Jen

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) acquired land in this area in 1988 to save the area from development. The Empire, Cienega, Rose Tree and Vera Earl ranches are next to the conservation area, and they are still active, working ranches. The 2017 fire destroyed a beautiful old grove of cottonwoods in Empire Gulch. This fire, now named the Sawmill fire, burned forty-five thousand acres in total, and more than twelve-thousand of the of the conservation area.

Even today I still read a book a week (or more), not counting what I read for school. I read as many books as I could about Chaco before visiting, and I’m still reading about it weeks later. In Search of the Old Ones by David Roberts, or Brian Fagan’s Chaco Canyon to get a deeper understanding of the landscape, culture, archaeology, and ancient Chacoan road system. I recommend at least stopping by Aztec Ruins National Monument, and then to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado to see what became of the ancestral Pueblo people after they left Chaco.

Cochise Stronghold, the last stand of the Chiricahua Apache, and the Amerind Museum, a world-class museum founded by the Fulton family. The Amerind museum is located on Dragoon Road, just twenty miles north from Cochise Stronghold. For more on this theory and other discoveries around the Southwest I highly recommend the book,  The Lost World of The Old Ones by David Roberts. The Amerind Museum is about 20 miles from the stronghold on Dragoon Road.

There’s also a McDonald’s right in front of the border crossing, which is a good place for a restroom stop. The tourists crossing into Nogales are going to visit the dentist or pharmacy, and that’s it. Back home my teacher’s salary and side gigs don’t seem like much, but just across the border, it’s truly wealthy. Although I’m a huge fan of sterling silver jewelry, all of the “silver” jewelry in Nogales isn’t real silver.