Since last winter went so swimmingly, let's try it again! TFS has very graciously opened her home in the west San Fernando Valley to me again. This time her daughter AS (and dog and cat) are there too. Two women + two dogs + two cats = not my usual solitary winter again. Huzzah! Place name links like Los Angeles, CA go to Wikipedia. Place name links like Los Angeles use a local tourism or government website.
| 2014.05.03 |
Jerome, Arizona |
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From forested plain
to green valley
under red hillsides
to tan desert, we
took the scenic
route you'll see in
pictures below. | |
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and there's not
much of it | |
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Jerome, AZ is an old copper-mining town turned ghost town turned tourist attraction. I was last there 22 years ago (1992) and it's quite different now, as am I.
Way back then I was a freshly-married man, in my first and only salaried (corporate) job, visiting Phoenix, AZ to look over the computers of a company my employer had acquired there. Summer heat in April!
The week before I was to go, the local newspaper ran a Travel section story about a place with my name. I had to see this place.
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I had a rental Geo Metro and set off on the Saturday at the end of my visit. Since I was coming from the south I think I came in the other way, on AZ-89A northbound, which is a much wigglier road, and I certainly remember that after all these years. |
Getting There from Flagstaff
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Down into
the valley |
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| In the valley |
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A lovely run, under green trees against red rock. People actually live down here. After passing through traffic in Sedona we continue into a plain. |
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In Cottonwood | |
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It's up in those hills. |
A National Historic Landmark | |
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up the hill | |
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This is definitely not the route I took to get here last time: nowhere near as winding and twisty. |
Entering | |
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up more hill | |
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And left on to Main Street, Jerome, AZ |
In Jerome
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| We parked on Clark Street, the other large street in town. | |
| Jerome is a product of a very fortuitous upwelling of mineral-rich water and magma exposed by the Verde Fault. An exposed seam of copper was likely mined by local native tribes for hundreds of years before the first mining claims were filed in 1876. It's named after Eugene Jerome, an eastern financier who aided in the creation of the United Verde Copper Company in 1883 and became its secretary. Started as a small mining camp with a small smelter, high transportation costs and low copper prices forced the company's closure in late 1884. | |
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Too Strong To Die | |
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Jerome Historic District 1966 National Historic Landmark |
Town Hall | |
The UVCC properties were bought and developed and population grew to 250 in 1890 to over 2500 by 1900. From 1876 to 1953 the United Verde (the largest, but not the only) mine produced nearly 33 million tons of copper, gold, silver, lead and zinc ore, said to be worth over $1 billion. After burning a few times it became a mining boom-town, with brick buildings, eletricity and telephones, as well as alcohol, gambling and prostitution. Fortunes rose and fell with copper prices until mining shut down in 1953 after extraction of 2.5 billion pounds of copper, 50 million ounces of silver, and 1 million pounds of gold.
Residents have worked from closure of the last mine to make the town a growing tourist destination with art galleries, craft stores, wineries, coffee houses, and restaurants. It's a scenic place perched on an east-facing hill overlooking a broad desert valley. With Ghosts. One of those places that a car club or motorbike run or trans-continental tourists like us would would use as a reason to drive through somewhere fun to drive and pretty to look at.
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| An old brothel, converted into a sex-related artifacts store. Unfortunately it was closed by the time we got there. Most other shops were still open. | |
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Chamber of Commerce
"the friendly town" |
Clark Street | |
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phriendly photographin' phool photo | |
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State Historic Park
| Quite a charming little place. We could have spent a couple more hours there. |
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Night view leaving |
with full moon | | We shopped for trinkets and found a few. Added to our list of Christmas stores shopped. I got a postcard and a fridge magnet; Mom got a bookmark and Xmas ornament with her favourite son's name on them. :) Saw some Jerome-branded wine but $30 a bottle too much for my plebian wine tastes. Had dinner with cheap margueritas, due to the restaurant's 20th anniversary. Headed back to Sedona in the dark, for the night.
Jerome Last Time
I surprise myself with my organizational skills sometimes. It took about 5 minutes to find the pictures I took last time. They're all stamped June, 1992, which I think is the printing date. I was there whenever the sun sets around 8 pm, because I remember that the fast southern sunset hampered a lot of exploration after my work day. I have no idea what kind of camera I had, though likely just a cheap disposable because I wasn't much into photography to own a camera.
I scanned the lot for a view from my past. None of me because I was travelling solo.
my car may have been the blue one | |
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lobby | |
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interior hallway | |
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courtyard | |
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| I was working for a large local engineering consulting company, as the IT guy for a growing number of companies. This was the office of a company they had acquired, pretty exotic at the time for a northern boy. | |
20 miles south | |
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Arriving.
Looks like I wasn't afraid of photographing while driving back then either. | |
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City Limits | |
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| This is the other route into town, on the 89A from Prescott. | |
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| Who knew that decades later I could stitch these images | |
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| together digitally in barely a minute and share them globally? | |
| Clark Street, I think. Looks like I wasn't much interested in capturing the town. This is the only pic. | |
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leaving - the view from below | |
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And that's 22 years later in Jerome, AZ . It probably hasn't changed much, except for more development. I on the other hand, await further introspection on the matter. |
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