Crown King is an old gold rush town located high in the southern Bradshaw Mountains. There are three ways to get there, a gnarly hard-core 4WD road from Lake Pleasant (Arizona's version of the Rubicon Trail); a 25 mile dusty, windy dirt road from the freeway halfway between Phoenix and the Verde Valley; and a 40 mile backcountry two track from Prescott that winds through the heart of the Bradshaw Mountains. None of the routes are convenient. To get to Crown King you have to really want to go to Crown King.
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| Passing the Buck |
Our plan was to take the 40 mile route from Prescott and return via the 25 mile road and the freeway. It was beautiful fall weekend. As Debi's 4-Runner was having some electrical issues, we packed my pick-up and started out Saturday Morning. The road itself starts in downtown Prescott not far from the courthouse and the first few blocks were though the beautiful historic home district of Prescott. The victorian mansions there date back to a more prosperous time when Prescott was being considered for the territorial capital. Frtom there, the road winds up and out of town towards Goldwater Lake, Groom Creek and several campgrounds. Soon enough, however, the pavement ended and the campgrounds and cabins dwindled and we were alone in the woods.
At one time during the peak mining years in the late 1800s, the Senator's Highway was a major route that connected a multitude of mines, towns and mining communities. This was Arizona's Gold Rush and the guidebook we were using described many of the mines and town sites along the way. We missed most of them. Oh, we stopped and looked, but nature has roared back and reclaimed it all. In most places there was no sign that anything ever existed there.
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| An 1800s Rangers Residence at the halfway point |
The road wasn't bad at all. Just a couple spots where we need some high ground clearance. And traffic on a beautiful weekend wasn't terrible either. We saw a dozen or so ATVs, sand rails and dirt bikes, a half dozen Jeeps and maybe four or five other trucks and SUvs. Most of those we saw around midday. Though the road wasn't bad, I still had to concentrate, watch for rocks and oncoming traffic.The road was very narrow, there were some steep edges and many blind corners. The key to this kind of driving is patience, but after several hours, fatigue started to kick in and I began to lose my focus. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, I was thinking about a cold beer and a place to camp.
The road, however, winds in and out of ponderosa forest and then high chaparral--thick brushy, rocky expanses of steep mountainsides. As luck would have it, about the time I wanted to stop, we were into a long stretch of hot, shadeless, steep, no-camping chaparral. Just as I was thinking I'd have to drive all the day to Crown King that first day, the road dropped into a little canyon and we found a lovely little campsite in a beautiful grove of ponderosa.
Ah, shade, a camp chair, a shot and a beer. Happy birthday to me.
A couple more ATVs zoomed by, but soon we had the entire place to ourselves. We sat up and watched the moonrise and had a wonderful, quiet evening.
The next day it was a fairly short drive up a steep mountainside, some rockhounding, and then into Crown King. We had lunch in the wonderful 1800s saloon there. The place had a terrific vibe. All the doors were thrown open. And people sat o n the porch sipping beers and sharing their tales on how they got there. We talked to one couple who were "testing" out their brand spanking new FJ Cruiser on the 25 mile graded dirt road into town. We were encouraging and didn't have the heart to tell them we'd just come 40 miles over the mountains from Prescott in a 15-year-old Ford pickup with 200,000 miles on it. But that was Old Arizona. The way the state was when things were wide open and everything was more of an adventure. And people were friendly.
I'd finally made it to Crown King. And it felt like home.
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