BACK ROAD ADVENTURE

The Treacherous Road to Carr Canyon Reef May Overheat Your Imagination

I wanted to escape to a high place, right up under the sky, so I could sit in the sun on a flat rock and dream outlandish dreams.

This is a universal urge, to take a day away from work and the city where, for a few swiftly passing hours, everything makes perfect sense, and you are the king and conqueror of everything you survey.

Easier than it sounds. You just need a child's imagination and enough nerve to handle a mountain road that might make off with a year or two of your life.

I drove seven miles south of Sierra Vista on State Route 92 and took a right onto Carr Canyon Road. My destination was Carr Reef, named for the imposing band of sun-bleached quartzite that juts out from the eastern slope of the Huachuca Mountains.

In the early 1900s, there was a town on Carr Reef. It had its own post office and a population of about 100 miners in the employ of the Exposed Reef Mining Company. They were after gold and silver, and that made them dreamers, too.

The Reef townsite sits at 7,150 feet and is roughly 6.5 miles from the turnoff on State 92. The dirt road is steep and slow-going. In places it climbs around tight switchbacks where the drop-off is so sheer that all you can see below is the band of road you just traversed. Don't look. It'll only overheat your imagination. But don't be deterred, either. In dry weather the road is easily passable, and dangerous only if concentration lapses.

I started up the mountain on a bright spring morning and soon passed a beat-up pickup stopped in one of the pull-outs.

The driver stood beside his rusted-out ride. He had a long, thick beard and was huge, about as wide as a beer truck. His arms looked like railroad ties hanging out of his red T-shirt.

I gave him a jaunty salute, the way custom demands on remote roads. He responded with a barely perceptible nod and narrowed his eyes at me as I drove past. I had no idea what caused his evident suspicion. But I would soon find out.

The road changes on the journey to the top. It gets rougher, rutted out in spots, and rocky. Pine trees and Douglas firs begin to appear on the mountain slopes, thickening as you close in on the townsite.

At about the six-mile mark, the road runs straight and flat for a stretch, shaded on both sides by tall trees. Driving through here is like passing through a tunnel.

When the road opens again, so does the view. It runs east across the shimmering breadth of the San Pedro Valley, past a portion of Sierra Vista, and out to a minuscule dot of a camp called Tombstone.

The terrain is 30-some miles of purple and brown desert that ends at the Dragoon and Mule mountains.

The Reef townsite, now a Forest Service campground, is dotted with picnic tables and barbecue pits and is a summer favorite for the heat-weary. But this day it's a lonesome place, lacking any evidence of its hustling early days.

The first entrepreneurs came to the Reef in the late 1870s after the discovery of silver on Goose Flats led to the founding of Tombstone.

Timber was needed to build the town and fuel the steam engines used in mining operations. Dick Gird, an assayer and partner to Ed Schieffelin, Tombstone's founder, established the Reef's first sawmill, which began operations in January, 1879.

It was a busy time in the southern Huachucas, says Bill Gillespie, a Forest Service archaeologist who has done extensive research on the Reef's history.

On my way up the mountain, I had stopped at Bill's office in Sierra Vista. He talked about a period of roughly seven

(LEFT) Spiky Spanish daggers dot the old Carr Reef townsite. Founded in the 1870s, the town of Carr Reef provided timber and firewood to burgeoning nearby communities such as Tombstone.

(RIGHT) A shaded picnic table overlooks a view of Sierra Vista and the distant Dragoon Mountains.

years during which timber from the sawmill helped Tombstone became one of the largest towns in the West.

By the mid-1880s, the demand for wood had diminished as Tombstone declined. Then the Reef became a mining center. The first gold and silver claims were filed in 1893, and the first major mill for processing gold ore was started east of the townsite six years later.

Investors poured $150,000 into state-of-the-art machinery, including a stamp mill. They believed the Reef would yield a fortune.

But technical problems forced the mill to cease operations after a run of only six weeks. Still, dreams prevailed. A second mill was built in 1903, and a third in 1916.

At one point, a telephone line was strung all the way to Tombstone. It probably made life easier, but not much. Alice Walker, wife of the first Reef postmaster, described the settlement: "Camp consisted of a few tents, one log cabin known as the store, and one log cabin for us. It was primitive construction with mud filling the chinks."

Gillespie says miners kept returning to the Reef on and off until the mid-1950s. None made the strike of their dreams.

My ambitions were more modest. I sat in the stillness of the townsite, now barren of buildings, and listened to the mountain wind. Then I drove another mile up to Ramsey Vista to have a second look at the desert valley below.

I found my flat rock. It was right under Carr Peak, still covered with stubborn winter snow. Everything was perfect. I was king for a day.

As I was on my way down the mountain, I ran into my behemoth friend in the pickup. Passing his truck, I waved again, and noticed something I missed the first time. He had a bumper sticker trumpeting the GPAA - Gold Prospector's Association of America. So that's why he seemed suspicious before. He was there hunting for color and thought I might be doing the same,

TIPS FOR TRAVELERS

Back road travel can be hazardous if you are not prepared for the unexpected. Whether traveling in the desert or in the high country, be aware of weather and road conditions and make sure you and your vehicle are in top shape and you have plenty of water. Don't travel alone, and let someone at home know where you're going and when you plan to return. Odometer readings in the story may vary by vehicle.

Thorning in on the strike he's sure is coming.

I bounced down the dirt road, thinking about how nothing changes. Here it is more than a hundred years later, and we are still going to the Reef to dream.