Tombstone Adventure 2013

30 Miles down the trail from Saguaro Co-Op can be found the infamous town of Tombstone.  What first caught my eye was this small town’s rather impressive Masonic Temple.  It was closed this afternoon, I’m sure I will visit in the future and report back to you.  There are retail establishments on 1st floor and according to the signage many of the Masonic Bodies meet upstairs.

We choose not to go to “Boot Hill”.  Reading to colorful brochure we found that there is no surety that anyone is buried there in the actual location indicated by the tombstones.  Historically graves were marked with a crude wooden marker that had a very short life in an area where wood is scarce.

One half of our tour group did enjoy the window shopping in the nicely rebuilt ‘Main Street’.  From tack to silver they had you covered, bring you Visa card!

 

Being fair, the 200 yards of ‘Mail Street’ has almost no vehicle traffic and about 20 looking characters doing there best not to overplay the 1880’s parts.  No need to walk the whole tour, you can choose to ride on the ‘Mass Transit System’

 

We did have  a nice lunch at ‘Big Nose Kate’s Saloon’.  The Piano player (Actually a keyboard) was very good, we tipped him rather than shooting him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we arrived back at Saguaro, we discovered a small excavator in our side yard.  It seem that a water supply line had broken and a fellow was busy repairing it.  That fellow is in the hole fixing the pipe.  His ‘Helpers’ are assisting by well meant verbiage and other insults.  I ask the ‘Supervisors’ to hold their hands up for the camera, there appears to be 2.

The root cause of the problem is that the contactor (25 years ago) ran out of bolts for the buried saddles.  He sent a worker to town who bought carbon steel instead of stainless steel bolts.  The failures started about 10 years ago. There are about 700 saddles of this type in the park. 

Facing a 7 figure law suit, the insurance company negotiated a lump sum payment that was very favorable.  Why?  The actual work is done by a crew of volunteers about once a month.  The money bought a needed excavator and maybe beer for the crews.  This is the joy of a Co-Op.