Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - Mule Creek Road, Guthrie AZ
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Camped along Mule Creek Road, Guthrie AZ, March 30, 2008
Today I thought I might spend the night at the Walmart Supercenter in Safford AZ but, alas, I'm not welcome to overnight there. So I headed up to the AZ border near Mule Creek NM. It's colder up here but the ride up through the Apache National Forest is spectacular and worth a bit of suffering.
Night camp
Mule Creek Road East of Guthrie AZ
- No Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here.
- Locate Mule Creek Road on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Heliograph routes of the 1890 Practice
The date was May 15th, 1890, and the Army's Department of Arizona had just completed a major heliograph practice; it was, in fact, the largest the world had ever seen. I call it the "Volkmar Practice", after the man responsible for it, Col. Wm. J. Volkmar, the Assistant Adjutant General and Chief Signal Officer for the Department of Arizona. Although the practice lasted only sixteen days, preparations for it took months of reconnaissance and preparation. Involved in the long range signaling maneuvers were twenty-five heliograph stations stretching from Whipple Barracks near Prescott to Fort Stanton near Ruidoso, New Mexico. My guess is that close to two hundred men were involved, both cavalry and infantry.