.

A flight at Caduceus Cellars, Jerome AZ

While in Clarkdale be sure to visit the newest additions to historic Main Street: The Copper Art Museum and Four-Eight Wineworks, book-ending the area’s mining past and wine future. The Verde Valley’s booming viticulture scene began in the 1990s in Cornville, a sleepy rural town near Oak Creek. Along the winding Page Springs Road, you’ll find the starting point for the region’s growing wine notoriety. Vineyards cascade down the sandy hillsides and wine-tasting rooms cluster like grapes. From here, the wine flows throughout the valley like the creeks that connect us.

Camp Verde, a river town with an adorable historic Main Street, is home to cowboys, horse ranches, pecan farms and Fort Verde State Park. If games of chance and glow-in-the-dark bowling suit your style, Cliff Castle Casino is an entertaining diversion run by the area’s Yavapai-Apache tribe. More daring yet: zip-lining over lions and tigers at Out of Africa Wildlife Park!

Old Town Cottonwood has enjoyed a renaissance over the past decade. Once best known as the bootlegging epicenter of the Southwest, by the 1990s this part of historic Main Street was a sleepy, going-to-seed, slow-down spot. Today, this vintage stretch of 89A is not just a place to tap your brakes. It's worth pulling over for serious exploration. Packed with pedestrians, wine-tasting rooms, antique shops and galleries, great restaurants and fun lodging, Old Town makes a great starting point for an area visit.

And there, mile high, twinkling and winking in the cool nighttime, Jerome watches over all from its lofty perch on Cleopatra Hill. This former ghost town is an exceptional place to enjoy a sunset glowing Sedona red in the distance. Ideal to explore by day or night, Jerome is home to great architecture, shops, museums, wonderful places to eat and historic, haunted hotels where you can rest your head. 

 The town’s popular ARTwalk takes place the first Saturday of every month; from 5:30pm-8:30pm galleries and studios stay open later than usual into the tranquil mountain evening, serving refreshments and conversation with real live local artists. We lived in Jerome for a number of years and enjoyed the tightly-knit community, a crazy mash-up of native long-time locals, hippies, artists and big city escapees. In the 1960s and '70s counterculture types arrived in Jerome and essentially saved the town's history and buildings with their gumption and elbow grease.

Jerome, AZ

With its milder, high desert temperatures, glorious landscapes and vibrant communities there are endless amusements in the Verde Valley, a variety to keep visitors delighted all summer long. As residents, we see a lifetime’s worth of beauty, adventure and cinematic moments everywhere we look.

Clarkdale Classic Station

Ellen Jo Roberts is an artist and shutterbug who lives in Clarkdale, Arizona, where she spends the workday as the group coordinator for Verde Canyon Railroad. Read more of her writing on: http://www.Ellenjo.com. Ellen Jo is a part of the Arizona Office of Tourism’s Guest Blogger Program.

Hot Springs and The Thing!

Random Western Wanderings.

In This Episode: Hot Springs and The Thing!

The Noise- January 2014

The Outs

Ellen Jo Roberts

Greetings from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, a dusty old town on the banks of the mighty Rio Grande.

Western New Mexico seems far away, no matter where you’re coming from. As one friend put it, it is the ideal place for felons to disappear forever because, like, who’s gonna look for them here? This road trip took us along hundreds of miles of two-lane blacktop, past never-ending forests of roadside yucca, through ghost towns and over corkscrewing mountain passes. Along the way we stayed at historic motels, wandered art districts, met interesting folks and made careful observation of the ways Arizona and New Mexico are similar and yet so very different.

After exiting I-40 at Holbrook we were the only car on the road most of the way to Glenwood. With Gila National Forest all around, the interesting ghost town of Mogollon to the northeast (home of the Winter Sun family’s Super Salve Company) and the San Francisco Hot Springs just south, Glenwood is a historic community with a small stretch of business butted up to a slow curve of Highway 180. The monsoon season hit the southwest big last summer. Arizona rains were relentless and in New Mexico it was no different. Glenwood’s main tourist attraction, The Catwalk National Recreation Trail, sustained heavy damages from flooding and remains closed until further notice. Named for an elevated pipeline frame, a relic of the mining era hugging the canyon walls above the Whitewater River canyon, the Catwalk was a popular trail, and its closure has impacted tourism in the immediate vicinity. 

We were the only guests checked into a strange old roadside motel. The furnace made sounds like a cat purring. The room was a wild cacophony of textures: wood paneling, rock walls, shag carpeting. Lots of different out-buildings and random artifacts littered the property, including assorted ice cream freezers and a vintage Schwinn Stingray. Stairs to the motel’s second floor had fallen away or been removed. The people in Glenwood were pleasant but I’d not say they were overly friendly. They regarded us as though we were French people on holiday rather than their neighbors from the state next door.

Heading south from Glenwood you soon pass the San Francisco River and the trailhead to its hot springs pools, also scoured by the summer floods but being rebuilt according to locals.




Further down 180, you meet up with the Gila River and a ridiculous number of towering yucca, saluting you from the hillsides like their California cousin, the Joshua Tree. Silver City arrives somewhat suddenly, a surprisingly big city in the otherwise lonely wilds of southwestern New Mexico. Born from a 19^th century mining boom, Silver City is a perfect size town—large enough to offer some engaging culture and diversity but small enough to still be considered “charming”. It’s got the perfect blend of appealing features: bountiful art galleries, crazy mannequins and cool 20^th century downtown architecture, all of it fringed with beautiful wilderness and just enough seediness to make it a “real” place.



 

Silver City’s Main Street is actually 65 feet below grade, sunken into a rocky wash now referred to as The Big Ditch. The town’s original dwellers foolishly chose this frequently flooded thoroughfare as their Main Street. The business owners kept rebuilding after each flood until the “big one” struck, in the summer of 1895. Now Main Street is better known as Big Ditch Park, where the lazy trickle of San Vincente Creek contentedly rolls over the rocks below.






From Silver City it’s a wild, winding drive on Highway 152 over the Mimbres Mountains, the Black Range and Emory Pass to arrive at our turnaround point on this random roadtrip, Truth or Consequences. The constant switchbacks and hairpin curves totaled less than 35 miles, but added 90 minutes to our drive time.



Dropping down into the valley below the pass, Kingston and Hillsboro are two historic mining communities, both part ghost town and part alive with Hillsboro being the more vigorous of the two.

By the time we pulled into Truth or Consequences, it was after dark and I was road weary from driving those relentless curves. We had reservations at a nifty lil’ restored motorcourt a few blocks from downtown. The owner of the motel was also a cranial-sacral specialist and she had an intense, hypnotic gaze I later found to be symptomatic of the city and similar to the New Age open-faced spiritualism conjured in Sedona. The people of Truth or Consequences are frequently involved in some sort of healing arts, no matter their day job, and their penetrating expressions seemed to be trying to bore right into my soul. Or, maybe they were alien visitors from another planet. Either way, fine with me. I’ve got nothing to hide.

 

Truth or Consequences (or “T or C” as called by the locals because the full name is such a mouthful), is a small city in Sierra County, built atop a deep reservoir of mineral hot springs that generate a flow of 2.5 million gallons per day. The Chiricahua Apaches deemed these hot springs sacred, calling them by the name “Place to Pray”. In the 1930s and 40s it was known as a health spa town, full of bathhouses and masseuses. The Rio Grande frames the edges of the town, gathering stream and steam from the hot springs as they join it upon exit from the assorted bathhouses.




The Hot Springs Historic District congregates close to the river. During its pre-World War II heyday there were more than 40 bathhouses in town, and a “21 Day Soak” regimen was touted to cure anything that ailed you.



Today a collection of ten active and open-for-business bathhouses dot the neighborhood. They range from expensive upscale to vintage downtrodden but all are piped with the same mineral-rich water ranging from 98-115º degrees Fahrenheit. The springs are not sulfury, so the volcanic smell familiar with hot springs in other regions is absent in these baths. Instead, 37 different minerals bubble up from the earth, including Lithium, a “natural mood balancer.” After a soak in these magical, slightly salty waters, we did feel younger, calmer, more limber. The public baths we visited were perched right at the edge of the Rio Grande. From our 104º soak, we watched the sun set over Turtleback Mountain in the distance and imagined the olden days, with early visitors camped in tents and slathered in mud to cure their rheumatism.

Advertised as the “City of Health” and “Health Capital of the Southwest” the name of this place was actually Hot Springs, New Mexico until 1950.  In 1949, Ralph Edwards of the radio (and later television) show “Truth or Consequences” announced a stunt to celebrate the show’s 10^th anniversary. They wanted a town to volunteer to change its name, in exchange for publicity and exposure in connection with the very popular show. Many towns entered the contest, but Hot Springs was deemed the champ. The premise of the long-running (1940-1978) game show involved challenging contestants with impossible trivia questions. Failure to answer correctly before the buzzer rang meant the contestants must instead complete some wacky, humorous stunt. In addition to having a town in New Mexico take its name, Truth or Consequences was also notable for being the very first game show ever shown on television, in an early broadcast in 1941 when the medium was in its infancy. 

Another surprising way Truth or Consequences is first on the cutting edge: Commercial space travel. Spaceport America is a “gateway to space” and "the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport". Located 20 miles east of T or C in the Jornada Del Muerto desert basin, the Spaceport is now open and operational. Construction began in 2006 though the concept dates back to the early 1990s.  Several tenants call it home, but its keystone is certainly Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the first commercial spaceline. Virgin Galactic has already succeeded at launching 20 space missions from this location, suborbital test expeditions to the outer reaches of the earth’s atmosphere, 60 miles sky high from sea level.

T or C is a weird town, but in a fun way. The people, with their warm sincerity and crazy soul-searching stares certainly make an impression. Just like Arizona, there is a great blend of cultures: Native American, Mexican, crusty old cowpokes, musicians, artists, hippies and transplants new and old.
 

The downtown shopping district is a cool scene of classic kitsch and dusty old western style. T or C’s main grocery store, Bullocks, probably hasn’t changed much since the 1980s and reminded me of the neighborhood grocery store of my childhood with its rubber entry mats prompting the entry and exit doors to open separately, its low ceilings and cluttered aisles. I knocked over an entire display of Pepto Bismal and no one batted an eye.

 “New Mexico: Not Really New. Not Really Mexico”- t-shirt spotted in downtown T or C.

New Mexican towns never have as many trees as Arizona towns. I always feel a bit windswept and sun-parched in New Mexico. Though New Mexico is very much like Arizona, geologically and historically, I was vexed to discover there are people in The Land of Enchantment who do not consider themselves fans of their neighbor to the west. We have traveled to New Mexico often in the past year and a general, jovial camaraderie from fellow western folk is something we have savored. On this most recent visit I was stunned by a conversation with a particularly strident employee of a bathhouse.

“I am enjoying Truth or Consequences,” I said with a smile, all positivity and light, trying my hand at hypnotic expressions, “I’m a fan of towns of the west and this one is surprisingly artsy and very interesting.” Despite my warm fuzzies, she was instantly dismissive, frowning, saying T or C “lacks culture”, and then hit me with this sucker punch from behind her work desk:

“I’d NEVER go to Arizona.”

Because of our horrible governor and her politics. And how our horrible governor was influencing the behavior of their slightly less horrible governor. I felt all the air escape from my lungs. I don’t think she realized how insulting she was being. I’m no fan of Jan Brewer so to paint the entire state and all of its residents with the same brush you’d use on the governor seemed absurd to me. How could she not see the irony of her prejudice? Besides that, she really harshed my mellow after a nice mineral soak. I kept going on and on about it as we headed back to the motel, to the point Chad finally said, “I wish you’d NEVER even TALKED to that woman.”

On the ride back we continued in a loop, following a southern route, interstate quick, along I-10 back to Arizona. Hatch, New Mexico is well known as the Chile Capital of America, but did you know it’s also the Capital of Colossal Fiberglass Figures?



Along the interstate,  famous billboards tout the rapid approach of something called “The Thing”. “The THING! WHAT IS IT?”  Building to a crescendo with every passing mile, these roadside teases did their trick on me, “Oh, we’re stopping. At THE! THING! We must find out, WHAT! IS! IT?!”

The Thing is located near Willcox, right off the interstate. It’s a gas station, a fast food pit stop, a gift store. And it’s also a crazy, amazing, creepy collection of the American bizarre! For only $1.00 entry fee (75 cents for kids) you can stroll through three big steel sheds stocked full of insane artwork, machines and autos, questionable artifacts, dusty mannequins, rain damaged furniture and unintentionally humorous displays.  My favorite? A 19^th century telephone in a glass case, sitting next to a 1950s rotary phone. The words above the two phones, “Ma Bell, My How Far You’ve Come!” (Ma Bell, you have no idea!)  As for “The Thing”? What was it? Well, I can’t say. Maybe a mummy, maybe a dummy. Chad thought it was an alien. I took no photos while strolling the collections at The Thing, because I believe every American should pay a visit and see for yourself. It’s only $1.00.

 Traveling the west is always fun. There’s always such a crazy mix of wild and tame, modern and ancient, futuristic and historic, weird and wonderful. As great fans of sun-baked patinas, vintage neon, silly roadside attractions, dramatic landscapes and wide open roads, we will certainly celebrate more western wanderings on the horizon.

Ellen Jo Roberts lives in Clarkdale AZ with Chad, Floyd, Ivan, Ned and Hazel. Read all about it at ellenjo.com

.