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Arizona

Part 71 of the Cycle-Across-America series. (Read from the start in Boston or see the full index)

Deep in the mountains and deserts of the southwest, it’s the day I cycle into the 24th state of the trip and say goodbye to New Mexico.

These excerpts are from the audio-taped sections of the journal, but I’m just posting shorter than usual extracts here now, so it should be more readable.

Once I went south, back to the junction where I’d joined the day before, I found myself on US 70 and I’m going across a desert.

A straight road for 28 miles. The view was amazing mountains all around. I was trying to work out which of the peaks were in Arizona, and which were in New Mexico.

The vegetation was a lot of cacti at first, the ones where the limbs are made of joined-up plates, circles all joined together. I saw another hawk on a yucca, quite close. Yuccas are very tall. There’s tons of them. At one stage it was almost like a forest of yuccas.

I got a few waves, and then there was one great moment. A truck coming the opposite direction - there was very little traffic here and there was a nice wide shoulder - but a truck coming towards me was waving at me, I thought, and I waved back. Then I realised he wasn’t waving at me, he was pointing.

He was pointing over to his left. And I wondered was he telling me to get over to the edge of the road, when I’m already on the shoulder? He’s hardly pointing at the view; it’s fabulous but it’s fabulous all around, and you can’t miss it. Mountains everywhere. So I looked a bit closer and then I saw what he was pointing at.

[The rest of this post, is continued below the fold]

There were 6 deer and a stag about 100 feet in off the road, just there in the sand. The truck was well past me but hopefully he was looking in his mirror to see me acknowledge that I’d seen what he was trying to tell me about.

There was a small wooden sign with the word “Honey” spelt on it burned out. I was wondering if honey was for sale anywhere, but there were no houses or ranches or buildings in sight for 50 miles ahead of me. I wasn’t far from the town of Lordsburg I’d left, so there would’ve been honey back there but the sign was facing the traffic that had left the town. I realised there was no honey for sale when half a mile further on, in exactly the same style, was another sign saying “Love Ya”.

I was going about 17 mph and I didn’t want to pause in case that wind changed. The total I did yesterday was 80 miles, equalling the 2nd longest day of the entire 2nd phase - since Kansas City.

The road then turned and dropped into a canyon. The whole time I’m wondering where I’m going to cross some mountains that were in the way. And then there in the canyon I get my “Welcome to Arizona” sign, with a nice flag - a copper star rising from a blue field of honour in the face of a setting sun. The sun was reflecting off it.

Franklin was a small scattering of trailer houses, and about half a dozen brick buildings, all bar one which were dilapidated. Brick buildings aren’t too common in New Mexico. When I had my meal back in Mesilla, the cafe I ate in was next door to the oldest brick building in all of New Mexico.

4 miles on was Duncan, which is where I was going to eat. I went through a bit of it, declined the steak house, turnind onto the main street - it looks like the town is battered by sand the whole time; it looks a hardy kind of town - and there were pizza slices. For $2.50 you could have a large pizza slice and a large coke.

So I said, “Yeah, I’ll have that please. And another two slices”.

I had survived across that desert bit in the morning with no drink whatsoever. I do this a lot nowadays; I go with no drink. I should be careful because if it gets hotter I could be in trouble. Yesterday it was somewhere in the 70s.

Leaving Duncan you start climbing. For about 10 miles. Because the road goes between a couple of peaks - Ash Peak and Rhyloite Peak. The climb was great; I didn’t mind it at all. The views were fabulous. Looking back down there’s canyons and then crowned with a mountain range on the far side. Bald Knob and Steeple Rock I think. They were all just so different, jutting out of the range. There were sloping angular juts of rock; there was rounded hills.

Finally you lose the view as you go up and up. And you stay up there for a few miles. Ash Peak was a bit like a Mexican hat.

I went through one pass and there was this odd sensation of where my left leg felt a lot of cool air and my right leg a lot of warm air. That went on for a couple of hundred metres.

Up there was a plaque about 2 people who were killed by “Indians with rifles”. Looking at the dates I worked out the man was 58 and his daughter was 14. The next plaque was about the Merrills, and they were “murdered by Indians”. Reading the rest of the plaque you see that they were pursuing the Indians, who had stolen 45 horses from a settlement, and then they got ambushed by the Indians.

The road finally turns down and you’re in the Wicklock valley where I saw another plaque. It was for General Kearny’s army of the West, shown the way by Kit Carson towards California during the Mexican War. He followed this route into the Gila Valley and it established a snow route to the Pacific.

I just kept looking up. At the top it’s flat. Below is full of dried river beds, a lot of cacti and other plants, overlooked by ridges of rocks. It was another day of pure blue skies, completely unblemished. Only at the very end of the day did an aeroplane go across leaving a tiny little trail of white.

I was picturing just Apaches being around. And I was remembering when we were kids. We used to play Apaches a lot, and I used to always want to be Cochise rather than Geronimo.

When you drop into the Gila Valley there’s irrigation. It’s only fertile at the bottom, 5 miles out from Safford where you hit Solomon. When I leave here I’ve got a few more towns, like Thatcher, Central, and Pima, on this side of US 70, and they are all dominated by the view of the Coronado National Forest on this huge mountain which rises a clean 7,000 feet from the desert floor. Actually the peak of Mount Graham is over 10,000.

Mount Graham is sacred to the Indians, who refer to mountains of this size as “Islands of the sky”; they’re so fertile and different from the desert below.

Close down in the valley there was cotton. And there were palm trees. It gave a definite oasis feel to the place. I had been in the desert all day. I had seen lots of lizards, a few tarantulas. There was a lot of sand. It was gorgeous and a truly epic day. I loved it.

With all the election coverage last night I watched some of it but it was incredibly boring. The speeches were good. I ended up feeling sorry for Bob Dole. Then worried about myself, feeling sorry for a Republican.

I’m very sore. It’s difficult to walk because of the blisters. And I was just after saying I had saddle soreness under control. Throw in a hot day, and a long day, and I picked up a couple of blisters.

The day was epic so I didn’t go for a drink or anything. To absorb everything I saw. It was just way too much. Truly wondrous. It’s hard to imagine it’s over and now I face another day. I said goodbye to New Mexico. I’ll never find out if they improve upon their 66 homicides in Albuquerque, and their bank robberies which averaged at 1 every 1 and a half weeks.

I’m going to miss New Mexico.

Read the Next Entry (#72) in My Bicycle Trip Across America
Read the Previous Entry (#70) in My Bicycle Trip Across America

Read more from my Cycle Across America

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under 1-eolai, Cycle Across America, Travel. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.