Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die

Today we went from 21st century aircraft at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson to the gunfights of the mid-1800's in the Old West town of Tombstone while traveling 120 miles on our BMW R1200 GS motorcycle, riding the little-used 2-lane highways in southern Arizona.

Mike loves airplanes and flight, and the Pima Air & Space Museum with its collection of more than 300 aircraft spread both inside hangars and parked outside on the hot and dusty grounds was a fantastic way to start the day. We saw airplanes that flew missions in WWII and VietNam, nuclear bombs (without a warhead) still in use today, scores of helicopters, the oldest existing SR-71 Blackbird (longrange Mach 3+ reconnaissance aircraft), and several seaplanes. We didn't cover the entire 80 acre museum, which means we'll be back to Tucson for another visit.

Brad and George planned a fun motorcycle route to Tombstone that stayed off the Interstate, giving us the opportunity to ride through the changing southern Arizona landscape. We saw mountains, rocky bluffs, flat sandy desert that stretched out to the horizon, and wavy golden grassland where I half-expected to see herds of buffalo.

 

 

We pulled into Tombstone in time for lunch at the OK Cafe where the ceiling was raised to accommodate a large stuffed buffalo head mounted on the wall over our table. I've never been to a town where people dressed in clothing from the 1880's enthusiastically told us to "don't miss the bank robbery at 3pm!" and a stagecoach was the only traffic along the main street.

 

Tombstone citizens dressed in 1800's clothing

 

 

A cowboy told jokes before the diarama/movie about the history of Tombstone narrated by Vincent Price where we learned how the town earned its name. According to the town's website:

 

Tombstone was founded in 1877 by a prospector named Ed Schieffelin. Ed was staying at what was then called Camp Huachuca as part of a scouting expedition against the Chiricahua Apaches. During his time there he would venture out into the wilderness "looking for rocks", all the while ignoring the warnings he received from the soldiers at the camp. They would tell him, "Ed, the only stone you will find out there will be your tombstone". Well, Ed did find his stone. And it was Silver. So, remembering the words of warning from the soldiers, he named his first mine The Tombstone.

 

The town was founded to support the thousands of miners prospecting in the mountains, but Tombstone really became famous for the gunfight at the OK Corral where Wyatt Earp and his brothers, in the name of bringing law and order to the wild town, gunned down three cowboys known for steading horses, robbing stagecoaches and shooting up the town. It sounds odd to say that the live re-enactment of the gunfight was fun, but watching the actors play out scenes I've seen countless times in Western movies really was great entertainment. At one point the actors adlibbed and started laughing so hard it took them a few minutes to compose themselves and finish the play.

Big Nose Kate, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and Virgil Earp

 

Big Nose Kate's Saloon still serves food and drink to a rowdy crowd, the Bird Cage Theatre is a museum full of old posters and memorabilia advertising singers and plays from over 100 years ago, and the Crystal Palace Saloon that started life as a brewery in 1879 still serves dinner.

 

Our hotel was just down the road from the Boothill Graveyard where the cowboys killed in the gunfight at the OK Corral are buried along with several other people whose white crosses on their graves piled high with rocks proclaim they were "hanged", "shot", "murdered" or every once in a while "died a natural death".

 

 

 I can imagine Tombstone on a Saturday night in the 1880's, with hundreds of cowboys and miners going in and out of the saloons, horses tied up along the wooden sidewalks, and loud music spilling out into the street. Tonight was a quiet night in Tombstone except for the sound of our motorcycles as we rode out of town to our hotel.







Motorcycle travel with a group

Since moving to Arizona we've met several people who ride motorcycles, and they've been kind enough to share some of their favorite routes with us. Today we headed south on a 3-day trip to Tombstone, stopping for the night in Tucson. Brad and George from the Prescott STAR 511 group took us under their wings, stopping at some of their favorite places to eat and showing us sites we never would have found on our own.

The temperature was in the high 30's when we started out, which meant layers:  fleece-lined turtleneck sweater, fleece sweatshirt, and all three layers of my motorcycle jacket:  warm inner layer, windblocker layer, and the jacket itself. Celtic Rider neck gaiter pulled up over my ears and head, thermal tights, thermal motorcycle pants liner, and warm motorcycle pants. The heated Gerbing motorcycle gloves completed the package. I couldn't move easily because of all the layers, but I was warm!

As we rode south on I-17, the elevation sloped continuously downward and the temperature went up. People in Prescott talk about going to "The Valley" when they go to Phoenix, and today I understood why. Phoenix is in the Salt River Valley at the northern edge of the Sonoran Desert. The temperature in the Valley is typically 15-20 degrees warmer than Prescott, which is why we ride South this time of year. We stopped to shed some of the clothing layers and then kept going into Phoenix to meet George.

We spent the next hour in heavy Phoenix traffic before we turned south onto Route 60 and then Route 79. We rode through desert landscape with distant views of the mountains as the temperature climbed into the 80's.

Brad suggested lunch at the Old Pueblo Restaurant in Florence, where the two guys sitting at the end of the table told us their favorite menu items and the waitress chatted about the local high school's homecoming parade.

George is Greek, and he took us to St. Anthony's monastery in Florence. Established by six monks in 1995, the monastery today contains the main St. Anthony's Church along with four chapels, each dedicated to a different saint.  Stone paths wind through beautifully landscaped gardens, and past the lemon and olive orchards.

 

 

Because this is an active monastery, I was asked to wear a head scarf and skirt. Mike, George and Brad wore hats and long-sleeved shirts. The monks greeted us with a traditional kerasma (water and something sweet, which today was Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies) before we wandered around the grounds.

 

Lynn with George at the monastery

We continued south toward Tucson with the Santa Catalina mountains to our left. Tucson is in the Sonoran Desert, but Mt. Lemmon, at 9,157' actually gets 180" of snow each year. Mt. Lemmon Ski Valley is the southernmost ski area in the United States, and Brad and George promised another trip to ride up the twisty mountain road.

One of George's friends invited us to his home in a high canyon east of Tucson for dinner. We ended the day riding down the twisting, curving and steep road into Tucson at 10pm, with the lights of the city competing with the stars. Tomorrow we ride further into the old West for a day in Tombstone.

Route 66 in Seligman, Arizona

I bet when you read "Route 66" a picture pops into your mind of the old Route 66 highway that stretched from Chicago to LA over 2,448 miles. Two-lane paved highway, family-run motels along the side of the road, big billboards advertising food, gas, and local attractions; and small, dusty towns separated by miles of scenery that vary from corn and soybean fields in the Midwest to the brown, dry hills of the Southwest.

While the majority of the old Route 66 that first opened in 1926 has been swallowed up by the interstate highway system, pockets of the old road still exist. Today we rode north from Prescott to Ash Fork, then turned west to Seligman where 80 miles of the original Route 66 head west to Kingman.

I rarely see trains in northern Arizona, but today we spotted several. Seligman was originally called Prescott Junction since it was founded as an intersection on the railroad line from Sante Fe to Prescott - where we live. 

Route 66 seems to define Seligman, at least the part of town lined up along Route 66 where we saw a pink 1959 Edsel in front of the Rusty Bolt store, old Fords, a purple Pontiac wagon with an orange roof, a lime-green VW bus, a rusty cabover truck sitting in a field, and a group of Harley motorcycles riding down the road.

 

We stopped for lunch at Westside Lilo's Cafe where the walls were decorated with Route 66 signs, photos, and newspaper clippings; a mounted elk head, stuffed mountain lion, and hundreds of German beer mugs.

Thanks to Mike's Garmin GPS, we discovered 17 miles of the old Route 66 heading east from Seligman until it joined up with I-40. We had the road to ourselves except for a couple of pick-up trucks, and we slowed down to read the Burma Shave signs along the road. These advertising signs with rhyming poems originated in the 1920's, and at one point there were over 7,000 signs spread throughout the United States. The signs are spaced along the right side of the road, with 2-5 words on each sign that add up to a pithy phrase. The first series we saw was:

The angels that guard you

while you drive

always retire

at 65

Burma Shave

 



followed by this second, tongue-in-cheek series:

Just one time

just for fun

you can finish

what we've done

??????

 

We only rode 146 miles, but we experienced enough highway history and kitschy tourist attractions to make it a full and interesting day.

 

If you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way, the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route 66!

 

Ride to Bagdad - Arizona

Every time we talk with motorcylists, they run through a list of places to ride in Arizona and ask us if we've been there. We probably haven't been there - yet. I count the places we've ridden in Arizona on one hand, and today thanks to the friendly and fun Prescott Star 511 touring group we added two more amazing locations to our list:  Skull Valley and Bagdad.

We met George who rides a BMW K1300S and Brad on a Yamaha FJR1300 at Starbucks and pulled out of the parking lot onto Iron Springs Road heading toward Skull Valley at about 9:30am. The sky was what I've started to call "Arizona blue", an intense bright, cloudless blue color that varies from a deep to a lighter hue depending on the angle of the sun.

I love learning about Arizona and the history behind the names of the towns and roads. Skull Valley, according to the Sharlot Hall Museum archives of the oral history project conducted by the WPA in the 1930's, was originally named by the Yavapai and Pima native Americans who fought a battle in this area. The dead were left unburied, which resulted in skulls and bones left in the valley for the white settlers to discover when they arrived in the mid-1800's.

I didn't see any skulls on our 15-mile ride down Iron Springs Road to Skull Valley (population around 743), but we did enjoy a large and spicy Mexican-inspired breakfast at the Skull Valley Diner.

We sat outside in the warm sunshine and told stories about motorcycle travels that involved riding through the Alps, Badlands, and New England; and breaking down in the brutally hot Arizona summer.

I was glad for temperatures in the 70's as we continued to our next destination:  Bagdad, about 60 miles west of Prescott. Like so many Arizona towns, Bagdad was founded by miners looking for gold and silver. Today the townsite and the Bagdad copper/molybdenum mine are owned by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold which continues its mining operations.

We climbed up and down through the rocky countryside, rarely seeing cars or motorcycles, or even houses. As we descended closer to Bagdad and the temperature climbed into the high 80's, I saw tall saguaro cactus covering the landscape. Saguaro are found primarily in the Sonoran desert, and Prescott is at too high elevation for this type of cactus.

The paved county road ends in Bagdad, where we stopped for an ice-cold drink (the bottle of water from the convenience store refrigerator actually had chunks of ice in it) before we headed back toward home.

palm trees in Bagdad, Arizona

Even though there's only one road in and out of Bagdad, everything looks a bit different going in the other direction. We ended our ride heading north on Route 89, riding through the Pondersa pines in the Prescott National Forest. This road is made for motorcycles, and we twisted our way through the hairpin turns and switchbacks, stopping a few times to look back at the pavement across the valley.

I want to go back to Skull Valley, stop in the train museum and eat another meal at the diner. Bagdad offers tours of the mine, and I'd like to explore some of the smaller roads that wind through the mountains north of Prescott. We've heard October is a beautiful month for motorcycle travel in the southwest, and we're ready to go.



Windy ride to Payson, AZ

 

The first official day of Fall greeted us with a strong, cold northwest wind. On a motorcycle, a windy day takes on new meaning. Mike says the wind moves the bike sideways while we're going forward,  and we felt like bobbleheads during most of the trip.

 

Today Steve and Kim on their Kawasaki Concours and Tom and Christine on their Victory joined us for a ride to Payson on the Mogollon Rim.



Steve and Kim



 

 

Tom and Christine

 

Payson was founded in 1882 and became well-known in the early 1900's due to  books and movies about the area by Zane Grey. We were more interested in the limestone and sandstone cliffs that rim the valley, and the twisting roads that climb through Ponderosa pine forests.  

 

 

We like to ride through the changing countryside in northern Arizona, where in the space of an hour we travel through flat, dry high desert plains with mountain peaks a shadow in the distance; scrubby pines that dot the rolling hills, towering Ponderosa pines that crowd thickly together, dry creekbeds and washes, canyons that zigzag through the valleys; and steep, sharp rocky cliffs. Payson is only 100 miles mostly east and a bit south from Prescott, giving us plenty of time to stop for lunch at the Crosswinds Restaurant at the Payson airport.

 

The wind didn't let up during the ride back home, and the bright sun made the limestone cliffs stand out stark and clear against the clear blue sky.

 

I like riding in a group, stopping to talk and stretch our legs, chatting at a stoplight, and pointing out a passing helicopter as we ride down the highway. We have hundreds of miles of roads to explore, and I'm looking forward to future trips.

 

Mike and Lynn on the road - thanks for the photo Christine!