Hysterical Journey to Historic Places

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PAINTED ROCK



Take exit 102 from the I-8 freeway west of Gila Bend and go north 11 miles to the BLM campground at Painted Rock. The campground is situated beside an amazing petroglyph site. Indians have been camping there and scribbling on those rocks for thousands of years. None of those scribblings have been done using paint though. Be careful where you step or reach. Many of the petroglyphs are snake figures. Snakes have been camping there for thousands of years too. The Gila River flows merrily along nearby. Following the Mexican War the Gila was the international boundary. The Mormon Battalion followed the Gila to California in 1846 and built the crudest of roads as they went. As the country expanded by 1857 the Butterfield Trail followed the route taken by the Mormons between Benson and Yuma. In due course the Southern Pacific Railroad was built roughly along the same route, and so has the interstate highway system. Over the years flooding and development have obliterated nearly all traces of the Butterfield Trail as it followed the Gila. By 1957 it seemed like a wise move to contain the Gila River for flood control. At a point about three and a half miles northeast of the petroglyph site the river channel is constricted by bedrock on both sides. It is a jolly good site for a dam because the basin behind the dam is large enough to contain the flow of the five rivers that feed into it; the Gila, Salt, Verde, Agua Fria, and Hassayampa. All of those rivers are pretty much dry below Phoenix now. Such water that has made it into the reservoir so far contains such high levels of agricultural pesticides that the lakebed sediments contain alarming amounts of DDT. For that reason public access to dam and the lake are now forbidden. The lake is dry as a bone so hopefully gusting winds will take the DDT back to Phoenix where it can continue to do most good. The Hassayampa River used to be home to a peculiar species of trout. Those fish had adapted to the dry desert conditions by growing lungs and burrowing into the sand in the dry riverbed. Folks up in Wickenburg used to go out onto the highway bridge to watch those trout leap into air and catch bugs. They would come down in a cloud of dust and burrow back under the sand to eat the bug. 1993 was an unusually wet year and flood waters came ripping down the river. Most of those fish drowned in it. The 1993 floods quickly overtook the capacity of the containment basin behind Painted Rock Dam and burst forth over the spillway in a raging torrent that destroyed everything in its path clear down to Yuma where it crashed over Morrelos Dam and went on into Mexico. The whole thing could have easily been avoided if the Corps of Engineers would have just agreed to open the damn gates for controlled releases before the water reached the spillway. Dam fools.

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Photos

PICTURE ROCKS
Petroglyphs at Painted Rock Campground. In many ways it is one of the most significant areas in the state of Arizona.

BY A DAMN SITE
Painted Rock Dam from near the locked gate. You cannot see the famous spillway from here, or the dry lake bed full of DDT behind the dam.