“I was rambling down the old gravel roads left behind by miners searching for gold and silver, when I came across my own kind of photographic gold, an old vintage car in
Fine art photography by Edward M. Fielding – https://edward-fielding.pixels.com/featured/vintage-service-station-jerome-arizona-edward-fielding.htmla old garage bathed in beautiful natural light.”
Jerome, Arizona raises up above the red cliffs of Sedona. In a landscape scared by the boom and busts of countless mining operations, a rickety of town, once abandoned and then reclaimed by hippies and arts, houses cling precariously to damaged rocky cliffs.
You never know when one of these buildings will crack in half, tumble down or slide across the road – a fate that met many of building in Jerome as witnessed by the famous sliding jail which used to be up there, now its down this away.
The views from Jerome are incredibly vast but it wasn’t the views that lead miners to trek out into the wilderness, dig and blast tunnels into the mountain and then haul the ore out on mule trains forty animals long across the desert.
Cleopatra Hill is where the town of Jerome sits overlooking the Verde Valley. A switch backroad ascends to more than 5,000 feet (1,500 m) above sea level from the valley floor on old gravel roads built to reach the mines and the town that sat right on top of it.
Tunneling under and blasting all around the town did not exactly help create a stable living enviroment. Fire also plagued the town on a frequent basis, sometimes burning the desert dry structures, other times burning UNDER the town in the form of mine fires.
Today the same roads used to bring provisions to the town via horse-drawn buggy, automobile and even train are now gravel or cracked asphalt narrow lanes reaching mining museums, shops, galleries
If you blink you’ll find yourself outside of town on lonely old gravel roads leading to ATV trails, abandoned mine shafts and even collections of old junk salvaged by free-spirits looking for some out of the way place to horde their precious finds.
Down one of these old mining roads at the ghost town of the former Gold King Mine where lucky prospectors looking for copper stuck gold instead.
“In 1890, the Haynes Copper Company sunk a 1200-foot shaft into the middle of one of the richest copper deposits ever discovered. Much to their chagrin, they found no copper. Luckily, they struck gold instead, creating the small boom town of Haynes.”
– Atlas Obscura
When the gold ran out the land was forgotten until a free-spirit looking for some wild open space for his collection of old junk came along. This is where I found this old car waiting to be repaired inside an old abandoned gas station.