Old Butte Phoenix

Tucson to Phoenix. It’s a short hop. An easy day in the world of road trips.

We’re going back to Phoenix as a sentimental journey. We stayed at the Marriott at the Buttes in Tempe some years ago in the midst of a vicious heat wave and we just loved it.

Of course, we also have loved the glorious saguaro city of Tucson.

It’s the only city I’ve visited where even the trailer parks are ritzy - avenues of tall palms and high walls.

It has roads with names like Sweetwater and Silverbell.

It has a deficit of architectural vulgarity.

It has the Santa Catalina Mountains.

And, whenever it rains, it rainbows.

We don’t hurry our departure. We linger around the pool first.

Oddly, I seem to have a touch of sunburn on my back. I have an olive skin and never have had sunburn and I can’t understand how I have it now, since I have not overexposed myself. Yet my back burns. I put on aloe vera and we drag ourselves away from this world of saguaros. Tucson is one of those low-rise cities which does not seem to have a CBD as a structural core. It sprawls in a big, wide easy way. It is big. It takes a while to get across it.

We decide we’ll have lunch at a Panera Bread. I love this chain. I have wonton soup.

Eventually we are on the road past mesquite scrub and lush, ripe corn crops on big, big flat land. It has been a while since I saw corn which was so much a part of the daily drives across the north of the country. We saw the crops young and watched their development right across the land. I have missed them.

The desert stretches out with craggy mountains ahead.

There’s a huge air base out there with lots of planes. It is clearly not commercial.

Oh, bee hives in the desert. Desert honey. Wish I had tried it.

A sign announces Red Rock. There are quite a few candidates out there. I Google and find Picacho Peak.

Another sign confirms Picacho Peak and yet another one invites us to visit its roadside Bird Farm and Feed The Lorikeets.

Good grief. You never know what you’ll find in the American desert. Caged Australian birds, no less.

Ironically, I spot raptors in the sky. Now, they belong here.

And so do goods trains. There they are out there, pushing their miles of loads overland. This one is Union Pacific. It has three engines at the front, two at the back. Even the graffiti artists can’t handle the volume of rail cargo. Only a couple of carriages show their multicoloured art.

The road is beautiful and wide. Six lanes. Flat and straight.

Sign: Blowing Dust Area.

Crops and shrubs adorn the land. A few cacti.

Hah. Here comes the town of Picacho. A long, long livestock train waits empty on the outskirts.

Police have sidelined an open-top sports car at the roadside.

A sign indicates Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.

The landscape has changed since those Pueblo days. What we’re seeing now is pecan orchards. Huge orchards with lovely lush trees. Fallow fields, Orchards.

And heavy traffic.

We are in another great cluster of trans-continental trucks and big rigs. I catch the eye of a driver as we pass. He is so high up. My father had a romantic notion about the loneliness of the long-distance truck driver. He saw an existential beauty in the somewhere nowhere nature of that life. I wonder what the trucker is thinking.

Billboards dot the roadside. They're mainly for food, delicious chicken wings. One asks: Do You Have Lyme Disease?

Now I spot four planes flying in formation quite low and slow over the desert. Planes and trains and automobiles. Yay!

And, suddenly, eek. There are always a few morons out there who can’t read the road. One such has just swerved past us to speed ahead and veer in front of the next car and tailgate the one ahead. Is he on drugs? Is he in a bad mood? Is he just plain stupid?

One often wonders about who are the other people on the road, where they are going and why.

Cactus seem to have vanished from the landscape. It is dry and dusty. Huge powerlines.

Cotton crops and fallow fields. Horses.

The town of Casa Grande turns up, big and dusty, malls and commerce.

And back to crops. Sorghum and cotton. Some acreage bright green with new growth. Some ploughed and brown.

Sign: Blowing Dust Area.

Mesquite and tufty saltbush plants. Dusty farms.

Another cop car has picked someone up.

We’re on the Gila River Indian Reservation - and cactus is suddenly back on the landscape.

It’s a wide old world out there, broad, flat with mountains on the horizons.

But the land is divided into patchwork irrigated crops. The deserts bloom these days and act as food bowls.

The police whizz by in pursuit of someone up ahead. We hope it is that hoon. We catch up as two cars pull over to the verge ahead of the police car. Hah. They have got that hoon. Oh, no. The hoon is not their target, though his pulling over indicates his guilt. He swings back into the stream of traffic ahead of us. Pfft.

We cross the Gilo River. It is bone dry. Pale, dusty mountains with slopes covered in cactus are around us now and feeder roads bring more traffic into our steady stream. We are nearing Phoenix.

Yep, industrial outlyings, reduced speed limit, mega storage, a racetrack, overpasses, A new line of mountains manifests, its ridges prickled with communication towers.

And hillsides covered in cactus. Here they are again in all their exotic beauty.

A big outlet mall. Very neat and handsome. Through the township of Chandler. Very sleek, tidy, busy, affluent with a big city efficiency to it, complete with traffic jams…

It is an upmarket Phoenix satellite - and here comes the big smoke itself, complete with its spectacular mesas and buttes.

That butte over there complete with ancient saguaros is our destination.

Hello Tempe at the Buttes Marriott.

The scary road to Tucson

Back in the olive green Rogue on a mild and cloudy morning. It is 265 miles to Tucson. A pleasant drive.

We head out from Las Cruces on 10 west. It’s a 65 mph speed limit and the trucks are doing every inch of it as hard as they can. It is a heavy trucks day. Dammit.

Past cattle and horse sale yards we whizz, over the Rio Grande which looks like a trickle today and out into the world of ploughed fields and thriving pecan orchards, clearly to blame for the river being at a trickle.

Soon we mount a hill and swoop into a world of mesquite, creosote bushes and arid grasses. The trucks are shocking. So many of them. All off them wanting to be in front of the one in front.

We pass the UAS Flight Test Facility, airport and National Guard, and a sign announcing: Prison Facilities. Do not pick up hitchhikers. One can’t imagine anyone hooking a thumb in the face of these rushing trucks. The speed limit has gone up to 75mph.

It is a world of pink sandy soil sometimes with pinkish mesas in the distance, sometimes those astonishing cinder cones.

Bruce is waxing lyrical about our time in Las Cruces and White Sands. It felt good to connect with his roots, he purrs.

Here come the Indian Trade Post billboards, one after another: moccasins; blankets; fireworks; Kachina dolls; pottery; kid stuff; jewellery; Exit Now. The trading post itself is a quaint little roadside thing. It must be simply crammed with all that stuff.

Glorious yuccas polka dot the landscape amid creosote bushes and mesquite. The hills are all grassy tufts. It is a very handsome desert. We are loving it, despite the trucks.

There are pointy blue mountains here, there, and everywhere on the horizon.

Heavens, another Border Patrol. We slow down and enter past all the cameras. A sign says Dogs On Duty. We don’t see any. We pull up beside the Border Patrol officer who is all army greens and guns. Just the two of you, he asks. Yes. Have a nice day. That's it.

Off we go on the open plain with its yellow grass and spiky low shrubs.

A sign warns that Dust Storms May Occur.

Another sign says simply: The Thing. Hmm

Mountains rise again, almost serrated against a sky with sunshine and rolls of cumulus cloud behind them.

Not sunny where we are, though.

We have driven under big grey flat clouds. Low. Spots of rain hit us.

The greenish groundcover on the desert makes it look even flatter than flat.

The rain makes up its mind and splashes down hard. The drops run up the windscreen.

Heavier. Louder. Great vicious hammering splats.

We should not have washed the car last night.

Akek Flats has another Indian Trading Post. Fudge, kachinas, fireworks, Mexican imports, and opals.

We’re in the Apache Homelands.

Use extreme caution, says a sign. Zero Visibility Possible. Drive Safe.

Hmm. Are they talking about this rain?

It suddenly eases and the sun pops out. We hiss and splash past grey nomads and trucks.

Oh, hell, roadworks. Trucks are all backed up in a chain.

Green crops one side of the road. Rail lines on the other.

The town of Deming is close. There’s an overpass and signs for hotels. Rail yards spread out beside the road, commerce.

We swing in for petrol and lunch. Not much going in Deming. The petrol station looks like something from the 1940s. It does not even have a canopy. A rather gnarled old cash girl, buxom with long, well-dyed jeune fille tresses, is standing outside smoking a cigarette. She stubs it out when Bruce goes in to pay.

Since there is little choice, we drive in for a drive-in Sonic burger.

We know they’re good. Their set-up is a bit odd, though. One drives up and parks diagonally beside one of a line of big menu screens and orders food by shouting at it.

Eventually, a gorgeous young girl comes out with bagged orders on a tray. No roller skates. And no car tray. Not like the old days of drive-in burger joints. We don’t feel like unwrapping everything and eating on our laps so we take it to one of a few tables Sonic has out front. It’s a bit windy. We huddle over the burgers and squint at the the back end of Deming. I have a jalapeno

burger. It comes with pickled jalapeno chillies. What a great enhancement to a burger. A little peppy zing burger. I am surprised how much I like it.

Back on the road, there are volcanic vent mountains, cinder cones, all around us . Yuccas cover the land. Caravans and trucks cover the road.

What on earth is that big fortified facility out there in the fields? Unidentified, unidentifiable. A secret experiments set-up? We scoot past quizzically.

Bigger yuccas now spike the landscape. They stand aloft, beautiful and sculptural over the desert grasses. The shadows of the clouds partnered by blazing windows of bright light are moving across the ground bringing out the colours of yellow and green from the grasses and shrubs.. The mountains are a blue and red backdrop. It is a glorious vista. They call this desert? What I am seeing is a vast arid garden.

Here comes more rain.

This is not so nice. Big storm clouds are massing out there. Two groups. They are forming that tornado shape I have seen in so many weather documentaries. This is scary. I see Bruce glancing more and more frequently in their direction. I can see he is concerned.

I pull up my Weather Channel app.

The radar shows fierce storms moving beside us, great red and purple cores to orange and yellow

Can we beat the storm which is heading our way?

Bruce is positive. He says we can. But I know he is just telling me that. He looks worried.

I marvel that we can watch the storm on radar and in real life as we travel.

I put the radio on AM and we listen to the lightning crackling. Uh-oh.

We race to get away.

This could be serious.

Black cattle out there. Poor things. We’re at 4585 feet Continental Divide Elevation. If that matters.

The Weather Channel App shows us in the path of the storm. We are the calm little blue dot moving along the landscape. This technology is incredible.

A sign says Caution, Dust Storms, Zero Visibility Possible.

Ironic.

The plain remains green and yellow and vast outside. Trucks keep coming in a relentless stream. We seem to be beating the storms. Passing a natural gas well, a billboard for Kranberry’s Chatterbox Breakfast, a small jail, more hoardings, a cross roads, a race track, low motels, a McDonalds… it is an unglamorous settlement called Silver City. It is gone in a moment and we are back to the beautiful desert plains.

Thanks for Visiting New Mexico, says a sign.

Aww.

Hello, Arizona.

There’s a police car picking up a semi-trailer at the roadside. Yess. Then again, those full-time road users are generally pretty good. Just the odd rogue out there.

The endless straight road takes a curve. We cheer and fuss about it.

The vegetation changes again. It is now grassless with tiny stunted shrubs. We seem to be in a big basin ringed by mountains.

We reflect on the scale of this country. Mountains in all directions. A train line out there parallel with the road.

Sometimes areas with lots of yucca plants. Then none, just low dry grass.

A salt pan appears. It reminds us of our own Whyalla country.

We see willywillies out there twirling in the desert.

Water is lying at the roadside here. Big rain has just been through.

Indeed, the clouds are spectacular - grey threatening low bands and high, sunlit layers. They seem to blow in different directions. The big sky provides a big picture of extremes, of moving patterns.

Two massive goods trains are out there, also going in different directions. They have three engines each. Sulphuric acid on one. You have no idea how important sulphuric acid is to the economy, says Bruce, not for the first time.

More trains, crawling steadily through the mountains and across the plains, double deckers full of Yang Ming Chinese products.

Oh, now we wind through a mountain pass and out to a changed desert landscape. More warnings of dust storms. Pull of the road and leave your lights on, says the sign.

Another huge stack train out there.

A sign says lane changes are prohibited. We don’t change lanes.

Ah, it’s for a weigh station.

The landscape changes again, now orchards on both sides of the road. Pecans! It is an oasis of farming here. San Simon.

The sky seems huge over the ribbed form of mountains around us.

More desert.

More rain. Not hard. The clouds are catching us. Damn.

A sign advertises The Thing, 57miles ahead.

A little deserted farmhouse is in the middle of nowhere out there.Two almost-dead trees outside. Lost dreams in the desert.

Low scrub surrounds us. Ah, those bands of weather are reaching out to us again. The radio is alive with the crackle of lightning. Damn.

Yuccas are back on the landscape and in the highway median. Lovely.

We pass a truck and the radio interference is deafening. What? Refrigerator truck, moots Bruce. Interference from the electric motors of its refrigeration.

More goods trains.

More orchards, Pecans and walnuts. Huge orchards. Wow.

More interference on the radio. Yikes. That was a lightning strike right in front of us. Sign to Bowie. 100 miles to Tucson.

Green plains, low scrub, the odd yucca, mountains still out there on the horizon Sign to Safford.

A canopy of nasty grey clouds has gathered above us.

We smell the rain before it finds us.

We see the lightning flashing as we hear it crackle on the radio.

The rain starts splotting loudly on the car.

The brown landscape looks as if it needs this rain. Happy yucca. Unhappy us.

Thickening traffic warns us that we are approaching civilization. Over an overpass. Nice, it has cattle designs around it. The town of Wilcox.

The sky is a challenge of sunshine and dark clouds. I pull up the Weather app again. We are in the rain but we are skirting the core of the storm.

A Border Patrol vehicle speeds by. Cops have another car at the roadside. A sign offers 3600 acres for sale. Another sign promises Thing, Mystery of the Desert. Turn off here. We don’t. But I do Google Thing and find it to be some sort of sad mummified mother and child.

Sunshine is breaking through and illuminating the soft undulations of mountainside, dotted with low mesquite and yuccas.

We pass through Texas Canyon to be surrounded by fabulous rock formations. Huge rocks are perilously balanced one upon another like those prayer stone rock piles people like to make. We ooh and aah.

Through the pass we come upon a vast open basin, another great plain surrounded by yet more mountains.

No rain now. Just puffy big low clouds.

The town of Benson.

Another Border Patrol vehicle, this one a lockup ute. We wonder if any hapless wetback is inside.

A sign indicates The Road to Tombstone - courthouse and state historic park.

The road descends in to Benson. Huge mini storage. The San Pedro River.

Sign: Spur Western Wear.

The AM radio is still on and has sunk into right wing hate talk. They’re offering guns as prizes. Defend your family. Win elite guns.

We’re gaining height again. With a 75mph speed limit, the road is a new hell of trucks. It is an endless chain of these lumbering transporters hauling things to and fro across this immense network of roads. The trains are out there, too. So many of them, double stacked with containers.

The scale of American consumerism is demonstrated all around us.

We keep trying to find our place amid the jostling trucks. Over dry creeks, mountain passes, and great straight open roads.

The landscape changes again. Prickly pears suddenly cover the mountain slopes.

We cross a bridge and, eek, that’s a huge canyon down there. It's fabulous, says Bruce.

Done't look, just drive, says Sa stubbornly looking the other way.

House are appearing on hilltops.

Vinyards, buzzards, adobe architecture. We’re in Arizona.

More mountains, cactus. This is a whole new look. Just like that.

Cactus. Cactus. They are called Saguaros and, to my ear, it seemed to be pronounced Sa-wah-rosse.

Dense Saguaros forests reach up the hillsides. Verticals as I’ve never seen them. Like a crazy spiked hair style. Punk mountains.

We arrive at the outskirts of Tucson, passing a gobsmacking acreage of old planes . What? The US’s old air power all sealed up and immaculately parked, mothballed for ever and a day. Both sides of the road. Acre upon acre. The Davis Monthan air base, says Bruce casually.

Siri Google gets to work and leads us through to Tucson burbs towards our destination. I’m drinking it all in with the eye. This is beyond amazing. The world is all cactus. Adobe houses and cactus gardens. There is an absence of architectural vulgarity.

These are nature-loving people who have built in harmony with this incredible ecology. It is not a world of people with stunning arid gardens, it is a stunning arid garden with people.

With the Presidential Election only days away,

the people also are showing their colours. Unlike the New Mexicans, the Arizonans are leaning right - heavily, according to this sign.

Hah. The storms have been here ahead of us. Tucson is washed and

clean. Moving on, the storms are producing a massive rainbow above sparkling wet cacti.

By the time we pull into Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, a great big old almost bauhaus style hotel nestled against the face of the mountain, the sun blazes and then has gone.

The colour of the city turns pink and brown, a sky almost adobe-coloured in the late light.

What a beautiful place.

I think we need a drink.