Walking the Last Mile to the Chloride Murals

Twenty miles north of Kingman, 93 is all business. Four lanes, trucks running for Vegas, and on a Saturday a steady line of pickups with boat trailers and out-of-state plates headed for the casinos. Nobody on that road is looking at the hills. I wasn't either, the first dozen times.

The turn for Chloride comes up on the right with almost no warning, and four miles of county road later you are in a town that has decided, as far as I can tell, to keep its own hours. A couple hundred people, maybe. Dogs that come out to look at you and then go back to the shade. Old mining iron in the front yards, painted up or left to rust, depending on who lives there. It was a silver town once. It still looks like it is waiting to hear whether the price is coming back.

What I came for is about a mile and a half past the end of town. In 1966 an artist named Roy Purcell walked up into those hills and painted murals right onto the boulders, big figures and swirling color on bare rock, and they are still up there. The road to them is dirt, and not the polite kind. I got the Glide maybe two hundred yards past the pavement, felt the front end start to wander in the loose stuff, and stopped right there. Eight hundred pounds of motorcycle on its side in a wash is not how I want to spend a Saturday night.

So I walked. The sun was already behind the ridge and the rock was giving back the heat of the day, so it was warmer walking than it had been riding. Took about half an hour. The murals come up all at once around a bend, and in that last orange light the colors looked like they went on last week instead of sixty years ago. Nobody else up there. Just me, a few beer cans somebody ought to be ashamed of, and a dog barking back in town.

Walking down I used the light on my phone, mostly to watch where I put my feet. October evenings the snakes still like a warm road, and about halfway back one of them let me know it was there. I let it have the road and went around through the brush the long way.

The ride home was dark and quick, 93 full of headlights going north and taillights going south, the Glide humming along like none of it had happened. Went the long way through town for a burger I did not need. Some evenings you go looking for a view. This one I had to walk for, and I think that is why it stuck.