March 5 - 15, 2024 Our Time in Casa Grande - Part 1

After hooking up and saying our "see you laters" to Sue,  we made our way south and east.

Spring in the desert:

Past the farm fields:

Past the solar farms:

Past the desert flowers:

To our lot in Casa Grande SKP Park:

Where we will be for the next few weeks.  After settling in, we joined a few of our neighbors at Barro's Pizza for a great time.

Stats for today:

Miles Traveled: 80 Miles

Arizona:  Painted Rock Dam Road; I-8; Montgomery Road

On Friday, March 8th, Andy dropped me off in Chandler and I spent a wonderful weekend with my cousin.  A little background:  Kris and I had no contact growing up and we got together about 10 years ago.  Whenever I traveled this way, we tried to get together for lunch.  So last fall we talked about me staying with her for a few days and I am so glad we made plans.   Have to say, it was a great girl's weekend talking and laughing and getting to know one another.  (Thank you Kris.) Hope to do it again in the fall.

Saturday, March 9th was the Tempe Festival for the Arts.  It is a 3 day affair in Tempe every fall and spring and it is huge.  So Kris and I spent a few hours amazed at the creativity of the artists.  WOW!  Last spring, I bought a pair of earrings from Paula Chang and loved them.  So I contacted her and she was a vendor again this year.  What a wonderful woman!  Very creative.   

Sunday, March 10th, our weekend ended.  Kris brought me back to Casa Grande.  Andy cooked us supper and we said our "see you laters" until the fall.

Kris and I in our backyard:

On Tuesday, March 12th, we took the RV to Southwest RV in Glendale for service: oil, oil filter, and fuel filter change.  They were able to do an oil and oil filter change but not the fuel filter.  Our RV has two fuel filters: One is readily available, the other is not (we did not know that).  So we have ordered the fuel filters and will be having them changed next week near Arizona City.

Those are the highlights of Part 1.  In between the highlights was laundry, shopping, cleaning, cooking, cleaning out our sheds, repairing stuff, visiting, hanging out, etc.  The normal stuff - LOL!

Thanks for coming along and enjoy today.

March 4th, 2024 Road Trip and Interesting Places

At the entrance to the campground, there is a sign about the Oatman Farm Tours (but only on a Tuesday).  When we were talking about it, Sue mentioned about the site of the Oatman Massacre so today we decided to try and find it.

What a great spot:

We passed this building and stopped.  We found out later that it was a stage coach stop.

That is one massive beam!

Have no clue, it was just sitting there.

We continued our journey and crossed over the now dry Gila River Bed - it was massive!

We passed the entrance for Oatman Farms and just kept going - we thought the grave site was outside the farming area - yes, we were wrong.

We turned around here - yes, that is volcanic rock:

A little bit about Oatman Farms:

"Oatman Farms™ is a fearless food company with a mission to revitalize and sustain family farms in hot and dry desert environments, including our own Oatman Flats Ranch, the Arizona farm that has been in my family for four generations.

Our farm has been a vital gathering place for thousands of years, and a recent witness to the desertification and degradation of American farmland. To preserve and steward the land, my wife, Leslie, and I are committed to using regenerative, organic farming practices, growing heritage crops adapted to our soil and climate, and working with chefs and bakers to craft delicious products. Eat Fearlessly™! 

J. Dax Hansen, Owner

In 2020, Oatman Flats Ranch became Arizona’s largest organic grower of heritage wheat, with a bumper crop of White Sonora, Red Fife and Blue Beard wheat. All the wheat fields are sown with a wide array of summer cover crops, and the drylands pastures with diverse native grasses, herbaceous flowering plants, and wildflowers. We are growing several different varieties of prickly pear and agave to intercrop in the driest fields, as well as native leguminous trees and heirloom fruit trees. These arid-adapted perennial plants will not only serve as food crops, but also as windbreaks, wildlife habitat and soil conditioners."

https://oatmanfarms.com/pages/our-story

They are doing some great things here in the desert!  (I love finding new places.)

So we headed thru the farm gates; talked to one of the tour guides on where to go; then off we went. We still got lost but found some more neat stuff. (Tours were advertised for Tuesdays but this week was changed to a Monday - wish we would have known.)

This was used as a storage building:

Notice the huge cottonwood tree.  The river banks were lined with these trees before the dams:

Part of Oatman Farms:

Crossing the Gila River Bed - this river bed is huge.  I cannot image what this is like during monsoon season.

Looking upriver:

These were some type of gourds - not sure where they came from:

Looking down river:

The road coming down from the bluff to the river bed:

I cannot imagine crossing this with horses, oxen, and covered wagons when it was full of water.

Beautiful wildflowers:

More river bed:

We are now in the middle of the river bed:

And yet it continues:

I should have measured the mileage from one bluff to the other.

We were not sure what road to take once we came out of the river bed so we wandered and saw this - The Fourr Cemetery.

Fourr Cemetery
"Twenty-something years after the Oatman Massacre, William and Lucinda Fourr, and their family settled in the area., where William ranched and served as an agent at the Butterfield Stage stop. Of the six children they had between their marriage in 1868, and when they left in the area in 1880, four died here. The Fouur Cemetery is where the children are buried: Seven-year-old A.F., month old F.F. -- on the same sad date in January 1877 -- and an unnamed baby, stillborn. (I'm not sure about the fourth child.) The Fourrs eventually had eight children who survived to adulthood, with William living until 1934, and Lucinda in 1942. Stanley Heisey, a Life Scout of Troop 263, has installed a bench, a logbook, and otherwise restored the site."

What a beautiful area and kudos to the Eagle Scout that restored this site.

We wondered some more and then found the Oatman burial site.

This was not the massacre site but it was near here.

From there we walked the area towards the location of the river and the wagon trails.

This is Oatman Flats where the river ran thru this area with the bluffs all around:

That is our truck in the distance:

The river ran alongside that bluff:

On the left, there is a drop off of about 20-30'.  Hard to see with the trees.

In doing research for the blog, the family was massacred somewhere here - either on the bluff beyond or in the river bed or the bluff in front.  Still not sure.

Also there are wagon wheel marks in stone near here.  Next time thru, we will have to do more research to find them.

There is a wealth of information here on the massacre, on the survivors, and on the captives. (Natives took the two oldest girls).  The town of Oatman Arizona is named after the family.  Very interesting.

https://azoffroad.net/oatman-massacre

https://www.frontiertimesmagazine.com/blog/the-oatman-massacre

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Oatman

https://www.carlsbadhistoricalsociety.com/Carlsbad%20Historical%20Society_files/historical/Oatman%20Massacre.htm

Will we come back again - Absolutely.   There are so many things to find in this area - ghost towns and historic buildings plus would love to do the tour.   And the campground is just beautiful.

What a great day.  We finished the day with another great campfire.  It was so good to connect with Sue these last few days (Thank you Sue).  Hopefully we will see her again before we head north.

We are heading to Casa Grande tomorrow so stay tuned and enjoy today.

March 3rd, 2024 - Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground

We woke to a beautiful day and just hung out enjoying the scenery and sun.

We are on the left and Sue is on the right:

View from my door:

Check out the greenery on the mountains:

Right by the campground is the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site so off we went to check it out.

"The Painted Rock Petroglyph Site is located on the eastern edge of the Painted Rock Mountains and about eighteen miles west by northwest of Gila Bend, Arizona. The area is mostly flat and sandy with May-Oct daytime temperatures in the 100s. The annual rainfall is only about six inches and the nearest irrigational water is the Gila River. In prehistoric times the Gila flowed west out of the mountains of western New Mexico, made a big dogleg turn at the town of Gila Bend and continued west to empty into the Colorado River. The Hohokam people once lived and farmed here. Ruins of their late Pioneer Period (AD 350 – AD 550) and Early Colonial Period (AD 550 – AD 700) villages are found to the north and west, and ruins of their Sedentary – Classic Period (AD 900 – AD 1400) villages are found to the south and east.Over forty petroglyph sites have been recorded in the area, however; most of these sites are small with only a few dozen petroglyphs. The Painted Rock Site is the largest known site with about 800 images. The petroglyphs are pecked onto weathered basalt boulders overlaying a granite outcrop. The outcrop is in the form of an east to west orientated oval about 400′ long, and about 20′ tall with two small knob tops. Most of the petroglyphs are concentrated on the boulders along the eastern edge, but the petroglyphs face in all directions from that edge.

Although considered a Hohokam rock art site, Painted Rock is on the extreme western edge of the Hohokam cultural area. East of Painted Rock, petroglyphs take on more typical Hohokam characteristics, while petroglyphs farther west take on more Patayan characteristics. Found here and in nearby areas of the Gila River are petroglyphs of Archaic origin. Human-seeming figures are etched into the boulders, as well as animals, sun symbols, concentric circles, spirals and mazes. Drawings of mounted riders indicate work was added after the Spanish introduced horses to the region.

There is also pioneer graffiti as this area became a well-traveled route. The Gila River Valley formed a natural roadway through the desert with reliable water, so plenty of Arizona history passed this way during the ensuing centuries. When Juan Bautista de Anza left the Tubac Presidio in 1775 with 240 men, women and children to establish a settlement on San Francisco Bay, he traveled through this valley and noted the drawings of Painted Rock in his journals. In 1846, the Mormon Battalion followed the same route along the Gila River, building a wagon road that opened the way for westward expansion. A dozen years later the Butterfield Overland Mail Company established mail and stage service that sliced across the region with six stations built between Gila Bend and Yuma.

During World War II, General George Patton used this area as headquarters for tank training. Eventually the railroad and the highways — first U.S. 80 and then Interstate 8 — would parallel the trail that was blazed so very long ago."

Initially the site looks like a bunch of boulders just dumped in the desert:

As you get closer there are petroglyphs all over.  Awesome:

Desert Varnish!  How about that!

Interesting!  I am curious as to why they made some of these drawings: Were they messages to others? Were they hobbies to pass the time?  Where they just what they saw in the area?  Even though it is desert now, it was very lush into the 1900's when they started to dam and divert the Gila River.  All along the river were huge cottonwood trees.  So were there trees covering these rocks?  (Yes, I like to imagine and visualize - 😁)

Look closer - modern day graffiti:

What a beautiful day that ended with a campfire!