Jeeping in the Patagonia Mountains

Hi Blog!

Tuesday, March 14, 2017, was our first full day near Patagonia, Arizona. We started the day with a delicious breakfast at the Gathering Grounds, a cute coffee shop in downtown Patagonia that was introduced to us by our good friends Gaila and Dick Mallery. Well worth the stop. Now on to the outdoor adventure!

With full bellies and our Arizona Backroads & 4-Wheel-Drive Trails book in hand, we headed up into the Patagonia Mountains. Aside from a few stretches of private property, most of our drive would be in the Coronado National Forest.

Livestock grazing is an important activity in the Coronado National Forest, with over 35,000 head of cattle permitted on almost 200 allotments. We had to be on the lookout because momma cows will bring their babies down next to road to get the sweetest grass.

Just a few miles from Patagonia, we crossed the Arizona National Scenic Trail which goes from Mexico to Utah and traverses the whole north–south length of the State of Arizona. The 800-mile long Arizona Trail was completed on December 16, 2011. The trail is designed as a primitive trail for hiking, equestrians, mountain biking, and even cross country skiing, showcasing the wide variety of mountain ranges and ecosystems of Arizona.  Dick Mallery, who we mentioned above, is one of those who has hiked the length of this trail; consequently, we were curious to get an idea of it.

The first ghost town on our list was Harshaw. Do you like the spooky looking gleam in the upper left corner of the photo?

Harshaw was settled in the 1870s, in what was then the Arizona Territory. Founded as a mining community, Harshaw was named after the cattleman-turned-prospector David Tecumseh Harshaw, who first successfully located silver in the area. At the town's peak near the end of the 19th century, Harshaw's mines were among Arizona's highest producers of ore, with the largest mine, the Hermosa, yielding approximately $365,455 in bullion over a four-month period in 1880.  This is one of the few remaining structures:

Throughout its history, the town's population grew and declined in step with the price of silver, as the mines and the mill opened, closed, and changed hands over the years. By the 1960s, the mines had shut down for the final time, and the town, which was made part of the Coronado National Forest in 1953, became a ghost town.  Here's a photo of the town cemetery, which crawled up a hill across the road from the abandoned town center:

We continued our journey up into the mountains to the abandoned town of Mowry. We missed our turn to the town site, but as we circled back, we were lucky enough to spot two pecaries cross the road. A peccary (also known as a javelina or skunk pig) is a medium-sized hoofed mammal native to the Americas, which are often confused with pigs. These speedy little guys didn't stay still long enough for a good photo.

Shortly after spotting the pecaries we found the town of Mowry. Sylvester Mowry was an American best known as a pioneer and the founder of Mowry, Arizona. He also served as an officer in the United States Army and was arrested as a traitor during the American Civil War.  Mowry became interested in mining and prospecting and in 1860 he purchased the Patagonia silver mine just southeast of the Santa Rita Mountains in southern Arizona. After renaming it the Mowry Silver Mine, Mowry began constructing a mill and a smelter for extracting precious minerals.

A small settlement formed around the mining works which today is the ghost town of Mowry, Arizona. Mining occupied Mowry's time until 1862, by which time the Civil War had already begun and Confederate Arizona Territory had been established. Though a northerner and Republican, Mowry was a firm supporter of the new territory, as were many other Republicans in Arizona, during the Civil War, the majority of the Confederacy's political leadership were Democrats. When Union forces captured Tucson, they arrested Sylvester Mowry at his mine. Charged with selling lead to Arizona's Confederate militias. Mowry felt an obligation to sell lead to his fellow frontiersmen, regardless of political stance. In the early 1860s, the Apache were fighting all across southern Arizona. The Mowry Mine and its immediate surroundings was the scene of several Apache attacks before the town was mostly destroyed in 1863.

As we walked around searching the neighborhood for abandoned sites, a large black mound appeared in the distance. It seemed to be volcanic. Our first thought was that it was obsidian. Upon further research, we learned it was black Mowry shale.

The theory is that black Mowry shale formed on the sea floor by the chemical decomposition of slowly accumulated, very fine grained, volcanic ash in the presence of decaying organic matter, including high amounts of silica, which it is theorized came from sea animals rather than sand. It gives the shale a very shiny black appearance, just like obsidian, but with the fragility, layers and flakiness of shale.  Below, Kathy holds all the specimens that were candidates to be adopted by her as "the best black Mowry shale":

With a pocket full of specimens, we continue in search of Arizona history. We traveled in and out between private and public lands. There are a number of historic ranches still in operation up in the Patagonia Mountains. This guy just needed to stop for a scratch.

We soon came to the town of Duquesne. While much of the area is abandoned, the town itself is located on private property. During its heyday, Duquesne boasted 1,000 residents, several businesses and numerous homes, one of which was a large Victorian frame house belonging to George Westinghouse. The home still stands, although in disrepair. Other remains include a smaller frame house, a boarding house and brothel, an adobe commercial building and an old cemetery.  (Dave just said to me:  "You mean we missed the brothel???")

Duquesne was founded in 1890, a year after George Westinghouse of the Westinghouse Electric Company bought up a majority of the Patagonia claims and organized the Duquesne Mining & Reduction Company to begin large-scale production. Major production began in 1912 and lasted until 1918, with total production at more than 450,000 tons of zinc, lead and copper ore and silver as a byproduct. The hillsides are full of mining shafts.

After leaving the town of Duquesne, we came across a large historical marker dedicated to Fray Marcos de Niza (c. 1495 – March 25, 1558), a Franciscan friar, credited with being the first European in what is now Arizona. Fray Marcos left Culiacán, Mexico in March 1539, crossed south-eastern Arizona near the present-day Lochiel, and penetrated to the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. He saw the pueblo only from a distance, and his description of it as equal in size to Mexico City was probably exact; but he embodied mere hearsay in other parts of his report, which led Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to make his famous expedition the next year to Zuni Pueblo, in present-day New Mexico, of which Fray Marcos was the guide; and the realities proved a great disappointment. This could explain why his monument is on a desert forest road in the middle of the Coronado National Forest, and not, for example, at the site of the former Zuni Pueblo.

Our last stop was the town of Lochiel. This area was originally inhabited by a small community of Mexican ranchers before a smelting works were erected in the late 1870s to serve the nearby mines in the Patagonia Mountains, bringing in American settlers. By 1881, a town by the name of Luttrell had formed and was home to some 400 people, most of whom worked in the smelter or in the mines, as well as five stores, three saloons, a brewery, a butcher shop, a bakery, livery stables, and a boarding house operated by one Dr. Luttrell, for whom the town was originally named.

In 1884, the cattle baron Colin Cameron established the San Rafael Ranch about a mile north of Luttrell. That same year he managed to have the postmaster in town rename it "Lochiel", after his homeland back in Scotland. Several years after that, the international boundary between Sonora and Arizona was surveyed and it was found that half of the settlement was in Mexican territory. The town was then split in two. La Noria became the name of the Mexican part of town while the American side continued to be known as Lochiel.

In the early 1910s, Pancho Villa and his men rustled cattle and horses in the area on more than one occasion. By this time, the famed businessman William Cornell Greene had acquired ownership of the San Rafael Ranch to use as his headquarters for his cattle ranching empire. The ranch remained in the ownership of Greene's family all the way up until 1998, when it was sold to The Nature Conservancy and Arizona State Parks for use as a nature preserve.

A few people still live in Lochiel to this day. In addition to a collection of old houses, Lochiel is the site of an adobe one-room schoolhouse, a teacherage, an old adobe church, and an abandoned U.S. Customs station.  The schoolhouse has been restored to pristine condition, and we took the opporunity to explore the property:

The return trip was uneventful. We stopped at a primitive camping area for a picnic lunch. On the way back into town, we stopped for a brief chat with one of the locals.

And so ends another jeeping adventure! Stay thirsty my friends.