Old Buildings And Other Things

One of our stops was in the old town of El Paso. We did a walking tour of some of the old buildings in the down town area. There were two building that impressed us.

The first was a hotel that is still in use. It is still a grand place, and was when it was built. It has a very beautiful stained glass dome in it.
The other building was the down town post office, also still in use. It also has a dome and the old original boxes lining the walls. The boxes are much more ornate than the plain ones of today. However, what impressed us the most was the floor tiles. Here are examples of two of them.
This one looks as if it is on a wall, but in order to get the lighting right we had to take a picture of it upside down and then flip it over.

There were about eight of these on the floor. (Samples of old postage stamps for those of you too young to remember single digit postage stamps.)

As we were driving across Texas and into the western part of the state, the land became much dryer. I wonder how they raise cattle there, (and there are cattle that we saw,) with such scarcity of grass and water. I also found interesting the few ranch house that we saw. They seem to be small, low to the ground homes. This one was close to where we stayed one night. The road into it is also very typical to what we saw.

Sometimes in life, a turn in what you are doing presents something special that you would have otherwise missed. An example of this, that I will always remember, happened many years ago one morning while I was skiing. I had just started down the hill when I fell and ended up looking back up the hill. I saw the beauty of the sun lighting up snow that a gentle breeze had just blown out of a tree. It was a scene well worth the fall.

We had a similar experience shortly after we crossed into Arizona.

We had looked for a place to spend the weekend that would honor our Pass Port America and that was close to a church. We found one at the small town of Clifton. It was about seven miles out of our way, but what the heck. We had been traveling down route 70.

We had been climbing prior to turning off to head to the town. Then we started climbing more. This area is covered with flat land with hills or mountains popping up out of no where. (Look at the above picture to see what I mean.) We were starting into one of these mountains. Before we reached the town, we noticed huge tailing piles stretching for miles. We wondered, what kind of mine was this?

We reached the town not too far up in the mountains, laid out beside a river in the base of a canyon. We learned that they were open pit mining copper and gold. They had also found diamonds but had cemented off that area. Right now they figure the gold will last thirty years and the copper one hundred years. However there is talk of increasing the copper mining which would then last fifty years.

The canyon divides with the trailer park up one draw and the old town and mine up the other. Since we had some daylight left and we were told that we could drive up and look down into the mine, we decided to check it out.

This was just one of the pits. There were several. At one time we had a pit on each side of the road, route 191. If they expand this to increase production, the opened surface will become the largest in the world. At this spot the elevation was 5520 feet. We continued on up the road and eventually ran out of the mine area and into the winding mountain road. Oh, there was some snow up there in the shade on the north side of the hills.

There is another town, Morenci, close to the mine, that is stretched along the upper ridges and their sides, with a population of over one thousand.

The next day we drove on up the canyon above the RV park. This is what we found.


What a nice side trip, and to think that we might have missed it all, never guessing what lay to the north.