Strong women, doing what they gotta do

You have to drive through the town of Fredonia to get to Pipe Spring National Monument. I like to do the driving because I can cut over to the curb or pull a U-turn quick-like when I see something I want to take a photo of, instead of yelling out, Stop! NOW!!! and giving the HH a heart attack. So luckily I was behind the wheel when we went through Fredonia last week because I did execute one of those quick-like U-turns when I saw this store. Lotto. Guns. Ammo. Beer. I didn't go in; I just wanted the photo. What more could a girl ask for?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Pipe Spring began as a tithing ranch for the Mormon church. In the 1870s, 80-100 cows were milked daily by the men and boys, which produced 60 pounds of cheese and 40 pounds of butter, churned out by the women. Daily! Twice a month a couple dozen steers were driven to St. George, Utah along with a load of cheese and butter. The men who worked on public roads and the St. George Temple and Tabernacle received shares of beef and the dairy products.

This particular site was chosen for the spring, of course, but also for the rangeland. At the time the grass extended for miles and was said to be belly-high on a horse. Later, years of drought and overgrazing reduced the land to desert scrub and it was no longer able to support cattle.

Anyone who's lived or visited in this part of the country knows that the wind blows and howls and whips sand into spaces that are not even visible. Before we left Petrified Forest I opened the windows during the early spring winds and found fine sand covering everything.  It was no different for the women who lived at Pipe Spring. Emma Seegmiller, who lived at the fort in the 1890s, wrote:

After every storm, house cleaning was necessary and from a single room I have swept or shoveled out five gallons of sand, the broom would not carry the weighty bulk to the door.

The women were also responsible for providing food for not only their own families but cowhands and other workers, clean beds, and a welcome to all visitors. Laundry had so many steps it took all day. I have a nifty washer-dryer unit in my house, a single machine that does both functions, and is it handy! On the nice days we've been having here I hang the laundry outside, just like we did when we were kids. For me it's a choice, though, and I don't have to use washboards and wringers and boil water to do the washing first. I have such respect for pioneer women. They were strong and endured a life we can't imagine.

Part of a wagon wheel with an iron rim.

I was surprised that the garden wasn't up and producing. The Ranger who gave the talk about the place said they do grow crops there and visitors are welcome to help themselves, but there wasn't anything ready yet. I noticed squash blossoms behind the main house and at the entrance to the monument and immediately thought about the stuffed squash blossoms HH and I enjoyed at La Posada in Winslow,

but didn't ask if I could take any. I couldn't have kept them fresh on that long day we were on the road.

This is the main building, Winsor Castle. It's the living quarters and fort and is named for its builder, Anson Winsor.

I mentioned this cornerstone to the Ranger who gave the talk, but until I loaded the photo onto the computer, I'd forgotten that I never got an explanation of what's on there. Because of all of the carvings it looks like a miniature version of Inscription Rock that I saw at El Morro in February. That seems like ages ago.


The heavy doors open to a sunny courtyard. One of my must-haves, if I ever have a stationary house again, is a covered porch. These are perfect. 

The gutters and downspouts are copper but are not the original. This was a really nice place and HH and I both thought it would be an easy house to live in.


One of two cabins outside the fort.

This plaque notes the award of National Monument status and honors Stephen Mather, considered the father of the National Park Service. What I didn't know until not long ago is that Presidents can name National Monuments but it takes an act of Congress to name National Parks. You can see the sign calls the place Pipe Springs, but the NPS calls it Spring.

According to an NPS webpage, Pipe Spring became a refuge for Mormon wives running from the feds in Utah:

With the passing of more strict anti-polygamy laws in the early 1880s, the federal government tripled the number of U.S. Marshals in Utah and began a campaign to convict men practicing polygamy. Pipe Spring became a refuge for wives of targeted Southern Utah men, since it was located across the territorial line in Arizona. Flora Woolley, second wife of Edwin D. Woolley, said of her move to Pipe Spring, "So about the year 1886, I moved to Pipe Spring. In other words, I went to prison to keep my husband out."

A photo from the same webpage, taken in 1891:

According to the plaque above, the telegraph line is reconstructed but the first was installed in 1871. As time went on Pipe Spring became, in addition to a women's hiding place, a resting place, a watering hole, and a telegraph café. 

Using the juniper at hand, the poles were set 70 feet apart. The telegraph line that passed through Salt Lake City inspired Brigham Young to plan a church-owned communication network. After the Civil War, the price of surplus telegraph materials dropped enough to make it affordable to install. (The Park Service posts the best interpretive signs and between them and Wikipedia I don't have to know anything; I just look it up.)

For 17 years in the late 1800s, at least seven women were employed to work the telegraph. They apparently didn't last long because it was considered a 24-hour job. Their bedroom was the telegraph room and they weren't allowed to leave it to mingle with visitors to the castle.

In the 1930s the CCC also had a presence here. They came to clean out the tunnel spring, graded the campground area (which I think does not exist anymore), constructed a road through the monument on a new location, and other projects.

There is an amazingly detailed history on the NPS site, loaded with illustrations. For such a small site, this place has many stories to tell.

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Thought of the day:

A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars. - Carly Simon

Paw prints

My HH and I went to Kanab, Utah last weekend for a little road trip. When I was still at Petrified Forest my friend Richard, who'd worked at Grand Canyon for a dozen years, marked up a Triple A map called Indian Country, to show us what we needed to see. This map of the Four Corners area - Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado - is worth every penny of the five bucks AAA charges, except HH has a membership so we got it for free.

Richard circled Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, west of Kanab; we saw that Pipe Spring National Monument was nearby; and my boss here, Robin, told us about Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, so off we went.

The state park is pretty but if you go don't pay the $8 to get in if all you want to do is look. There are a couple of pullouts on the road in that allow you to climb a dune and get expansive views of the dunes and the mountains beyond. Pipe Spring began its life as a holding area for livestock that the Mormon faithful tithed to the church. A house/inn/fort was built to enclose a spring and guard against Indian attacks, which wouldn't have happened if our gov'mint hadn't harassed them onto reservations. In any case, those pictures haven't been processed yet. I'm so far behind.

The animal sanctuary is spread out over many acres. Its buildings are miles apart and generally the first stop is the visitor center where you can catch a shuttle that tours all the buildings. There aren't any animals there; they're all housed in other buildings in really beautiful surroundings.

But I want to cut to the chase. We didn't take the shuttle but drove ourselves around and in taking the back, gravel roads we came across a cemetery. As I first glimpsed it through the fence that surrounds it I thought it was a beautiful park, which I suppose in a way it is.

The area the entire sanctuary is in is called Angels Canyon, and what I took to be a park is a pet cemetery called Angels Rest. I've seen people cemeteries that haven't been so lovingly maintained.

Niches in the walls are filled with memorabilia:

pet collars,

photos, notes,

and what I suppose to be cremated remains of beloved pets.

Many graves carry multiple names and most are marked by simple concrete squares,

but some are marked like these three, with professional-quality stones such as you'd see in any people cemetery,

 
while others have handmade memorials.

There are a few dozen wind chime trees spaced around the rows and arcs of graves.

Each chime is dedicated to someone's pet.

I looked up Reno Rabbits and found this blog that talks about some rabbits that the writer had adopted "from a crazy woman that lived in Reno; she had over 1000 rabbits in her backyard."

I've loved every one of my pets and, while I may not go so far as to bury them in a pet cemetery, I certainly understand the devotion people have. But these two puzzled me. Are the owners also buried here? It looks like that might be true.

I went through an interesting array of feelings about this place. I was creeped out (I did look for a synonym but nothing fit), amused, bemused, and finally touched by an overwhelming wave of others' grief and sadness. The tinkling wind chimes were an eerie sound as the shadows lengthened down the canyon walls and I found myself alone. 

We should all be so loved that we will be remembered like this.

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Thought of the day:

Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened. - Anatole France

Cold night, but worth it. Oh, yeah.

I scored a camping permit for Cape Final last weekend. All backcountry camping, on the rim and in the canyon, requires a permit and they're limited. The great thing about Cape Final is it's exclusive - only one permit is given each night, which meant I had the place to myself.

The weekend before, my neighbor's husband Glen and I went out to Cape Final to see what we could see. We got there about 8:30 am, just in time to greet the previous nights' campers as they were leaving, and we were the only ones there. On our way out, a couple of hours later, there was a river of people heading in. The hike is only a couple of miles each way and pretty easy, so that makes it popular with folks who don't want or can't do a challenge. It was good knowledge to have because it told me I needed to be up and out early after my night to camp.

There are so many wildflowers in bloom, and day by day the butterfly population is increasing.

Lupines are now on the decline but last week there were sweeps of their unmistakable color.

 

Not just butterflies, either; as I've been trying to get close-up shots of flowers like the one above, I've seen insects everywhere. This spider did its best to hide from me no matter which direction I took to get a good view.

Until I gave up because it could move in more directions than I could.

Locusts are also in bloom. They're large bushes covered with delicate flowers and protected by huge thorns.

 Their buds. Amazing, isn't it?

I waited until late afternoon to head in. I'm pretty sure this isn't a hotbed of crime, but I still didn't want an audience to see that I was a single person out there that night. I planned well because when I pulled into the parking lot at the trailhead, mine was the only vehicle there.

Glen and I had found the campsite easily enough, but when I was toting my backpack in, it had disappeared. I hiked up and I hiked down. I followed the trail, I went cross country. I dropped my pack and wandered to places previously unseen, and the campsite was nowhere to be found. I finally said to heck with it and put my tent up on an overlook point, grateful that I'm not a sleepwalker because there are no fences and the canyon is deep.

The view from my front porch.

 
And in another direction.

 Now I'm running out of directions.

 
OK, one more. 

I have a new tent, different from last year. I really liked my old one but it weighed six pounds and my new one is half that. Thankfully, REI takes back items even if they've been used so I got all my money back on the other tent. The old one was free standing and the new one requires a couple of stakes. Generally that's a good idea anyway if the wind is blowing, but just to give it what little interior room it's supposed to have, it has to be staked. So I snapped all the poles in place, attached them to the tent, and when I went to pound in the stakes I found I was on solid rock with just enough dirt covering it to get into everything I owned but not enough to sink a stake into. I had to move back on the trail about twenty feet before I found enough dirt to nail the tent down.

This is what I looked like when I finally set up. The big rock at the top of the tent isn't doing anything. I was just too lazy to move it. I hung my pack on a tree, not deceiving myself for one minute that it would keep critters out. When I got my permit, the backcountry ranger asked me to let them know if I had a rodent problem when I was out there. Immediately I was suspicious: what kind of rodents, exactly? Mice. Oh, all right. I thought maybe she meant skunks or raccoons, but I saw nothing at all.

I got everything set up in time to watch the sun fade over the canyon. Even with some cloud cover there wasn't a fiery sunset but a gradual leaving of light that softened the edges of the chiseled terraces and the pinnacles and valleys in front of me. I found a large rock at the edge of the rim to watch from, and drank it all in.

For the longest time since I got there, all I heard was the wind among the Ponderosa pines. Then an intrusion far above me and heading away: the distant, diminishing drone of a plane. I watched its contrail scrape straight as an arrow across the sky until the winds aloft blew it to cotton wisps and the plane disappeared into the clouds. Then another, but traveling in a different direction, and I didn't see it or hear it for long. 

The evening began to chill. A bird chittered close to me and I heard the far-off drill of a woodpecker and the hum of a fly. It was me and nature; what a life.

The rock I sat on offered views that held my attention as much as the ones in the canyon.

And then the light got wonderful, highlighting tips and edges, giving this part of the canyon the look of the Great Wall.

It wasn't a perfect trip. The tent seemed so small, my sleeping bag confining and cold, and I couldn't seem to get comfortable all night long. When the sky lit with pink the next morning I was up and packing to leave. But everything's a trade off. I could have stayed home and not seen any of this.

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Thought of the day:

'Just living is not enough,' said the butterfly, 'one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.'  - Hans Christian Anderson