Weekly journal-miner., 1919-08-20
(BL SHARLOT HALL)
Why Not Take Your Vacation Right Here In Yavapai?

Right Here In Yavapai?
 There Is a man in one of our neigh bor counties who every year or two brings his family and spends his vaca- ton in Yavapai. He says that Pres colt hotels are just as comfortable as those on the Coast, if not as showy, and that some of the Yavapai ranches are just as interesting as orange or lemon ranches in California or apple orchards in Oregon.
 He keeps tab on what we are doing at Orchard Ranch and his interest in Yavapai scenery always tempts us out on some little trip which we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for not having taken before.
 This time it was a trip to Crown King over railroad which if it was in some of the Eastern states would be advertised as a scenic wonder.
 True, we had made the trip before, but how many of us here at home re- member that this railroad climbs the Bradshaws by the longest series of switch-backs in the world? Just the engineering skill which gave us this bit of mountain railroad would be a matter of local pride in many places and many a thriving tourist city would be built upon less of beauty than we can see in one day by leaving Prescott in the morning and coming back at night If this trip were ad- vertised as it deserves few tourists would come into Northern Arizona without taking it.
 Let me tell you what you can see here in our own county in this one days ride. Leaving the pines at Pres colt, whose beauty we are blind 10 because We see them all the while, the road slips out through the Point of Rocks, whose fantastic granite peaks have interestc every traveller into Prescott since the days when the old military wagon road wound through them fifty years ago.
 Beyond the Rocks the road winds down Lonesome valley, green just now as a field of wheat, passing the big. round bulk of Bald mountain which IS really a dead volcano and shows a broken crater high up on its side and has blow-holes and vents that would once have made a lively panorama of fireworks if anyone had been living in Prescott to see them When we used to climb to the top there was still to be seen the plat form of a little heliograph station es-i tablished by General Crook and from which he once relayed a message twenty-four hundred miles.
 Across the valley to the east the Black hills reach like a wall, scared by the raw line of the new state high way between Prescott and Jerome, just i'll the building. I often wonder if anyone but myself remembers that in these Black hills the earliest Span ish explorers found the first trace of. minerals in Northern Arizona, and that Kit Carson, a yellow-haired boy in his early twenties, passed up the valley with his little company of beaver trappers before anyone had dreamed of railroads across the con-. tinent.
 As the train runs into Humboldt with the tall smokestaCks belching smoke from the smelter. 1 remember how Carson camped in the willows on the smclter farnL and how King Woolscy and John Townsend led out their men from the old stone house, whose ruined walls still stand, to fight the Apaches, and how Pauline Weav-I CT trapped beaver in the big marsh that used to lie where now the floods have cut deep canyons.
 The corn fields are tall along the road-and I remember that the men who first plowed them did so with rifles on their backs and that fairly in sight from the railroad track the Apaches slipped Up on the ranchers and killed one or two as they worked.l But because this is just part of our own home county most of Us go over it and never dream that it has just as romantic a history as the places we travel to see in distant states.