Day 12: 'Tombstone - Arizona's Commercialized Ghost Town'

 

Our friends had told us their thoughts of the little town south of Tucson called Tombstone – they weren’t impressed.  However, it was 30 miles from the Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area where I really wanted to the see the tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes that lived there during the winter months.  I used all my RV apps for looking up free places to park an RV overnight (boondocking) and Tombstone had one, amongst the 5 other RV parks we could have stayed at.  (Clearly this town is a major tourist attraction for RVers.) 

Walking through the town of Tombstone took us barely an hour and we were bored and done.  It was basically a commercialized ghost town with people dressed in cowboy outfits and standing on every street corner trying to get folks to ride the trolley, ride the stage coach, watch a gun fight, take a tour, etc, etc.  Not our cup of tea so we decided to drive a little ways away to a true ghost town call Fairbank, which was known for mining silver in the early 1900’s.  

Once we found the barely marked turnoff for the ‘town’, we went on a 4 mile hiking path right out into the desert but completely surrounded by thorny mesquite trees, so it made the walk partly shady for quite a while.  The first thing we came to was an old cemetery and it was not what we were expecting at all.  It was up on one of the rare hills in the area and there were no grave markers!  

Most of the graves were just piles of rocks with very rough pieces of wood as simple crosses marking the graves.  A few had some wrought iron fencing around them, barely standing upright.  One enclosure was obviously a family plot with two adult sized rock piles and then a baby sized rock pile.

Next we came to the only other hill we could see for quite a while, which turned out to be the back wall of an old silver mill.  Being the scrounge that I am, I started climbing up the hill (leaving Rick at the bottom) to see if I could find any old mining implements or artifacts, knowing that my chances were slim to none but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to at least look.  

After getting snagged on dozens of extremely thorny bushes, I did find a small golf ball sized rock that had some silver flakes in it and when I broke it apart, there was a small silver vein.  

Down the trail a bit was an old mine shaft and the foundations of some old buildings and lots of broken glass, but as it was getting very late in the afternoon and we were only halfway done with the hike, Rick wouldn’t let me scrounge in this area for very long.  The trail started following along a river that was surrounded by majestic cottonwood trees, making it very easy to forget that we were in the desert.  At one point in the trail, we startled two deer that had the biggest and fluffiest white tails we had ever seen, making us think they were something other than deer for a few seconds.  Scared the wits out of me and got both of us increasing our pace a bit, even though our legs and hips were already starting to seize up from the long hike.

The end of the trail took us past the old train boarding platform and then into the town.  It’s now been turned into a day use campground so it wasn’t really a ghost town but there were a few old buildings still standing.  (Apparently the townspeople had knocked down most of the towns’ buildings before they were evicted, rather than let their evictors have use of them, so there wasn’t much left.)  All in all, this was one of our most enjoyable hikes of the trip thus far.