To and Along a Ghost Town Trail

 

The Artist and I never took the Gleeson Road, never saw Gleeson, so I decided Sunny and I would make an expedition together and see what there was to see. 

First building on the Gleeson Road. It's for sale.

The Gleeson Road is the second road to the west after the Border Patrol checkpoint on 191. I stopped briefly to photograph the first building, but when we came to the Ghost Town Trail, I decided to stay on the Gleeson Road long enough to see Gleeson and then turn around. The Gleeson Cemetery is on private property, with a locked gate, so I had to turn back east without exploring that site. 

An old wreck of a building along the road, however, caught my eye on the way back, and I stopped to take a closer look. What could it have been?

Ready to move in? Turnkey? I don't think so.

Why is the weathering of materials so fascinating?

There were a few other old ruins to be seen, but one pretty little house right on the road looked quite habitable. At first I thought it was the historic Gleeson jail and was surprised at how homey a jail could look, with the overhang and the Chinaberry tree shading the tiny front yard.  

But no, when I got close enough to read the sign, I saw that the jail was a bit farther down. It too is on private property, though open to the public certain days and hours. Maybe another time. 

Historic Gleeson jail

High Lonesome

High Lonesome, this place was called! Was it a ranch? Mining offices?  Occupied? And why did the name seem so familiar? A week later I realized that it was the name of the fictional Joanna Brady’s ranch outside Bisbee in the mystery novels of J.A. Jance. A completely different High Lonesome.

Gleeson had a post office from 1890 to 1939.

 

John Gleeson … and his wife were an Irish couple who came to Arizona from Iowa and Colorado. They worked in the mines at Pearce – he as a miner and she as a boarding house keeper in the early 1890’s. Gleeson grub-staked a crippled friend and the man re-located [to?] the old mines at Turquoise. He sold out by 1914. Long before white men appeared in this area Indians were mining turquoise on Turquoise Mountain. Tiffany and Company of New York continues to work the mine when the demand warrants. The remnants of the older community of Turquoise came back to life in 1900 for a brief building boom, and there are still restricted mining operations here. 

 

-      Byrd H. Granger, Arizona Place Names, revised and enlarged, 1960

 

Of course, 1960 was a while ago now, so I don't know if Tiffany is still at work in the Gleeson-Turquoise area....

Mining activity on the mountainsides

But Gleeson had really only been a detour for me. My main objective that day was the Ghost Town Trail.

"Primitive Road" -- one of my favorite signs

The curves of the land are soft and beautiful to my eye, but looking closer one sees the scars left by mining. Now this, below, is it tailings or overburden? I have only just learned the difference: overburden is rock and soil merely removed; tailings have been processed in addition to being removed. 

But ah, here! This is the kind of thing I came for! Still handsome remaining walls of an old stone building. Could this be a remnant of the little town of Turquoise? I couldn’t stop photographing the building walls, inside and out, from different angles. Truly, this was vernacular architecture, made from materials at hand, and what more lovely materials could be found? 

Photographing the stone walls necessitated getting out of the car, which also provided Sunny with a little walk. Territory on both sides of the Ghost Town Trail is a patchwork of state and private lands. Some of it is for sale, though I would worry about water quality. 

I did not photograph every interesting ruin along the road. Some I simply missed. Then after the shot of this one below, staring me in the face, my camera battery ran out. If you want to see a little bit of Pearce, however, the last town before the trail rejoins the two-lane highway, here is an old post from explorations the Artist and I made together, and here is a post from the Historic Pearce Cemetery, a place I loved right away. 

Thank you for coming along on this expedition into the past of Cochise County, Arizona, and please join me for more adventures to come!

“We did it, Sunny! We did it!”

But it was just the beginning --

I only meant to go as far as the Old Pearce Cemetery. Stopping at the library in Sunsites to return a book, then making a short cruise through the adjacent FOL bookstore, I wasn’t ready to turn around and go home yet, not quite ready to take Birch Road across the Sulphur Springs Valley and then the Kansas Settlement Road to familiar Hwy. 186, so I drove first to the Mustang Mall to get a cup of coffee and then back to Old Pearce, another mining “ghost town” like Dos Cabezas, aiming for the peace of the cemetery, a place to sit quietly and drink my coffee before it cooled, maybe look into the pages of a new library book (Becoming Animal, by David Abram). Wind fluttered little American flags on many of the graves, and as always Cochise Stronghold drew my eye off to the west. 

 

Maybe it was that view of the Stronghold that wouldn’t let me sit still for long. I thought, I’ll just go a little way up the road. Middlemarch Road has always intrigued me, especially as I’d seen the other end of it on every trip to Tombstone, letting me know that it went all the way across the mountains! I’d asked neighbors about the road, but the Artist and I had never taken it, and I didn’t plan to do the long drive last Friday, either. “We’re not going far, Sunny,” I told her, “just a little way.” I stopped by the plank bridge to photograph the deep-sided, red gulch…

 

…but couldn’t stop there, not just yet, with the Stronghold luring me on. Signs like this hold their own allure.

And then! This sign!

Well, now I have to keep going, don’t I? 

The terrain changed as we went along. After a while there were mountainsides dark with trees, like the Black Hills of my native state, South Dakota. 

 

And soon Sunny Juliet and I, having left private land behind to enter a section of the Coronado National Forest, were winding our way along an ever-narrower road amidst oaks and junipers, and somehow I had committed myself to going all the way. It was like that day last spring when I hadn’t planned to drive up over Onion Saddle to Portal but found myself doing just that, after going far enough into Pinery Canyon that it would have been absurd to go back.

I pulled over as much as I could for an ATV coming from the opposite direction. He stopped, too, and I asked, “Will this road take me to Tombstone?” (I didn’t want to go to Tombstone but did want to get to the highway.) He told me yes, “about 8 or 10 miles.” (Remember, those are mountain miles!) I asked about snow, and he assured me there was no snow “at the top” and that it was “good road” all the way.

 

The hairpin (above) near the top of the pass was not my idea of “good road.” It could have been much worse -- it wasn’t gullied or falling away at the edges -- but there were several stretches with very loose rocks, and many that looked sharp, but I put the thought of a flat tire out of my mind. No sense “borrowing trouble,” as my mother used to say.

 

Opposite the hairpin was this sign: 

No, I am not turning around to go all the way back to Pearce, and I don’t want a dead end, either (and I don’t know anything about Soren Pass). We’ll just keep going on Middlemarch, thanks very much! 

See that snowy mountain range in the far distance? Those are the Chiricahua Mountains, and we are looking down over the flat expanse of the Sulphur Springs Valley from high in the Dragoon Mountains. I was careful keep my eyes either on the road or looking off to the distance, not right down over the edge of the road, but Middlemarch Pass was not as scary as Onion Saddle. Really, not scary at all, and the views were thrilling.

 

Around a bend, one particular mountain view took my breath away. Reminiscent of the tumbled rocks of Texas Canyon, a scenic stop on I-10 between Willcox and Benson, this peak is one I knew the Artist would have loved. 

He would have loved the long, smoky vistas, too, distances that held, somewhere out there, the town of Tombstone. “Be with me, sweetheart!” I said aloud, standing in the road with my camera. 

We were through the mountains now, the pup and I. Besides mountains and trees, we had seen a creek with a trickle of water, and we had seen a very broad, very dry wash. Lots of birds. It had been a beautiful adventure. 

Now the dirt road gradually broadened again, and there was even a paved stretch before the highway -- where we turned right in the direction of Benson rather than left to Tombstone, as I said aloud to Sunny -- four or five times -- “We did it, girl! We did it!”

 

Times like these, though, I can’t help thinking it isn’t fair that the Artist should be missing these adventures with us. He would have loved the road, the thrills, the views, the vastness of it all! Then I remember – and this is true, too, absolutely – he loved the life he had. He loved our adventures together (as well as adventures he had on his own), our cozy times, our dogs, and our families and friends. He was deeply satisfied to have made his living as an artist. Books, movies, music! Long talks with friends! The two of us holding hands. “We live in a beautiful place,” he said so many times in northern Michigan, and at the end of a day in Arizona, coming back to the ghost town cabin, he would often say, “It’s good to be home again.” When we traveled across the Great Plains, he would exclaim over and over, “What a country!” He lived with joy and enthusiasm and gratitude. 

 

And that’s what Sunny and I have to do now, without him, though I miss him every day. He would want the pup and me to go on living.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone, from the girl and me. We wish you love!