Not mythical to the open minded

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Arizona does have a couple of ghost towns of the sort from the movies - tumbleweeds on dusty mainstreets, the abandoned bar and hotel and bank, and almost no private residences - but they're privately owned and operated and purpose-built. One real one, Bumble Bee, is almost like the movies' ones, but it too is (necessarily, if its to last) privately owned. Another is Ruby.

In the ghost town books of the late '60's and the '70's many of the Arizona sites depicted rivaled the ones in the movies, but they are all gone: Enchanted visitors traveling to many of these have an open mind, and still enjoy the meager remains however. Vandals and treasure seekers mostly, free in the new age of the off-road-vehicle, along with the occasional land-owner afraid of the liability potential, have erased the bulk of the remains of those "published" sites from existence in just the past 18-21 years. White Hills is a perfect example where barely a scrap remains. A few sites had so many concrete structures that they are almost indestructible, like Swansea and SASCO, but even those now leave a great deal to the imagination.

The real ghost towns that I have found in Arizona consist of a few residences, modest at best, a jail, powder-shacks and outbuildings, and mining debris. I have only found a few undisturbed ghost towns in twenty-some years of looking. All old town sites have garbage dumps, however, abound with a vast array of artifacts, but here we must enter into the imagination there again, and have an open mind to enjoy. Trash sites seem less readily pillaged, as yet, than most aspects of these town sites.

One of the last new ghost towns I found, a few years ago, consisted of ruble and houses and an old road. An open mind was required to even be able to see it, and I nearly failed the test.

We were done for the weekend, really, headed-home taking an ancient jeep-trail to intersect with the modern-bladed road around the current Silverbell Mine to the pavement. It used to go past the cemetery, I recalled, and intersect at the town of Saguaro. We passed the cemetery, but before the junction was a tremendous berm across our road as well as a gate-less fence beyond. We stopped and got out to inspect, and review our options. We climbed the berm and under the fence and up the blockaded road a quarter mile to the old intersection and an abandoned brick commercial building of some sort. It was gutted and nobody was around. I found myself standing amid the site of Saguaro, grumbling about why we couldn't use the road anymore, for ten minutes before I knew what we had! We were standing in a modern ghost (circa 1955)!

As I said, I've been doing this for a while, and I'm afraid I too have expectations about the vintage and arrangement and location and ex-purpose of a ghost town. It's really no different in so many ways from the expectations (so grossly in error) of someone on their first expedition expecting the likeness of a movie-set. Expecting, wishing, wanting, hoping; a trap that we all fall into from time to time (some more than others and I hope you know who you are) that will cause us to walk right past what it is that we are actually looking for. As I stood in that little ghost town then, not far enough from the city, not high enough in the mountains, not old enough (hell, I'd driven through there 3 or 4 times in the past 25 years when it wasn't ghost), I realized that my expectations had almost stolen the entire experience. A ghost-town-discovery-experience for me, nearly paramount you see, and so I suppose one the other hand, if I weren't such a grumbler (about the fence), we'd have just turned around in the first place, and driven another way.

So for you ghost town hunters (and wanabees too), remember that it isn't at all what it used to be, and almost definitely not what you expect, but its still a hellofa lota fun if you can just manage an open mind. A town site could be gone entirely, but if you can find the stamp-mill or separator-unit, and follow the road backward, you might just be able to find the town's streets, some foundations, some English china from the 1870's, an Oscar Meyer can from the teens, or a Prest-O-Lite sign from the twenties, and let your imagination do the rest. One request though: Leave the damn things there for others of us to see!!!!

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Revised: 9 December 2002 by Rover

Postcard (hand colored) from the late '30s

Where was it? (Riverside??)

What remains?