Cochise Stronghold

About 45 minutes from the Museum is The Cochise Stronghold. We had visions of a rock formation that Cochise used to hide out from the Army. It was slightly different. It is actually a group of granite hills in the Dragoon Mountains where Cochise and his men hid. The hills are at the edge of a huge valley that would allow the defenders to see intruders days before they got close enough to do anything. A great place. On the other hand, attackers could camp in the valley for a year and have a good supply line and starve out the defenders. There seem to be tradeoffs either way. The ride to get there is about 50% paved. From I-10 you go about 10 miles on pavement and then 10 miles on a reasonably graded dirt road. The Stronghold isn’t so much a place to go as a camping area with no services. When you get close to the hills, there is a sign that says, (more or less) ’Cochise and his men hid out up there”. (There will be pictures soon, I promise.) The ride was pretty, and the hills were spectacular to look at, but we probably wouldn’t go back. If you want pistachios, it’s a great place as there are about 6 pistachio farms all displaying “pick your own” signs. Our rating:

The Patagonia Loop

November 4, 1999

So many people have told us that Patagonia is a wonderful place, that we could hardly wait to see it. So we decided to go today. We drove east on I-10 about 11 miles and took the exit to Sonoita and Patagonia (State Route 83). From there, it is about miles to Sonoita where we turned southwest on Route 82 to go to Patagonia. After about another 30 miles, we reached Patagonia. We both expected the town to be a lot larger than it was. If we had bothered to look in the atlas before we left, we would have seen that it is just a little town of about 1000 people. I was expecting more like 7000. We continued on to the Patagonia Lake State Park which a very pretty place to camp. I don’t think there is much chance of us going there with the trailer, but if my brother wanted to come up and camp, we would take our tent and meet him there for a weekend. There is a beautiful lake there with both swimming and boating allowed. It is way the heck off the beaten path somewhere around 5000 ft elevation, hidden away in a nice valley. The park ranger gave us a complimentary pass to look through the place, but the regular entrance fee is $5.00 per vehicle (up to 4 people) and camping is $10.00 per night for tenting and $15.00 with electric and water.Our rating:

After leaving the park, we continued on to Nogales, an Arizona border town. There is also a Nogales Mexico right on the other side of the border. We really aren’t into “border shopping”, so we just finished the loop by driving up I-19 to Tucson. There are a couple places along that road that we will go back and visit another day, like San Xavier Mission, Tubac, and Tumacacori Mission National Monument. There is also a ride out of Patagonia that goes through several ghost towns. We may do that ride too. We weren’t in the mood today. One interesting event: the Border Patrol had the road blocked at an exit not too far north of Nogales. Everyone had to drive past the Patrolman. He peeked into each car and truck and waved most people back onto the freeway. He did stop the vehicle behind us though. Wonder why: there were only about 6 people in it......The entire ride was about 150 miles through the hills with more dense scrub than we had near Phoenix. I’m sure that this area gets a lot more rain than Phoenix. I grew up in Colorado, and Gary and I both lived up in the mountains so we don’t get that impressed by the mountains in Arizona. All in all, this day was a pretty ride through the hills, but somewhat disappointing. We both know that it would have been much more scenic if we were driving through in May or June. We did drive through Sonoita about that time last year and everywhere there were tall grasses growing that reminded us of the midwest. At that time of year, it is very green there.

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

November 5, 1999

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a combination botanical garden, zoo, and natural history museum all in one place. They have more than 300 animal species and over 1200 kinds of plants. The animals include those typically found in the Sonoran Desert region which covers parts of Arizona, California, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California. Some of the highlights of the trip through include docents with live animals at various stations, a reptile house with lots of good snakes and lizards, a prairie dog colony, Mexican wolves, the cat house (mountain lion, ocelot, bobcat, jaguarundi), otters and beavers, walk in bird aviaries (I really like the hummingbird aviary) and several desert gardens. If you stop and look at everything, it probably would take about 3 hours to go all the way through. We have been there before, and will certainly go again. This time, we even ate lunch in their cafeteria. The food was pretty good. The entire experience is a great one for both adults and children. We would strongly recommend this for anyone new to the desert. Entrance fees are $8.95 for adults, $1.75 for 6—12 years old, and free for under 6. Our rating for this museum:

Sierra Vista

November 6, 1999

While driving around Tucson, we had noticed a sign advertising an RV resort opening in October in Sierra Vista. Since we only paid here until December 30th, we need to have a plan for our next stop. When we called them, their answering machine says they will be open November 15th. We decided to go early and see what the place looks like. Well, now that we’ve been there, we think they will be lucky to open before January.

Sierra Vista is another one of those towns we have wanted to see for a while. It was actually about the size I was expecting, about 33,000 people. It sits right next to Fort Huachuca (wah choo' ka for the rookies) which is an active Army base. It is situated in a great valley, and it gets more rain than we are used to, so there is a lot of green to see. The really big deal on this trip is that we drove past Kartchner Caverns. That is a cave that was discovered in the 70s, but kept secret until now. It will be opening to the public on November 12, 1999. We probably won’t go there since we really don’t care much about caves, but I will extract my brother’s promise to tell me about it if he goes.