Recreationist From East Forgets Toil and Turmoil Of City Under Spell of Arizona's Scenic Grandeur and Warm Climate

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS VOLUME V. NOVEMBER, 1929 NUMBER 11 Recreationist From East Forgets Toil and Turmoil Of City Under Spell of Arizona's Scenic Grandeur and Warm Climate

HERE is there grandeur like the painted vistas of Arizona's rocky mountains and gorges where beauty lies like the hills turned vermillion in an Arizona sunset, and where can one find peace like that of the moonlit desert with the great sahuaros standing guard and the sharp outlines of the peaks silhouetted against the stars? Such is the setting of Arizona's winter playground, where the lure of the open road furnishes exhileration and where the trails and missions of the old Spanish padres and the ruins of a forgotten race lend a dramatic atmosphere-not forgetting the remains of a colorful western frontier and the dread hand of the Apache?

Here, with the warm sun at his back, a bright mountain trail ahead of him and a good horse under him, the tired business man will soon forget the smoke in Pittsburgh and the ice and snow around his doorstep. Transported into another world, he will find himself chuckling over the reminiscences of an old pioneer or following a grizzled prospector in wonder at his knowledge of this strange country and his unfailing hope of riches just around the bend.

For the thousands of such winter visitors, Southern Arizona furnishes an infinite variety in scenery, accommodation and entertainment, but its chief appeal lies in the atmosphere of free dom from conventional life, in the rugged force of its natural beauty and in the perpetual warmth and sunshine which clothes its hills and valleys.

Luxurious hotels in and about Phoenix, Tucson, Nogales and other of the larger cities can cater to the most fastidious who prefer to make daily sightseeing tours or to exercise their golf clubs, and in the more remote sections By JULIET DAY, Arizona Industrial Congress are fine hotels and hot springs for those seeking health and quiet.

On the other hand, scores of bank presidents, railroad heads and industrial magnates from the great business centers of the country discard their "tucks" and dinner coats for a few weeks every year and bask at some of the many delightful guest ranches tucked away off the roads and against the hills. Here they spend glorious hours hiking, riding the range or being initiated into the serious business of cattle raising. Days of carefree wandering clear the mental cobwebs away and are a blessed respite from the fast pace of modern life.

Despite the enormous area of Arizona's winter resort country, a network of splendid roads brings most of its attractions within the radius of a day's journey from any of its central points. From Phoenix, for instance, located as it is, in about the center of the southern portion of the state, a few hours of easy travel will transport the tourist to Clifton and Morenci on the eastern border of the state; in the other direction to Yuma at the California side; south and east to Nogales, Douglas and Bisbee at the Mexican border, or north to the Grand Canyon.

For many visitors, Arizona's great copper industry has fascination. For them, there is the Globe-Miami district, only 65 miles from Phoenix, forming the largest copper-producing section of the state. Here, banked by walls of tailings, the great mills and furnaces of the mines and smelter tower like ancient citadels over the busy streets of the town-huge monuments to science and the energy of man, and to the grimy mucker whose toil after all, makes Arizona's copper supremacy possible. At Superior on the way to Miami, one of the newer producing properties, is flourishing in a gorgeous mountain setting of vari-colored rock, and over the hills to the south the mines at Ray and smelter at Hayden add hourly to Arizona's wealth. Southeast on the border is an older and nearly equally large copper district at Bisbee and Douglas, producing millions of pounds of the red metal every year. These and many other similar scenes of industry are responsible for making Arizona the greatest copper mining section of the United States.

More wonderful to some, and more incomprehensible, are the vast irrigation projects by which thousands of acres of desert land have been turned into farms and gardens, creating in an unbelievably short time an agricultural empire out of land where formerly only cacti and greasewood would grow. Best known, most successful of its kind in the United States, is the Salt River project, comprising around 240,000 acres of land and furnished with irrigation water and electrical energy by a series of dams in the Salt River with great Roosevelt at the head. Phoenix, the capital city of the state, is in the midst of this fertile valley-a rapidly growing business center and a city of broad, palmlined avenues and beautiful homes.

The system of dams making all this possible can be seen largely from the Apache Trail, which in itself is probably the most widely advertised scenic attraction in the state with the exception of the Grand Canyon. The loop trip to Globe over the trail and back through Superior is a thrilling experience and one never to be forgotten. Leaving the valley through fields of grain and cotton, past citrus groves and green pastures, the road follows the paths of the

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fierce Apaches up into the mountains. These warring tribes were a continual menace to the peaceful valley Indians in the days before the white men came, and were invincible because of their safe retreat in the mountain fastnesses.

Now the winding road climbs up and up, revealing startling panoramas in undulating mountain chains and shift-ing colors. Then suddenly over a ridge appears a torquoise lake, like a bril-liant gem cradled in deep colored rocks. Like a mirage it seems at first, but its shining mirror of sky and jagged rocks becomes a vivid reality as the road slopes down near the edge and at one end, through a sharp causeway, can be seen the dam which holds the water back.

Going on to Roosevelt, the road at times hugs the grim rocks on the mountain side and then circling slowly up-word, tops the peaks, only to make a sensational drop again to the shore of another lake, finally arriving at the great dam. Before this massive struc-ture one is conscious of a mighty force rivalling nature itself.

It is but a short trip from Roosevelt over to Globe and 20 miles beyond to the head of Arizona's newest irrigation project Coolidge Dam on the Gila River. In a setting equally as strik-ing as that of the older dam, this struc-ture with its distinct "architectural" ap-peal is responsible for the beginning of a new epoch in the Florence-Casa Grande Valley, where 100,000 acres will soon be irrigated by its stored waters, mak-ing added millions for Arizona farmers.

Forgetting for the moment the practical value of Arizona's artificial lakes, they furnish a delightful recreational area for the many lovers of water sports. For fishing, boating and speed races they are ideal, and they blend so strikingly into the wild rocks and hills into which they are set, it seems they must have been part of the original plan. They are exquisite gifts from the hand of man.

But that is of the modern, up-to-date Arizona, and apart from the romantic past and melodramatic atmosphere which once characterized this frontier state. Arizona is indeed the baby state, but within its borders, fastened to the side of its cliffs, bleaching on its desert and buried under ages of sand, are the remnants of a prehistoric race of whom no other records remain. Resourceful men who built canals and irrigated by gravity water inhabited the lower valleys and plenned so skillfully that some of their old lines were followed by modern engineers in laying out the irrigation systems of the Salt River and FlorenceCasa Grande valleys.

Going on south of Phoenix into the Florence-Casa Grande valley, which will in the near future be cultivated from the water stored by Coolidge dam, passing either through picturesque Florence or Casa Grande, or direct from Sacaton, one may see the Casa Grande ruins which are thought to be some of the most remarkable in existence. Remains of a number of buildings here are preserved as a national monument, and among them is a four-story structure almost intact. Here too, are the remnants of an ancient irrigation system and many archaeological prizes showing that these vanished people possessed a high degree of culture that they had a calendar based on the movements of the sun and that they grew a variety of cotton, among other things, for their use. But of where they disappeared, or of the manner of their going, they left no trace.

Cliff dwellings, too, in various parts of the state are well preserved and have produced rich finds in pottery, utensils and implements showing a high degree of practical development and a definite, vigorous art. Some of these ruins are visible from the Apache Trail between Roosevelt and Globe, and many others further north are visited by thousands who, lost in dreams of the past, delight in trying to picture that ancient civilization, their lives in these great cliff "apartment houses," and in wondering where they vanished.

For the lovers of less ancient history, there are the remains of Spanish holdings in Arizona before this part of the country was even dreamed of by the good English fathers. Probably the finest example of Spanish missions in the United States is San Xavier, a few miles south of Tucson. The city of Tucson, now the second largest in the state, is actually one of the oldest in the country. In the seventeenth century, it was a walled pueblo used for headquarters by the Spanish military, having obtained a charter from the King of Spain. It boasts a wonderful winter climate and is every year host to thousands of visitors seeking health or relief from northern blasts.

Tucson is in the Santa Cruz valley and is completely surrounded by beautiful mountain ranges, some whose sharp peaks seem to pierce the western sky and some stretching away in the distance, carrying at their heights great pines that shelter deer and lion. Delight-ful trips can be taken into the canyons, west to Ajo, a great and busy mining camp, south to Nogales on the border, picturesque and colorful with its mixture of Mexican life, and in many directions there are guest ranches where the real western atmosphere proves attractive to hordes of visitors every year. Trips into the little mountain towns, Oracle to the north and Patagonia southeast, are ever enticing, and smack of the old west which after all, is not so long ago.

On a sort of citadel south of Tucson stands San Xavier mission, overlooking the valley and giving it a benediction. In gleaming white it is a lovely shrine and a fitting monument to the courageous Spanish padres who sought to civilize the Indians and to bring some good influence into a country flocked by fortune hunters and constantly the prey of warlike Indians. Tumacacori mission, nearer Nogales, has not been kept up as has San Xavier, but is still largely intact. It too was founded by Father Kino in 1687, but had to be abandoned eventually because of disastrous Indian raids. Once the scene of a fine European settlement, the country around Tubac now has little to tell the traveler of better days.

For even later color are those sections of Arizona which were the scenes of early mining activity in the west-the west of the dime novel and the movie, where the man who was quick on the trigger was lord of all he surveyed and where blood and lust ran high in the frenzied search for easy riches. Bisbee, Clifton and other localities still show traces of those exciting times, but most picturesque perhaps is Tombstone, still a silver mining camp, but only a shadow of the town once teeming with thousands. There the Bird Cage Theater still stands, as closed and neglected as the bars nearby, all eloquent of a rough and racy past.

Merely suggestions there are, for would-be "riders of the purple sage" who have a longing to glimpse this western country so replete with memories of more picturesque days, so full of surprises in industrial progress and delights in spectacular scenery.

Back of the facts about Arizona's superb climate and scenery is something more difficult to explain but very real to any one who has spent much time in this desert land. It is said that whoever drinks of the waters of the Hassayampa will eventually return to this country to die, which is merely another way of saying that there is a fascination about