2016 Letter (DRAFT)

1295 Raindagger Drive

Prescott AZ 86301

+928 717-2466

Dear Family and Friends,

Because of our move, it’s been almost two years since my last letter, so lots of catching up to report.  I have embedded various photos in the text, so you will be able to see what our new house looks like from the inside and the outside, plus view other photos.  Each photo has a caption underneath, so scroll down to read the caption.  I have added Headings to the letter below, so you can skip the parts you are not interested in – WARNING: it’s fairly long! Please note our new address above if you want to send us normal mail.

NEW HOUSE – CONSTRUCTION AND MOVING

I did mention in my 2014 letter that we were planning to build our new house in 2015 and, back then, optimistically expected to be moved in around July.  Well, that goal was way off, as our actual move-in wasn’t until a few days before Christmas! 

The construction loan for the house wasn’t completed until May so the digging of the foundation didn’t start until late June.  This was the main reason for the delayed move-in date.

Taken in mid-July 2015, shows the house from the front, with the foundation completed under the floor of the house (the yellow plywood) – no walls above the floor yet.  

We had the floor raised up well above the ground level for two reasons: a better views from the house and a higher “ceiling” in the basement – those aren’t windows under the floor, but gaps into the basement framing.  

This photo, taken two weeks later, shows the framing completed including the roof trusses – with Andrew and Abby standing at the entrance to the garage, plus myself on left and Becky on right.

We had never built a house from scratch before, so it was a big learning experience. Friends had told me that it was very important to check the construction at least twice a week to be sure that everything was going as expected.  It was only five miles from the old house to the new house, so not a problem, but it did keep me busy for months. 

Here is a shot of the four of us by the future front door.

Liz & her two boys were arriving the day after Christmas, so we really wanted to be moved-in before then.  We had packed most of our small stuff into many boxes and decided to transport them ourselves, with the help of my hiking friends.

We accomplished that in mid-December but had to pile the boxes in the garage because we needed final approval from the City building inspectors before using the inside of the house.  Fortunately, we have a very large garage, big enough for our two cars AND our trailer (caravan) – it had deteriorated somewhat due to being left outside in the fierce sun. 

This photo was taken in April and shows the inside of the garage, with many boxes still to be unpacked, plus Donna’s car and the trailer in front of her car.

In early December we had some hard freezes plus snow that caused more building delays – the last finishing touches like paving the driveway and adding soil to the front garden.  We had to make an advance reservation for a moving company for our large furniture and appliances, so chose Dec 23 to give as much leeway as possible for the inspectors.  Well as luck would have it, we were assigned the worst inspector and he repeatedly found picky stuff that he insisted had to be fixed.  The day of the move, our builder went over his head to the inspector’s manager, but approval didn’t get signed until the next day.  That meant all of our furniture and appliances had to be unloaded into the garage – by then a very tight squeeze.  It was a very long day – that evening we sat in the family room on folding chairs and slept on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom – no blinds anywhere.  We found out later that the appliances could have been moved inside the house – frustration, frustration!!!

On a more positive note, this photo shows the outside of our house as it looks now – it has a stucco finish.  On the left of the house, the family room, with its rock chimney.  On the right, the two garage doors.

Here is a shot of our entrance way – the part near the front door is covered by the V roof above so there is shelter from the rain – not that it rains much in Prescott.  

If you look carefully, you can see some rocks lining the pathway on each side.  These are interesting rocks I have collected over many years.  They are much more exciting if you could see them close up – lots of deep red jasper, my favourite rock.

   

Here is the family room with the rock fireplace at the far end, and a large TV above.  If you look carefully, you can see our two armchairs that face the fire and the TV – a much better arrangement compared to our old house where the fireplace was on one wall and the TV on another.  

The black railings in the foreground separate the dining room from the family room – the family room is two feet higher to give us better views through the large window on the right.

The fireplace is a very efficient sealed system, with combustion air from the outside then going up the chimney.  To put wood into the fireplace, I open the glass door temporarily, then close it with a latch that seals it.  This makes it completely safe – no sparks or embers can shoot out onto the carpet.  Some heat into the room is radiant, but there’s also a switchable fan to blow room air that’s been heated by pipes running through the fire chamber.  The glass door let’s us enjoy the flickering flames.  I’m still getting used to controlling the heat, so here’s a funning story.  

Yesterday (when I started this letter) was Thanksgiving Day – celebrated in the US on the fourth Thursday in November, in case you don’t live here.  With clear skies, it had been a cold night, a few degrees below freezing.  When I got up, I started a fire that warmed the house nicely.  As the morning progressed, it got hotter and hotter in the family room where we were doing a jigsaw puzzle – reaching nearly 80ºF (25ºC).  We had to open the windows despite my reducing the combustion air to its lowest setting and using large oak logs that burned slowly!   We were getting cooked while the Thanksgiving turkey was getting cooked!

Most years I go out into the forest and use a chain saw to obtain my firewood.  This year, a hiking friend, whose back fence is against the forest, told me that the forest service had cut down all the trees for 50 feet from the properties to make a fire break in case of a wildfire.  Some of the trees were oak, and they had stacked them up temporarily in wigwam shapes to be removed later.  Even with a permit, oak can only be removed from the forest if it is dead, and by then it is usually rotten.  This newly felled oak was in great shape and I took two large loads away in the back of my Landcruiser.  It’s now stacked in a huge pile behind our new house.

This photo is looking down from the family room – the dining room table on the left & the kitchen beyond.  This is Donna’s pride and joy. 

The island has a sink surrounded by a granite countertop, with the stove behind it.  Donna chose two contrasting stains for the wood cabinets – some of the upper cabinets are closed, some have glass doors.  The kitchen, and all the other rooms in the house, has ten-foot ceilings, which allows more room for storage in the cupboards.  A negative is that the air filters (for the heating and cooling system) are in the ceilings, so not easy to change.

This photo shows it is a huge room.  The floor was all dirt originally but I put in a concrete floor for my workroom by the entrance door, about 24’ by 14’ so plenty of room for my workbench and saw – on the right.  

Now on to my part of the house – the basement.  The saw and workbench are well travelled, having started in the Chicago area in the seventies, moved to England for a couple of years, then to Arizona (Phoenix and now Prescott).  The unfinished walls make it easy to add shelves, etc.  The basement runs the full length of the house, about 75’, so I’ll never run out of space for storage.  The ceiling height above the concrete is 7’, and a little less towards the front of the house, but always room to stand up.  As an unfinished room below the main floor, it is classified as “crawl space” but it certainly isn’t.

We really like our new house.  At 2000 square feet and with only one storey, it’s much smaller than our previous house, but big enough for our needs.  The move made us sell, donate or get rid of lots of furniture and other items, which was good.  After twenty years in one house you accumulate too much stuff!  We are pretty settled in now, but there’s some boxes and other stuff still inside the garage to unpack ­– so my Landcruiser will be parked outside on the driveway for a little longer.

This photo was taken from our family room. 

VIEWS FROM THE HOUSE

When be bought the lot it was because of the views and because the empty lot was fairly flat, though I found out later after a couple of rain storms it wasn’t as flat as it looked.  It was close to the top of a hill, so nice views for 180 degrees.  

The best view is to the east looking down on Watson Lake and the Granite Dells. The Dells are a great place to hike and explore, as some of you who have visited us will remember well.  Granite Creek feeds the lake and is lined with giant cottonwood trees that you can see at lower right.  The dark shape at the very bottom of the photo is our neighbour’s roof.  Now you can understand why we built the house well above the ground and made the family room higher still.  Our bedroom, also on that side of the house, has good views too. 

Look at the photo again – the darker hills behind the Dells are called the Black Hills, and they stretch for many miles to the south.  The distant hill on the left is called Woodchute Mountain, and its top at over 7000 feet is covered in ponderosa pines.  The mining town of Jerome, founded in the late 1800s, is on the far side and that’s how the mountain got its name.  A lot of wood was needed to build the town, and also for props in the various mining tunnels used to extract the copper ore.  To bring the chopped-down pines into town by wagon was very laborious, so instead they built a wooden chute and slid the pines down the mountain to the edge of town.  Jerome had a population of over ten thousand people in the 1920s but then became a ghost town when the copper ran out, with less than 150 people in the 1950s.  It has now grown into a tourist town with art galleries and curio shops, with many of the old wooden houses being refurbished into attractive homes by the new inhabitants.  The name of the town has some connection to Winston Churchill, whose mother’s maiden name was Jennie Jerome.  Her cousin was Eugene Jerome – he was the man the town was named after.

Here is another panorama from our window, looking more to the northeast. 

You can see the Dells and Woodchute Mountain on the right, but the snow covered mountains in the distance are the San Francisco Peaks – over 70 miles from Prescott as the raven flies (north of Flagstaff).  They are the highest mountains in Arizona, with the summit of Humphries Peak at 12,633 feet above sea level.  These majestic mountains are snow covered for much of the year.  Two hundred thousand years ago, this was a single mountain, a strato-volcano around 16,000 feet high.  When it blew its top, that left the multiple peaks of today, that I have climbed.  Back in the 1920s, an entrepreneur built a toll road to near the top – now a wilderness hiking trail that I explored with Stephen many years ago.

This telephoto shot is of Glassford Hill, to the east of Woodchute and much nearer to us.  

I’m not finished yet with our views and more history.  If you look closely, you can see some wireless masts on top of this old volcano, but if you could go back to the 1880s you would have seen a heliograph station instead.  Heliographs were a means to signal long distances using mirrors and the sun.  A whole network of heliograph stations was set up by the military in the southwestern US.  The summit of Glassford Hill could signal down to Fort Whipple, the army post on the edge of Prescott, and then onwards to Squaw Peak in the Black Hills, and from there to the whole network.  The mainly cloudless days made this a fast and efficient way to send information over long distances.  However, it was superseded a few years later with the invention of the telegraph – technology is never static!

This shot is of “P” Mountain, taken from our deck (balcony) looking southeast. 

To promote their location, many towns in the West have a large letter made from chalk or limestone on a prominent hill  – this is Prescott’s letter.  It is fairly recent, less than 30 years, old but this area has a special significance to me because of the Prescott Circle Trail.  See below under NIGEL’S ADVENTURES for the reason why this is so.

NIGEL & DONNA

Well, it seems like we spent the last two years doing nothing else but our house.  We didn’t take any long vacations but we did slip away for a few days to celebrate our anniversary in June last year.  We stayed in Pinetop, a small town in the White Mountains in eastern Arizona, with lots of good restaurants to choose from.  These mountains are heavily forested, and have many lakes and numerous trails, so it’s a good place to relax and explore.  Pinetop is just below 7000-foot elevation so the weather there is comfortable in mid-summer.  The highest peak is over 11,0000 feet, but it wasn’t one of our destinations. 

Donna's diagnosis of multiple myeloma, that was discovered three years ago, is pretty static, thank goodness – based on her quarterly blood checks.  The osteo-arthritis in her hands is getting worse but hasn’t stopped her from her hobbies of quilting and hand-crafting cards, which she gives to family and friends for special occasions.  She does this with three other ladies, and they also give classes – it is amazing what they can do!

Donna church is an important part of her life, and she volunteers there one day a week, as well as being heavily involved with other lady’s activities.

My health is amazingly good for a 74-year-old.  I’m still heavily involved with various hiking activities and groups – little has changed in that regard for many years.  I lead a hiking group every Friday, although my pace is a little slower than a decade ago.  Most of our hikes are in the forests and by the lakes close to Prescott, but on occasion we go farther afield – see NIGEL'S ADVENTURES below. 

I continue to volunteer at the county GIS department (Geographic Information Systems) – I do that once a week.  That’s where I’ve learned how to make customized maps, both for my books and for the Highlands Center (see more below about maps and books).  I have also given a couple of tours in Sedona through my one-man business (Bumpy Road Adventures).

For various reasons, we didn’t have the landscaping done around our house until early October, and that resulted in a lot of hard labour for me.  Apart from one nice pinion pine tree at the back, the ground around our new house was bare dirt, where weeds liked to grow.  The landscaper covered all that with weed cloth and gravel, plus some interesting rock walls on the slope at the front.  We also had him plant a few trees and bushes, which don’t look much at the moment but will look a lot better in a few years when they have grown bigger. 

During our monsoon period (July to September) we get most of our rain.  The run off in our front garden from one heavy storm in August washed a lot of silt from our dirt down into our neighbour’s gravel, which I had to clean up.  There was an even heavier storm in early September (2.2” in one hour!) that messed up her gravel again, and the mess at the back was even worse.  The developer of the whole area hadn’t dug adequate diversion channels so water from the hill behind us washed right into our back.  The very next morning he sent out one of his workers with a back hoe to stop that from happening again, but too late for us.  Of course he said it was our fault because we had had various trucks delivering building materials.  It was BS, but we weren’t going to win an argument in court.  I got very good at digging out gravel, washing it off with a hose through a sieve into my wheelbarrow before replacing the now clean gravel.  On the bright side, it kept me fit and I've lost a few pounds.  Also on the bright side, the showers do give some wonderful rainbows.  

I took this photo from our deck during an early monsoon. It’s not often you get a full bow like this

The white buildings along the ridge in the middle of the photo are in Yavapai Hills, where our previous house was – that was on the far side of the hill, much lower down.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Our two youngest grandchildren, Thomas (now 5) and Jack (now 3), live in Moses Lake, WA, with their parents, Michael & Liz, but we have seen them on three different occasions in the last two years.  Liz is a Physicians Assistant and works at a clinic.  To keep their staff up to date on the medical practice, the clinic pays them to attend a course of their choosing at any location, all expenses paid.  

This allowed Liz to attend a course in Arizona in April last year, even though it was mainly online.   She brought the two boys with her and they all stayed at our old house. 

Here is a photo of the boys enjoying a bath!

Liz and her boys came back again just after last Christmas – they drove on the Interstates so the winter snow wasn't a problem.  The kids slept a lot, and Liz got some sleep at a motel on the way.  

Abbey and Andrew came up with Becky, for a second Christmas celebration.  All the kids got on well together.  

Here’s a shot at Christmas of Abby and Andrew opening presents.  They still have their red hair (Becky calls them her "gingers") – 

– and another of the four grandkids with their respective mothers.

This year we spent almost two weeks at the end of September in Moses Lake.  It’s over 1200 miles from Prescott – that took us two long days of driving each way.  We visited M&L in their respective houses, and our grandchildren at both houses.  

M&L’s divorce is proceeding very slowly and acrimoniously – we hope it will be final early next year. 

The photo on the left is of Thomas and Jack taken at a Halloween festival.  

Three weeks after that trip, Donna flew out to visit her sister Karen in Rochester (New York State).  They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years – they had an enjoyable week together.

Abby and Andrew only live an hour’s drive away so we’ve seen them (and Becky) many times over the last two years, including a week they spent with us in Prescott last summer.   

Here’s a good shot of them in Sedona this July – they are now 13½ & 11½ respectively. 

Teenage girls can sometimes be a handful, but Abby hasn’t been any problem so far.  They are both doing very well at school, and are involved in sports – Abby in volleyball and Andrew in soccer and basketball (outside of school).  

Becky still has the same job as before, working as the executive assistant to one of the top gun lawyers in the US.  She keeps very busy arranging meetings and conferences, plus flying back to Washington DC every month or so. 

At the beginning of this year, Stephen moved from his previous store (Manzanita Outdoors), where he has been the bicycle manager for a number of years.  He now works at a smaller bicycle store, where he has more freedom.  It’s just him and the two ladies who own the store – the two of them don’t have a lot of business experience so we’ll see how that works out.

Back in February my niece Helen, her husband Jon and their two boys had a good visit with us in Prescott for a few days.  Their boys (9 & 6) have done more travelling around the world than many adults!

I had a nice surprise back in October 2015 when an old friend of mine, Graham Wood from our days at Southampton University, had a business trip to Arizona and came up to Prescott for the day.  He is retired from his main job but now grows and exports orchids with his wife – they have lived in Hawaii for many years on the Big Island.  

During the last two years there have been many other good friends in Arizona that we have gotten together with – too may to mention individually.

NIGEL’S ADVENTURES & BOOKS

A month ago, four of the hikers from my group drove about 130 miles to the Slate River Cave, which is north of Flagstaff.  It location is in the middle of nowhere and known to few people.  The “cave” is a small crater, with four lava tubes radiating out underground from the crater.  These "tubes" were formed 700,000 years ago when lava flowed down the slopes of an erupting volcano.  As the lava flowed it cooled somewhat and a crust formed on the top and sides of the flow, forming a tunnel that emptied out once the lava from the volcano ceased.  Over the millennia, these tubes were buried by soil and plants, so are no longer visible from above. 

The roofs have collapsed at a few points, giving access.  There is a very well known tunnel farther south that can get crowded, but at the Slate River Cave we didn’t see a soul.  It is pitch black inside, so headlamps and flashlights (torches) are a must. 

You can see from the photo that the tubes are like a subway tunnel – you don’t have to crawl.

On another trip, my hiking group drove the 50 miles to Sedona with its striking red rocks. Our hike on that trip was along the Hangover trail. 

This shot is of the first part of the trail, easier than later on.

There are many trails in Sedona built by mountain bikers – Hangover was one of their most difficult creations.  It was tough in places for us to even walk on our own two feet, but riding it at 20 mph is crazy.

There is a 400-foot drop-off on the right, and rocks sticking out on the left, some around helmet height.

The photo below gives you an idea of this part of the trail – riders have to get between the tree and the cliff with their handlebars!

You can watch a video of an expert mountain biker riding this trail by clicking Nate_Hills_Hangover – (delete any ads), then click the follow up video for the lower part of the trail.  Just sit back and relax! 

     
I sent the Hangover video info to my nephew Mick in England.  Of course he had to top it – and he did! 

Apparently, one of his friends has a cousin named Danny, who rides mountain bikes.  If you go to the following link: youtube.com/watch?v=xQ_IQS3VKjA&feature=youtube you’ll see what I mean – Danny is like a ballet dancer on a bike.  He takes mountain biking to new heights – literally – on the Island of Skye, which is off the northwestern coast of Scotland.  

And, towards the end of the video, watching him ride over a fence that was blocking his descent is absolutely amazing – look at it and see!  Calling Danny a daredevil is just too mild!!

Now back to Earth.  I have mentioned the Prescott Circle Trail before – it's a trail over 50 miles long that goes all around the City of Prescott.  It’s neat that I can see part of it from our new house.  This trail is for hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians.  The last connecting segment was completed in June 2015, it’s the segment that goes just below the “P”.  Here’s a repeat of the earlier shot – the trail is barely visible.  The day it was completed, Stephen biked around the complete circle.  Actually he did it twice in succession, so over 100 miles on this narrow dirt trail – from a highpoint of 6640 feet to a lowpoint of 5160, with many ascents and descents in between.  I had hiked every part of the trail so new it better than most.  I decided to produce a booklet called the “Guide to the Prescott Circle Trail” to help other people – locals and tourists.  My first edition was published in June 2012 before the circle was close to being completed.  It was a stapled document of standard pages (size 8.5” by 11”).  Since then, I have updated and improved it through various versions.  Now, the Guide is spiral bound, with 17 pages of descriptive text and 12 pages of maps.  I learned my map-making skills at the County GIS department.  The Guide has been a very popular booklet, sold at all the outdoor stores in Prescott and by the Chamber of Commerce.  I have sold over 1500 copies since January of 2015.  The first photo is the back cover, showing a map of the whole Circle Trail with Prescott in the middle.  I have divided the trail into eleven segments based on access points.  From our house, we can see part of segment 7 (“P” Mountain).  You can see Rosser Street and US 89 roughly in the middle of the map – our house is a little to the west of the “S” in US 89. The next photo is the front cover, showing various photos of the trail and some other local shots of things you might see while hiking.

My next book will be titled “Over 80 Hikes in Northern Arizona”.  Since 2009 I have been producing maps for the “Highland Center for Natural History” – a charitable institute on the outskirts of town that organizes what they call a Hiking Spree.  They (now mainly me) select 12 trails each autumn to encourage people to get off the couch and enjoy hikes on the many trails in the Prescott area – some farther out, 20 miles or more.  I choose a mixture of trail of varying difficulty – easy, moderate and strenuous.  Each year, I try to select trails that haven’t been included before and I have been able to do that so far with a few exceptions.  Each of my maps is a self-contained page that isn’t just a map of the route but also gives driving directions to the trail head, plus points of interest along the trail.  My new book will consist of most of these map pages, but it’s not just a matter of sticking them together in a book.  The older maps used simpler graphics and some trails have been changed, so quite a lot of updating, plus organizing into areas so readers select what part of the forest or town they want to hike.  I have started this task but there is a lot more work ahead.

HEALTH

I don’t have good news about my sister Stella (who lives in British Columbia, Canada).  She was diagnosed with a serious case of lung cancer back in February that appeared to be dire.  There is the possibility of an operation in the near future but I don’t know how effective that might be, especially as her state of health is not good.

Sadly, two of my cousins have passed away in the last two years – Tony Price in 2015 and Dick Doe in 2016, both from cancer.  We all miss them, especially their close family.   Two of my good friends also passed away this year, one being Kurt Wenner who was part of our trio – he, Ben and myself.  We explored many ghost towns and other interesting places in Arizona and Utah some years ago.  Age is catching up with all of us.

It’s not just the heath of individuals we need to be concerned about, but also the health of countries.  Britain’s vote to withdraw from the EU was a surprise to me, as well as to many who live there.  Similarly, Trump’s winning of the presidential election in the US was a bombshell to me and to many others.  Time will tell how both of these events turn out.  My friend Ken made an insightful comment to me that at least the US has another chance four years down the road, whereas the UK is stuck with their decision.

So, on that somber note, let me be more positive and wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Love Nigel & Donna