Great Hole in the Ground Tour 2006: Days 4 and 5, with a backtrack to Day 2
Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2006 at 8:33 a.m.
On this day in 1962, the British Broadcasting Company bans "Monster Mash" -- the Halloween-themed novelty tune by Bobby "Boris" Pickett -- for being "offensive." The BBC never specifies precisely what it is about the song that's problematic.
Other than the fact that the song has excretious lyrics and kills brain cells worse than the Christmas �hit� �I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas�?
Well, kiddies, I forgot to post the two most important pictures from Day 2 of the Great Hole in the Ground Tour 2006:
Look! We�re standing on a corner! In Winslow, Arizona! And there�s a girl (My Lord!) in a flatbed Ford!
Seriously. This is it for Winslow. Well, that and the �Standin� on the Corner� days, with America�s premier Eagles cover band playing the mainstage!
So skipping back ahead to Great Hole in the Ground Tour 2006, Day 4, we awoke on a 50*F day in a tent in the Chiricahuas, and we then packed up and met a van at the ranger�s station that dropped us off at the top of a mountain. We then proceeded to walk down 4.5 miles with a 1000-ft. drop in elevation.
A really long time ago, yet another area volcano went BOOM and spread ash over an area of about 1200 miles � a bigger blast than Krakatoa, thank you very much. All this ash got very well compressed, and over time, was eroded by air and water movement into all these spires, known as �hoodoos�. Why hoodoos? Why not?
It�s a pretty cool walk � we were on the �Echo Canyon� walk, which was fairly easy. And it had neat formations:
We also got to see some more wildlife � lots and lots of anole-type lizards, and this little guy:
A foot-long baby rattlesnake! Right on the rock we needed to step on to cross the stream! So we gave him wide berth. He was skeered of us, and little�uns are more dangerous than big ones. We also saw a couple of chipmunks and smelled skunk. Coatimundi and javalina also roam the area, but we didn�t see any, although we saw their scat. Yay!
After we made it out of the woods, we hopped back in the car and headed towards Bisbee. On the way, Hubster showed me this hole in the ground:
This is a shot of the Phelps-Dodge copper mine in Morenci, one of the biggest and the highest-producing copper mine in the world (?). Anyhoo, it�s big. Freaking big. Hubster received a scholarship from here to attend the Uni of Arizona, and he had to visit here and take a tour. Apparently they have more money than they know what to do with. Also, the actual town of Morenci keeps getting moved whenever the mine needs to take over. Nice, huh?
We then drove through Bisbee (another of Arizona�s historical mining towns) and up to Tombstone, which is, of course, �The Town Too Tough to Die�. We walked through the main street area for some dinner, and of course, we met a lot of the locals, who all doffed their hats to me and called me �Ma�am�.
You know, why don�t men wear hats anymore? And baseball caps aren�t proper hats, and furthermore, you men need to take them off and show some respect when you�re indoors. I like having a man doff his hat at me. Hats need to come back.
But not corsets, thank you very much. Unless you like that kind of thing, which, actually, I kind of do, but mostly because I like having the girls under my chin.
On Day 5 of the Great Hole in the Ground Tour 2006, we went back to Bisbee and visited the Queen Mine, which was in existence for over a hundred years, and only closed about 30 years ago.
Our tour guide worked the mine through its closing, and it�s a wonderful example of old-style mining. He was full of great stories. We went in by train about 1500 feet, and it was only 47*F in there! Yikes!
Have you ever wondered just where a miner �went�? Check this out:
Okay, now, you have to imagine that this thing is on wheels as well, and one schmuck made a living out of cleaning these things out. (Known as a �shitnipper�, and he worked that job for 42 years!!!) Of course, the �old-timers� loved to give the new guys merry hell, so when the new guy got on this thing for the first time, the old-timer would wait until the newbie was pants-down and seated, and then kick out the chock holding the bog in place, sending it flying down the track. Invariably, the newbie would turn that wheel in an attempt to stop it, but the wheel opened the plug hole on the bottom. Talk about shit flying everywhere!
I guess when you�re 1500 feet inside a mountain, dicing with death and explosives everyday, you have to have some fun somewhere, eh?
After this, the Hubster and the Valkyrie went home to their own little hole in the ground. Yay!