The Big Sandy

BIG SANDY

Travelers who see the Big Sandy Valley for the first time often have a religious experience. “Lord,” they say, “please don’t let my car break down here.” Long, narrow, looking dry as a bone, and 50 miles from anywhere, the valley appears harsh and unforgiving. My family owned a farm in the Big Sandy Valley for more than 20 years. Since then, I have come to realize that, for most visitors, the austere beauty of this spot in westcentral Arizona is elusive and will remain so, unless they get out of their cars long enough to allow the solitude to seep inward like river water into sand. The valley's namesake, the Big Sandy River, a thin blue doodle of a line on the map, runs north-south, parallel to U.S. Route 93 between the Hualapai and Aquarius mountain ranges, in Mohave County.

We started this business about 25 years ago, Luchia says. 'And we've built it piece by piece.' [PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 6] The gritty dry riverbed of the Big Sandy River begins in the Aquarius Mountains northeast of Wikieup.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 7] Buddy Kenworthy, seated at right, founded the truckstop known as Nothing, Arizona, in 1977. About 30 miles east of Wikieup, Nothing boasts a population of 4.

[ABOVE] Myron Storing - shown here with his wife, Luchia, says he's never found any place he loves as much as the Big Sandy Valley.

Like the Mexican primrose that flourishes within a granite crack where nothing else will, paradise is often where deep roots abide. Myron Storing has deep roots in the Big Sandy Valley. "I've traveled the world, but I've never found any place I love as much as this valley," Storing says while sitting with his wife, Luchia, in their restaurant and gift shop on the west side of the highway north of Wikieup. An apple pie bakes in the kitchen. Authentic Southwestern Indian jewelry and Peruvian gem-carvings glitter in brightly lit display cases. Out back, peacocks preen on the lawn beneath the shade trees near the Koi pond. "Oasis" comes to mind. Storing's grandparents moved here in 1945. He visited them often as a young boy, and dreamed of someday coming back to the valley to make it his home. Storing met Luchia in Peru while on assignment to fly over the jungles there looking for oil. A gemologist as well as a pilot, he saw in the turquoise boom of the 1970s an opportunity to realize his dream. "We started this business about 25 years ago," Luchia says. "And we've built it piece by piece."

The valley the Storings love begins where the Big Sandy River does, at the confluence of Knight Creek and Trout Creek. The Big Sandy flows south, creating a rare and valuable riparian habitat. Its banks grow thick with tamarisks and mesquites, garnished with ancient cottonwoods where turkey vultures watch cattle graze. It flows beside scattered farms, through the little town of Wikieup, population 300, and under U.S. Route 93, at the Big Sandy River bridge.

BIG SANDY VALLEY

To the east, Burro Creek flows southwest out of the Aquarius Mountains through steep basaltic canyons, and far beneath the highway at the Burro Creek Bridge. Farther downstream, Burro Creek meanders into the Sandy; together, they join the Santa Maria River to form Alamo Lake on the Bill Williams River at the southern border of Mohave County.

Crossing the Big Sandy River bridge south of Wikieup, it's easy to see how the stream got its name. The low bridge stretches almost a thousand feet, yet, most of the time, the water it spans is barely a trickle in a sea of sand, hardly qualifying as a river, even with Arizona's generous defini-tion of the term.

If there's been a wet winter in the high country, though, the river will flood in spring, filling up bank to bank; then every inch of that bridge is needed. Thick with silt, brush and uprooted cottonwoods when it is up and running wild, the Sandy capriciously cuts new channels with unstoppable power. Grainy banks crumple like brown sugar, and the few scattered intersections of dirt road and riverusually hubcap-deep and crossed with a soothing gurgle are wiped away.

Nobody on either side of the river can cross it again for weeks. Sometimes short messages are scratched into the damp roadbed, such as "try again next week," or "back tomorrow." Once, I left the clearest possible warning against crossing the river at high water by getting my father's bright-orange jeep stuck up to its axles in midstream.

While there is some water in the river year-round, a walk along the bank reveals places where the current narrows and slips to a slow dribble, then disappears into the sand. Walk a little farther and the river appears again, first seeping, then trickling, then flowing.

Hydrologists estimate that the aquifer under the valley may be one of the largest natural reservoirs in the Southwest. The wells drilled along the valley near the river often hit water at just 20 feet. My father used to say the Big Sandy River was "too thick to drink and too thin to plow."

The steep sedimentary bluffs visible from the highway are deposits from a lake formed 5 million years ago, before the downcutting that created the Grand Canyon began, when tributaries of the Colorado River filled the valley. Ranchers call those clay cliffs the "Natural Corrals," referring to a time not so long ago when they used them during spring roundups to help contain their herds.

When our father died, my brother made his funeral urn from the clay in those cliffs.

From the Natural Corrals, the local ranchers made a five-day cattle drive to move the herd to railroad shipping pens approximately 50 miles to the north in Hackberry, on historic Route 66.

Valley ranchers continued the drives until the Second World War when trucks replaced cowboys on horseback.

Gradually over the millennia, once-abundant surface water receded. While windmills still spin in the valley, pulling groundwater into tanks for livestock to drink, electric pumps are needed now to bring water up for irrigation. The expense of operating electric pumps has curtailed most agricultural activity. At the valley's agricultural peak, however, farmers had almost 2,000 acres under cultivation, growing everything from alfalfa and corn for their cattle and wheat for chicken feed, to vegetables and fruits for canning. Today many of those farms are abandoned, owned by a mining company that bought them for the rights to their water.

BIG SANDY VALLEY

Mineral strikes brought miners to Mohave County, and by 1880 there were 2,000-plus mining claims throughout the area, producing gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead and tungsten. Along the Big Sandy, farming and ranching to feed the miners thrived. So did the Stephens family.

Leonard Stephens is 80 years old and still lives on the Sandy. His family was one of the first to settle in the valley. The farmhouse he was raised in is under consideration by the Bureau of Land Management for restoration and preservation as an example of early settlement in the valley. Hunched behind a hill below U.S. 93 about 12 miles north of Wikieup, the old house sags under the weight of its history.

"Remember that little tree I showed you in the photograph?" Stephens asks, stooping to hold his palm flat at knee level. "It was planted in 1939." He points into the sun where the narrow tip of a towering, slender juniper disappears in the pale blue sky some 50 feet above the house. "That's the little fella now."

We walk and talk. "When I was a kid," he says, "I didn't have any worries. I had plenty to eat. What's a kid got to worry about?"

We return to his truck and lean against it for a moment. It's quiet. He's been trying to give me a sense of the history of this place and his abiding affection for it, and I have been trying to [LEFT] Darrell Briles discovered the Big Sandy in 1981 while hauling hay and feed to the horse-racing community in Phoenix. Three years ago, he retired from ranching in Montana to open Big Sandy Feed & Western Wear.

understand. I can almost see the bustling farmyard he's been telling me about.

We shake hands and part. My truck rattles along an old road back to the pavement.

Until the late '50s, the road through the valley was unpaved. A trip between Phoenix and Kingman on a paved road went through Ash Fork and Prescott, a 240-mile trip. The dirt road locals used through the valley crossed the Sandy in Wikieup. When the river ran high, it was not uncommon to see a team of horses pulling a stuck vehicle across it. Prudent travelers to Phoenix packed several day's worth of provisions. "If you broke down," Myron Storing says back at Luchia's, "it might be a week before somebody else came by."

Wikieup, the capital city of the valley, is as small as it appears. People go elsewhere if they need a bank or a haircut. Still, while other towns came and went with the booms and busts of mining, as transient as the brush Indian shelters that gave the town its name, Wikieup endures.

Familiar to those who travel through the area, the Wikieup Trading Post has had a facelift and added a convenience store. But with its gas pumps, clean rest rooms and comfortable cafe, it's still the same refuge it has been since the early '40s. Just up the road is that benchmark of civilization in the rural West the post office. Joyce House has been postmaster in Wikieup for six years. She greets her customers as if they are friends, which most of them are.

"I love it here because it's so peaceful and quiet," she says. A steady stream of people arrive and leave. "I have 230 boxes rented," House says. "About 400 people get their mail here."

It has been a good day poking about, but I have one more stop:

BIG SANDY VALLEY

The Coyote Canyon Country Club, a free nine-hole golf course on Country Club Avenue, where a sign on the gate reads “Course open. Cattle on course. Keep gate closed.” Forrest Purdy and his wife, Jan, retired to Wikieup 13 years ago and built the course because they love the game. He nods toward a half dozen cows grazLooking on the driving range and says, “That's my grounds crew. It's a cowboy course. Rough. It's a place to hit balls.” A few years ago, a flood took out three holes but, Purdy says, “People still come out and play.” On the ridge of the Aquarius Mountains across the river, a silhouette of Sleeping Beauty turns pink. It will be getting dark soon. The Milky Way will spill from the teapot of Sagittarius. Across the black valley, scattered lights will glow like stars in a sparse constellation. Nighthawks will swoop through the electric light, feeding on the insects beating against the glass bulbs.

The next time you drive up Wikieup way in the Big Sandy Valley, slow down; or better yet, stop. Hit a few balls, have a picnic down by the river, or Sunday brunch at Luchia's.

You'll be glad you did. AH