 Well, if I'm good morning, all this is Patricia and I am traveling for history. Now today's show, as you can see, is called an Abandoned Fort of Ghost Town and an Inauspicious Start. So, the Saturday following my January 2024 show, I was flying out to Arizona. I have a friend who lives out there and she's been asking me to come out for some time and figured, oh, the heck with it, why not? So, when I'm gonna travel someplace, I like to leave at the Crack of Dawn and actually, I was booked to leave at 5.39 a.m. before that Crack of Dawn. Hallelujah. Because then I'd be landing in Tucson about 12 to 12.30 their time and this time of the year they are two hours earlier than we are. I had already confirmed my flight and then I got a text from Delta saying, just after midnight, saying your flight will be delayed by how much? Nine hours. Within two minutes of that, text, I called them and within five minutes, when was the last time you got through to customer service in five minutes? Well, I got through to customer service, she was super nice. I told her I really needed to leave early in the morning because all the other flights of Delta were late in the afternoon after one, but starting at about 1.30 in the afternoon. So, she booked me on a United flight instead. Now, I get to the airport just after three in the morning figuring that I was gonna be leaving at 6.19 in the morning instead. Now, unlike Delta, which sent out a text, I did not receive a text or a phone call or anything from United letting me know that that flight had been delayed by six hours. All in all, I got to spend nine glorious hours at the airport that day, waiting for the flight to go, and then it was late in the second airport with United. The third one, we took off on time. All told, I got to Arizona, Tucson at 9.30 at night. My friend who comes and picks me up, I kept her abreast of all of this and she graciously picked me up at 9.30 at night. Oh, for a two-hour drive back to her place. This was a working vacation though for me. You know, I was filming there. The first place we went was Camp Rucker. It was an abandoned fort about 50 miles outside of Douglas, Arizona. The picture you're looking at now is a barn there. On a side note with this human in the picture, when I was in college, I had an ancient Near Eastern history class. The professor had this slideshow, and when I say slideshow, I mean the carousel of slides, not PowerPoint. And she said, well, someone had asked who the person in the photo was with a pyramid and she went back a slide and said, well, oh, pst, I don't know. She said, but it's really good to have a person in the picture for scale. So it's good to see that that's a two-story barn but the height of a two-story barn, but it is one story. So at Camp Rucker, it only ran, it was only open about three years. It was very, very hard to get supplies out there. The purpose of Camp Rucker was to find and essentially route the marauding apaches. This building in front of us here, this was the bakery and the bread bake there was described as both good and very good. Now what you wanna notice with this building too is it is, although it is an Adobe building, there is no Adobe covering on it. What you're looking at there is the mud bricks that are used as the base before they put the Adobe coating over it. The problem with that is when it rains, it's just mud brick, it was never baked, although I'm sure it bakes in the sun out there, but it's not actually baked. So the water, the rain erodes the brick. The Camp Rucker is owned by the, or under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, and they have pledged to preserve this site, which is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. My friend and I were there for hours on end and not another soul, which, as far as I'm concerned, is fabulous. I don't really like filming around other people. So it's a great site if you're gonna go there. There is a camp, if you want a camp there. There we go, close up of the brick. Those bits that you see poking out of there, excuse me, those are rocks that were used to make the mixture, but it shows you how much erosion has already occurred. So I hope when the BLM pumps some money into this to make sure it's still around, I hope they address this very quickly. That and I don't know if you can see on the left there, the hole, those little holes in the roof. If I had sent over the interior picture of this, you would have seen sunlight poking in from both sides. Now also inside there is the brick oven that is, how it was bricked up because this building was turned into something else later on. There was a lot of walking, by the way here. Now this was the officer slash enlisted men's sleeping quarters. What I found interesting and as I said, the BLM has pledged to preserve this place. So at the threshold of it, there's a brand new step inside. I would say this oak wood, it didn't appear to be finished with anything. It wasn't stained, that's for sure. And inside there was the old one just hanging up standing, leaning against the wall. And I thought, well, hopefully that's not the only preservation they have in mind, but it would have been a cheap fix. Now the camp, as I said, lasted only three years. Getting supplies there was very difficult. More importantly, the food supplies were incredibly hard to get there. At least two officers had written letters saying, where's the food? Forget where's the beef, where's the food? They regularly did not have, they either had not nearly enough food for everyone or an abundance of food. There was no happy medium. Now near the bakery, the bakery was on the right side and in front of me where I was standing because there are state historic markers all over the place, the bakery was there and to the left of the bakery in that photo was the former commissary. Unfortunately the commissary only has this corner section, a little tiny corner section still standing. And that's because the house, excuse me, once it was no longer a fort, homesteaders began moving in. One couple at a time. So three walls of this were made of three walls of the commissary. So this is a very spacious house, cut up kind of oddly in little rooms. I mean, little rooms are easier to heat than one big room. But, and we can see there's a fireplace on this side. I'm pretty sure if I recall correctly there's a fireplace on the other side. That front there that we see you walk in on the, on the, to the right of the chimney. That's the entrance to the house. And on the farther side also on the right is the kitchen side of that door in the center. You'd walk in the fireplaces on the left clearly, because of the chimney right there. It had a very sturdy, what's that called? Mantle, very, I mean, very thick mantle on there. I'd say a good two inches thick for that wood. This place needs attention. It really does. There were floorboards that were broken. Now there's no basement. There's no basement here. But I was going to step down to the kitchen but the floorboards, several of them were just broken right through. And at my weight, I wouldn't want to risk worsening the floorboards. Now my friend who's considered me thinner than I did walk around in the kitchen. But it also looked like it had a lot of mouse droppings, you know, Hentovirus sort of stuff. I watch plenty of videos myself on YouTube of people who visit ghost towns. So this is not a ghost town, this is an abandoned fort. And mind you also, I should mention too, that when I think of a fort, and I'm thinking if you're of a certain age you probably think of a fort like Fort Apache, which has the stockade fencing all around it. And then perhaps buildings inside. It wasn't like that at all. There was no stockade fencing at all around it. It was just individual buildings. So the barn was the first building I entered. And if you look to the right of the person there's that gate sort of thing next to her. And for that, that is a style, S-T-I-L-A. You're entering in style, so to speak. So yeah, see to the right there. You have to walk in on an angle and that's to keep the livestock from getting in. You're thinking, you may be thinking, well it's an abandoned fort, Patricia, why would there be livestock? Because there are ranches around this place. So there were cows grazing on the way up. In fact, I have a video up on my channel, this short video about two cows that are right there in the middle of the road. They were slowly moving around and no, I can't help myself. So that's why they would have those kinds of entrances so that the livestock would not get in. Another place we went was Ruby, Arizona, which you may have heard of Ruby if you like ghost towns. It is a ghost town. You can book online and then pay with PayPal or credit card, debit card. If you're not lucky enough to do that and I could have been lucky but then I was not, you'd pay $15 cash when you get there. There is a caretaker, I'll talk about that fun in just a moment, there is a caretaker there and there are signs to get to her. So she gives you a history of the place, a brief history of the place which I did actually use throughout my series of videos. And Ruby is open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday as of the filming of my videos anyway. I think they're closed on Christmas but they were open Thanksgiving later in the day but what's interesting is about that is they close at dusk so if they open at four, you're not gonna spend much time there. Now the drive there was, a horror show. If you're gonna be going to ghost towns, you have to expect, I recommend expecting a spiral mountain road. And note that I've not yet seen a guardrail on one of those roads. So this one was not only a spiral mountain road which somehow everyone thinks is a two-way road. What are they thinking? And did you know that if two cars, if two vehicles come up to each other and they can't pass, that the vehicle that's closest to the mountain is the one that has to back up, which makes sense of course, but you have to back up until someone is available, is able to pass the other. Now on this drive up, we're in a minivan and my friend is driving. I was on the safe side of the road, the side closest to the mountain and it was terrifying. I'm afraid of height to start with, in fact, I'm afraid of falling from the height, but it was, it was, well, to say it was insane would be an understatement. Not only was it this mountain road, it had hairpin turns. They had signs for all these hairpin turns. There was also because they had rain recently, water flowing over the road. It was, what is the word I want to use? Ugly. It was ugly. At the end of the day, was it worth it? Oh, and by the way, it was, how many miles was that? Well, it was a lot. It was maybe 30 miles, maybe 30. When we were going to Camp Rucker, it was 23 miles of dirt road and then we got to what was described as a primitive dirt road. Oh, but this one was, oh, this was just dreadful, dreadfully scary. 15 bucks to the gate per person. We had to sign off on all those forms. You know, if you get hurt, it sucks to be you. If you fall, it sucks to be you. If you die, it really sucks to be you and it just sucks to be you. Which we both signed off on. So, but it was worth it. Now, that first slide was a slide. So this slide here, oh my gosh, this is the tallest children's slide I've ever seen in my born days. This is behind the school, by the way. Now, it's a little hard to see, but the tall part there where the ladder is, oh, there you go. See, the magic of the producer here, Kevin is the producer today and the magic that he can, the wizardry he offers. So, that piece of the center was the piece that held the middle up. So it's just flapping in the breeze now, but that first part there would have connected to this center portion and then the rest of the ladder, which is broken in half, would have connected to that as well. And we can see it there just flopped onto the ground. All rusty, that is a metal slide. I don't know if you've ever seen that in a metal slide, but I can assure you hot as sin comes to mind. And oh, you see that ski jump sort of bottom so you come tearing down that thing and fly off. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking broken arms, broken legs, broken hands, broken feet, broken. Broken is the word of the moment. And I remember as a little kid, there was a really tall metal slide when I was in school, but nothing like this. Now the rung, by the way, there is one or two, there are one or two rungs left and the first rung was above my head. I am almost five two and it was above my head. I didn't try to do anything, well, I wouldn't anyway. Did I just say I'm afraid of height? I did. So yeah, the ski jump at the bottom there. So, but very cool, but I wouldn't have wanted to be a kid. I just read last night that metal slides are not produced anymore. So you're not really gonna see a metal slide at a playground anymore, they're plastic now because plastic doesn't conduct heat as much as metal. And let's say the example I saw online last night was if it's 100 degrees outside, which it likely would be there, the slide would be easily 137 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, just no, I'm behind the school. But if I were a kid, I would likely think, oh, wow, that's really, really high. I wanna slide down it because like any kid, there's an adventure there. Those mountains behind are the, oh, the Pajarito Mountains, P-A-J-A-R-I-T-O, I believe it was the spelling, but now this is Ruby. Ruby, Arizona was a mining town. They mined copper, silver, lead, and zinc, and Ruby became the number one producer of zinc in the United States. And in fact, the United States government was the number one buyer of that zinc. They didn't have a lot of copper or silver, and then they eventually ran out of zinc, but then they had lead, and then, you know, lead bullets. The town eventually closed in 1941, and then the people left. Now this, what you're looking at here, there is a jail, and that is the door, the inner door to the cell. It was locked, that lock, that padlock there, kept it locked, because I looked. I tried, because, you know, because you know. But it was locked, unfortunately, but the only thing in there, by the way, because I don't know if you can see it in there. I don't know if it's in this part of the picture. There is a hole that you can sort of look through. It has a metal grate kind of thing coming in the window. And inside, there was a metal rack with, what do you call it? Like a tote, like a rubbery, made tote inside. Ruby, well, some of those buildings have collapsed, and this one is certainly in the throes of that. I have no idea what this building was used for. I can't figure it out on the map provided. Now we can see Adobe in action here. So on the left side of the building, we can see the white on there, that's the Adobe, and beneath it, those mud bricks. So we can see, we have an idea of what the bakery would have looked like from Camp Rucker, by looking at this building right here. And again, there's the Adobe covering. And a lot of the buildings had that there, because they don't get a lot of rain. So the Adobe covering protects the mud brick from that, and tons of wood. But some buildings that really couldn't go into, because you can go into the buildings, if you feel it's safe enough. And I was warned about that too, that just wanna make sure that to look at the floorboards to make sure that they look good enough to step on. Pretty sure I was on the patio, but I don't recall walking in, because it looks so unsafe to do so. As much as I am a mild adventurer, self-preservation is key. But these buildings did not have basements either. In fact, I said something about basements, and my friend who was there, and my friend who's lived in Arizona now for I think 23 years as of the filming of this video, and she was laughing, and the caretakers said, oh no, no basements here. Oh, all right, well, she said that's a back east thing. Okay, all right, fine, fine. Ruby had a vertical mine. I think a lot of us, certainly when I think of a mine, I think of walking in because it's a horizontal entrance, but that is clearly not the case. Well, Bodie, Arizona, for instance, all of their mines, except one, were vertical shafts. So I don't actually recall the, so that is a, I think that's called the town lake. Given all the leaching, I don't know if I would drink any water from that, but I don't know if the water is safe there or not. My guess is that's where they got their water from, but they would have runoff too from the mountains, which is good. But so it was a beautiful thing. It was just kind of a nice juxtaposition to the buildings I've been filming and the ruins. Most of Ruby is just a bunch of ruins. Still worth 15 bucks. We went a different way. We left a different way, and it was only eight miles of dirt road and then civilization with, oh, I don't know, paved roads? Yay, paved roads. But they're getting back to the vertical shaft. I don't have any pictures with me of that because the pictures are so far away, it wasn't really, it didn't seem like a good picture to send. So above a vertical shaft, you have something called a head frame. And the head frame was how they would raise and lower, say, the ore buckets. They're not ore carts, they're buckets. They sort of remind me of recycled bins with lids, with the lids on them. That's what they remind me of. Now in this case in Ruby, they also had this elevator to move the men up and down. So that's a boon for the men working because usually it's ladders. I wanna say it was 700 or something feet down and that's where they were mining the lead and zinc, copper, silver, all that stuff. So fascinating stuff. Now they didn't mill there. They did have mills there, but they didn't actually mill the ore there. They shipped it out either to El Paso, Texas or to Sierra Vista, Arizona. I'm guessing it was less expensive that way than milling it there. But they have this interesting area that looks a lot like a beach. A lot like a beach. I thought it was a beach, but I was wondering where the water was. It was not a beach. Don't take your shoes off there. It was the, what was left behind after the ore had been pummeled. By these metal balls. It was stunning. That so-called beach sand. But Ruby was a good place to visit. If you've got 15 bucks and maybe you're fearless and wanna go that way. It was a gorgeous drive, but it was frightening beyond compare. By the way, for the jail, it was a one-cell jail. So sometimes they would certainly have more people than would fit in the jail. So what they would do instead is chain them to a tree. I mean, in the summertime, I think a lot of us would think about summertime there in Arizona and it was, I would think it'd be brutal to be out there in the summer. But you know, in the winter, they do have snow as well. And it does get, well, it's cold enough to snow. That'd be 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees Celsius. So just awful all the way around. So horrible, really horrible. So anyway, this was my trip. Other places I visited, I don't have photos for. I also visited and filmed the Bisbee Restoration Museum in Bisbee, Arizona. That is an historical society museum. Five bucks for adults and kids are free. They also have a donation box. So I highly recommend giving them some cash. I had unfettered access. It's good to have friends in these different places. So I had unfettered access to film there. And I was able to film the basement as well as the attic. And those two places are not open to the public. So that was a lot of fun. You'll have three floors of fabulous items. You'll have a real good idea of what it was like to live and work in Bisbee, Arizona, a mining town. Well known for their copper. Some strange roadside attractions. If you watch my show on Saturday, once we'll be to the date, on Saturday, February 22, you'll see one of those roadside attractions. The historic Tellus family shrine. Because you can't make this stuff up. So anyway, it was a great trip. Had a lot of fun. Fun to see my friend, great to see places like Camp Rucker and the Ghost Town I shared with you today. And how fabulous is that? Now, as I say at the end of all my YouTube videos, thank you so much for watching today. Truly appreciate you're coming around and hanging out with me as I talked about this great trip. And until I see you again, you have a fabulous rest of your day. Thanks for watching now. Bye.