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
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