At the beginning of July, I had some days off to use and being my wife and my boy were out of town I got a hold of my buddy Lance and hatched a plan for a day trip somewhere. We both went in my truck seeing as how his truck still doesn't have AC. We decided to run the Hassayampa and see where we end up from there. The Hassayampa is a river that is typically dry on the surface, but like many rivers in AZ, flows underground. The Hassayampa, in the area we were running upstream, flows underground through a canyon that varies in width from pretty wide to fairly narrow. In areas where it narrows, it forces the water up to the surface making large pools of water that must be crossed.
This particular pool seemed to be about the same as the others we had previously crossed, but it proved to be quite deep. We ended up washing the dirt out of the door sills in this pool:
This is at the end of the canyon where the river emerges from underground:
After we got to this point we looked at the map and it looked like there was a nice trail leading north out of the area we were in. We headed that direction and in a while, found ourselves in an area of dense mining. People mining everywhere.
The first area we came to was the old town of Octave. There was a couple buildings here, but with all of the mining and fences, one doesn't leave their vehicle to go exploring.
Some of the year-round miners on site:
Right near that area was Weaver:
Around the hill from there we found this odd building:
Any guess as to where the spider lives??
It even had an outhouse:
Neat looking hill nearby:
The town of Stanton is right in the area of all of these other towns:
This is the old hotel in Stanton:
This is an adobe wall of the theater/dance hall:
It is still in phenomenal condition.
A little bit of history of the area:
We continued up the hill and ended up in Yarnell for a late lunch. There was still plenty of fire damage around from the fire in the previous year.
It ended up being a great day trip. Lots of great scenery and a bunch of cool history to absorb. Good stuff.