Another fisheye view.
I shot this closeup photo of the cable for the old mine hoist at Monte Cristo Mine near Wickenburg, AZ.
The Monte Cristo is one of two relatively well-preserved mine sites on Constellation Road. This cable can be found in the hoist building beside the mine’s tower.
Photo Info:
Camera: Nikon D80
Focal Length: 10.5mm
Aperture: f/4.0
Shutter Speed: 1/60
Lat/Lon:
34.0646° / -112.5836°
Covering more miles of dirt and desert.
Yesterday, Jack the Dog and I took my Jeep out on Constellation Road. It’s a dirt road that winds into the desert northeast of Wickenburg, past numerous mining sites. It was named for the town of Constellation, which is on many maps. But I’d driven and flown the area extensively and cannot find a trace of the town where it is supposed to be.
PhotoJeeping is like photowalking, but done in a Jeep. Sure, you get out and do some hiking now and then, but most transportation is by Jeep or other 4WD vehicle. I covered 40 miles yesterday, roundtrip, in about five hours. I made stops at a number of mining sites and more than a few “scenic” areas near the road. And, for the first time ever, I drove all the way out to the Williams Family Ranch on the Hassayampa River.
Along the way, I took plenty of photos — more than 150, in fact — and a bit of video.
This is one of the last photos I took on the way back. The light was getting good but I was exhausted. I really didn’t think I’d get back as quick as I did, but wasn’t interesting in hanging around for the light to get even better. This spot is about 8 miles out of Wickenburg, right at the beginning of the hills.
Photo Info:
Camera: Nikon D80
Focal Length: 35mm
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/160
Lat/Lon: 43.04841° / -112.6031767°
Jack the Dog is bored and confused.
One of the things that’s new about my life this year is our place in Phoenix, nicknamed “Rear Window.” You can read more about it here.
When Mike and I go to Rear Window, we bring along Alex the Bird and Jack the Dog.
Alex is easy. We set up his old cage in the living room by the window, stocked it with toys and food, and let him do his thing. He’s not particularly happy to be here — he likes his cage at home better, even though it’s smaller — and he doesn’t seem to want to come out of his cage in the strange surroundings. But at least he does his bird thing and doesn’t seem distressed.
Jack is another story. At home in Wickenburg, he spends most of the day outside, loose. He hangs out on the back patio to watch the cars and trucks coming down the road so he knows when a strange vehicle needs barking at. (We’re at the end of the road and there are only three houses down here, so any strange vehicle qualifies.) He stretches out in the yard to soak up some sun while napping. He patrols the yard for mice or rabbits or, in warmer weather, lizards, and chases them accordingly. Once in a while, his friend, Charlotte, from the house across the wash, comes over and they chase each other for a while. When the weather is good, he often spends the whole day outside, on his own, to do whatever he likes. He never does anything that bothers us or our neighbors. He rarely leaves the property. And, of course, we take him with us for more off-leash fun on hikes all over Arizona.
It’s an idyllic life for a dog.
But in Phoenix, things are different. The apartment is in a complex where people come and go. He can’t see them, but he can hear their noises and he wants to bark. But we need to keep him quiet because we don’t want to annoy our neighbors, so we’re shushing him all the time. Rear Window has two patios, but they’re both too small for him to get any pleasure out of them — and certainly too small for him to do his business, even though they both have untiled dirt patches. Because he’s rarely on a leash at home, his leash skills are very limited. He also doesn’t like to do his business on a leash. In fact, the only way we can get him to do #2 is to let him loose.
Needless to say, this is quite a challenge for all of us. I feel bad for him because I can tell that he’s bored silly in the apartment, even with toys to play with. And I feel bad for all of us because this walking on a leash thing is a real pain in the ass.
And it makes me wonder why people in cities bother having dogs at all.
Anyway, I got a lead on a dog park about 2 miles from here. I figured I’d take him out and give it a try. It might be within walking distance — I have to drive it once to see. I’d hate to walk all the way out there to see a No Dogs sign.
One more thing I need to mention here…one reason there are so many No Dogs signs in parks is because so many people fail to clean up after their dogs. What’s the big deal here? Bring along a plastic grocery bag. When the dog does his business, use the bag to pick it up and seal it. Then drop it in the nearest garbage bin. If everyone did this, we wouldn’t have a need for so many No Dogs signs.
We become part-time city dwellers.
The situation was absurd.
Mike was driving 70 miles each way from Wickenburg to Tempe for work every weekday. He was spending more time in the car than doing the things that make life worth living.
I was trying to operate a helicopter charter business in a town where the retiree population was far more interested in making day trips to WalMart than spending money on something new and different. All my business was in Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Glendale, making me wonder why I’d even bothered getting a Wickenburg business permit.
We were both trapped in a town with an ever-aging population, few shopping and dining opportunities, and an economy based on real estate and property taxes. There were few good-paying jobs and more than half of the new businesses failed. All of our friends in our age group had already moved out of town to places like Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and even Michigan. Our remaining retiree friends weren’t usually interested in activities like camping, off-roading, hiking, or weekend trips by plane or helicopter.
I was miserable, starved for input simply not available in Wickenburg. At least Mike got out of town every weekday, where he could socialize with younger, more liberally minded people and enjoy lunch out with a wide variety of ethnic options.
So when the housing crisis sent house values in Phoenix down 30% in one year, Mike acted. He bought a two bedroom, two bath condo in Phoenix.
We moved a bunch of stuff down to the condo on Tuesday, including a futon, Alex the Bird’s old cage, our old bedroom furniture, and a brand new leather sofa we’d bought at Macy’s. My brother and his wife were still in town and they helped out. They were also the first people to sleep on the new sofabed, since we all stayed over on Tuesday night. The new bed arrives January 14. We’ll bring the futon back home when it arrives.
I spent Wednesday shopping for the things we needed to make the condo a home — mostly kitchen and bathroom stuff. Then I came back to the apartment and began cleaning the kitchen. I soon found that the insides of the cabinets needed more than just soap and water. Soon I was giving them a fresh coat of white semi-gloss paint.
The apartment is part of a large complex of two-story buildings set around grassy, tree-shaded courtyards. It was built in 1965 and the cabinets and closets and bathtubs clearly date back to that time. The cabinets have new doors and drawer fronts and the kitchen is fully modernized with a huge refrigerator, gas stove, and dishwasher. It’s a small kitchen with limited counter space, but there’s plenty of cabinet and drawer space. I don’t expect to do much cooking here, especially with so many restaurants nearby.
Our place has two bedrooms, each with two full baths. The master bedroom has a walk-through closet big enough to satisfy any clothes horse — so big, in fact, that we put my long dresser inside the closet. There’s a big living room/dining room area with a gas fireplace and a wall big enough for the flat screen television Mike keeps talking about. There are two patios, one accessible from the living room and second bedroom and the other accessible from both bedrooms. (Yes, the second bedroom sits between two patios.) Each patio is surrounded by a 5-foot block wall with a gate to the courtyard.
The apartment complex is on Highland Avenue, between 22nd and 24th Streets. That’s part of the “Biltmore” area of Phoenix, although it might officially be just south. It doesn’t matter. We are walking distance from a Trader Joe’s, a Fry’s supermarket, the Apple Store in the Biltmore Fashion Park (which also features Macy’s and Saks), two bookstores, and dozens of restaurants. If Wickenburg is a desert island, our new part-time home in Phoenix is in the port city.
Yes, I did say “part-time.” We have no intention of living here full-time — at least not yet. Like at least two other friends of ours, we’ve decided to maintain a home for work and a home for play. We’ll still be in Wickenburg part of each week. The rest of the time, we’ll be in Phoenix.
You see, despite Wickenburg’s shortcomings and the direction that the town’s former administration pushed the town in — real estate growth above all else, including business or job growth — it still has a few things you can’t get in a big city:
Dark skies.
At night, it gets very dark around our Wickenburg home. We’re on the edge of town and few of our neighbors believe in those ridiculous accent lights on their homes and trees. We see the Milky Way every clear night — which is just about every night in Arizona. At the Phoenix condo, there are parking lot lights and pathway lights and the general glow of the city all around. You can see some stars — after all, this part of Phoenix isn’t nearly as bright at night as Los Angeles or New York — but stargazing is not an option.
Peace and quiet.
Because we live on the edge of town in Wickenburg, at the very end of a road, there’s no traffic noise. Because we have 2-1/2 acres of land, we have no neighbor noise. Sure, there’s an occasional barking dog, but we’re more likely to hear coyotes howling at night. And yes, if the wind is blowing just right, we can hear the occasional loud motorcycle or truck air brake from Wickenburg Way or Vulture Mine Road. And, during the spring and fall months, when windows are open at night, we do hear the garbage collector making her 4 AM rounds. At the Phoenix condo, however, there’s a bit more noise. Outside on the patio, you can clearly hear the sound of traffic passing by on Highland, 100 yards away. Police helicopters fly by once in a while, mostly at night. There are more neighbors with more dogs and we can occasionally hear them. Don’t get me wrong — the Phoenix condo isn’t what I’d call loud. But it’s not as quiet as the peaceful quiet in Wickenburg or the absolute dead silence at our Howard Mesa property.
Privacy.
Having 2-1/2 acres of hillside land helps keep neighbors away from your windows. Indeed, in Wickenburg we rarely bother closing blinds or curtains. We have absolute privacy, which is the primary reason we purchased a home that wasn’t in a subdivision. (Who the hell really wants neighbors that close?) At our Phoenix condo, however, privacy is simply not available. Our windows — all of which are actually full-wall sliding glass doors — look out into our patios. Beyond the 5-foot walls is the courtyard. Beyond that is another two-story building looking out our way. Ever see the movie Rear Window? That’s my nickname for this place. No, it’s not quite that bad, but that’s the idea.
Is all the shopping, dining, and convenience of a Phoenix home really worth sacrificing these things for a few days each week?
You bet they are.
Not as bad as it seems.
As I type this, I’m sitting on a leather sofa in the second floor “pilot lounge” area of a friend’s hangar. The hangar is at a San Diego-area airport and the three large windows on this side of the room face out over one of the airport’s three runways. Outside it’s dark. From undefined glow of the lights across the runway that fade into the darkness, I can tell that it’s foggy. I can barely see the sweep of the white and green rotating beacon atop the control tower on the other side of the runway.
It’s 5 AM local time. I get up early no matter where I am.
If I look down out the closest window to the pavement outside the hangar, I can see my helicopter. I tied down the blades — needlessly, it appears; there doesn’t seem to be any wind here — and pushed it over to a level spot on the ramp area, clear of the taxiway. Seems weird to have it parked there, but it’s been there two nights now and no one has bugged me about it. After all, other folks park cars and other vehicles in the same place at the end of their hangars.
In looking at that fog, I’m sure I’ll be wiping the helicopter down with a towel later today. You get spoiled living in the desert.
You might wonder why I don’t put the helicopter in the hangar I’m camped out above. I could. But there’s already a Hughes 500c helicopter, a Diamondstar airplane, Jaguar sedan, and a GT40 sports car in there. There’s still a big empty space where the hangar’s third aircraft occupant usually parks his Twinstar and I probably could have fit in that space. But it didn’t seem worth the bother. A few days out on the sun won’t kill my helicopter. But with this salt-laden fog coming in, I’ll definitely be washing down the helicopter before I put it away at home later on today.
It’s wonderfully quiet here, with just some white noise — a distant hum that could be someone’s heat pump or even a generator. The heat inside the lounge, which just went on, is a lot noisier. The space I’m in takes up half the depth and the full width of the hangar below me. It’s completely enclosed and insulated, finished with nice plaster walls and carpeting. There are windows that open with screens on all four sides of the space; on one side, they open into the hangar’s main area.
There are three rooms up here, including a full bathroom, and one of the rooms has a little kitchen area, with certain conveniences conspicuously missing. There’s no stove or oven or dishwasher, but there’s a double sink and microwave and the small refrigerator has an ice maker in it. There isn’t much in the way of food in the cabinets other than coffee and the non-perishable condiments that go with it. But there’s a Starbucks off-airport, walking distance away, and I know the owner of this hangar frequently drives across the runway in his well-equiped golf cart to get his meals at the airport restaurant.
In all honestly, the second floor of this hangar is very museum-like. My friends collect Mexican, South American, and Native American art. Although their best and most valuable pieces are in their two other homes, there’s a lot of it here. There’s also a lot of weird items you’d expect to find in a museum: a copper diving mask, pull-down wall maps dating from the 1950s and 1960s, a fully restored glass-tanked fuel pump, an old Coke machine that takes dimes (with a small bowl of dimes on top and bottles of Corona beer inside), two free-standing and fully restored wood popcorn machines — the list goes on and on. Sometimes it’s neat just to look at these things. But when you pop a dime into the Coke machine and pull out a Corona, you remember that all of these things are still fully functional.
I’d take a picture and include it here, but I really think that would be a serious invasion of my friend’s privacy.
My friend is not here, although his helicopter is. He used to spend a lot of time here when the place was first built. He and his wife had lived in Wickenburg before then. His wife fell out of love with the town when the Good Old Boy bullshit that makes Wickenburg what it is started directly affecting her. From that point on, it was just weeks before she was desperate to get out of town and continue life elsewhere. She started spending more and more time in California with her daughter and less and less time at home with her husband. The hangar was a temporary solution, followed by an apartment on the coast and then a condo in Beverly Hills with a second apartment in Las Vegas. They spend most of their time in those places now, although my friend uses the hangar as a kind of getaway place when he has a few days off and wants to go flying. They still own their home in Wickenburg and have tried three Realtors in the past two years to sell it. But there isn’t much demand for a $1 million home in Wickenburg these days, even when it has a separate guest house, hangar and helipad, horse setup and plenty of acreage around it for privacy.
They want us to buy it, of course, but I’m not prepared to go into debt to buy a home and I’m certainly not going to sink myself any deeper into Wickenburg.
Mike and I have been camping out here in the hangar for a few days. Supposedly, it’s against federal regulations to live on the property of a Federally-funded airport — which is why this “pilot lounge” is missing a few necessities of life, like a bed. So we’re sleeping on an air mattress. We’re not living here, of course. Just sleeping over. We have business in the area during the say and just needed a cheap place to spend the night. My friend was kind enough to let us camp out here.
It’s a wonderful place to hang out. This airport, unlike a few I could name, has a lively population of tenants in the hangars. When I went out for coffee yesterday morning, I walked by a hangar where a man was busy preflighting a Cessna in preparation for an early morning flight. He greeted me as if he knew me and we shared pleasantries about the weather: “Great day to fly.” “Sure is.”
After lunch, we decided to drop by the hangar to put our leftovers in the fridge. We were very surprised to find our big hangar door wide open. Inside, tending to the Diamondstar, were three Brits. We introduced ourselves by name and were immediately offered coffee. It later came out that we were friends of the hangar’s owner. “Oh, well then you must come by at 5 for cocktails,” the woman said. “We have such fun.” When I mentioned I was in the area working on a video project, she hurriedly took me to meet a man named Steve who is also in film. He was stretched out on a leather sofa in his modest hangar, watching a game on a big television. The TV’s rabbit ears antenna was out of the pavement beside a gas BBQ grill. Inside the hangar was the neatest and cleanest Cessna 140 that I’d ever seen.
Later, when we returned — too late for cocktails, I’m sorry to say; I could have used one — we were treated to stories of other dinner parties in the hangar’s big lower area, with unknown pilots stopping by to join in the fun. There’s a real sense of community here. It’s more than just a place to store your aircraft. It’s a place to hang out and meet people with similar interests. It’s a place to watch the world — and the planes — go by.
It’s nearly 6 AM now and I can see a tiny bit of light in the sky. The fog is still thick on the runway; the rotating beacon is now invisible. If the tower controller have come on duty, there’s not much for them to do. It’s IFC — Instrument Meteorological Conditions — here and I’d be very, very surprised if we saw or heard a plane outside until the fog lifted. But I’ll get dressed and make a run for coffee. We have more work to do today. Then, at about noon, we’ll start the 2-1/2 hour flight back to Wickenburg.
I’m looking forward to camping out here again.