An Eclectic Mind

An idyllic scene in high desert range land.

Mike and I own 40 acres of “ranch” land about 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon at Howard Mesa. For the past three years in a row, I’ve spent a good portion of my summer camping out there with my dog, bird, and horses.

I’m an explorer. I like to look at a map, find a potential destination, then hop in my Jeep (or helicopter) and see what it looks like. On a summer day in 2006, Jack the Dog and I took the Jeep to follow some of the dirt roads that run through National Forest land just south of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. My objective was to take a photo of the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine as it made its way to the depot in Grand Canyon Village.

I wrote about that day in my blog, so I won’t spend a lot of time repeating myself here. I’ll cut to the chase.

This gate and corral was on one of the roads I followed near the railroad tracks before I got into the National Forest. Nearby were the remains of a few buildings. It had once been part of a train station where cattle had been loaded onto cattle cars and shipped south for sale and slaughter. Now it’s just a picturesque spot on a remote dirt road, captured with my camera during a Jeep outing with my dog.

I bring my Jeep back from Howard Mesa.

On Saturday, Mike and I drove up to Howard Mesa to take care of “winterizing” our shed and property. That included things like spraying down the little building with Thompson’s Water Seal, covering the valves on our two water tanks with foam insulator cups, and securing loose items.

We were going to fly up, but for some reason, Mike wanted to drive. So we made several stops along the way in Prescott: the excellent True Value hardware store near the hospital, the Secondhand Man Furniture Shop, and an antique store near Courthouse Square. We almost bought a table and a drop-front desk (or secretary, as they’re sometimes called) but decided that the table was too big and the desk was too rickety. Then we got back on the road and, after stopping at Safeway in Chino Valley for fuel and KFC in Chino Valley for lunch on the go, we finally made it to Howard Mesa by about noon.

We did our chores. It took about two hours. I used Trade-a-Plane sheets to cover the windows of the shed and it’s a good thing I did — Mike has very little precision with the sprayer. He sprayed and I brushed the wet spots — mostly the building’s trim and “shutters.” Then we did our wooden bench and picnic table. Then we did the building again. We went through two gallons of Thompson’s. It was certainly worth the effort. The building will be protected for up to two years (although we’ll probably do this annually anyway) and, hopefully, it won’t turn black like the picnic table is.

Afterwards, we called our friends Elizabeth and Matt, who live full-time on the other side of the mesa. They were home so we decided to visit for a while on our way back home.

My Jeep was at Howard Mesa — it had been there for about two months — and I wanted to bring it home. I’d been driving my little Honda S2000 for the whole time it was gone and the poor car was tired of eroded dirt roads and dust. And I was tired of washing it. Besides, as fun as the Honda is to drive, it’s not terribly practical for life in Wickenburg. I’d bought it for road trips and driving down to Phoenix — not for picking up feed for the horses and grocery shopping. And that’s what I’d been doing. (Do you know you can fit three 50-lb bags of horse and chicken feed in the trunk of a Honda S2000?)

So I loaded the garbage into the Jeep and let Mike take Jack the Dog in his truck. (He also took a very tall ladder that I’ll be using at the airport during my preflight to get just a little closer to my rotor hub.) We drove to Elizabeth and Matt’s place. We took what we call the Tank Road — a two-track that winds through state land from a big metal water tank to the edge of Elizabeth’s and Matt’s property. It’s a mile shorter that way, but the road is pretty rough. Didn’t stop me from bouncing along in the Jeep. I figured that the Jeep had had enough rest and it was time to get back to work.

We had a nice visit, then hit the road again in our two separate vehicles. I led the way. And that’s when I started to remember why I’d bought the S2000 in the first place.

On paved roads, the Jeep rides like crap.

First of all, the Jeep’s 6-cylinder, 4-liter engine cannot compare to the 4-cylinder, 2 liter engine in my Honda. The Jeep has terrible acceleration and could barely reach the speed limit on Route 64 (65 mph), I-40 (75 mph), or 89 (65 mph). My driver’s license would be safe: Speeding wasn’t much of an option. The whole thing shakes and rattles, feeling very unstable at any speed over 55. The Honda, on the other hand, feels rock solid and stable at any speed — and I’ve tried a bunch of them.

And the Jeep’s brakes — well they suck. I’m going to get them checked. They really can’t be that bad by design. The first time I used them at a stop sign, I nearly coasted right through the intersection.

Noise was a big issue. Although I had my iPod plugged into the stereo system with one of those cassette do-dads, I couldn’t get the volume loud enough to hear the podcasts I was trying to listen to. I had to resort to my ear buds, which are designed more like ear plugs than the standard iPod buds. That actually sounded good and cut out all the road noise.

You might say, well if you hate the Jeep so much, why don’t you just get rid of it?

First of all, I never said I hated the Jeep. I actually kind of like it. You know, the way you might like a stray dog who knows how to catch Frisbees. It can do a cool thing — drive just about anywhere my Honda can’t — and it really isn’t either troublesome or costly to gas up and insure. I hardly ever wash it — Jeeps are supposed to be dirty — and it does start right up every time I turn the key. And it is the perfect vehicle for driving around town in Wickenburg. After all, I have to cover nearly a mile of dirt road just to get to the supermarket from my house.

But I really don’t like driving it long distances on paved roads.

Especially after driving the Honda nearly every day for the past six or so weeks.

We stopped at the Iron Springs Cafe in Prescott on our way home. I wish Wickenburg had a little restaurant like that. The March Hare comes close — but it’s only open for dinner one day a week and you need reservations by noon the previous day, which is not always convenient. Good, interesting food, great taste combinations. But the Iron Springs Cafe is filled with trendy baby-boomers and young people, rather than retirees.

From there, I followed Mike home. I had a hard time keeping up with him on Iron Springs Road. The sun had set while we were in the restaurant and the sky glowed with that post-sunset color — red, orange, violet. The air was clear. I had my window open — mostly because I had a half full, open bottle of fuel injector cleaner wedged in beside my seat (long story) and the smell of it was screwing up my sinuses. (I think if I had the windows closed, I probably would have been asphyxiated.) The air was cool enough to have the heat on in the Jeep. We passed by the Kirkland Steakhouse, which was really hopping and had a bunch of antique cars parked out front, then made our way through Kirkland Junction, Peeples Valley, and Yarnell. We got behind a slow pickup truck going down Yarnell hill and I smelled his brakes burning until I managed to pass him where it opens up to two lanes. (Some people just don’t understand how to use a lower gear.) A while later we were home. I had to leave the Jeep in the middle of the driveway because Mike had been encroaching on the Jeep’s parking spot with his Honda Accord and there simply wasn’t enough room to park.

I washed the Jeep at the airport on Sunday morning. I had to do it twice. It was really dirty — too dirty for even a Jeep. There’s still some mud on the asphalt just outside the hangar door.

I took the Jeep to work with me today. I would have taken Jack the Dog, but he made himself scarce when it was time to go so he missed out. It was nice to bounce along the dirt road as I left our house. No worries about erosion or rocks.

The Honda gets a rest now. It deserves it.

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At least in some parts of Arizona.

Mike and I took the helicopter up to our vacation place at Howard Mesa yesterday. I’d bought some blinds for the windows on the shed there, mostly to keep the sun and prying eyes out. We also had to caulk the windows — one of them leaks terribly when the rain is coming hard from the northwest and the floor and wall there are starting to show water damage. We wanted to bring the dog, but we had so much junk — blinds, tools, etc. — packed into the back of the helicopter that there wasn’t room for him.

We left Wickenburg in t-shirts and shorts. I was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt. It had been cooling off in Wickenburg over the past few days, but it was still in the high 90s every day. And the humidity — which was probably hovering around 30% — was glazing me. We loaded up the helicopter in Jim’s hangar. (Wickenburg airport is temporarily closed so I moved my helicopter to a friend’s home hangar so I could continue flying during the closure). Even with two helicopters in the hangar, there was enough space for Mike to back in his car, enabling us to load in the shade.

It was a nice flight from Wickenburg to Williams, AZ. We stopped there for fuel. It was “only” $3.79/gallon. That may seem high for fuel, but it’s probably one of the lowest prices for avgas in the entire state. They’re currently getting over $5/gallon in Scottsdale and Phoenix Sky Harbor for the same stuff. Sheesh.

The wind was blowing hard at Williams. At least 20 knots out of the south. And when I stepped out to fuel the helicopter, it felt very cool. Almost cold. This at 11 AM on an August morning. I started wondering if I’d need the warmer clothes I had stored in the shed.

We overflew our friends’ house on our way to our property. On the way, we also overflew Howard Lake and a bunch of cattle tanks. The tanks were all full of brown water. That means it had rained rather recently. Everything was green.

On our “helipad” (an area covered with gravel that I try to keep free of weeds), the helicopter cooled down quickly. The wind was still blowing hard and it was still cool. The elevation at our place is 6,700 feet and it’s always 10 to 20°F cooler than it is down in Wickenburg. That day was definitely at least 20° cooler.

We’d brought lunch from Wickenburg and ate it at our picnic table. The sky was full of white, puffy clouds, speeding northeast. The trees around our future homesite at the top of our property seemed to shield us from most of the wind. We weren’t quite cold — the sun is very strong in Arizona — but we certainly weren’t hot.

And that’s when it hit me: summer was over at Howard Mesa. Sure, there would be a few more hot days and, hopefully, plenty more rain. But the seasons were changing as the sun moved south, shortening the days and changing the angle of the sun at the hottest time of the day. The amount of daylight simply wasn’t enough to bake the high desert landscape. Things were cooling down because they weren’t getting enough sunlight to heat up. In another month or two, temperatures would dip below freezing at night.

I think the realization was triggered by an overall feeling I had, though. Like when I was a kid, growing up in New Jersey. School starts in early September there, on the Wednesday after Labor Day. I clearly remember the coolness of the mornings as I dressed for school. And the smell of the air. I had the same feeling at Howard Mesa yesterday as we ate our lunch.

This year, I hope to get up to Howard Mesa during the autumn and winter months. I hope to be there when there’s a snowfall. The snow falls hard and deep up there — I’ve been there twice when there was at least a foot of snow on the ground — and it’s beautiful to see. Best of all, it melts quickly with that hot sun beating down on it during the day, so it never has a chance to get dirty and ugly.

As I write this at home in Wickenburg, it’s a startling 67°F outside at 5:45 AM. That’s wonderful. Normally, in August, the nights just don’t cool down like they do the rest of the year. There’s too much humidity and often some cloud cover to keep the day’s heat close to the earth. But lately it has been cooling down. Is this just a front passing through? Or is the end of monsoon season near?

Time will tell. Summer has to end sooner or later, even in Arizona.

My windsock.

As I’ve written extensively elsewhere, Mike and I own 40 acres of land at Howard Mesa, which is about halfway between Williams and Valle, Arizona, 5 miles off route 64. If you’ve ever driven from Williams to the Grand Canyon, you’ve passed within 3 miles of it (as the raven flies).

This photo shows my windsock at the top of the property, with a dead tree in the foreground. It was probably taken during the summer; that’s a thundercloud in the making in the distance in the background.

I occasionally land my helicopter not far from the windsock on a gravel pad. It’s a three-hour drive from our house to the property but only an hour by helicopter. We sometimes fly up just for the day — usually to do some work in the shed or check on things.

The dead tree is a whole other story. Here’s the short version.

Imagine a whole lot of land laid out in one square mile sections called…well, sections. The sections are colored on some maps like a checkerboard, with private squares and state land squares. The private squares were owned by cattle ranchers. They contracted with the state to graze their cattle on the state land as well as their private land in what’s known as open range.

Cattle eats grass. The ranchers got the idea that more grass would grow if there were less trees. So they came onto their land (but not the state land) with bulldozers and knocked down all the piñon and juniper pine trees that grew there. The trees died, but since the ranchers didn’t take them away, their carcasses littered the rancher’s land.

The ranchers were wrong. About the same amount of grass grew.

Years passed. New trees grew in place of the old. The ranchers had another brainstorm. They realized that they could make a bunch of money by selling their land to developers. Best of all, with Arizona’s open range laws, they could still graze their cattle on the private property that didn’t fence the cattle out. So they could stay in business without actually owning the land the cattle grazed on.

The developers split up each section of land into 10-, 36-, and 40-acre lots. We bought one of them.

So now you know why we have dead trees like this one on our land.

The good thing about all this: there’s no shortage of firewood.

Howard Mesa, Arizona, photo

I haul water for the first time.

“Off-the-grid” is a term that applies to property without access to public utilities like electricity, gas, telephone, cable television, and water.

By this definition, our home in Wickenburg is only partially “on-the-grid.” We have electricity and telephone but live beyond the range of cable television and town water lines. (I don’t think gas is available anywhere in town other than in tanks.) We have Dish Network, so we don’t need cable. (Ironically, Internet is provided wirelessly through the local cable company.) And we get our water from a well we share with the house next door.

Our place on Howard Mesa is utterly and completely off the grid. We get electricity through a small solar system Mike installed on our shed. We get gas delivered to a tank on the property. We use our cell phones for telephone service. We don’t have any kind of television or Internet. And water…well, it has to be hauled up to the property.

While it is possible to dig a well for water, this area of Arizona is notorious for its low water table. A well might have to go down thousands of feet to hit a good water source. It’s just too darn expensive to dig that deep. So most folks have water tanks and either hire a water service to keep them full or haul water themselves.

We have two tanks with a total capacity of 2,100 gallons. Because we don’t live up here full time, we only fill the tanks once every two or so years. Since we bought the property, we’ve had the tanks filled four times by water services (once because a crack in the valve drained a tank over the wintertime and once because I found a dead animal in one of the tanks). But when I called three different water services to fill the tanks sometime this week, none of them would come. (It appears that we’re not the only ones who have had bad experiences with the roads here.)

Not a big problem. Our friends Matt and Elizabeth, who live full time on the other side of the mesa, haul their own water. They have one of those water tanks that fit in the back of a pickup truck. It holds 425 gallons. They said we could borrow it, and the transfer pump we’d need to move water from the portable tank to our tanks anytime.

I picked up the tank yesterday. Matt had created a platform for it that made it level with the back of the truck. It was just a matter of sliding it off the platform and onto the tailgate, then lifting it slightly to get it over the wheel wells. Close the tailgate and it’s in.

Elizabeth also gave me their pump. It’s a black cylinder that stands upright in the bottom of the tank (on the inside). A power cord and a hose come out of the pump.

I went into Williams today to do some laundry, get on the Internet for a while, hit the Post Office, and pick up a few things at the local hardware store. I stopped at the water “store” — Running Water, which was also one of the water services that wouldn’t deliver to the top of Howard Mesa — on the way back. I pulled in behind a man with a pickup truck towing a trailer with the same 425 gallon tank I had in the back of my truck. I shut the engine, and got out.

“Mind if I watch?” I asked. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Sure.”

He’d parked his tank right under an orange, flexible hose with a 2 or 3 inch diameter. As I watched, he pulled a piece of black plastic pipe with a 4 or 5 inch diameter and stuck it into the top of his tank. He put the orange hose inside that.

“I use an extension,” he told me. “My tank is so low that sometimes the water pressure pushes the hose out while filling. The extension keeps it in.”

He walked to the machine the hose was connected to and inserted a ten dollar bill. The water immediately began gushing through the hose and the extension and into his tank. He put another quarter in.

“I like to fill it all the way,” he said. “This way the water doesn’t slosh around while I’m driving.”

We watched the water fill his tank. It was white and somewhat transparent and the water looked blue. While we waited, we talked about the price of water going up because the price of fuel had gone up. The water at Running Water is hauled to the site, probably from Flagstaff or Belmont. The more water you got, the cheaper it was. But not everyone could haul thousands of gallons of water. 400 gallons for $10 seemed to be the most popular quantity. That made it 2.5 cents per gallon.

The water rose into the neck of his tank and stopped just beneath the 425 gallon mark. The man inserted another quarter. A moment later, the water was overflowing in the tank, splashing all over the trailer. He pulled out the flexible hose, which was still flowing water, and his extension. He put the extension in the back of his truck and came back to fasten the lid on his tank.

“Have a good day,” he said to me. Then he climbed into his truck and rolled away.

I pulled up carefully, aligning the orange hose over the top of my tank’s fill port. Since my tank was high on the bed of the pickup, I wouldn’t need an extension. I got out, checked the position, then moved the truck back about six inches. I killed the engine. I took the lid off the tank and inserted the orange hose in it. Then I slipped a ten dollar bill into the machine. The water started gushing; the hose stayed in place.

While I waited, a woman pulled up in a pickup truck with a smaller tank on the back.

Although I didn’t want the water to slosh around in the tank, I also didn’t want to get water all over the back of the truck. I’d bought three bags of mortar and I didn’t want them to get wet. So when the water stopped flowing short of the 425 gallon mark, I was satisfied. I pulled the orange hose out carefully and let the water in the hose run into the tank. Then I pushed it aside, fastened the lid on the tank, got into the truck, and drove off.

Let’s do the math here. A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds. I had 400 gallons, which totaled 3,200 pounds. I also had the tank itself, which probably weighed about 50 pounds, 3 80-lb bags of mortar, and a 20-foot length of 1/2 inch re-bar, cut into 4 pieces. So I was hauling at least 3,500 lbs of stuff in the back of that truck.

That’s why we have a truck. Because we haul stuff.

It was 10 miles back up Route 64 to the turnoff for Howard Mesa, then 5 miles up those nasty unpaved roads. The speed limit on Route 64 was 65, but I soon discovered that when I got my speed over 60 MPH, I could feel a certain amount of instability in the truck. I don’t know if I was imagining it or if it was because of the gentle sloshing around of the water, which I could watch in my rearview mirror. So I kept my speed between 50 and 60 MPH and signaled for my turn long before I reached it, letting the truck slow to 40 MPH before I got into the turning lane. I didn’t want to have to jump on the brakes. I also took it very slowly up the roads to our lot, keeping my speed between 10 and 20 MPH the whole way.

I arrived without incident and backed the truck up to our small, 550 gallon tank, which I’d been using to keep the horses’ water trough filled. After letting Jack the Dog out to supervise and putting my lunch on the stove to reheat, I went out to transfer the water from one tank to the other. I started by lowering the pump into the bottom of the tank and running its hose into my tank. Then I plugged in the pump, using an extension cord from the shed. The pump started pumping, sounding strangely muffled from deep inside the portable tank. The water rushed into the other tank.

Elizabeth had said that it took 20 minutes to transfer a whole tank of water from one tank to the other. That sounded a little too quick for me. So I timed it. I also filled the horses’ water trough to make room for the incoming water. Whatever didn’t fit in the small tank would go in the larger one. But I was trying to use up all the water in the larger one so we could move it closer to the shed. Can’t move a 1,550 gallon water tank when there’s water in it.

I was standing by the tank, monitoring its pumping progress, when the pump sounded like it was trying to suck air. I unplugged it. My tank was nearly full. The portable tank was nearly empty. It had taken 38 minutes to make the transfer.

A lot of people think it’s some kind of crazy ordeal to haul water. I guess it would be if I had to do it every day. But this was the first time I’d ever had to do it — and we’ve owned our place at Howard Mesa for over six years. It wasn’t difficult at all. It wasn’t even inconvenient. I picked it up on my way home, then transferred it from one tank to the other while making and eating lunch.

I figure that between me and the horses, we probably go through 30-40 gallons of water a day. The horses are the big consumers; on a hot day, they’ll drink 15-20 gallons each. I don’t drink this water; I drink bottled water and we have 5 gallon water bottles we fill at home and bring up here for cooking. So this 400 gallons — plus the 300 or so gallons I had to start out with — should last about 20 days. With luck, we’ll have the bigger tank drained and moved before the end of the season. Then we can top off both tanks in three trips and be all set up for the winter (if we come up here) and next summer.

Next summer, I hope to put up a shade structure for the horses. It’ll have a gutter on the lower side of its roof to collect rainwater and dump it right in the horses’ water trough. With monsoon rains the way they are, the trough should stay full from the beginning of July through the end of August.

I will admit one thing about having to haul water: it really makes you conscious about how much water you use. You don’t let the water run in the sink when you know that every drop that goes down the drain is just another drop you’ll have to haul up one day in the future.

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

water, tank, Williams, Arizona