Da Pix

As promised both here and to ourselves, we drove the Florence-Kelvin Highway last Thursday. It’s a 32-mile strip of road, about 10 miles of which is dirt. It took us over four hours to drive it because we stopped every five minutes for photos.

Mother Nature was in a particularly generous mood. The skies, as you can see from the photos, were perfect. Temperatures hovered mostly in the 60s. While rain was definitely in the air, it didn’t start sprinkling until we were in Superior on the way home, and on a main highway. The dirt segment of the road we traveled was good the whole way, but I have a feeling it would’ve turned into mud bogs in spots with a little bit of rain. I know for a fact there were a few spots we’d have been stranded due to flash flooding in streambeds and gullies like this one:

Nope, that’s not a road, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was. It’s certainly wide enough to be a road, at least for a way back. Now imagine it filled with rushing water and debris several feet deep. This wasn’t the biggest one we crossed, either, not by a long shot. Flash floods hit fast, too. This video gives you a little bit of an idea:

We’re definitely not driving the Florence-Kelvin Highway during monsoon season. Beyond flash floods, I was concerned about the possibility of running across one of these in the road:

This was a side road near The Boulders (preview at the top of the page, with more to come below). If the main road had been like this I’d have turned around. It might be no big deal to drive through – or might’ve been an hours-long wait to be pulled from the mud.

That’d be a big-ass nope, because you never know.

Our main reason for going now was to capture wildflowers in bloom – and they were out in force. Arizona poppies (yellow) were everywhere, and Globe mallows (orange) were exploding in several areas. I especially adore the mallows. Something about them just rings every bell for me.

Below is a much better capture of the Arizona indigo than my last one a few entries back (with a few of the poppies mixed in). These things grow in profusion by the side of the road. They’re so tiny and so delicate though, especially early in the season, it can still be tough to capture the individual spikes and blooms in a picture.

The first twenty miles of our trip was on paved roads, before we hit the mountainous part of the drive and it became dirt. (Not gravel – dirt.) Even along the paved part of the drive, we had spectacular views.

The rains – including this week – meant the desert has greened right up. It isn’t comparable to what you’ll find in temperate zones, but it’s far more color than you’ll see for the majority of the year.

After we crossed onto the dirt part of the road, we found The Boulders (or the Boulder Field, depending on who you ask). The saguaro next to this balancing act looks tiny in comparison. I couldn’t get close enough to get a good feel for size, but the average height of an adult saguaro is around 40 feet. The tallest recorded is 78 feet. So the stack of rocks pictured below are about the height of a three- or four-story building.

This picture of G, below, gives you a better idea of scale. These weren’t the biggest rocks in the area, either, by a long shot. He’s trying for a better vantage point to capture a panoramic series of photos. You can just barely see the line of boulders in the distance. They’re the ones in the featured photo at the top of this entry.

The tilted monkey’s face, below, was easily several times the size of the sportage. I had to do some strategic wheeled contortions to get far enough back to get the whole thing in one picture, because it was right next to where we parked.

This is a better shot of the main road we traveled, with its amazing view of the Mineral mountains in the background.

Riding shotgun has a whole different meaning out on these rural roads. The further out you go, the more likely you’ll see road signs used for target practice.

When we drove into Kelvin – which I didn’t know existed until recently – we edged down a narrow road to the Gila River. It would once have been much larger and year-round, but there’s at least one major dam upstream. The only undammed year-round river in the state now is the Verde, which flows just north of Payson.

In the midwest, the Gila (pronounced HEEL-ah, for the record) would be considered a creek instead of a river.

My one obligatory sepia picture is below. This ruined house sits along the road in Kelvin.

We absolutely plan to do the drive again in the future.

Because we hadn’t driven the area before, we didn’t know which places were readily accessible and which were going to take strategic meandering to reach. There was another gorgeous old house perched high on the mountainside, for example, and I didn’t get a snap at a distance, thinking we’d be able to get closer. We might have, but we’d already taken several hours to drive 30 miles by that point, and our older daughter was expecting us.

G hiked the path nearly to the top of this smallish rise, so he could get a snap of the valley beyond. He’d planned to go all the way to the top. Unfortunately it was loose, rocky rubble and too unstable for him to make it a vantage point. I’m shocked he made it far as he did – he’s not the most mobile person, either, though he’s obviously far more ambulatory than I am.

And to wrap it up, something I can’t believe I didn’t notice before. The photo below was taken where the Florence-Kelvin Highway meets up with SR 177, only a couple of miles down the road from where my daughter lives. We’ve passed it several times before.

I haven’t got a clue if this ginormous rock has a name. We dubbed it Beehive Hill, for obvious reasons:

You can see evidence of the Ray Copper Mine in the distance. There was no horizon to level from this view, so I tried to balance much as possible, assuming the utility poles and such stand more or less straight.