Visting the Superstition Mountain Museum

Our time near the Superstition Mountains is waning.  We feel sad, because we just haven't had enough time to hike through them and really get to know them.  Unfortunately, this campground stop got sandwiched between our Ecuador trip and plans to attend a rally at Quartzsite this Wednesday.  We could easily have stayed here another two weeks.  So this area is high on our list to return to when we pass through this area again.

At least we had a chance to get to the Superstition Mountain Museum today.  Instead of satisfying our curiosity, however, it only whetted our desire to get out into the Superstition Wilderness.

The museum displays what might be the best explanatory diagram of geologic history we've seen.  This one explains how the mountains were formed:

The museum displays a large number of indigenous pottery pieces - most of which are very colorful and display a wide variety of designs and patterns:

Of course, no tour of anything related to the Superstition Mountains is complete without something related to the "Lost Dutchman Mine."  This museum pays ample homage to the Lost Dutchman, here displaying dozens of original treasure maps, prepared over the last century, purporting to lead to the lost mine.  It also displays quite a bit of material on Jacob Waltz, a real historic figure who is said to have related stories of the lost mine to others - many of whom traveled into the wilderness to find it:

The Superstition Wilderness is also known for Apacheland Movie Studio, a full western town movie set where over 33 major movies and television series were filmed between 1956 and 1996, including "Gunfight at the OK Corral," "Have Gun Will Travel," "Bonanza," "Death Valley Days" and "Charro!"  The museum contains a diorama scale model of the original set, which finally burned to the ground in 2004:

The grounds of the museum include a 20 stamp ore crusher, used to break gold ore down to find the small pieces of gold in it - this one having been moved from New Mexico:

Two buildings from the Apacheland movie studio survived the 2004 fire, and were relocated to the museum grounds - the "Audie Murphy Barn" --

-- and the "Elvis Chapel" --

There is a real stagecoach of the sort used in the area, and visitors can get inside to experience what it might have been like to ride the stage:

After the museum we returned to the Goldfield Ghost Town, just up the Apache Trail from the museum, to have some lunch.  Our goal was the Saloon:

The inside of the saloon sports period decor:

On the back deck, which looks out on Superstition Mountain, we could have lunch and listen to a local country-western artist performing popular songs:

This was about the last of our local touring before we have to attend to pre-move logistical matters tomorrow.  Likely, our next blog post will be from world-famous Quartzsite, the capital of RV boondocking!