Road Tested

The great dunes under a monumental sky.

Last week's post offered images from a recent visit to the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The SLV is the largest alpine valley in the world at 60 miles wide by 120 miles long. It’s a behemoth that’s lightly populated and a person could wander its backroads for a lifetime. 

Shadows and Light.

To simplify.

Swoosh.

Today and perhaps for several editions are a clutch of Roadside Attractions that are contenders for our upcoming show by that name and for my May-June article in Shadow and Light. Selecting 10 images out of 100s is always a daunting task. I both relish and hate the process. Looking back I often discover a image I missed back in the day. I like that part of the drill. Moving forward its about identifying something special in a subject or a scene. We're searching for another dimension that separates this image from the ordinary. Today's post relates to the theme of our upcoming show and to the article in that the photographs were made on the road to or from somewhere. Among the 10 or so images in the article will be gems from the archives and more recent efforts. In the ideal world the selections for the article and for the show would be weighted toward the new and favor New Mexico. But, ultimately, it's he best 10,15 or 25 that are true to the theme.

The image curation task and our tour of the San Luis Valley a week ago yesterday led me to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, the wonder within the great valley. It is breathtaking. Above are four images from that magnificent place.

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Roads Revisited

This little number comes to you courtesy of our upcoming summer show and a possible article for Shadow and Light. It’s rare when I can vanquish two birds with one theme. That theme is Roadside Attractions, the working title of our sixth biannual show at our Taos Gallery, Wilder Nightingale. So, here’s your first notice of the show which will open on Saturday, August 30. Consider yourself warned.

"We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."

The theme, Roadside Attractions, comes from Peggy’s fertile brain. Though I have had reservations about the title and have wondered if it's too restrictive, I’ve embraced it more or less. Can a still life be a roadside attraction?  On the other hand, most of my photographs and Peggy’s paintings have been inspired by short jaunts or meandering journeys into the southwestern landscape. So, that part works.

A sliver of color in the high desert,

New road trips are part of the plan and in the past week we returned to the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. So, on our week ago yesterday excursion we revisited old friends like the Great Sand Dunes National Park and an abandoned farmhouse in Mosca, Colorado. A dozen years ago I photographed the lonely dwelling which looked to me more like the Midwest than Southwest. So, I called the photograph “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” I’ve been processing the new ones of the farmstead and either the original will be in the show or one of the new ones if it’s better. Both of these are 2025 iterations.

Abandonado, Costilla, NM.

Just south of the Colorado border on the way to the San Luis Valley we explored the town of Costilla. West of the downtown, I use the term loosely, on the west side of NM 522 we found an entire village of abandoned buildings. It’s as if Costilla once thrived then died. One of the photographs of the abandoned buildings shown above is a work in process but I'm getting there.

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King Copper

The Ray Mine with Teapot Dome in the distance.

In an Instagram post a couple of weeks back I referred to a side trip to the threadbare copper mining town of Winkelman, Arizona. We were driving back from the California coast and planned to avoid Interstates where possible and to use so-called Blue Highways from Apache Junction, Arizona to I-40 in Grants, New Mexico. We had in mind driving northeast from Apache Junction on US 60 through the copper mining towns of Superior, Miami and Globe then through the White Mountains and plains of northeast Arizona into New Mexico at Quemado. From Quemado we’d traverse more grasslands before entering El Malpais National Monument and the junction of I-40.

Betwixt and Between

It was a daunting 12-hour haul from Arizona’s Copper Country to Taos in one long day. In the lead-up to the turn northeast Peggy expressed interest in visiting the less known copper mining town of Winkelman where her grandfather once lived and where she believed her uncle George was born. I told her, “We absolutely have to do that.” The math suggests that her grandfather would have arrived in Winkelman around the turn of the twentieth century and that her uncle would have been born there in 1920 give or take, 

Winkelman, AZ

A shell of its former self

Fate made that a necessity. As we approached Superior, population 2.407, we saw signs saying that US 60 was closed from Superior to Miami and Globe and that we’d have to take a detour through Winkelman and back to US 60 in Globe. We had no idea whether Winkelman still existed or that copper mining was alive and well. Perhaps 15 miles south on AZ 177 we caught our first glance of the sprawling Ray Mine in Hayden, AZ. It is still functioning and now Mexican owned. I photographed the mine which stretched from north of Hayden and into Winkelman with its smelter on a shallow rise above the village of 353. The town was founded when the former Kennecott Copper Mine was built in 1881. The town’s bones are of that era and there has been little new construction since. Gotta love it. In another IG post I wrote that I could spend a week in what’s left of the once bustling burg. One of my favorite portfolios, dare I say an important one, is The Edge of What’s Left. Winkelman is what's left. I am and will always be drawn to the decaying and forgotten.

It should be noted that the Ray Mine encompasses 59,000 acres and is the second largest producer of copper in Arizona, a state that produces 65% of America’s copper.

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Those cotton fields back home

The Palms Inn still standing tall.

Back in 1965 I was a cotton inspector for the state of Arizona. In no way was I qualified to inspect cotton but my college roommate at Arizona State University, Cal Z. Miller, was an entomology student. He studied bugs, Cal was going to be a cotton inspector in the hell hole of Gila Bend that summer and he recommended me to join him. It was the best paying job a college student could get in the mid-Sixties. $1.50 an hour was the going wage for a bartender or men’s wear salesman. I was both as well as others like a truck driver, bank teller, a PR flack and a singing waiter. As cotton inspectors we’d be making $275 a week. A bank trainee straight out of college earned about that. We were in high cotton if you'll excuse the pun.

So, I interviewed with Cal’s supervisor at the state Capitol in Phoenix, couldn’t spell the weevil in boll weevil, and still got the job.

Palms at the Palms

The legendary pool at the Palms.

Learning to be a cotton inspector had a short and shallow learning curve, right up my short and shallow alley. You opened the cotton boll, looked for the tiny insects, did that a hundred times and your day was done. As I recall it, we walked twenty steps into a row of cotton, picked a plant, inspected it and moved on to the next row. It was easy if blisteringly hot work. By noon each of us had tested the obligatory 100 plants. We worked five or six hours a day, five days a week for our $275. We found no weevils. Ever.

Throughout the summer of '65 we drove 70 miles from Tempe to Gila Bend every Sunday night, checked into the Palms Inn, still there and better than ever as the photographs above attest. I’ve punched the saturation to cast a mid-century vibe. We returned to our apartment at the Lone Palm in Tempe every Friday afternoon, and repaired to the pool beer in hand. It's been said that college mates say they never saw me without a beer after 5pm. We held beer chugging contests from time to time. The contestant stood in the bath tub, it's wet business, beer can in hand and waited for the go signal.  Two stop watches timed his effort. Jack Francis amazed with a world record of .9 seconds. I did 1.2. Yes, sports fans, that's faster than you can pour a beer down the drain. As if anyone would do that

When I call Gila Bend a hell hole I am not embellishing. The town was often the hottest in the country vying for that recognition with Presidio, Texas and Death Valley. To survive we were in the fields by 6am and back at our motel by noon every day.

Our routine was to work in the morning, have lunch in our swamp cooled room, take a nap, lift weights, hang out by the pool, shower, read a good book and walk to Frankie’s Bar for a steak and several bottles of Budweiser, the King of Beers. It was the same every day. Then and now I relish routine and ritual. On Fridays we were back by the pool at the Lone Palm in Tempe by mid-afternoon. It was a simple, unchallenging life. By the end of the summer of 1965 Cal and I were bronzed gods and rolling in dough.

In the spring of 1966 Cal graduated from ASU and became a health inspector in LA. I graduated a year later after eight off and on years. He visited us in Van Nuys a couple of times after Peggy and I moved to The Valley in 1968, Then we lost touch.

All of this is prompted by our drive to southern California in mid-March. In our two-day trip to the coast we stayed in Tucson for one night and took the low road to Borrego Springs through Gila Bend. We were not impressed by the backwater. It is a pit. Whereas most towns from my long ago and misspent youth in Arizona had flourished, Gila Bend had shriveled. It was less than I remembered and that’s saying something.

Of the icons of the summer of 1965 in the no stoplight Gila Bend the Palms Inn still there and was crisp, beautifully maintained and much better than it was when I was 23. Sadly, Frankie’s is no longer. If, indeed, that was it's name. I don't have a clue but Frankie's feels right. The building that once housed the dive bar was gone. I considered making the shuttered bar across Main Street from the Palms as Frankie’s but Peggy’s disdain for small fictions dissuaded me.

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