BACK ROAD ADVENTURE

back road adventure Tortilla Mountains' Ghosts Dream in the Winter Sun along Barkerville Road

Patricia Haydon, 80, took me for a trespasser and, as the evidence will show, she was right. But I didn't know I was camped on her ranch land, honest, and after she heard my explanation she invited me in for tea. Then, while her watchdogs sniffed at the door, she told me about the past, when Barkerville was a place and not just a memory.

The night before, after driving 35 miles into the Tortilla Mountain foothills, I camped beside the dirt road where the map said Barkerville ought to be at the base of Cottonwood Hill. Not only was there no town, there weren't any cottonwoods, either, or signs warning of private property.

So I pitched my tent at sundown while a great horned owl watched from an acacia perch. Two coyotes yipped nearby, reminding me to hide the food.

The lights of Phoenix and Tucson, 110 miles apart and both many miles from me, glowed like galaxies in the blackness of night.

The next morning I drifted over to Haydon's.

"The way you drove up, slowlike, you looked like someone who's been run off private property before," Haydon surmised as she boiled tea water.

As a young newspaper reporter, I'd been shown the door a few times. I wondered if it showed.

As for those posted signs, if they weren't up where I camped, they soon would be, she assured. My campsite was on a corner of Haydon Ranch, she said, on 640 acres her dad homesteaded in 1897.

Michael Cox, 28, of Superior, a radio frequency technician, whom Haydon had run off her place, said Pat Haydon was pretty crusty. "She's an interesting ole gal," he added.

So there I sat, in a singlewide mobile home across the kitchen table from a woman who'd lived her entire life in the middle of the high desert between Florence and Oracle Junction in central Arizona. I gathered she'd run off dozens of trespassers, and her ardor for the chase hadn't dampened.

City folks, hunters, developers, even a few lawyers had come around. Most kept on going, but more each year were settling, she said, not realizing the land was ornery and drought-prone.

It was country I knew from quail hunting. Land cooked by summer and often gasping for water, which leaves soon after it arrives, which isn't often.

An early explorer who in 1872 gave the name "Tortilla" to the low, featureless mounhow unexceptional the heights were. Less than mountains, more like hills, the Tortillas rise gradually to form a brow overlooking the San Pedro River valley.

In wet years, the slopes bloom with poppy yellows, cactus purples, and daisy whites. And if you're on the lookout, you can see deer, quail, coyotes, maybe even a mountain lion.

I began my journey to Pat Haydon's tea a mile south of Florence, where a turnoff leaves

State Route 79 for the FlorenceKelvin Road through a paloverde and saguaro cactus forest. At 14.2 miles, I turned south on Barkerville Road, through Cottonwood Wash, on a packeddirt highway between privateposted land on the south and Bureau of Land Management land on the north. Three years of drought had left the land shrunken looking. It would take a spring rain to draw out the wildflowers.

A large mule deer doe almost crashed into my pickup as she bolted across the road and bounded over the wire onto private land. A two-point buck followed her. They were fat and in prime condition, and I knew there must be water near.

My reasoning was confirmed by Cox who, with his girlfriend, Debbie Rodman, 30, and friend Glen Anglin, 37, of Phoenix, a microwave engineer, had a hunting camp in Lambing Camp Wash beside Barkerville Road a mile farther. The nights had been cold enough, they reported, for ice to form on their water.

There were water holes and cattle tanks in the desert, they said, frequented by migrating ducks.

Barkerville Road continued broad and smooth. Saguaros gave way to catclaw acacia trees, and the paloverde petered out as the land grew tougher. The road crosses a buried pipeline at 28.1 miles. A maintenance road which you don't take - heads northeast. That knob directly ahead is Cottonwood Hill. By staying right, at 30.4 miles you arrive at the site of Barkerville, 4,000 feet elevation.

The north side of the road includes Haydon ranch land, and if Pat Haydon catches you there, she'll run you off. The other side, extending beyond an acre-size water hole, also is private land.

Once the spot was owned by the Barker family. Ruth Barker operated a one-room store and post office there between 1924 and 1933, when a motor stage still ran between Tucson and Florence. Long ago there was a small schoolhouse. A concrete cistern "is all that's left of the school," Haydon said. "I went to school there. We had all eight classes. There were eight to 20 kids. In that day, there were quite a lot of cowboys, and they all had a houseful of children."

Many children still live on ranches in the Tortillas. That's why the county maintains Barkerville Road so well, so they can be bused to schools in Winkelman and Superior, Haydon said.

From the Barkerville site, the route becomes Willow Springs Road and runs south for 21.4 miles through acacia, yucca, and prickly pear country and places like Blood Sucker Wash.

Suddenly a vista overlooks miles of desert and a mansion oasis called "The Big House," headquarters of rancher Frank Natros.

From there the land tumbles quickly to its junction with State Route 77. From that point to Florence is 52 miles through plenty of public land. But watch for signs that say "Private." Pat Haydon won't invite the next trespasser to tea.

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