East of Eden

Achievement: Minication

Today’s my last day of of vacation. Technically I have Fridays & Saturdays off, so this is just a regular ol’ weekend. I choose to consider it vacation nonetheless, so nyah.

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Lotta Photos

We tracked down a few ghost towns along the way, and one that wasn’t considered a ghost town — but should’ve been.

I left everything in color this time, partly because the colors are wonderful and warranted, partly because I’ve got well over 1000 photos to go through and any extra processing is a nope until I’ve sifted through. What you see is straight out of the camera, other than resizing and cropping. The skies were mostly bright blue, with a few light clouds, except late on the first day.

The store below is from a designated ghost town named Eden (as the name on the building suggests). Though aside from a couple of older structures like this, Eden looked to be defying its designation. There were plenty of modern homes and vehicles alongside the older structures.

We did get a few other photos the first day. The East of Eden sign at the top was one of them, because how could I not?

We drove out to a small park in Safford before checking into our hotel. The lake photos turned out meh. The pictures of Mt Graham, taken lakeside, were a little better.

Original plans were to hit the rockhounding spot and the riparian spot on our second day. The combination of temperatures and a recommendation from the desk clerk at our hotel changed our minds. Mt. Graham was our revised destination.

The weather was perfect. Autumn color was exploding. All those orangy-red streaks on the upper part of the mountain, in the photo above? That’s trees. Up close they were even more spectacular.

Yeah, yeah… unnecessary closeup. This is one of my favorite pictures, despite its narrow focus. Maple never disappoints in autumn, though I didn’t know there were native maples in Arizona, even at higher elevations. (Not 100% sure they are native, come to think of it. People tote plants in from everywhere.)

A few blew me away with their color. And yes, the sky really was that shade of vivid blue.

Besides the red maples (and a pink one – I swear to God, it was pale pink, instead of vivid orangey-red), there were countless oaks along the road:

If I posted everything we saw and photographed, my website server would explode. I’ll split up the photos over several entries because it’s gonna take me weeks or months just to get through them all.

We decided against the Chiricahuas because it’s still ridiculously hot in the lower deserts. Instead, we headed north on the Devil’s Highway, which had been our first choice anyway.

It was MAGNIFICENT.

We took hundreds of pictures, and will post more as time goes on. We had plenty of time and kept all three cameras going. It was worth every stop along the way.

If you’re thinking these colors are so vivid they look fake, I don’t blame you. Look at the sky and the surrounding conifers. I’m good with Photoshop, but not that good. Where fire had devastated pine forests, stands of baby aspen washed vivid yellow among the stark burned pine trunks. I don’t know if I got any good shots of the new growth.

For most of the drive, the view took my breath away.

I’m a sucker for distant layers of mountains. This one took the cake. I count ten layers deep here, eleven if you count the foreground trees.

The next few shots are from the drive home.

Below is the Salt River Canyon. The Grand Canyon isn’t the only massive, beautiful crevasse in the state. I personally like Salt River Canyon better than the Grand Canyon. It’s less overwhelming. You can drive top to bottom and back up on the other side. It’s also free to visit.

The thin line snaking up through the middle of the picture is the Salt River. You can just see part of the road, lower right.

Below is Seneca Lake, perched atop the south rim of the Salt River Canyon.

A ghost town is all that remains of an attempt to build a resort at the lake, which is tragic on countless levels. Seneca Lake is small, though larger than the tiny inlet in the photo above. The resort was a good idea. Unfortunately, timing and money were off, so now there are only skeletal structures to whisper what might have been.

 

This was one of several cabins in comparable condition, scattered across the landscape. I would normally have turned this photo sepia. The colors almost don’t look real here — but they are.

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A minute of grandma-brag before I go. This is my youngest grandson. He’s five years old — and started home schooling in August. His reading has come a long, long way…

I was listening to him struggle to read simple words a little over a month ago. When my daughter shared this with me, my jaw dropped.