BACK ROAD ADVENTURE

Blue Elementary's Head Count Was Low, but Adventure Was High

BLUE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL'S PHONE pulled me out of my warm bedroom. The mother of half our pupil population said, “Justin won't be in today. He tangled with a skunk.” So began one adventure I had with my wife, Marilyn, and our son Lee, then 3, about 33 years ago while living and teaching at Blue Elementary, a remote one-room school with two studentsJustin, an eighth-grader, and Duane, a first-grader.

Strung along the Blue River on the wilderness border of Arizona and New Mexico, the community of Blue counted a ranch population of 25. The nearest town, Alpine, sat 25 miles away on a dirt road.

While scruffy bobcats padded by the windows and quail called from the front playground, we taught reading, writing and arithmetic. For us, though, extracurricular projects provided the real “adventures” in this land of ranches.

The year began tamely enough, but soon we would face problems-and a possible practical jokeencountered by few other Arizona teachers. Marilyn, officially the K-8 teacher, created arithmetic and reading exercises for Duane on her manual typewriter. I worked with her to teach Justin algebra, science, geography and the Arizona Constitution (mandatory for graduation).

Duane wore cowboy boots and a black, broadbrimmed Stetson, just like Justin, who ensured that Duane stayed close to the school at recess.

School had been in session for several months when Justin told me about the many deerhides tossed onto the branches of a huge pine at Blue Lodge, just 7 miles away. Slim Joy, a hunting guide and trailmaster, spread the hides in the tree to dry each hunting season.

Justin knew I wanted to tan a deerhide, so he asked Slim if he could have one for a “class project.” Slim gave us the hide and a “recipe” to tan it, using water and oak ashes tinged with chicken manure - very high in nitrates. This supposedly softened the hide so hair could be removed. Justin brought two horseshoe raspscoarse, 18-inch steel files-and we draped the hide, thoroughly soaked and beginning to smell, over a log in the wash beside the schoolhouse. During every recess for the next five weeks, we straddled the log and scraped that stubborn hair, using those rasps and sharp pieces of granite-just like people did a century ago.

I felt very pioneerlike.

After six weeks, I took the hide, now nailed onto a frame, to the ranch of veteran hide-tanner Jack Brooks and asked if I'd wasted my time.

Jack stroked his grizzled chin, wanting to know where it came from. When I told him, he didn't laugh; he just suggested I take it somewhere on a dark night and lose it.

That same afternoon, I roped the hide to my Volkswagen rack and drove to the dump on Red Hill Road.

For weeks, Justin muttered that Slim had “put one over” on him and his enthusiastic young teacher. Slim must have figured we knew about tanning only green hides, meaning freshskinned. Our hide was too old.

One morning shortly after the deerhide adventure, Justin met up with the skunk on his way to feed the chickens. He glimpsed a blackand-white blur and grabbed a shotgun. Though he got the would-be egg thief, he missed school that day and the next. His mother, he said, made

him bury his clothes “out by the back fenceline.”

Two days later, he showed up, well scrubbed.

A week later, when he passed the Arizona Constitution test, his hair still smelled faintly of turpentine.

Not long after the skunk incident, the school's water pipes froze. We lived in a three-room “teacherage” attached to the school. Pupils used our bathroom. Justin and I broke river ice and filled buckets. Duane counted each bucket we poured to flush the toilet - our last adventure.

At year's end, Justin graduated well prepared for high school. The school board members said they couldn't keep the elementary school open the next year for just one pupil. A board member hinted, humorously, “Adopting six kids would keep the school open.” We laughed, then left in midsummer 1971. We heard that Blue Elementary School reopened the following year with several new students, including Duane in second grade.

Years later, we learned that Justin graduated from high school with good grades, got married and began managing a ranch along the Black Canyon Highway.

When Justin rode his new range, he may have recalled his eighth-grade adventures at Blue School-deerhides, buried clothes and frozen pipes. And, of course, the Arizona Constitution.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Blue Elementary School remains open for several area students today. AH

Visit the Camp Wood Area to See ‘Real' Old-time Cowboy Country

REAL ARIZONA RANCH country barely exists anymore, so they say. But those willing to spend a day exploring around picturesque Camp Wood will discover the old ways of rural Yavapai County still notched in time by mountains and distance.

This area of the Prescott National Forest also offers terrific picnic and camping spots, and hiking trails threading through cool ponderosa pine trees.

As for those ancient rock forts topping the ridges all around, well, they'll remain a mystery. But you can pass good hours trying to guess who built them, and why.

The fun begins on the Williamson Valley Road, marked County Road 5 on some maps, running northwest out of Prescott. It passes white rail fences, grass hills and even farm fields dotted with grazing antelope. After about 22 miles, turn left onto County Road 68 (unmarked) heading west, where the signs simply point to Camp Wood and Yolo Ranch.

Raindrops plinked onto the pickup as we drove with a wonderful windshield view of the Santa Maria Mountains.

"I'm not crazy about hiking in the rain, but we need it so I won't complain if it comes," said 70-year-old Don Johnston of Prescott, my companion this day.

Agreed. But I questioned whether thegray cloud cover might diminish the views.

I got my answer after driving on a mostly flat, washboard road through juniper country. At the 13-mile point, where CR 68 began to rise into the ponderosas and thread its way between Sawmill and Cottonwood mountains, we looked back at the view. Williamson Valley filled the eastern horizon, a broad sweep of many miles hanging with mist.

At about the 16-mile mark, we reached Merritt Spring, a pretty clearing with a small apple orchard behind a pole fence. Expecting signs for Camp Wood, Don and I continued west, unaware we'd passed it by.

Beyond Merritt Spring, the landscape closes in, with tumbles of granite rock crowding both sides of the truck and tall ponderosas shading it overhead.

We expected more wide-open country, and we found exactly that, at the 21-mile mark at Yolo Ranch.

It looks the way a ranch should, at least according to the movies-with a sprawling, fenced meadow, horses lolling in the grass, two wagon wheels hanging on the ranch gate leading to the main house and outbuildings.

In 1967, Western Horseman wrote about roundup at the Yolo, saying it had a reputation for "the best cowboys in the country" working on 110,000 acres stretching from pine trees to saguaro cactus.

The magazine also said the Yolo was a "last frontier in the old style of cowboying."

Certainly the range has closed in since the 1960s and before, but the basics of cowboy life haven't changed at the Yolo, the 7-Up, the Las Vegas and other ranches near Camp Wood. The history goes too deep.

Take Harry Knight, for example. As a young man, he performed as an exhibition rider with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and for more than 30 years operated the Triangle HC Ranch. Beginning in 1925, he took in guests.

Historians credit Knight with starting the guest-ranch business in Yavapai County. His brochure states: "This is not a hotel, an inn, a resort, a sanatorium, a dude ranch, nor a 5-acre turnip patch. It is a real, successfully operated cow

ranch with first-class guest accommodations." But Knight also talked about the stone forts used by ancient Indian tribes. With his brochure in hand, we asked friendly Yolo cowboys if they knew where we could find them. They sent us .6 of a mile down Forest Service Road 702, which connects with CR 68 immediately south of the Yolo meadow. We turned right past a campground and continued a few hundreds yards. Through the trees to our left, we saw the hilltop fort.

The structure measured 66 by 42 feet and consisted of stacks of small rocks standing as high as 5 feet.

Prior to our trip, Jay Eby, a retired Arizona forest ranger, said they were likely defensive positions, rather than homes, built about 1300. Found throughout west-central Arizona, the structures are part of a large system of hilltop forts used for smoke-signaling and as retreats in time of danger.

On that point, Don and I couldn't argue. The fort sat high in the pines, affording an excellent look all around at potential intruders.

The Yolo cowboys also directed us back to Merritt Spring and Forest Service Road 95, which goes north from there to Walnut Creek. After a few hundred yards on 95, we finally found the remains of Camp Wood, today consisting only of a few decaying foundations. The site once bustled with a post office, lumber mill, forest headquarters and a Depression-era camp for Civilian Conservation Corps workers.

Prescott resident Lois Merritt Ward, now 82, lived there in the 1930s and said in an interview that the Camp was a world unto itself, rugged and isolated with no bridges and much heavier snowfall than today.

"In winter, my parents bought six months of groceries because you couldn't get in and out through 6 feet of snow," said Ward, whose mom planted the Merritt Spring apple trees. "We had a one-room schoolhouse and