Mountain Bikes, Peacocks, and Ghosts

Adventure, discovery, and healthy outdoor exercise combine in a backcountry tour of a different sort...

Arizona's back roads and sturdy, multigeared mountain bikes can be the perfect combination. (ABOVE) Road surfaces are often rough, but apres-touring accommodations (BELOW) at Sonoita's Crown C Ranch are comfortable and distinctive in their Southwestern ambience.

It was pure play on a bicycle-that ride down Hog Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains near Sonoita. We re-connoitered above the rough patches, scanning the gravelly, rock-strewn jeep trail ahead, washed out and sandy in places. We gauged where to lean right or left to adjust for the pitch of the slope, where to turn sharply to miss a log or a big rock. Then, releasing the heavy-duty cantilevered brakes, standard equipment on these mountain bicycles, we launched ourselves downhill.

Propelled by gravity, we sped down-slope, the steady syncopation of the knobby tires accompanying the wind in our ears, jolts of road shock coming up through the "bull moose" handlebars into our arms and shoulders and teeth. Some-times, on the really "cobbled" parts, we had to rise slightly on the pedals to take the shock with the big muscles of our legs. Then, whooping and laughing, we'd be on the other side, rejoicing in the freedom that comes from play with a small element of risk in it. It was like the exhilaration that comes with shooting white water in a canoe.

Four of us were on this practice rideKate McCarthy, Mary Cannon, and I, with our leader, Frank Lister. Frank owns a company that runs mountain bicycle fit-ness programs at Canyon Ranch in Tucson and at other health and fitness resorts throughout the United States. Frank has probably put more people onto the sad-dles of mountain bicycles than anyone else in the world.

We were on our way back to the Crown C Ranch to stay overnight before riding out next morning to the ghost mining towns and camps in the Patagonia Mountains. The ranch house-with its twofoot-thick double-adobe walls, beamed ceilings, massive fieldstone fireplace ablaze with chunks of mesquite, and bedroom wings extending out on both sides to enclose a walled courtyard-was a true hacienda.

Waiting at the ranch were Frank's wife, Sarah, and their three-year-old daughter, Claire. To complete our group, Juliet and Tommy Thompson, expert cyclists, would join us later that evening. Our ages ranged from three to fifty-three, and we were a real mix of abilities. Claire Lister, too young to ride alone, spent the weekend as a doughty little passenger aboard the "rumble seat" of her mom's bike. Mary Cannon, on the other hand, had ridden a bike but couldn't remember the last time. Juliet Thompson, seven months pregnant, handled the trip with ease, even the toughest parts.

In the morning, we wound south out of Patagonia and up into Harshaw Canyon on a road that has been in use for more than 200 years. Now called Harshaw Canyon Road by local residents, it bears the label Forest Service Road 58, then FS 49 in the Coronado National Forest. The Indians came through here first, followed by the Spaniards, Mexicans, then American pioneers.

It was a beautiful spring day. Prickly poppies and Parry's penstemon bloomed at roadside. Harshaw Creek sparkled in the canyon bottom, and the giant Arizona sycamores growing there were just beginning to come into pale green leaf. More than fifty mines-among them the Blue Nose, Santo Niño, Hardshell, and Pride; Black Eagle, Endless Chain, Bonanza, World's Fair, and Morning Glory; the Thunder, the Chief, the Line Boy-had pockmarked these hillsides and gulches. And the towns we were riding to had boomed-spectacularly, sometimes-on the ores gouged from those mines, and then gone bust.

We wanted to see the towns. But we wanted, also, to "detour" up the trails into some of those rugged canyons to see some of the mines up close. The tailing ponds, chutes, and junked equipment. Things you couldn't get to, normally, except on foot, on horseback, in a fourwheel-drive vehicle-or on a mountain bicycle.

"Cities and Towns, Ruined and Extinct, etc." That's the library subject heading for ghost towns. It fits Harshaw. It is hard to believe this town once stretched out for nearly a mile along the road. Doctors and lawyers practiced here. A butcher, druggist, tailor, and shoemaker set up shop. There was a boarding house, a laundry, and a livery stable. And at the more than twenty saloons in town, card sharks and prostitutes conducted a lively trade.

It was called Durazno, "peach tree" in Spanish, when David Tecumseh Harshaw came to town in the early 1870s looking for a place to begin ranching anew. What he found was a silver mine the Spanish settlers had called Mina del Padre. When Harshaw acquired the mine, he renamed it, and the town, after himself. And when the Hermosa Mining Company of New York bought out Harshaw, they renamed the mine Hermosa, Spanish for “beautiful.” Harshaw returned to ranching.

A few peach trees were in bloom when we rode through Harshaw. One grand old building with a lovely wood-columned porch and sloping tin roof still stands. Across the road, there's a very old cemetery, and farther down, just past Flux Canyon, is a ruined adobe. The rest is gone“Ruined and Extinct.” Sarah and Claire Lister rode ahead to scout out a campsite at Mowry while the rest of us detoured up into Flux Canyon. It was “granny gear” most of the way, the lowest of our fifteen gears except for push power. Some of us had to get into that ultimate “gear” when the pitch got too steep or the scree too loose for steady traction.

We found signs of mining up there. The scars. The places where the earth had been gouged and blasted; where dross lay in layers so thick that whatever lived beneath is forever smothered. Even the stink of sulphur still lingers in the air after all these years.

But a small stream, where yellow monkey-flower grows, still flows in the canyon. Clusters of sand verbena bloom on roadside embankments, and birds are everywhere. Up at the end of the road, among tall pines, we found a seep spring.

That night we camped among the oaks at Mowry. Just before the Civil War, the Mowry Mine operation produced 1.5 million dollars in silver; much of it was formed into seventy-pound bars for ship ment to European markets. We bicycled around the townsite to see what was left. The foundation and part of a wall remained of the foreman's house. It must have been the envy of the town, with its commanding view of the roadway below. Nearby, the foundation of a dance hall was barely discernible. We found the assay office up among the oaks on a hillside. Its walls were still up, but crumbling. Roofless, it wouldn't be long before the wind and rain finished it off.