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| PB Canyon Ridge Line Loop, AZ | |
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| | PB Canyon Ridge Line Loop, AZ | | | |
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PB Canyon Ridge Line Loop, AZ
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| no partners | | It was our 5th day at Camp Grasshopper in Upper Cherry Creek Canyon. Hank decided to take a day off from hiking and remain in camp to relax, clean up, shave, etc. - everything any civilized person would do after 5 days of camping. But to heck with being civilized. I set off for a loop hike from camp walking up FR203 for 2 miles to a saddle that crossed over to the ridge that forms the west side of PB Canyon. Then I would explore along the top of the ridge proceeding southeast until reaching a point approximately due east of camp before dropping down the west side of the ridge and returning to camp. The ridge top looked like a good place to find more Indian ruins.
I don't normally enjoy hiking on roads - makes my feet hurt. But it offered the opportunity to take lots of zoom telephoto pics of the cliffs above which I would later examine for cliff dwellings. (Just finished looking at those photos and no cliff dwellings were seen.) I crossed the saddle seeing an old road bed coming up from the PB Cabin site. This may have been the road into this area before the upper section of FR203 was built in the 1950s. Climbing up to the ridge top I encountered patches of Manzanita but cows had conveniently left paths through most of it. The top of the ridge was covered with thickets of Manzanita as far as I could see but I was prepared with knee high snake gators and long leather rose pruning gloves. The ridge line has a series of humps sticking up along its length. On top of the second hump I found the remains of a compound style Indian ruin. The outer defensive wall had been high and built with large flat red sandstone but it had all fallen down to ground level. This was curious because walls made with large flat stones usual survive the centuries without falling down. There are several examples I know of in the Sierra Ancha. This leads me to believe that someone purposefully knocked these walls down. I doubt that cattle, one of the usual culprits, could have done such a thorough job of leveling these walls. The ruin was covered with a dense growth of Manzanita. The outer wall was roughly rectangular enclosing an area about 100ft x 80ft. Strangely it was U shaped being open on the west side or perhaps someone had re-purposed the rocks that had formed the west wall. There was evidence of several interior rooms but a short search revealed no surface artifacts.
Proceeding on down the ridge line I was faced with what looked like an impenetrable thicket of massive Manzanita. Fortunately some large beast had busted through the brush leaving a trail of broken branches with dried up brown leaves which were easy to see in the ocean of green. Some of the broken branches were 2 inches in diameter. I did not find any more ruins but as I approached a saddle blessed with an open meadow, there was a kitchen stove with a white porcelain surface sitting in the shade of a large Juniper tree.  Closer examination and some web research revealed that it was probably a 1930s vintage gasoline fueled stove with two burners and a small oven. These stoves were made for use in remote locations with no electricity or natural gas before the common use of propane. The unanswered question is why was it on this ridge. Maybe there had been a cowboy or hunting camp here. Or maybe this had just been the site of a trash dump for the PB Ranch cabin about 1 mile away. Or maybe there had been a mining camp here when this area was being prospected for uranium in the 1950s.
After the stove incident, I proceeded on down the ridge without finding anything of interest except the views. Then I found a clear path down the west side of the ridge and returned to camp. |
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