There are many routes to sunny Southern AZ for snowbirds.
There are lots of ways to travel, depending on your preference for highways or secondary roads, concerns about weather, etc. Over time, snowbirds have visited many sights along the way, posting photos and sharing tips on the best viewpoints, diners, camping spots and, in this case, ghost towns.
Folks still live in Chloride.
I saw some houses(some nice, some abandoned, kind of mixed together), lots of trailers, and the tourist center – a pub, a diner, a souvenir place. There was a reconstructed old time mining street where I heard they enact melodramatic main street shoot-outs.
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| Abandoned, I think |
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| More rusty stuff |
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| Cool old trailer; abandoned now. |
It was hard to get a photo without a motorcycle in it.
There are a lot of motorcycles in Kingman and again here at Chloride. I had heard that there was ‘some kind of event’ but wasn’t giving it much thought (dum, dum, dum, dum ‘foreshadowing’).
I was more interested in the art.
There were a lot of wall paintings, and up-cycled stuff in people's yards, and outside art galleries. All fun stuff.
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| The heads are bowling balls |
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| cute bowling ball guy |
More motorcycle foreshadowing (see next post)
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| Note the spine is actual vertebrae! |
Recently, I had heard that there are Murals!
The Murals are about 1.5 miles past a cattle guard. Just drive through town on the main street to get to the cattle guard. The road is quite rough; sometimes it’s cut with deep washouts and sometimes it seems to be a wash. Watch out for the big rocks if you don’t have great clearance. Signage is pretty good - look for painted arrows on rocks.
As you can see from all the photos, I really liked the Murals.
This answers 'why?'
A remarkable coincidence!
As I was winding my way up into the hills to see the murals, I was waved over by an oncoming SUV. The road was very narrow and I had a big shoulder where I was - I was glad to get out of their way.
As the SUV made it’s way downhill, I got out of the car and chatted with a couple women who were walking their dogs in front of the car. In the usual chat about where we were from and where we are going, it came up that these women are in the process of creating an ‘intentional community’ between Santa Fe and ABQ (Placitas, actually). How coincidental – this is one of the areas that I’ve been researching as a potential place to settle down! Hopefully, we’ll keep in touch and I can visit the next time I’m in Santa Fe.
They warned me about snakes and wasps near the murals; I didn’t see any – but the cactus was lovely!
It's a long way back down.
Aren't coincidences like that wonderful? The older I get, the more I think they are purposeful. We just don't see the connections coming. :-) Those murals are great.
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