Jerome and Tuzigoot

We have been happy to explore Prescott, Arizona, for the last few days.  But we keep hearing that we just have to see Jerome!  It is said to be the most vertical city in the United States, and it literally hangs on the edge of a mountain with a 30-degree slant.  We couldn't get a good picture of its verticalness (is that really a word?)  But we did get a picture of Denisa preparing to devour a double dipped chocolate covered frozen banana that we bought as our only souvenir in Jerome.

This little town used to be a mining town.  There was once 10,000 people living here, most involved in mining or entertaining the miners after a hard day's work.  When the mines closed down in the 1950's, it would have become a ghost town, had it not been for all those saloons and bordellos becoming boutiques and restaurants.  It was hard to find a parking place with all the tourists flooding into the town in the middle of the week.  We have heard it is impossible to get a parking place here on the weekend.

Since Jerome got its start as a mining town, we also visited the Little Daisy Mine.  The shaft here is 1900 feet deep, and lined with concrete.  In layman's terms that would be 650 feet deeper than the Empire State Building is tall.  We looked down into that shaft, but you couldn't even hear when a rock hit the bottom far below. This is Mark trying out the "elevator" that took the miners to work each day down a very long shaft.  If he had any thoughts of coming out of retirement to become a miner, he and his claustrophobia have decided against it.

This was a very successful mine, as it produced 5.5 tons of gold, 221 tons of silver, and 397,000 tons of copper between 1915 and 1938.


It was only 15 miles from our camping spot to Jerome, but took close to 30 minutes to make the drive.  It was one of those winding highways that motorcyclists crave.  The views were beautiful!

While driving around other surrounding towns like Cottonwood and Clarksdale, we saw a brown national park sign.  Since we purchased a national park annual pass, we followed that sign to Tuzigoot.  On the way, we had conversations about what we might find at such an oddly named national park. It turned out to be an archeological site that was a simple rounded hill in 1930.  But two young archeologists found enough evidence that there were the remains of an Indian pueblo village from the 1100's under that hill.  As they unearthed walls and artifacts of a once thriving community, they chose the name Tuzigoot for this village.  This was the view from the bottom of village, with Denisa standing almost at the top.

This is a view from the top, with Mark bringing scale to the remaining walls that used to be the latest in apartment-dwelling just 900 years ago.  They also have a good interactive display at the visitor's center, and we felt like we learned a lot about life in one of these pueblos so long ago.

The last stop in our road trip day was down a dirt forest road deep in the Mingus Mountains.  Again, we just followed random signs down random roads to come to the hang glider launch pad.  At an elevation of 7815 feet, this is the view straight east that hang gliders see right before they run off the edge of that concrete slope.  We were sad that the winds were blowing too hard to watch someone catching the thermals while we were there.  But we were told that they are breaking hang gliding records from this site on a good day.