RETURN TO MY VALLEY

Return to My

As a professional photographer, I have traveled into Canada and Mexico, and through much of the West in search of color and beauty. But not until the past year did I carry my camera as an adult into my own backyard and the scenes of my childhood, Verde Valley in the heart of Arizona.

Verde-verdant, green. The Spanish word makes the place name alliterative and pleasing to the ear, but it holds true, too, to what the eye beholds from February into early November. For those who think of Arizona as a dry and barren land, the area is a revelation. The Verde Valley is like a fertile forty-mile stretch of the Midwest, about thirty miles wide, surrounded by 7000-foot mountains and mesas, heavily timbered slopes, and colorful red rock formations second only in spectacular grandeur to the state's Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. Nour-ished by the Verde River and its tributaries are dairy and truck farms, grazing lands, and small ranches grow-ing alfalfa, peaches, pears, corn, and apples, and where the 4-H kids raise pigs, sheep, and cattle. Fishing streams abound, stocked from the state's largest hatchery and rearing ponds at lower Oak Creek Canyon, and bordered by colorful ferns and the cottonwood trees which gave their name to my birthplace, the Valley's shopping cen-ter. There are the abandoned mines and smelters of Jerome and Clarkdale to the north, the remains of the army outpost at Camp Verde in the south, and scattered vestiges of pre-Columbian Indian occupation such as Monte-zuma Castle and Tuzigoot National Monument to remind one that this is Arizona. But for the most part, the valley could furnish both the location and the produce for an Iowa county fair.

I grew up in this Verde Valley with all the joys of an outdoor boyhood: hiking, hunting, camping, swimming, boating, and fishing. Looking back, I suppose I first began to take pictures, as a youngster while in grammar school, because of the beauty around me. But I did not appreciate that beauty, or perhaps even really see it, until I went back this year from my home in Tucson to do a series on the shifting seasons. I must admit that when I made my fall pictures in November, I was amazed at the amount of color I had never paid attention to before. There were forests and groves of oaks, cotton-woods, sycamores, and alders as well as countless varieties of grass and bush turning red, bronze, and brilliant yellow just as they had when I was a boy tracking through them after quail and rabbits. The delicate tracery of the flowering orchard in the spring meant nothing to me then: I was only impatient for the fruit to ripen. Tuzigoot was just a hill we had to cross over to go fishing in Peck's Lake, where arrowheads and pottery sherds were still so common we hardly bothered to stoop to pick one up.

Valley

My perceptions have quickened in the past twenty years, but there have been changes in the valley, too, for it is no Shangri-la. However, a rarity in itself, the changes have been mainly for the better. New and improved highways have opened the area to tourists without spoiling what they might come to see. The pall of smoke that once hung over the vicinity has disappeared with the closing of Clarkdale's smelter, and drab "company" houses there are now gaily painted private residences. State and federal governments have taken steps to arrest the decay of historic landmarks and prehistoric edifices. And the people of the valley, those who remained and those who have returned to visit or to retire, seem bound by some unspoken pact to preserve and enhance the natural beauties of their pleasant surroundings. But the change I came home to photograph was of a different kind-the change of the seasons through spring, summer, and fall. Winter in the Verde Valley is hardly more than a breathing space between the last dropped leaf and the first bursting bud. The guardian mountains ward off wind and weather from all directions, so that snow is a rarity on the valley floor. In twenty-five years I recall one snow in Cottonwood that lasted until noon. So I came back in March, August and November to record the valley's beauty and old landmarks and signs of progress. I came remembering Indian legends and tales of the ranchers and miners who in time had established the towns of Clarkdale, Jerome and Cottonwood, the villages of Bridgeport, Rimrock and McQuireville, and of the bloody campaign against the Apaches that had resulted in Camp Verde. I came remembering the happy boyhood that began in 1921. As I drove due north out of Phoenix and the Salt River Valley on the magnificent new Black Canyon Highway (69), I reflected on the travel difficulties of those who had come before me: the Indian aborigines, the foot-weary Spanish explorers, the early settlers hacking out their own wagon trails, and even the modern motorist who until this beeline route was completed had to grind over the mountainous grades of U.S. 89 and 89-A for some five hours between Phoenix and Cottonwood.

So often we take for granted the beauty of our scenic country and forget the part our modern highway system plays in making it accessible. The 54-mile journey to Flagstaff from Cottonwood used to mean an overnight stay because of the narrow, winding, unsurfaced road along Oak Creek, and the old switchback at the head of the canyon. Now we can cover the paved highway (89-A) in a little over an hour, shop, and return before night, even allowing for time spent in admiration of the Awesome gorge and tumbling stream it follows. After crossing the Valley from the north, the route leaves Cottonwood to climb to 7,026 feet at Mingus Mountain, precarious perch for Jerome at about 5000 feet, and drop southwest into Prescott. The highway has been well maintained and is in excellent condition, a rewarding route for travelers who prefer scenery to speed.

On this spring day, however, I was heading for my Valley via the southern approach and was not to be distracted by redrock formations to the north. As the new highway cut through the Black Canyon I found that lookout points had been developed here, too, from which the tourist could have an expansive view of the southern portion of the Verde Valley. The cutoff at Cordes Junction (79) took me right down to the business center of Camp Verde.

Camp Verde has always interested me. Here are five of the old fort buildings which were erected in the 1860's as a protection against marauding Apaches for immigrants traveling the southern portion of the Santa Fe Trail. A military road along the Mogollon Rim connected it with Fort Apache to the east. The fort was first established as Camp Lincoln in 1864 by Arizona Volunteers dispatched from Whipple Barracks at Prescott. Two years later it was manned by regular army troops and its name changed to Camp Verde in 1868. At the turn of the century, when the district had become comparatively peaceful, the fort reservation was sold to settlers for agricultural uses.

One of the original buildings of the fort was recently opened to the public as the Fort Verde Museum and has early army equipment on display. Additional buildings will be opened in the future. Even with these remindersof a grim and martial past, it was hard to realize that less than ninety years before, two companies of Arizona Volunteers who had killed or taken prisoner about one hundred Apaches, were waiting here “barefoot, half-clad, and upon half rations” for the bounty of $100 apiece the recently organized Territory legislature had promised them at the time of enlistment. “Instead,” reads the report of the adjutant general, “they received a letter of appreciation from the Legislature with expressed regrets that the territorial treasury could not stand the strain.” This was hard to realize in the midst of that peaceful productive land, with fragrant and colorful orchards in bloom and attractive cattle ranches along the river operated, as likely as not, by descendants of the very Apaches who once held the Valley as their stronghold and used the Verde River as their natural highway.

Recreational areas are being opened near the town, there are excellent cabin sites south and west of Camp Verde at Brown Springs near the river, and a golf course on the west side.

Four well-known guest ranches of long standing are operated in the area: Beaver Creek, Rimrock, Soda Springs, and Clear Creek. Rimrock Ranch is perched like an Indian pueblo high on a moundlike formation that gives an extensive view of the country. The other three ranches are situated along Beaver Creek or Clear Creek, two tributaries of the Verde River as it widens and deepens on its way south to the Salt River system.

As any tourist might do, I spent a day enjoying the Camp Verde area and the guest ranches before letting my curiosity lead me further northward to the prehistoric Indian ruins of the valley. The Apache wars were fought

revolves from left to right as the film passes a vertical slit at the same relative speed as the lens scans the view . . .

But yesterday as compared with the period when the “ancient ones,” contemporaries of the first Crusaders, erected apartment houses in canyon recesses or the valley walls and engineered irrigation systems to sustain their crops.

My first stop, about five miles north of Camp Verde on Beaver Creek, was at Montezuma Castle. This is a fascinating 12th-century housing project unaccountably named for an Aztec emperor who never got this far out of Mexico and lived some four centuries after the apartment dwellers had built five and six storied structures in the limestone cliff.

As a boy I used to climb the ladders into the Castle, about 80 feet above the stream bed, and go through the upper rooms. But too many others climbed them, too, and the wear and tear of thousands of sightseers has made it necessary in recent years to view the architectural wonder from below and study the cross-section model in the small building nearby. I gazed upward, visualizing life behind those sparsely windowed walls and wondering at the kind of force or fear or compulsion that could make men build like gods and live like animals. Turning away at last, I looked for the trail I had cut some years ago to find a vantage point for my camera. It was easy to locate, for it was plainly marked by signs and has been used for the same purpose by numberless photographers, amateur and professional.

Seven miles or so farther along the Beaver Creek road is Montezuma Well, the site of more cliff dwellings. Here again the name of the Aztec warlord stands for the nameless ones who perhaps contrived and certainly used this large deep almost circular pool as the hub ofa system of irrigation ditches supplied by gravity flow. There are other remains of a primitive civilization scattered across the Valley. I leave it to the archaeologists and anthropologists to determine the identity of the builders and define the dates of their occupation. I only know how fascinating it is to crawl into limestone ledges or clamber over mounds to explore the century-weathered masonry of a vanished race. The Indian ruins that probably mean the most to me of any in the valley are at Tuzigoot National Monument, about a mile from Cottonwood. I would think that these were built by a different people than those who huddled in canyon walls, or perhaps at a time when there was not so much to fear, for the ancient pueblo of over 100 rooms stands proudly on a hill. It is built of stone mortared with mud and once sheltered a high degree of culture developed, we are told, by antecedents of the modern Hopi. Tuzigoot was not unearthed until 1933-34 and I knew the site first as a high mound where I hiked as a Boy Scout and searched for arrowheads at the urging of the scoutmaster. Now, like the Castle and the Well, it is a National Monument, with an attendant museum which contains rare turquoise ornaments, pottery, and many artifacts uncovered during the excavations.

While I was revisiting Tuzigoot, I walked on for a long look at Peck's Lake, where I had spent so many hours swimming and racing my homemade sailboat with my boyhood friends. We could see the distant peak of Mingus Mountain reflected in the lake's clearness in those days, when men and boys would walk over there in the late afternoon after work and school and return home with fish for dinner. Now the lake was deserted, its surface almost clogged with plantlife. But the golf course still flanked the southern side of the lake, the picnic grounds still hugged the northern shore, and sheltered by the steep tree-covered east bank fishermen sat silently awaiting that nibble. And, as always, at the far end of the lake and along the ridges high above it, Indian ruins remained to challenge those of us who like to hike and to explore.

Across the Verde River from Tuzigoot stands a different kind of abandoned enterprise, now in the process of restoration and reoccupation, the product of our own century. I crossed the bridge and climbed the sloping desert mesa into Clarkdale, founded by Senator W. A. Clark of Montana. From about 1911 to 1950 Clarkdale was a company-owned smelter town, established to process the ores from the mines of Jerome. At its height of production it housed several thousand employees and their families in substantial if unimaginative brick cottages in the Lower Town and larger brick and stucco dwellings in Upper Town. These were all but emptied when, with the exhaustion of Jerome's ore reserves, Phelps-Dodge sold out in 1950 and moved most of the population to new operations in Ajo, Morenci and Bisbee.

Now the houses are gradually being retenanted by retired couples, local school teachers, shopkeepers, and members of the staff of the Valley hospital at Cotton-wood who, with the few old-timers who have hung on, make up the bulk of the town's resurging population. Privately owned, these houses are taking on an individuality they did not have before. The black iron fences that edged the streets in identical patterns and kept out the wild burros have largely been removed. The drab brick and stucco walls are being repainted in startling turquoise, pinks, reds, blues, yellow, and greens as well as more conservative colors. Some homes have added patios and carports, others are completely remodeled.

The recreation center is unique for a place this size. Clark Memorial Clubhouse was provided by the company to compensate for the community's isolation and helped to earn it the title of "the model town of Arizona." Its facilities included a swimming pool, bowling alley, endowed library, a large auditorium-gymnasium, and lounges for men and women. There was also a completely furnished kitchen and banquet room. This clubhouse. open to the public is still in use for I recently enjoyed an Italian dinner served to most of the local population in a fund raising program. Here I met many friends I had not seen for nearly twenty years.

There is talk of a cement plant in the near future, and evidence of action along this line promises new activity and another chapter in the history of Clarkdale.

U.S. 89-A ties Clarkdale to Jerome like the rope of two mountain climbers, as their fortunes were linked in both spectacular ascent to wealth and sudden plummeting. Jerome, in fact, has been literally sliding down hill for the past thirty years, slipping slowly from the shoulder of Mingus Mountain, towering bastion in Verde Valley's western rampart. Most of the serried frame houses on the face of the steep escarpment stand empty now, staring vacantly over the rooftops of the row below at the green spread of the valley and the colorful canyon walls of its farthest rim.

Jerome has had considerable publicity in the past and more recent years, first as the "most unique" mining town in Arizona (to quote a former road sign near the town

NOTES FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS RAY MANLEY AND HIS CAMERA BEAUTIFUL VERDE VALLEY

"On Windmill Ranch, Verde Valley." In the north central part of the Valley lies the ranch that for many years was known as the Windmill Ranch, now a part of the Coconino Cattle Company. At roundup time several herds of four to five hundred cattle are brought to the red tank where they fill up with the last water they will get until their trail drive to the summer range ends. This is to the area north of the 6000 foot range beyond the red colored "tank" as our water holes are called. Large supplies of water caught in these reservoirs after rains often have to see the cattle through long periods of little rain and make sparsely grassed areas habitable for cattle. 8x10 Eastman View camera (30 years old) using 8½ inch commercial Ektar lens, 1/25th second f.20 on ½ sheet of 8x10 Anscochrome.

"Summer Pastorale, Along the Verde." 5x7 Deardorff camera, 5" wide field Ektar lens, 1/10th second at f.18, daylight Ektachrome film, early summer. This scene is the reason for this site being selected for my retiring father's new home, lying some 180 feet above the stream with an everchanging pattern of color from the fresh new green of spring and summer to the brilliant yellows of late fall. Small grazing fields below feed cattle that are fattened there. This area is just a few miles upstream from the Cornville Bridge lying a short distance above that point where Oak Creek joins the Verde on its way south to the Salt River Valley a hundred miles away.

"Lazy Summer Day, Along the Verde." 5x7 Linhoff camera, 210 mm. Symar lens, f.22 at 1/25th second, daylight Anscochrome film, midsummer. Here beneath the many cottonwood trees that lie along the Verde from Clarkdale to Brown Springs below Camp Verde, people can picnic and camp, fish or daydream in complete silence and peace. The sound of the water or the mooing of a cow, the call of a crow or the splash of a jumping fish might be the only sound heard. It was here I often paddled my homemade canoe. This particular scene lies a few hundred feet downstream from the Bridgeport Bridge, two miles southeast of Cottonwood.

CENTER PANELS

"Verde Valley Panorama." 5x7 Linhoff camera, 210 mm. Symar lens in compur shutter, 1/25th second at f.16, daylight Anscochrome film backlit scene, 5th of November. Fall comes rather late in the Valley and the thirty different varieties of trees along the Verde and Oak Creek turn many shades of brown and yellow and because the change is gradual there are still great areas of green, a reminder of summer.

"A Touch of Autumn, Lower Oak Creek." 5x7 Linhoff camera, 1/25th second at f.18, daylight Anscochrome film, 210 mm. Symar lens. Some six miles south and west of Sedona, on the eastern edge of the Verde Valley, lies this beautiful spot, a homesite I would choose should I return to the Valley to live, for here is a mixture of changing color that remains beautiful all winter but reaches a climax in color in the early weeks of November.

"Autumn Approach, Verde Valley." From the Bridgeport Bridge, one can get a typical view of the manner in which the cottonwoods grow along the Verde river. For weeks in November, the trees are a mass of yellow along the banks of the winding Verde. Some twenty years ago the Verde often ran 16-20 feet deep at this point during spring runoff and much valuable farmland went south with it. In recent years early plantings of cottonwoods have diverted and maintained the river channel protecting valuable soil. 5x7 Linhoff camera, 210 mm. Symar lens, 1/25th second at f.20, daylight Anscochrome.

"Lower Oak Creek, Near Cornville." 5x7 Linhoff camera, 210 mm. Symar lens, 1/25th second at f.20, daylight Anscochrome. It was a real pleasure to take off my shoes and foll up my pants for this picture. It brought back the days of some twenty years before when I waded the river every day going to some new point of exploration. Here, south of Cornville (a gas station, post office, and small store,) the Verde and lower Oak Creek will soon join, forming a much larger Verde just a few miles away.

OPPOSITE PAGE

"Winter Panorama, Verde Valley." 5x7 Linhoff camera, 210 mm. Symar lens, 1/25th second f.25, January 28th, daylight Anscochrome. Clarkdale has been partially abandoned since its closing a few years ago but recently many people have returned and the better brick homes are being used. This scene illustrates the fact that it seldom gets below freezing in the lower levels of the Valley and that snow seldom comes below Jerome, high on the hill at 5000 feet. Protected from winds, the valley remains pleasant all winter and its 3500 feet in altitude keep it cool in summer. This old dam provides water for Peck's lake, the country club golf course, etc. At one time the Verde meandered forming a sharp s curve, later floods cut through embankments leaving an S shaped lake bed, now refilled as a recreation lake. Gravel from the Verde riverbed is hauled by truck fifty miles to Flagstaff, which lying on a lava flow has none for construction purposes.

approach) and now as the largest ghost mining town in the United States. Once serving some 15,000 mine employees with an annual payroll of $20 million it now houses about 250 "live ghosts," as the residents call themselves. These present ghosts have organized the Jerome Historical Society, which tourists have swelled to a membership of over a thousand. Since the Mine Museum was opened in June 1953 over 94,000 visitors have signed the guest book and the monthly average is increasing rapidly with the opening of the Black Canyon Highway.

In Jerome I looked for old landmarks: the serviceable but deserted Jerome High School plant, the Douglas Mansion and the bridal home given Lewis Douglas by his mother, the empty three-story Jerome hospital which still holds the birth and death records of vanished Valley residents in its locked safe. The hospital building is still in good condition and has been the subject of much controversy as a possible hospital-home for the aged or a TB sanitarium. Certainly its windows command a glorious sweep of distant shadows and highlights, from the sloping hills around Camp Verde to the redrock mouth of littleexplored Sycamore Canyon and, beyond Flagstaff, the whitecaps of the San Francisco Peaks which rise to the highest point in Arizona above the long fringe of Coconino National Forest timber. Most of the houses in the town share this view, and tourists coming over the Mingus Mountain grade from Prescott stop open-mouthed at its beauty.

I could have spent hours musing in Jerome, but instead I stopped to talk with one of the oldest settlers who still do business in the town. George McMillan, tall, white-haired and distinguished, has been the Valley undertaker since 1920. He came to Jerome in 1900 and has known it as a boom town and a ghost town. Understandably, he has seen business slacken off in recent years. After all, one doesn't expect to find an undertaker in a ghost town. His son John, born in Jerome, operates the "Spook Town Curios" gift shop on the main thoroughfare and when more pressing duties do not call, George assists him. His wife Rosalind recalls the years when groceries were delivered on muleback up the slippery trails that confined mothers with young families to their homes for most of the winter months. The McMillans keep up on the town necrology and are well-informed as to the whereabouts of oldtimers who moved out of their own accord.

Another Jeromite of pioneer stock is R. S. (Pop) Clanton, the man with the burros. Pop calls himself the "last of the Clantons," a feuding family of early Tombstone. He is always ready to oblige the tourists who stop to photograph him as a "character" or to take pictures of their children on his burros. If your interest is such he will trade guns with you. When, for lack of something to do he donned a dilapidated felt hat and a screen of whiskers and took his old covered wagon and burros from Cottonwood to Jerome, he found desired relief from the boredom of retirement. Pop summed it up for me with a smile in his gentle brown eyes: "If I didn't have this to do, I'd go crazy. You meet such nice people.'"

I made a few more pictures around town, and from the eminence of Sunshine Hill tried for a view of its clustered dwellings against the colorful panorama of the Verde Valley. If I should have a single impression to take away with me, it would be of a silent house on stilts with paneless windows gaping at distant beauty while a

fruit tree in full bloom rustles its branches against the weatherbeaten clapboards. Although the families have moved on long ago, spring continues to come to Jerome with the foliage of green trees and flowering fruit.

At last I returned to the paved winding highway that carried me through Clarkdale again to the floor of the valley and my birthplace, Cottonwood.

In Cottonwood, old landmarks and new ventures had a more personal interest, for here my parents live and some of the friends of my former years. It is an unpretentious western town of about 2000 population with a business district two blocks wide and about a mile in length along the river, but it is peopled for me with happy memories and living history. Founded in 1895, it is now the largest town in the valley. It never knew the sudden rise or quick fall of Clarkdale and Jerome, but has been content with the more stable trade of the agricultural and cattle raising interests which surround it. At an elevation of about 3400 feet, protected on all sides by the valley's walls and its temperature further modified by the attendant river and streams, it is comparatively cool for Arizona but never cold. One of the few outdoor pleasures lacking from my boyhood was that of building a snowman on my own front lawn.

Cottonwood's first permanent settler was James Oliver Bristow, who arrived with his family in 1875 and sheltered them in a dugout through the first winter. Grass was waist high when pioneer Alonzo Mason arrived from Missouri by covered wagon at the age of nine with his parents shortly after. The site was described by L. A. W. Whipple, exploring the area for a proposed railway route from Ft. Smith to Los Angeles in 1853-54, as "a pretty valley where were willows and fine alamos," Alamo is the Spanish Southwest's name for the poplar tree and cottonwoods are of the poplar family.

Charlie Willard, who was 99 when I saw him again last March and whose red brick Victorian house is the oldest landmark in town, thanks to fires that razed many wooden structures in the 1920's, wrote a brother in February 1879-the year of Tombstone's founding of his first interest in the valley: "I have intended to write in regard to going down into the lower country, having heard some very encouraging news of that section from parties who have just returned. I saw a gentleman lately, too, who gives some glowing accounts of what he saw on his journey. Among the rest he says he passed and traveled through numerous little valleys or glades well watered and suitable for farming and stock raising within two or three days' ride of a railroad."

Evidently the Cottonwood location was "it" for when Charlie arrived in the Verde Valley that summer of 1879, he had come to stay. He planted his orchards along the Verde River and built a frame house and, some time before 1890, the two-and-a-half-story house of handmade brick. With 'Lon Mason and Charlie Stemmer he laid out the building lots that made Cottonwood a town of homes as well as the chief trading center of the valley. For some time prior to my last visit he was living with his daughter, Jennie Willard Garrison, who so kindly showed me the old letter and allowed me to quote it above, just across the street from the red brick house he built so long ago.

Although fires have destroyed many old landmarks in Cottonwood, it is not likely to happen again. The volunteer fire department has been given modern equipment and a firehouse. The main street is paved now and only this year the remaining streets were blacktopped. Thanks to food sales and other projects, the town has a community clubhouse; and parallel parking replaces the old hitching posts. Stores are in turn presenting new fronts with larger plate glass windows supported by modern flagstone facings. I was glad to see that the old sidewalk awnings, so characteristic of the real western town, remained to offer citizens protection from summer sun and winter and spring rains. The residential sections are branching out from the center of town, and I found two new subdivisions, Verde Heights and Pueblo Gardens, which offer sweeping valley views for the new resident.

Perhaps Cottonwood is most widely known for the Marcus Lawrence Memorial Hospital, the "little Mayo of the West" which draws its patients not only from the entire state of Arizona but from much of the Southwest. Here is a hospital with modern equipment and doctors of high reputation: yet the Lawrence Hospital staff radiates a friendly and personal interest that is a reflection of the spirit of the Valley residents themselves.

Yes, Cottonwood still retains its genuine western atmosphere and hospitality, and has no need of the synthetic artsy-craftiness and sham heartiness some communities use to give this impression. On Saturdays the Valley ranchers and their families come in to load their trucks and cars with the week's supplies and the young cowboys show up, as they did in my youth, with their weekly or monthly pay which still has a way of disappearing all too quickly during easy hours along the main street. Prospectors and "desert rats" are familiar figures, along with the dudes who help to load supplies into the station wagons from Beaver Creek, Rimrock, Soda Springs, and Spring Creek guest ranches.

Seemingly untouched by it all, Paris Webb, the town marshal adds his bit of authentic western color as he patrols the streets at night, when the many-colored neonlights proclaim that Cottonwood is still alive, and later when the streets are dark, tries the doors of business houses, his six-shooter in readiness on his hip.

Yes, while the town of my birth recognizes progress as all must do, and tries to take of it what is necessary and good, Cottonwood remains such a "natural" that movie producers have more than once used its streets as background for the old gun-play "westerns."

A visiting teacher from Iran, Miss Fakhry Sheibany, spent six weeks in the Verde Valley last spring and, regretfully leaving, expressed herself thus by letter to the local paper: "I was a stranger and ye took me in. I have traveled thousands of miles, but I say in all honesty and sincerity that I have never been the recipient of so much kindness, so many evidences of hospitality as I have experienced while in the Verde Valley-It is with sadness that I leave that behind me lies the beauty of the State of Arizona and of the Verde Valley. I take with me beautiful memories of what I enjoyed in friendly associations and many kindnesses."

Had she known it, Miss Sheibany was speaking not only for those who have remained a while in the Verde Valley and then gone on, but for one who was born there and at last returned with opened eyes. I know of many men who have been disappointed and dismayed by a return to their boyhood home, to have their memories shattered by reality. I count myself fortunate indeed to have been able to discover fresh beauties in my little green valley, to have found its charms unspoiled and undiminished.

I'm glad I went back to the Verde Valley.

Verde Valley Climate

by Louis R. Jurwitz Between the towering peaks of Mingus Mountain, reaching 7720 feet at its highest point, and the high ramparts of the Mogollon Plateau stretching from Turkey Butte (7304 feet high) to Buck Mountain close to 7000 feet high, we find sheltered lower hills sloping to the valley floor through which the Verde River winds its way southward toward the desert regions of southern Arizona. Much of the Verde Valley floor lies at the 3000 to 4000 foot level. This assures a delightful climate, when compared to the low desert regions in summer and the high plateau winter weather.

Cottonwood, located close to the center of Verde Valley at an elevation of 3320 feet, only experiences an average of 1.7 inches of snow during the winter months. January with 1.2 inches accounts for most of the average annual total snowfall. With an average daily maximum temperature of 57.1 degrees in January, we can readily understand why snow does not remain on the ground much longer than a day or two. The lowest daily average temperature of the year occurs in January also, and stands just a little under the freezing line at 30.6 degrees.

Summer temperatures climb to fairly high levels as warm air currents move into the Valley. Highest average daily maximum temperatures occur during July in Cottonwood with a value of 98.2 degrees. Nights cool off considerably as the average daily minimum temperature for July stands at 68.9 degrees. Cornville, a short distance to the southeast of Cottonwood has temperatures which average three or four degrees cooler than those mentioned for Cottonwood. This is true both during winter as well as summer months and is doubtlessly due to air drainage off the high Mogollon Plateau to the east.

Montezuma Castle National Monument at an elevation of 3180 feet is located a short distance to the north of Camp Verde, one of the earliest settlements of white man in the region. It is interesting to speculate about the "ancient ones" who constructed their "apartment houses" on west Beaver Creek, about sixteen miles from its juncture with the Verde River and about twenty miles from the present town of Camp Verde. Weather records at Montezuma Castle National Monument divulge one reason perhaps, for the choice of site. With an average annual temperature of 60.6 degrees we see a range from an average daily low temperature in January of 24.9 degrees to July's average daily high temperature of 100.7 degrees (doubtlessly one reason for constructing walls which average from twelve to as much as twenty-four inches in thickness). Winter's warming sun makes up for early morning chill temperatures. January's average daily high temperatures climb to 58.6 degrees. While the dry invigorating air, even in July when high temperatures are near the century mark, allows rapid cooling after sunset which results in an average daily July low temperature of 62.7 degrees at "The Castle."

High on the slopes of Mingus Mountain to the west of Cottonwood we find the famous "Ghost Town" of Jerome. Perched on the steep mountain side at an elevation of 5250 feet, this once fabulously rich mining town enjoys a remarkably pleasant climate. Highest average daily temperature is 90.6 degrees in July with average daily low temperatures standing at 66.1 degrees. January sees the average range from a daily high of 51.1 to a low of 32.5 degrees. The steep mountain side location does not permit much cold air "pool-up" in this area, hence the relatively warm winter minimum temperatures.

Rainfall over the Verde Valley area ranges from 18.16 inches at Jerome high on the slopes of the mountain on the west side of the Valley to 11.12 inches at Cottonwood. Other average annual precipitation values on the floor of the valley include Cornville with 12.23 inches and Camp Verde with 13.12 inches. A two season rainfall regime brings about one-half of the annual precipitation between December and March with the remainder concentrated to a great extent around the two summer months of July and August when thunderstorms visit the mountain areas of central Arizona. The growing season in the Verde Valley area averages about 231 days in length. The valley can expect its first killing frost in the Autumn around October 3rd. The last heavy to killing frosts in the Spring occur around the 21st of April. United States Weatherer Bureau records indicate that the sun shines about 73 per cent of the possible number of hours in Verde Valley. December, on the average, experiences the lowest amount of sunshine with 63 per cent of possible while June is highest with 86 per cent of possible sunshine. Annual relative humidity values in the Cottonwood-Clemenceau area average 56 per cent at 6:00 a.m. and 39 per cent at 6:00 p.m.

It is small wonder that the "ancient ones" chose many sections of the Verde Valley area for their home. The climate is one that does not "fight" mankind. With plentiful water, they doubtlessly found the region a pleasant one in which to live! One is led to wonder why they left. Now we find the valley again populated by folks that enjoy the same invigorating climate that the "ancient ones" did in the place they called home the Verde Valley!