Things from simpler times

Or: what we saw inside the old store at Cordes: oodles of stuff from the 20s & 30s, including my childhood days. (You may recall that I visited the place with my lady friends last Sunday.)

The kind of skate that I rolled around on. You needed a paved surface for sure; you'd barely move on any other type of surface. Not at all like today's slick roller blades.

And who doesn't remember the mighty Wurlitzer? Even though the songs are from a much later slice of time...

My kind of radios, at least if I'm going to listen to the Lone Ranger or Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. They wouldn't do for my NPR classics from KNAU today.

Soda pop bottles from the days of glass. Evidently not collected on the desert surrounding Cordes -- they'd be purple in that case.

The thrifty housewife can't have enough meat grinders. Or (below) cast iron pots, pans and ovenwear.

A well equipped tool box for the man of the house.

A hiccup in the above time line: three humming bird nests collected in and around Cordes. The Cordes Station Store holds a humming bird festival in April.

And this is an antique that's for looking only -- it belonged to Proprietor Cathy Cordes' great-grandfather and she intends to keep it in the family.

Here she wraps up a sale to my travelling companions.

Greater Cordes, pop. 11

Continuing our ladies' outing adventure on Monday: here is Cordes, Arizona, established as a stage stop in 1883 by John and Lizzie Cordes -- today, the Cordes Station store is owned and operated by their great-great-granddaughter, serving up snacks, drinks, antiques and collecibles.

Cordes is located on the old Black Canyon Highway in lower (and hotter) desert country than I-17; the shotest route is via Duffer Road in Spring Valley.

Note the power lines. Things are actually quite up to date in Cordes -- including internet reception. And, speaking of the internet, there's a cool interview of Cathy, who runs the store, at YouTube.

The old gas pump still stands.

Here is the store (above) and a ranch house (below). (Note: the picture of the store was borrowed from the Cordes Station web site.)

Another group of buildings is hidden behind this big old barn. And that's about it, as far as I could see the other day. BTW: there's a rumor going about that ADOT is seriously considering a new, improved super-duper version of I-17, but set down in the lowlands where Cordes, Bumblebee, and Cleator are located. That would be a real pity; why can't they leave well enough alone?

The self-reliant abo-dude

Cody Lundin first came to our attention some time back in the early 90s. Probably at the Sharlot Hall Territorial Days celebration. There was this dude sitting crossed legged by some rather crude-looking camping gear. He was dressed in skins as I recall and barefoot. He had a brochure that talked about Aboriginal Living Skills or some such. We saw him a few more times around town. Always barefoot. (I've nothing against bare feet -- my mother had a hard time keeping shoes on my feet when I was a kid. But I've seen Cody Lundin barefooted at times when I'm struggling to keep my feet warm.)

His courses caught on. At one point, my friend Georgene spent a very rugged nine days in the bush as a student in one of Lundin's back country survival classes. She was very impressed.

Wednesday night, I finally got a chance to hear him tell his story to members of the Professional Writers of Prescott.

A self-reliant childhood as an Army brat. Then drugs. Jail. Rehab. Epiphany in the red rock country where he connected with the outdoors.

In fact, that's his explanation for the bare feet -- a direct connection with the earth. Today, he enjoys nationwide recognition for his survival skills, his no-nonsense approach to teaching those skills to others, plus two outspoken books on the subject of survival -- in the outback and in case civilization breaks down.

Unlike some in the survival training biz, Cody walks the walk. He lives off the grid an hour and a half drive in the high desert northwest of town, in an carefully designed earth home. Road kill? Rats? Insects? Food, when that's all there is. He enjoys shocking the complacent, as you can imagine.

And he brooked little nonsense when it came time to publish his books -- obviously, one who is larger than life can deal with publishers and editors differently than most of us!

Here are his two books (a third may be on its way). And do take some time to visit Cody's web pages. Fascinating reading and video watching.
.
Linkage: At last, a new blog I've been waiting for is online. LindaG, of The One Acre Wood, has premiered Prescott Past which will feature, along with reminiscences, selections from her husband's wonderful collection of old postcards. I think you'll also find Susie of Arabia interesting; she's an American woman who moved with her husband and son to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. And, if you have plenty of time on your hands, spend some of it at Zero Out of Five, where the schtick is selected answers to exam questions, some quite amazing. Oh yes, I nearly forgot the Chinese rap video the dotter featured today.

Back in the outback 1: Hillside

Hillside is a tiny hamlet in southwestern Yavpai county located on the Date Creek road which starts at the Bagdad Road near Yava. The road continues on to Congress, although it is dirt. Don't let the county warning sign deter you. They have those waivers on all the county dirt roads. As you travel, remember that 80 years ago this was the best north/south road across our state, according to William Peck, who has contributed a number of articles on this area of the county to the Sharlot Hall Museum archives. (This must mean that it is the same road taken by my Phoenix grandparents when they drove to their new warm-weather home from the Dakotas in 19-aught-16.)

Hillside has been around a while, as the 1885 date on the old store indicates. But... the highway sign on the Yava-Bagdad road said "Hillside store now open." No, it was not the Saturday that dotter and I showed up. As I recall, another Prescott blogger passed that way recently and also found the store closed. Not that Hillside and environs add up to a real market, but a general store is always an important meeting place out in the far countryside. (I wonder if any reader might know whether the store is ever open these days.)

In addition to the store, there is a church...

...and a school/school district with 28 students when last counted.

It's a two-bus school district serving ranches, miners, and locals in a not too ancient set of buildings built in Hillside sometime in the 1940s after the old schoolhouse in Yava, 4 miles up the pike, burned down. With 21 qualified voters in Yava and an equal number in Hillside, where to locate the school, then serving 11 students, was a contentious issue, according to one of Peck's articles. (That, by the way, was why this blog was not written last night -- I was quite caught up in his memoirs and my writing time ran out!)

Population? Data for Arizona from the 2000 census, though listing places with as few as 150 people, didn't bother to include Hillside. Be that as it may, Hillside has been around for a good many years. After all, it is located on an important branch of the Santa Fe, now the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, that runs between Phoenix and the mainline across northern Arizona.

About the Santa Fe, Peck wrote in 2002, watch for a train along the east side of the road. This is a working railroad and a dozen mile long trains a day wind through our mountains. As recently as three years ago, our sleepy little burg was the origin of a trainload of ore a day. Thousands of cattle have taken their last trip to the slaughterhouse from our former stockyard.

It was hard to figure out just what of the railroad siding structures were still in business and which abandoned. If we had been lucky, a train might have passed our way while my camera was out, but it wasn't to be.

I think I can hazard a guess that this was the conveyor belt that moved copper ore from trucks onto railroad cars, whence it was shipped to a refinery in the eastern part of the state. When we first moved into Arizona in the aught-80s, a drive on the many-curved Bagdad road on any weekday meant competing for the right of way with the speeding Dickey trucks that hustled ore between the big mine and the Hillside loading docks.

Abandoned or not? Hard to tell.

This building (above) appeared to still be in use; don't know about the lower.

One missing Hillside picture is the bigger mobile park; the one shot that didn't work is the house high up on the hilltop. Fortunately, The Prescott Chronicle has a good image in a recent post. If you want to follow up on any of the Hillside articles at the archives, pop the word "hillside" into the search window and take it from there.

Prescott's mountain icon

No wonder Thumb Butte is the symbol for Prescott. You can't miss it! For tonight's post, I combed my archives for pictures that included this iconic volcanic pipe and found more than I had expected, from more vantages that I had expected. The one image that completely disappeared was the standard shot looking straight up Gurley from the Square. There was such a picture, I know, but the archive gnomes must have eaten it. So I made do looking straight up Gurley from near the Sharlot Hall Museum.

The Butte is quite evident coming from the east down Bullwhacker Hill (above); it forms striking a backdrop for the Prescott Resort/Casino (below), though I should warn you that the zoom lens really magnifies the mountain in this and several other pictures.

Here's Thumb Butte from a little knoll on the east end of town (above) and looming over Fair Street (below). The latter picture dates from before the muffler man changed occupations, BTW.

A pair from the 4th floor of the hospital. Very different perspectives, thanks again to the zoom lens.

These two views are from a more northerly vantage and note how the shape of the butte has changed. Looks more like a thumb, don't you think? The picture above, across a sea of roofs from Willow Lake Park; the lights below in the parking lot at WalMart west (and my favorite picture of the lot).

For a totally different perspective, drive out Iron Springs Road where the Butte resembles the Sphinx or a recumbent lion.

In the forest, the Butte is often hidden by the pines or the hillsides.

Above, one of Prescott's favorite trails, which provides either a gradual climb or a steep series of switchbacks to the saddle, but not up the rocky tor. Thumb Butte is a great noon hike for the downtown worker, as it takes about one hour up and back. The dead trees? Part of the great western bark beetle plague which has killed conifers from Alaska to Arizona.

No, hardly a different viewpoint of our favorite mountain. This is Little Thumb Butte, up north near the Verde River just east of SR89. In the old, old days, more than one group of explorers was misled by the instruction to find the butte that looks like a thumb. If I remember correctly, that's why the first Fort Whipple was built north of Chino at Del Rio Springs instead of at the site of Prescott, as intended.