Sedona, Jerome, and on to Prescott, Arizona

Well, you know what they say about best laid plans, sometimes they never come to fruition. This morning the Arizona weather girl seemed confident that snow was coming to the Arizona highlands. Places like Sedona where we were parked and, more importantly, Flagstaff, where we intended to camp next were definitely, she said, going to get some snow. Now we haven't minded the cooler temperatures we've encountered since we headed north from Carefree, but snow is a different story. I have no idea how this RV is going to react to the white stuff. So, deciding to be better safe than sorry, we turned west this morning out of Sedona instead of continuing north. Instead of Flagstaff we set our course for Prescott.

Right now we're having lunch on the museum grounds in the thriving town of Jerome, a stop which was recommended by a reader of this blog as being a place we shouldn't miss. Blog reader, Richard, was absolutely right. Jerome is charming and the museum here is outstanding. Jerome was a turn-of-the-century mining camp that largely followed the traditional boom and bust lifespan. We're used to that story in our home state of Nevada where gold and silver never seemed to last long enough for a community to become permanent.

In Jerome the miners were searching for copper. Starting with underground shafts, stopes, and galleries, the miners eventually transitioned to open pit mining in search of riches. At the height of the mining boom Jerome was home to some 15,000 people. Once the boom had ended the total population shrank to several hundred. Today, I think that the town sports a population of something like 500 folks.

As with most towns, mother nature exacted a heavy price on the town's residents before she gave up her riches. Fires routinely leveled dozens of houses and businesses. Mine accidents felled the town's sturdy miners. And the constant removing of the lower stratas of earth to recover ore sometimes caused whole sections of the town to simply fall into pits or, in some cases, toboggan down the hillside to end up a couple hundred feet from their original positions.

Concetta and I learned these fascination facts and more at the wonderful museum that sits below the town proper in a converted estate once belonging to one of the town's prominent residents. Everything from intricate models depicting all the underground workings of the various mines, to a fantastic rocks and minerals collection are housed in the museum. Of special interest to me was an outdoor display of rock crushing equipment. A steam-powered stamp mill was displayed right alongside a arrastre, a primitive ore reduction method comprising a circular, rock-lined pit in which broken ore is pulverized by stones, attached to horizontal bars. The bars are often attached to donkeys or mules who travel endlessly around the circle reducing the rock to powdery ore. I know from my reading as a child that the Spanish conquistadors of the fifteen and sixteen centuries used this same method of processing ore.

I asked the museum's ranger employees if they would advise me to try and pilot our thirty-foot RV through the tiny streets of Jerome so we could park somewhere and walk around. The museum is some distance downhill from the town. They told me that they wouldn't recommend me doing that. However I could park just outside the museum's gate and walk the mile or so up the mountain if we wanted to tour the town. Concetta and I elected not to take that on today since we spent much of yesterday doing exactly that same thing. So, for this time, we had to pass on the further adventures to be found in Jerome. We'd like to come back some day and visit again. We're sure that the effort would be amply rewarded.

Since we couldn't drive through town in order to continue on our way to Prescott, we elected to retrace some of our steps down the mountain, catch highway 260 that promised to intersect Highway 17 south of Sedona, and then catch Highway 169 that headed toward Prescott. It was a little bit out of our way, but the drive was wonderful. Along the way we found a market for stocking up our larder, a gas station to fill our tank, and navigate to the one and only RV camp on the outskirts of Prescott that promised full hookups.

So, here we are for the next two nights. Tomorrow we're going to leave camp and drive into downtown Prescott for a fun-filled day of walkabout. The camp hostess told us that there's a great museum in town, a Wally World for our essentials, and a great place to park near the center of town. What more could we want? So, until then, I'll say good night.