Mystery Hike in Phoenix

On our last full day in Phoenix, Dear Husband and I went hiking on South Mountain. We had originally planned to do this in the late afternoon after my brother and his fiancé arrived from San Diego, but he was recovering from COVID and couldn't make it. So DH and I hiked in the morning, which turned out to be the right idea, because the weather had definitely warmed up later in the week, with a projected high of 80.

I had found us a 1-hour-out, 1-hour-back hike up to Dobbins Lookout, named for James C. Dobbins, who chaired the Phoenix Planning Commission that acquired the land for South Mountain Park. The head of the trail was not marked, but thankfully another hiker finished just as we were parking. It was somewhat busy, with lots of folks going in both directions. Apparently it's a popular place to catch the sunset, but then of course you would have to drive up and back.

This is the summit, 2,330 feet above downtown Phoenix, seen here to the north. To the left is a stone structure good for taking Instagrammable photos (while we were there an Indie musician arrived with her acoustic guitar to take promotional shots). To the right is the part of South Mountain we hiked. 

Immediately after we got down, we joined a 45-minute tour of Mystery Castle, the eccentric domicile constructed by father Boyce Gully ( -1945) after he relocated from the Pacific Northwest to Phoenix as "treatment" for pulmonary tuberculosis. He intended it for his daughter, Mary Lou, but he died before he could finish it or reunite with his family. His wife and daughter moved down from Seattle to Phoenix to take possession, and almost immediately it became an unofficial tourist site, and then quickly an official one, as Mary Lou invited the press, guests, and weddings into her home.

Gully scavenged stones from the desert, cast-off bricks, and other materials for building. He worked as a shoe salesman to earn money for food and concrete. Electricity and indoor plumbing weren't added until decades after Gully died, so they had to haul water every day from 1 mile away.

Apparently someone vandalized the house the exact time we were in Phoenix last year, but I hadn't been able to squeeze it into our itinerary, so I'm glad they were able to repair the estimated $100,000 in damages (according to Wikipedia) so we could appreciate this father-daughter duo of collectors and animal lovers.

The floor doesn't slope too much in Gully's bedroom on the main floor. May Lou's bedroom above the kitchen remains off limits despite her passing in 2010. (See the chain across the stairs below.) 

Above are photos of the kitchen and dining areas. Below is the main patio with a view toward the wishing well, the mother-in-law's quarters (accessed by a winding staircase without a handrail...), and the gift shop, which looked like a cheap yard sale. No photos were allowed, however.

"He who does not like cats was a rat in his former life."

This is the entrance to the guest suite, which was mostly complete when Gully died. It consists of two levels: a sitting area above and then down a staircase the trundle bed that stores in a niche under the upper level. Below left you can see the skeleton of the saguaro cactus that was on the site when Gully started building. It lived until he put the roof on. You're no longer allowed to kill cacti like this one, which must have been over 100 years old (given its height and presence of 2 arms).

On the right is some furniture from the underground parts of the castle. Under the trapdoor the alligator is standing on were important documents and money Gully had made from selling what little bit of ore who scraped from the dirt while building. (It's the excuse he gave to acquire the land for free under the homestead act as a "mining operation.")

"Woman who grinds corn grinds away her troubles."

Every castle needs a dungeon, right? I don't know why it needs whatever is going on in the corner below, which is what you see on the righthand side of the above view. Yes, that's a mannequin wearing a blue bandana and a star-spangled top hat. Reportedly they have parties / receptions here.

Above is the organ in the castle's chapel, where I was surprised to hear they were holding weddings already in the 1950s. Below is the "altar" area; they have the couple stand between the stone snakes on the floor. There is also a shelf with a collection of shoes donated by brides who have gotten married there.

With the jigsaw puzzle nearly complete, our vacation was almost over.

1 Train, 2 Train, Locomotive, Choo-choo Train

The next day in Phoenix, Dear Husband and I had a much-needed slow morning, since our out-of-the-house activities would be concentrated in the afternoon and evening. We did take a nice bicycle ride up and down the length of the dry and wet canals near our Air BnB. After I had a continuing medical education Zoom class, we hopped in the car and headed over to Scottsdale for our second baseball game, where we had to park and walk with the masses. After the game ended, we headed north to the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, a free public park run by the municipal Parks & Rec Department.

With a miniature railroad, a carousel, a playground, and a birthday suite, it's mostly directed toward families with young children. However, there's enough to see that two grown adults were entertained for an hour and a half.

In one of the several old train depot buildings moved to the site is a small museum crammed with memorabilia. Here's a diorama of a signal operator. 

The park is proud of being the final resting place of Arizona's part of "Merci Train," 49 railroad cars stuffed with presents from grateful French people after Americans gathered >700 carloads of supplies for them after World War II. Each state received one (and D.C. and the Territory of Hawai'i shared the 49th; sorry Alaska). Some of the gifts included these vases made out of artillery shells from World War I and these embroidered anthropometric animals.

There is also the the Roald Amundsen Pullman Car, which was used by every president from Herbert Hoover through Dwight Eisenhower. (The NORAD agreement was signed on it.)

Fancy-schmancy dining room.

Left: The rooms were all en-suite, with bunk beds and a sitting room with a sink in one corner and a toilet in the other (not shown).

Right: In one bathroom you could take a shower if you stepped over the toilet!

In the attached Baggage Car were a bunch of other exhibits, such as this one about the luxury enjoyed on a Pullman Car, and another on the Pullman Strike (1894).

On the left, objects from Fred Harvey's restaurants, which were famous for "The Harvey Girls," which was also a 1946 movie featuring Judy Garland and Angela Lansbury. 

On the right, dated railroad nails for recording when sections of the track were serviced. The paper on the right lists various historical correlates, like "1909 Orville Wright injured in plane accident," "1923 bathtub gin and home brew popular," or "1928 Al Smith campaigning -- Yankees in 4." You know, the important stuff.

Then it was on to the main attraction: the model railroads!

Above is a sculpture celebrating the "5Cs" of Arizona: copper, cattle, cotton, citrus, and climate.

At the drive-in movie theater scene, they have a camera connected to a tiny screen with a label that reads: "Now showing: Attack of the Giants." You can see me impersonating Godzilla.

DH says he's always wanted to make a baseball stadium for a model train set.

This scene reminded me of the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix (which we visited last year), because both have models of flat-topped and round Native shelters. Turns out I didn't put any photos of them in my previous blog post, but you can see how much colder it was by the layers we're wearing.

Covered bridge to nowhere.

The park is on the former estate of Anne and Harold Fowler McCormick, Jr., (grandson of both John D. Rockefeller and Cyrus McCormick of reaper machine fame), who donated 100 acres from their cattle ranch to the City of Scottsdale in 1967. Anne's son from her first marriage, Guy Stillman, donated his 5/12-scale ridable locomotives from his private property to the Railroad Park in 1971. The Paradise & Pacific Railroad has about 1 mile of track, and you can ride it for $3 on the hour and half hour.

We decided to skip the train and carousel and headed still farther north to eat a healthy dinner at Desert Child and then take our seats in the Left Balcony of the Musical Instrument Museum for a nearly sold-out guitar concert. Last year we had listened to a beautiful classical guitar concert, so I figured this would be something similar. Boy, was I wrong. It was an electric guitar concert! I guess I could have done more research when I bought the tickets, but it would have been nice if 1) the people working the doors had explained why there was a bowl of ear plugs, or 2) the sound techs had turned it down so ear plugs weren't necessary. We stayed until the end, but some people walked out after the concert had started.

Uh oh, the puzzle is almost finished!

Time is running out on our vacation...

Visiting the Phoenix Art Museum

On Wednesday Dear Husband and I visited the Phoenix Art Museum, which had come highly recommended by a friend.

Something I appreciated about Phoenix (and Scottsdale) was the ubiquity of public art: at bus stops, on highway interchanges, etc. There was even art in the museum parking lot. The diving figure on the left reminded me of a baseball player reaching to catch a ball, while DH liked the Tyrannosaurus Rex in a cage on the right.

Left, me reading the floor map in front of a collage. Right, a piece called "Mass," an exploded cube of charred wood salvaged from a church that burned after a lightning strike.

Is it art? This look like a shelf in your grandparents' garage, but it is actually made of fiberglass.

These mercurial blobs are definitely art.

Selfie snapped before we entered the immersive installation that is "You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies" by Yayoi Kusama. It is a mostly dark room with strands of tiny flickering colored lights that reflect on the black tile floor and mirrored walls. When you step in, you're not sure which way is up (kind of like how my body is going to feel after traveling Mountain Time --> Eastern Time --> end of Daylight Saving Time --> Central Time in the space of 24 hours to go from vacation to home to a conference in Chicago). DH constantly felt like he was falling, while I braced myself with a hand on one wall while I walked the perimeter. It was a trippy experience until our eyes adjusted to the dark, and we could hear other people getting ready to enter, so we found the exit.

Next we visited the fashion wing for "The Modern Cut of Geoffrey Beene." To the left is the first piece of clothing the PHX acquired, a sequin and feather number of his; the black and white figures in the background are a facsimile of the mural in the entranceway of his atelier. I had never heard of Beene (born Samuel Albert Bozeman Jr., 1924-2004) and felt vindicated when a book in the museum shop of "50 designers you need to know" omitted him, although it stopped in 1990, and he appears to have hit his stride in the '90s. This may be thanks to his partnership with the American Ballet Company for fashion shows or a false narrative encouraged by the fact that the majority of pieces of his that they own were donated by a fashionista who wore his label from the late '80s to the early 2000s. Some of the pieces looked dated, but others were fresh. I thought the captions were particularly good at pulling out interesting details, such as the various hem treatments, or variations on a single theme (such as polka dots). I'm definitely not cool enough to have worn most of it, but I did like this black and purple evening gown with tailored jacket.

After a leisurely lunch in the central garden next to a burbling water feature, it was upstairs to look for the historical dollhouse rooms, since neither of us was in the mood for absorbing the impact of their Asian / European / American collections. Signage in the building(s) left a lot to be desired, especially since the upper floors of the two wings don't connect. I had almost given up (despite finding another John Coleman, right--we had seen this exact statue at the Western Spirit Museum in Scottsdale the day before), when finally we found them: the rest of the Thorne miniatures collection (the other half is at the Art Institute in Chicago).

Of course, the one thing I wanted in the museum shop was priced three times as much as I was willing to pay for it. So we picked up take out from a downtown Japanese restaurant that uses purple rice and went "home" to our AirBnB for a nap before eating dinner, a walk around the neighborhood, and (re)watching Forrest Gump.