Harrys Hideaway in Cornville

Something's going on in Cornville. Whazzup, you say?  Well, it seems that the whole Cornville scene is a changin' for the better.  There's a new restaurant in Cornville.  Yep, it's called Harry's Hideaway.  I learned about it when I roamed down to the Verde Independent newspaper.  Phil Wright wrote a nice article and listed the restaurant's website.  So, I moseyed over there and was shocked.  I was expecting just another plain vanilla restaurant website.  Ho, Hum.  Well, I was shocked.  It's a GREAT website!  If the food and service and hospitality are anywhere near what is reflected in the website, then this little place will be tremendous and a genuine asset to Cornville and its nearby cousins, such as our winter home near Montezuma Well.

I called The Goatherder right away and asked him if he'd heard about it.  He was aware of it but hadn't paid any attention to it yet.  I respectfully requested that GH go forthwith and check it out today.  I am very impressed.  This is the kind of news you can use (and eat).  Disclaimer--edible news is easily my favorite news.


Meanwhile, as I was talking with GH, I noted that Harry's got called off the sidelines for mid-field action in the Celtic Fest last weekend because a Fork In The Road closed.  Oops. GH's son, Josh, got stiffed for two full weeks of wages at the Fork.  (We will resist the temptation to use the word "fork" in another context.)  We sure hope this doesn't dim young teenage Josh's interest in and enthusiasm for learning about the restaurant trade.



Well, suffice to say, we are excited about Harry's Hideaway and can hardly wait to get back down there sometime before December to give it a try.  In the meantime, how's about all the Verde Valley readers of this here blog go check it out and give us some reports back.  OK?  OK!  You can bet we're gonna be avid readers of that restaurant's blog and Twitter.  You can click here to go to their website.

The Cornville Sisters

The Camp Verde Bugle newspaper has a great story September 22 entitled "A tale of two Cornvilles." Judy Miller actually went to the only other Cornville in America. It's in Maine. Judy wrote an awesome comparison of the two communities, highlighting their similarities. Then she proposed that the two places become "sister cities." Sister Cities are nothing new--practically every Tom, Dick and Harry town has one. But they are rarely between "sisters" of the same name. What a novel and intriguing idea. It certainly has me interested in Cornville, Maine. The two places are 2,817 miles apart, according to Mapquest. It would take 43 hours of non-stop driving to get from one to the other. Cornville, Maine, is truly out in the middle of Nowhere, Maine. Anyway, you can click here to read Judy's excellent article.

Here's an interesting "aside" on Cornville and many other American communities. Judy was kind to the Post Office in her article. The legend I've heard (and repeated for over 25 years) is that when Mr. Coane turned in his application for a Post Office to be named after himself, the Postal official in D.C. in the 1880's looked at it and declared, "This idiot doesn't even know how to spell the word "corn!" So they simply scratched out Coane's name and put in "Corn." Such behavior was common then. In my years of reading history, I've stumbled on many instances of such postal behavior. The latest was this year over in Wyoming. The people there turned in for a Post Office named "Never Sweat" and the postal people threw it out and named it Dubois instead. Senator Dubois was in charge of the subcommittee that oversaw post office appropriations. Arco, Idaho, is another one close to home. The place was known as "Root Hog" and the people turned in for the name "Junction." The postal people threw that out and arbitrarily named the place for a visiting German count Georg von Arco who was visiting Washington at the time. Bannack, Montana is another one nearby. They applied for the name Bannock with an "O" but the postal people decided they didn't know how to spell and changed the "O" to an "A." Bannock with the "O" was correct because the people wanted to name their town after the Bannock Indian Nation. Nope, now way, the postal people once again decided the locals didn't know how to spell!

What's ironic here is that Cornville, Arizona, really once WAS a great cornfield in the prehistoric days. But it only accidentally wound up being named Cornville and not Coaneville.

No juice from Hoover?

I haven't been paying much attention to the ongoing drought in the Southwest. It's Sunday morning and one of my favorite activities is reading our local Sunday newspaper and then roaming to read the various online newspapers around the West. Since Susun is in Vista, California, now, I decided I'd read the local newspaper there. Much to my surprise, there's an excellent article an a possible shutdown of electrical generation from Hoover Dam, maybe even as early as within the next couple of years! This is definitely a "must read" article. It's now archived on our Google Docs. Click here to read it.

109 in Phoenix on September 18th!

Yes, the high temp in Phoenix broke the all time record for a high temperature this late in September. The previous record of 107 was set in 1980, THIRTY years ago! Today's high here in Idaho Falls was 83, notched between 3-6 pm.

SOURCE: http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2010/09/18/20100918phoenix-weather-heat-record-high-brk.html

Ranch House Coalition formed in Lake Montezuma

Awhile back we talked about the dilemma in Lake Montezuma. Private developers have robbed the community there of its heart and soul by shuttering the Ranch House and letting the golf course die. Alas, its entirely within their private property rights to do what they did. Legal? Yes. Morally wrong and unethical? You betcha. These developers are poster children for why a lot of Arizonans have such a low opinion of land developers. It's taken quite some time but the local citizens seem to be rising up about the matter. Theirs odds of rescuing the property are slim and none and Slim just town, as the saying goes. But at least they are TRYING to do something. That's better than sitting at home wringing their hands and raising a fruitless hue and cry.
If anything, their mere efforts to organize are providing a glimmer of hope (even if hope is a mirage) and such glimmers have a huge psychological impact on the collective community psyche. That's a good thing, it's like therapy---almost--and it surely doesn't cost much real cash to organize and talk big talk. We wish them well, they surely have a huge windmill to tilt against! You can read the latest by clicking here.

Cottonwood Commemorative Coin

COTTONWOOD - The City of Cottonwood is offering a token of its 50-year history of incorporation. Get your collector coins while they last.

The 50th Year Birthday commemorative "challenge coin" reflects the community's strong affiliation with the Verde River and the towering cottonwoods that line the river.

The specially made collector coins bear a reflection of the Arizona flag on one side and the city logo, the Cottonwood and Verde River on the opposite side.

The coins measure 1.5 inches in diameter and bears a copper hue, reflective of the Verde's copper industry era of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The coins are in limited supply and available for $5 at Cottonwood City Hall.

Call 634-5526 or email Kayla Allen at kallen@cottonwoodaz.gov

Northern Arizona Wildland Fire Overview

The bulk of the Year 2010 fire season has passed in Northern Arizona.  To date, fires in that vicinity have cost at least $30-million.  However, fire suppression costs there  have been only about 3% of the national cost of fighting fires so far this year.  The Schultz Fire around the San Francisco Peaks was the most devastating fire of the year.  The true cost of that loss isn't calculated into the $30-million.  The scars there will take a few generations to heal.  Meanwhile, flooding in the fire aftermath has been severe and will continue mostly unabated for years to come.  Cindy Cole of Flagstaff's "The Arizona Daily Sun" did a nice wrapup article in the Setpember 12th Sunday Sun. Unfortunately, I can't print the article to a PDF file so you will have to click here to read it on the newspaper's website.

Tovrea Castle still alive

Even though this doesn't relate to the Verde Valley, per se, it is still all about an Arizona icon, a mythical symbol that hovers in the backbrains of untold generations of Arizona residents and visitors alike. There are few more iconic icons than Tovrea Castle, sitting as it does lonesome and aloof on a cactus-studded desert outcrop smack dab in the middle of urban insanity down in Phoenix. Susun grew up casting glances Tovrea's way. Personally, I can't think of a more haunting and endearing landmark for the 1920's dreams of desert developers. There's something about Tovrea Castle that causes it to stick in your synapses. I can remember so many times when Susun's Late Mom or her Dad Don would make some remark about Tovrea Castle. Don simply couldn't drive past the place with starting some story or other about Tovrea.
It's that way for any one who's ever lived in Phoenix or been a regular visitor there.
I was very happy to find this story front and center on the September 13th issue of The Arizona Republic. I've archived it in our own Google Documents so it can be accessed forever. (Click here for the article.) If you know anything whatsoever about Tovrea, you are going to appreciate this story. Enjoy! Cheers, jp

New Ranger at the Verde District

Most Western States have a lot of US Forest Service lands. Arizona's no exception. The Verde Valley is basically surrounded by Forest Service land and numerous large pockets of public land exist with the valley itself. The Verde River long ago provided a natural boundary marker with which to divide various Forest jurisdictional boundaries. Four National Forests--The Coconino, The Prescott and the Kaibab and the Tonto technically each have a chunk of some portion of the Verde's geography. The "Coke," as it's called and the Prescott (pronounced Press-KIT) are the two major players. Two Ranger Districts vie for Top Dog of the Verde. One is the Sedona-Red Rock District and the other is the Verde District.

Our own personal career became involved with the Verde District way back in 1981-1982. By the time 1989 rolled around we actually had an official agreement to use a small portion of the maintenance area for an office of the Verde NRCD. We worked for years ON the Verde District property without ever being an official Forest Service employee. Dear Friend Tom Bonomo was the District Ranger all of those years. Tom retired a few years ago and a Dee Hines took his place. Well, Dee moved over to the Apache-Sitgreaves earlier this year and the powers that be finally got around to naming his successor. She's Celeste Gordon who's most recently of the Coronado National Forest. A story about her is available here.

We're interested in the new Ranger because she will be working closely with Dear Friend Dexter Allen who's the Wild & Scenic River Ranger for the Verde River. Dexter has his warehouse there on the Verde District even though his actual office is over in Sedona. Hopefully, the new Ranger will be very supportive of Dexter's program. We thought it would be useful to put up the article about her here for future reference.

Gas Prices

As anyone who travels well knows, gas prices are often uppermost in mind. It's still probably at least two months until we head south for the Snowbird Season. However, it's not too early to begin watching how gas prices ebb and flow between now and then. Up here in Idaho, we have been hard hit by high prices this summer. The bright red color of the gas temperature map tells the tale. Meanwhile, Central and Southern Arizona are enjoying prices as much as 50 cents a gallons cheaper than Idaho. Many locations in Tucson are right about 2.40 (or lower) now. Northern Arizona is always higher and looks to be only slightly less than Idaho.
At today's prices, it's going to cost us $200 one way coming south. We shall see what the spring prices hold. The above graphic can be found at Gas Buddy. Click here to go to that website. We've used Gas Buddy since the summer of 2002. It's an awesome website and we're thankful that it exists!

Moonscape in Verde Valley?

Yep, you betcha!  An enterprising reporter for the Camp Verde Bugle wrote a great historical piece recently.  Practically everyone we know in Arizona knows that the lunar astronauts trained for their moon missions out in the cinder fields north of Flagstaff.  That's old news.  What none of us knew was that they had TWO training sites--the famous one by Flagstaff and the heretofore unknown site right smack dab outside of Cottonwood near the Ogden Ranch Road.  Amazing but true.  The gubmint used huge quantities of explosive to blast hundreds of craters in the Mingus Mountain foothills.  When it was too cold and snowy to train up in Flagstaff, the astronauts came down to Da Verde to train.  It's an amazing story.  We printed it to PDF and then uploaded the story on our Goodle Doc's so it's preserved for posterity.  Click here to read all about it.

Drought studies reviewed by Payson Roundup newspaper.

I've always thought it a tad weird that a newspaper would be named for a weed killer!  Anyway, back in the day when The Payson Roundup got its name, roundups were something you did to cattle, not weeds.  This sleepy newspaper rarely published much more than bowling league stuff.  I've often thought that Rip Van Winkle's cousin was actually the paper's publisher.  Well, imagine my surprise when I discovered in the Roundup a nice overview of some University of Arizona studies on drought.  Click here to read the story.

Snowbowl set back...again

Perhaps the Arizona Snowbowl's quest to use reclaimed Flagstaff waste water for snowmaking might qualify as Northern Arizona's longest running political soap opera.  We've lost count of how many years this issue has been contested through the NEPA process, the courts and the arena of political theater.  It's possible that the issue might even span a generation or two.  There's no end in sight after this week's vote by the Flagstaff City Council.  As nearly as we can tell, the Council could have accelerated the process by selling POTABLE water to Snowbowl.  They voted 5-2 to nix that idea, thereby keep the reclaimed agreement on the table.  Now, as the Arizona Daily Sun reports, "Federal courts will next rule on whether reclaimed water is safe for such use, and an injunction could delay construction perhaps by one to four years by rough estimates if there is a likely appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals."  Watching paint dry looks positively FAST compared to this process!
Click here to read the latest installment in this story.

Verde Valley news roundup

Even though it's still more than two months before we head south, we're ramping up our interest in Arizona's Verde Valley news and events.  We will periodically print and archive various news stories to link to blog posts here.

First, the Really Big News: Neighbor Gary W. went over to our house this week and knocked down some of the rampant weeds.  Our use of a pre-emergent chemical didn't work on the nightshade species.  It apparently worked well on tumbleweeds, though.  You can see the results in the photo above.  THANK YOU, GARY!

Today, we have numerous other items of interest.  First, one of our actual neighbors (and the person who scared off the vandals that broke our windows) ran in the Democratic primary for the right to challenge Senator John McCain.  John Dougherty actually received 58,898 votes!  Even though he lost by a wide margin to winner Rodney Glassman (84,635 votes), it shows Dougherty must have put in a lot of time and effort during his campaign.  Dougherty's vote total was 23 percent of ballots cast in the Democratic primary.  Even though Dougherty may not realize it now, just having participated in that election will pretty much change his life from this point forward.  It will be interesting to see what he's "up to" when our paths cross next.  John and his wife are regular walkers out in the Old Field of Montezuma Well National Monument's wild western end.

Speaking of The Well, as we call the National Park Service property, our neighbor Gary W. told us yesterday that almost the entire Old Field is now a "sea of tumbleweeds."  That's no surprise since the Park and its contractors made a terribly disturbed mess of the alkaline soils there this past spring.  We are now going to have our hands full stemming the inevitable tumbleweed tsunami.  The prevailing southwest winds will blow them straight toward our property this fall and winter.  Since the Park put up a new and tight boundary fence, we expect to see a giant mountain ridge of t-weeds piled up along our south property boundary.  Ah, well, life with the Park as a neighbor is an often bumpy ride.  They live in a world of their own and all we can do is be rather mute observers next door.

On a positive note for The Well, their Staff received some press recently for their Green Rangers program. It seems that the National Level NPS leadership has passed down word from on high that all parks should work harder to engage youth in the NPS mission. The Green Rangers program is apparently unique to the Verde Valley NPS properties and attempts to teach children what it takes to preserve natural and cultural resources.
We've archived this particular story on our Google Documents as a PDF.  You can click here to read it.

A 10+ year planning and construction process for the redesign of Highway 179 came to an end last month with a big hoop-dee-doo celebration in the Village of Oak Creek and Sedona.  It's all done and speeches have been made and ribbons cut and maybe even the dust has settled, too.  Hwy. 179 is one of our most traveled routes when we are living in Arizona.  It's our link to and from many of our Dear Friends as well as our lifeline to our favorite hiking trails in Red Rock Country.  It's actually a little hard to believe what transpired there since the late 1990's.  Arizona Dept. of Transportation was ramming a horrendous plan for the highway down everyone's throats.  There seemed to be no hope that the Darth Vader ADOT plans could be changed.  Somehow, local people banded together in a David-style group called "Voice of Choice" and brought down the ADOT Goliath.  The whole saga is a true miracle in every sense of the words.  Everyone came out of this epic looking and smelling like a rose.  ADOT's won some awards for its All American Highway and the Voice of Choice people are now local legends in their own time.  The road is now a dream to travel and we can get to and from Sedona much faster, easier and more safely.  Our hats will be forever to Dear Friend Jim Bishop for the behind-the-scenes role he played in the early days of Voice of Choice.  Without Jim and his peers, that area would have been forever destroyed.  THANK YOU, JIM!  Click here to read a wrapup article about the hoopla last month.

Some things never change.  People have been talking about "saving the Verde River for way more than 20 years.  Heck, that was the essence of my whole career there from the early 1980's until our retirement in January 2001.  For 20+ years that's all I lived and breathed and preached.  The bottom line is very basic: more people = more water usage.  Duh?  What a novel idea.  Well, it seems that the only thing that people can do is simply "study" the situation over and over and over ad infinitum. And so it continues to go.  Among the galaxy of various groups that purports to have leadership status over who's up to bat on behalf of the Verde River is a creature named the "Verde River Basin Partnership."  The group was actually formed by Congress as part of a complex deal to trade a huge chunk of land to some guy in return for remote, arid land of little use to the public.  VRBP finally got some money and so now, guess what?  They are commencing to once again study what will happen when the projected 200,000 people come to live in the Verde Valley by the Year 2050.  You can click here to read all about it.

The aftermath of the housing bubble continues to impact an area not far from our Arizona home.  Technically, we live in a community called Rimrock.  But the vicinity is much better known simply as Beaver Creek.  These days it might even qualify as Greater Beaver Creek.  Within Beaver Creek, there are such places as Lake Montezuma, Montezuma Well, Rimrock, McGuireville (Home of the Goat Ropers), Indian Lakes, Thunder Ridge, etc.  Back in the day, there was once a great golf course and restaurant over in what's now called Lake Montezuma.  It had been a grand ranch in the early days of Beaver Creek.  The 1960's developers chopped up the ranch into teeny, tiny parcels, threw down a golf course, Photoshopped the lake into artificial grandeur and spawned a dubious development that somehow eventually became legitimate.  Lake Montezuma now actually has its own Zip Code so we suppose that means it has come of age.  The golf course and restaurant were a true Point of Pride for the people of Lake Montezuma.  Even though the course wasn 't really much, it drew duffers from far and wide during the winter months.  Back when money was free and easy, some developers bought the whole kit and ka-boodle and had grandiose plans for condos galore and all the related bells and whistles that only deranged developers can conjure up.  Well, along came Polly and the whole house of cards tumbled down when the housing bubble burst.  So what did Dick and Don Developer Do?  They closed the golf course, shuttered the restaurant, turned off the irrigation, let all the trees die and the golf turned into a nightmarish moonscape.  Naturally, this caused a hue and cry from the residents and their wailing has beengoing on for a few years now.  County officials wring their hands but simply can't find it in themselves to knock the crap out of the developer--heck they don't even seem capable of rapping his knuckles with a ruler.  The county has been in bed with developers for as long as the county has existed.  It's in their DNA so that's no surprise.  Anyway, yet another chapter in this long running sad soap opera played out recently when the developer got yet another six months to "proved up" on their sorry and disastrous deal.   You can click here to read all about it.

The Verde River stretches from the high, wide, lonesome country way up near Seligman, Arizona, and eventually flows clear down to a point near the Phoenix metroplex.  Since white people took over the place, there's been a lot of weirdness happen along the length of that river.  One particular place of perennial weirdness is called Childs, Arizona.  It was once a community but now it's a mere memory.  That's another story and a long one to boot.  Lots of weird things have happened at Childs.  Why?  Well, there's a hot springs nearby and for some largely unknown reason, weirdos are attracted to hot water than flows mysteriously out of the ground.  It just goes with the turf.  OK, since the Verde is still a river that means people will always attempt to paddle it in various boats and flotation devices no matter what the flow level.  Summer's low flows do not deter paddlers.  So....three kayakers were paddling in or near Childs the other day and this guy starts shooting at them with a 30.06 rifle.  One bullet apparently came within six inches of one of the boats.  It's VERY rare when river runners get shot at from shore.  It happens so rarely it generally makes news in the river runner circles nationwide.  From our perspective, it's just yet another weirdo chapter of Verde River history playing itself out at (where else?) Childs, Arizona.  The story has all the weirdness you would expect from an incident such as this.  You can click here to read it.

In reading the various news of the Verde Valley there's the typical litany of sad stuff.  A minister charged with child molestation, a wrong way driver on I-17 who died in a head-on, a suicide on Midgley Bridge, and all of the other detritus that seems to collect iin the back eddies of humanity.  We'll cover such things as a guy shooting at kayakers because that's personally relevant.  But we won't cover stories such as the above.  They are all too common everywhere in America these days.  The only thing we're interested in are news and events that are rather unique to the Verde Valley itself.  We welcome any suggestions for future topics.  Please leave your idea in the form of a comment below this post.  Thanks for reading & Happy Trails!

Cheers, Johnny Montezuma