Colorado City felt like a foreign country. Wide, empty streets, and big privacy fences around huge, unfinished homes. Not much to lure tourists except the strangeness. It didn't seem creepy until I read this.
You already know this, but Colorado City is a fundamentalist Mormon settlement where polygamy is still practiced. Women dress the same way they might have 150 years ago. The town is the setting for the non-fiction book Under the Banner of Heaven.
Fredonia, Arizona. I don't know what this meant.
Pipe Springs is home to Windsor Castle, a small fort that protected an early Mormon tithing ranch. Nothing so easy as tithing by personal check or automatic deposit, so the church needed places to store the livestock and produce that came in from the faithful.
Church members could use the telegraph for free. They could reach anyone. Standing in the same place today, you can reach no one, but you can do it on a cell phone.
Housing for ranch hands, and a guardhouse
Tess
Sullen Whit is sullen. We took Tess' picture first. Is that what's bothering you, Bunky?
The rooms were cool inside 18" sandstone walls built into the hillside. There is a spring that was diverted into the dairy room, so there's running water. Annie figured out where we could install the composting toilet, and we immediately made plans to move in.
We could hear some unusual laughter coming from the garden.
Patti is the master gardener for the monument. Here she's making arrangements to mail a 60 pound Hopi squash to these guys before the garden is plowed under. She maintains a Paiute side of the garden, and a pioneer side.
We met Patti again before lunch. She had just received a proposal of marriage from an eighty-year-old Hopi elder. He wasn't called an "elder" for nothing. She didn't reveal her answer, but did say she was now in hiding.
She's also a fiddler, and demonstrated her skills as part of her interpretive duties.
I named this barrel Cooper and amused myself.
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