Ghosts in Hiding

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(South West Bible Camp)

We’re nearly finished with two weeks, half way through this project, and I’m just now getting around to blogging…..thank you for bearing with me! Last time I mentioned how quiet it is here, and I’m telling you again, it’s quiet! But the thing is, everyone is so friendly that we have things going on all the time! The Senior Citizen’s Center is right across the highway (not highways like we knew in Phoenix, though!), and they serve lunch every day for $2. Some people go every day, and some on select days, but everyone goes on Thursday….well, everyone except the Danielsons. Seems that you have to be a senior citizen to eat there, unless you’re willing to pay $8.25 per meal. We’re not. Not senior citizens and not willing to pay that much for lunch. I don’t care how good it is! So we’ve certainly taken our share of ribbing the past two weeks! They say the meals are really good…and we’re thrilled for them!

Jeff and Alice are the caretakers/directors here, and they’ve just been with SW Bible Camp for less than three years, so they haven’t been involved with RVICS before. Gordon, who’s always worked with them (RVICS) came from Albuquerque (thank goodness for spellcheck!) to spend the month and be our project director. He and his wife Jeanie have a fire going every morning when we get to devotions, and they have coffee made~~it’s kind of like having a mom! And we appreciate the fire, because it has gotten down as low as 28 some nights; it warms up nicely during the day, but the nights get cold. We’re about 5000 feet elevation~~some say a little more, some a little less. The continental divide is not far from here, and it’s 6340’. It gets cold! No palm trees in Glenwood, but we do have trees that have green leaves popping out. And the tulips are coming up.

The first week we drove to the top of one of the mountains to a ghost town named Mogollan (mug-e-yon); it was a mining town, but I think it just has ghosts and monsters now! It opens for tourist season in Mays, and if you’re there in April the buildings are closed and peeking through the windows we could see lots of cobwebs and places where spooky things would live! They have historic stuff there when the real tourists come. We had a good time peeking through the cracks in the doors and making up stories, though. Then we went to lunch, and off to a cemetery with soldiers buried in the 1800s. Many were killed (or murdered, it depends on who was writing on the tombstone) by the Apaches. It was sobering to think of how long those bodies have been in that cemetery, and how they got there. One of the tombstones had four names on it~~two on the front and two on the back. The graves are covered with rocks; apparently the ground is too hard to be dug with a shovel. All the graves had men’s names on them.

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Photos

An RV and a guest cottage...
What more could a guy want!

Our April backyard.
There are only five of us, but there is an empty RV parked here, as well as a couple visiting the camp.

There we are, way on the southwest...
hugging Arizona. If you look just east of Glenwood you'll see the Gila Wilderness, in there you'll find the Gila Cliff Dwellings. It's about 130 miles from Glenwood, because you have to go south to Silver City and then up the road that ends at the cliff dwellings. And then back! We're going there next Saturday.

Mogolloon is nearly 6000' elevation
and this is a glimpse from part way up. It is a mining ghost town, that feels like it really has ghosts! The historical/touristy part opens in May, so we were there with just us and the ghosts! This is beautiful countryside, and I can't even imagine how pretty it wouod be with some rain.

You know the service is slow
when the parking lot looks like this! Actually, this was up in Mogollon~~the mining ghost town.

And there's a gas station for the ghosts!
Bob's next in line.

Apparently this is our group
of slow children! (And doesn't it seem a little odd that they would allow the slow children to play on the bridge???)

This is the tombstone listing
the four soldiers. Sad, huh?

Looking north through Glenwood...
See the brown sign at the end of the road~~or what appears to be the end of the road? That's where we go to get a signal to use our cell phones~~if you're Verizon or ATT&T. The rest are out of luck. So I sit on a rock next to the highway and look like I'm making cold calls to find business! Everyone driving past waves to me! They probably wonder why I don't just get a house!

Looking south through Glenwood.
Our camp is just behind the truck parked at the post office. The building on the left is the Senior Citizen's Center. The library and Community Center are down the road a ways.