It was our first real day for exploration in the Cottonwood area and we elected to go see some local stuff touted as nifty in the brochures we picked up at the Cottonwood Chamber of Commerce visitor information center. The cleverly created map we initially used for getting to the mining town of Jerome, AZ, was highly imaginative in nature and entirely inaccurate in reality.
After only getting bollixed up once in Cottonwood by being trapped in a parking lot with no exits and subsequently misled near Clarkdale where the map deviated substantially from the actual road configuration, we found the road to Jerome. This was a town established by copper mining employment and it appears that scads of people used to live on the steep side hills surrounding the mine. Miners can be clever builders and the structures in Jerome are proof of their tenacity and absolute lack of engineering expertise. Old buildings are built atop the even older but flimsy former buildings. The result is a quaint assembly of interesting but structurally horrifying structures that have entries at grade level on one side and tall columns, hastily constructed retaining walls and sheet wall systems on the other. If you enter by the front door you will be as safe as anybody in a war zone but if you exit by the back door the fall will probably kill you. The streets are lined with old, seismically susceptible-to-failure buildings containing bars, antique stores, restaurants and tourist hangouts. If you don’t look at the foundations, walls, columns, beams or streets closely, you will probably enjoy the place.
The town is located halfway up the side of a very steep mountain so the views out across the valley are terrific. The road up and back is very narrow and Peggy kept the speed down for fear of plunging off the side into oblivion. Once we had made a pass through Jerome, we headed down the hill and stopped at a sandwich place called #1 Sandwich Shop that published an ad in our Verde Valley RV Resort guide alleging that they offered “The BEST sandwich you’ll ever have.” Their advertisement is not quite true but the sandwiches were okay and we devoured them at a picnic table in the nearby Tuzigoot National Monument. Tuzigoot is right next to the town of Clarkdale and consists of a hilltop pueblo ruin where maybe 225 Sinagua lived. There is a walkway around the ruins and you can actually climb to the very top of them but Peggy and I stayed on the loop trail because we could do it the fastest that way. It was a bit over 100 degrees but it was a dry heat since the humidity was 5%. There was no shade on the loop. After a bit of human barbecue here, we hopped back into Charlotte, turned the air conditioning to ramming speed and sped home to our Barbarian Invader and cold air Nirvana.