Back Road Adventure

[OPPOSITE PAGE] With furry leaves formerly used by Indians and settlers to line their shoes, common mulleins poke upward among rocks in the foreground shadows along Upper Goldwater Lake south of Prescott. [LEFT] Anchored by the Hotel St. Michael, Prescott's Whiskey Row shops, saloons and eateries occupy a block of Montezuma Street opposite the Yavapai County Courthouse. [BELOW] Mary mourns for the crucified Christ in one of the Stations of the Cross at the nondenominational Shrine of St. Joseph of the Mountains, built 65 years ago off State Route 89 in Yarnell. leaving the pines behind. Obviously, I've missed the picture. So I loop back toward Prescott on County Road 101, a dirt road that leads past soothing, tree-nestled campgrounds at Lower and Upper Wolf Creek. Then I wander along another road that's much more like the 1925 route than the modern, paved, two-lane 89. From town, we start down 89 again, still seeking Paul Gill's Prescott National Forest sign. Two miles outside of Prescott, I glimpse the flash of a bright yellow bird and veer toward the shoulder. My wife has gotten used to this quirk on my part: She hardly ever screams anymore. I pull over, thinking I have an oriole on my hands. “Were you looking for a Forest Service sign?” asks Elissa. “Oh. Right,” I say. “There’s one,” she says, pointing to a 6-foothigh sign. Subtle. No wonder I missed it the first time. I get out, walk up to the sign, turn and look back up the road. And there’s the cover shot-the same Sshaped undulation, the same mix of trees, the same rising shoulder on the left-unchanged after 80 years except for the substitution of asphalt for dirt in the foreground. Across the way, the oriole flashes in an oak tree, bragging. So I cross the highway and enter an oak-edged meadow alongside Granite Creek, where placer gold deposits helped spur the establishment of Prescott. A perfect skin-tingle of a breeze sighs up out of nowhere, stirring the gold-tipped, waist-high grasses.

After a spellbound interlude, I climb back into the car and finish the drive down to Wickenburg. Along the way, I marvel at unfurling vistas; detour to the Kirkland Junction cafeturned-middle-aged-bikerbar; visit a strangely moving Yarnell shrine with its concrete statues of Jesus scattered among the boulders, and drive the hairpins down the extravagantly scenic stretch between Yarnell and Congress. I end up in Wickenburg, with its own cozy cluster of restaurants, bars and legends-including lurid tales of a stagecoach massacre that fueled a war with the Apaches. A rich day-brimming with scenery and history. But at the end of it, I think mostly of that meadow, with the ode of the oriole, the symphony of the wind and the dance of the grass. And I wonder if an oriole cocked its head to watch that first Highways photographer 80 years ago. Alas, many things do change-editors, highways, towns. Fortunately, some things don't. Arizona EDITOR'S NOTE: Peter Aleshire is now the editor of Arizona Highways magazine.

arizona highways.com

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS 61

{destination} Touring Bisbee's Historic Queen Mine Recalls Workers' Hardships

"IT TOOK TWO YEARS to make a miner," 66-year-old Henry Hernandez told the passengers who straddled the tour car inside Bisbee's historic Queen Mine. "Then you had to keep learning because there was so much to know and it was all dangerous, especially in the days before so many safety regulations." Before he started guiding tours of the Queen, which shut down in 1943, Hernandez worked Arizona mines for 30 years. During tours he and other guides, all exminers, describe what it was like to work in the subterranean darkness, manhandling heavy beams and ore cars and wielding axes and drills so powerful one slip could cost a limb, or a life.

Bisbee's heyday as one of the world's premier copper producers began in the 1870s with a foolish wager, and ended nearly a century later when the ore dwindled and prices plummeted. Scouring southeastern Arizona's Mule Mountains for silver, prospector George Warren discovered copper instead. Not realizing his luck, he bet his claim that he could run faster than a man on a horse. He couldn't, and he lost his fortune. On the upside, the adjacent community of Warren is named for him.

By the early 1900s, several dozen copper mines had made Bisbee the rip-roaringest town west of St. Louis. With a population of 20,000, numerous businesses including one saloon after another along Brewery Gulchand even a trolley line, it was a bona-fide metropolis. Eight billion pounds of copper poured out of Bisbee's mines before they closed in the 1970s.

Many former boomtowns became ghost towns, but Bisbee reinvented itself. Moderate weatherit sits at an elevation of 5,300 feet and an easygoing lifestyle lured new residents and businesses. Part artists' haven, part retirees' heaven, the town today has a population of 6,000. Shops, galleries, bars and