High Roller

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Took today off to rest and do errands, staying at the Walmart in Claypool. Early this afternoon I drove back to the Apache Gold Casino to try my luck, and came away half an hour later $5.95 to the good. Saw far too many Apaches gambling alongside their white brethren. I took my winnings to Globe, where I blew them in a riotous afternoon at the Wash-N-Fluff laundromat. Also went to an RV dump station and filled up on propane. Wild and crazy day.

Globe is a city of about 7,000, easternmost in a chain of contiguous communities along U.S. 60, including Midland City, Claypool, and Miami. It's as close to urban sprawl as you're going to get here in Gila County, these other places just about doubling Globe's population and creating a market for the all-important Walmart. Globe and its neighbors are mining towns dating from the 1870s. First there was silver, but it soon ran out, and then they discovered copper. Today there's still a copper smelter around here somewhere. Some of the mountains along the highway have been neatly sheared off and terraced as they continue to take ore out of them, and new mountains of ore and slag have been created. Globe has a colorful old west past, including the usual fighting between the Apaches and the townsfolk, gunfights, lynchings, and trials of desperadoes. I'm sure I'll discover more as I walk through these places tomorrow.

I promised to post some maps of my progress, so here are two--one for the trip since I started back and the other for the entire trip.