Road Conditions, Arizona Highway System

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

STATE ROUTE 88 (Apache Trail) STATE ROUTE 187

STATE ROUTE 82 STATE ROUTE 61

NO MAN'S LAND BELOW THE BORDER

(Continued from Page 21) Altas, one above the other as the gulch heads high in the pass. The United States Geological Survey has placed a sign at the bottom of the mountain giving the distance to each tank and has provided a cable for those who have to climb up the steep sides to the upper tanks. We are now but thirty miles south of Wellton. The way is over a sandy, even grade but cut up by many small washes not over a foot or so in depth that make fifteen miles an hour the limit and even that speed a danger to springs and frame. To show the complete isolation of even the Tinajas country and the passing of information to Wellton of events, the flood of 1931 at Wellton is a good example. During the evening of Friday the thirteenth of February 1931 the people of Wellton were in their homes unaware of any danger or even of anything out of the ordinary with the exception that there was a nice gentle rain falling, something they wanted and which came seldom. About nine in the evening people sitting around their tables reading or playing cards were startled to see a snaky finger of water creeping under their respective doors. It came as si lently as the silence of the land of its origin, slowly but surely, higher and higher, without a noise of any kind. A railroad freight train came to a halt two miles west of town as the engineer saw water where he had never seen it before, but even then he was too late. Too late to keep his train intact but not too late to escape and give the rest of the crew the warning. The engine stayed in its place from weight alone but box-cars toppled over as the sand beneath the roadbed washed away. Tourists bound for their homes and traveling at night were stopped by the silent flood as it poured over U. S. Highway 80. One car whose occupants did not obey the rules of the desert tried to force their way through the flood and were lost, buried in mud and sand; and a woman was taken from the embraces of a barbed wire fence, a mile away, the next morning, dead to this world. There was no warning from the southwestern desert of that flood. There was no human south of Wellton to telephone in the danger. There was no wire or signal possible south of that last civilized fringe of the desert. The desert was in charge of that flood. It may never occur again but when it did it was as mysterious and silent as the land where it gathered its force. It seems as we sit down to ham and eggs, good coffee and bread that we have left something behind us in the land in which we spent days of pleasure and wonder. There is something in that desert to remember all of our lives. We want to go again and explore the same places and find new ones where mystery and silence reign. Pinacate is a personal thing. Its surrounding deserts and volcanoes are still personal things. They lie below the blue hazy horizon to the south. Unseen and unsung, they reign over that part of the world. As Antares burns his red way carrying the constellation of Scorpio with him on his celestial "pass in review" across the southern sky, to usher in a new scorching day of summer, and as the blue, distant, and cold Orion marches past the dim outlines of Pinacate during the cold frosty nights of winter, we wish we could go again there to feel the spirit of that clean desert and to see Nature's most grand exhibition of the forces of Vulcan. Perhaps we will go some day and never return. It is as good a place to sleep as any, and we know that we will have many companions with us who rest there to be undisturbed forever.

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