Back Road Adventure

BACK ROAD ADVENTURE The Twisting Trail to Tip Top's Ghost Isn't Always Where Maps Say It Is

The advance word on Tip Top was this: there's not much left of the onetime mining town in Yavapai County, except for the cemetery.That isn't strictly true. At least it wasn't for us. We found remnants of stone dwellings, a concrete building which served a purpose unknown to us, and some old stone fences. We, and some half-dozen other backroad adventurers exploring the southern reaches of the Bradshaw Mountains, also found Some jagged hillsides never viewed by sightseers willing to restrict their travel to paved roads. What we never found was the Tip Top Cemetery.

A word of caution. Don't limit your advance planning to the data found on USGS topographic maps. Some are outdated, and backcountry roads aren't always where the maps tell you they are. Flooding changes the terrain; roads can become trails, and trails have a way of petering out.

We left Interstate 17 at Exit 236, marked Table Mesa Road, doubling back northward be-fore swinging west toward the Agua Fria River. On every out-ing, there's at least one wrong turn. We made ours only two-and-a-half miles off the luxury of the freeway's paved surface. At the fork where we made a bad choice, a sign points north to the New River Sand & Grav-el pit. Trusting our map, we took the west (left) fork. Near the Agua Fria ford, we encoun-tered dozens of parked pick-ups, RVs, and horse trailers - base camp for an outing of the Verde Vaqueros, we were told. We also discovered that the road runs into private property of the Boulder Creek Ranch. That meant backtracking about three-and-three-fourths miles to the fork and taking the route to the gravel pit. About .7 of a mile beyond the fork, the road branches again, and a sign points left to the pit. Go right there.Just over two twisting miles from the second fork, general-ly northward, we forded the Agua Fria near the ghost town of Gillette, built as the mill town for Tip Top's rich ore. At the "T" junction atop the hill on the west side of the river, turn right. From that point on, our map told us, we were on a "jeep trail," nothing as grand as the tortuous, bone-jarring "unimproved" road we'd been following.

For a while, the trail roughly followed Cottonwood Gulch. At one crossing, we saw a pair of large concrete culvert sections, pockmarked by recreational shooters, perhaps hunters frus-trated by the absence of game. A cactus wren swooped by to say "Howdy," the first real sign of wildlife we'd seen.

But for the existence of our road, rough enough going at times to slow us to a crawl, it would have been easy to be-lieve we were the first intruders to come this way. There were occasional reminders, though, that we were following what many others mostly miners and cowmen laid down ahead of us. About three-and-one-quarter miles after crossing the Agua Fria, we came to a corral. Three pickups were