A reminder, SKP is also spelled Escapee and is our primary membership organization.  They also provide our postal mail address – that Livingston TX address you  may see from time to time.  The campground at North Ranch is about 60 miles north of Phoenix and about 20 miles north of Wickenburg.

We returned to Wickenburg on Saturday and had lunch before walking over to the museum which had so impressed us almost two years ago on our first visit.  The open shed that had faced the center of town has been enclosed and houses some exhibits that were in the main building, minerals and Native Americans, as well as a new exhibit of the history of the “Express” companies.  It was interesting to see which of the old companies continue to exist in some form to this day.  The two most dominant ones are Wells Fargo which was primarily a stage coach line then and American Express which handled freight on stage and then rail.  Some of you might remember Railway Express Agency, later R.E.A. the last company to handle interline freight on the railroads as an independent company.

As we toured the main exhibit building we found a collection of photos of Arizona ghost towns with really fine interpretive audio by the photographer, Kurt Wenner.  To see much of what we saw click on this link and select Arizona.  As we walked through the exhibit and listened to the audio we noted that a few of the sites were near by.  On Sunday we worked around the coach until after lunch then we took off to see if we could find anything in Congress and Stanton.  We took 89 a couple of miles north to the intersection with 71 and turned left over the railroad tracks to Ghost Town Road which I had noted as we drove by on our way in.  There was also a sign pointing to the Congress Cemetery.  Eventually, as all interesting roads in these parts do, we left the pavement behind.   Proceeding up the dirt continuation we passed a BLM dry camping area about .6 of a mile along and eventually we came to the Old Congress Cemetery.  The most recent burial we saw was in the ’50’s and that seemed to be forty years after the next most recent.  Retracing our tracks we found a turn with no indication that the road was private and followed it to the current town cemetery.  We returned to 71 and contemplated our next adventure.

We had heard that Stanton was east of 89 just north of the intersection and a check of the website and Google Navigation confirmed that. So we set off on another adventure.  Six miles of good dirt road brought us to a sign that read LDMA Stanton.  LDMA? It did not mean anything to us so I decided to play stupid, not hard on some days, and parked and walked into the office as if I was looking for a campsite, which I might indeed have wanted.  I learned that LDMA is the acronym for “Lost Dutchman Mining Association.”  The campground is members only and we were given permission to look around.  We immediately met a member who was not out mining for placer gold and was more than willing to give us some of the history.  The buildings date back to the gold rush of 1863! and have been restored and maintained by the association for their own use.  There is a large Opera House with a bar that fills one end and the hotel across the street houses the card room, TV room and kitchen.  Most of the men were off on their claims and the woman we spoke with said she preferred to “mine” on beaches for lost coins and jewelry as the sand is easier to dig than the rock in the claims around Stanton.  Membership in LDMA includes the privilege of working the claims the association owns all over the west and into Alaska.  We have run into the name in our travels, but had never met any members before this excursion.

Following directions from our guide and in agreement from Google Nav we continued up the road we had come in on and 6 miles of tortuous dirt road that climbed a couple of thousand feet brought us back to 89 in the town of Yarnell at 4800 feet.  This is the Big City for the miners and there were a couple of businesses that seemed to still be open, most of the town which sits astride the road from Wickenburg to Prescott seems to be verging on becoming a ghost town itself.

We returned down the very long grade from Yarnell to the valley floor and our coach at North Ranch.  We concluded the day’s adventures by going to the activity center for the weekly Ice Cream Social.  We slipped the ice cream but enjoyed the social which became a do it yourself program responding to questions about the states east of the Mississippi.  Carol and got roped into telling what there was to do in Alabama.  We surprised ourselves, and others, with how many interesting paces we knew to recommend in Alabama.  Lots of fun.

Dinner, the Grammy Awards, and our books on Kindle concluded the day.