April 17: Superior 

My 23nd day hiking the AZT

The night after Alamo Canyon, I slept on a hillside overlooking a farm. A donkey brayed every hour, on the hour, all through the night. I awoke slightly bleary-eyed to a beautiful sunrise, got in 6 more miles on the trail, and then got picked up by Mom and Dad near a trailhead. They had driven up from Tucson to spend the afternoon with me in Superior. One of the best parts of this trip is spending time with them, and we talked and traded stories.

We drove 6 miles into Superior. It looked cooler than Kearny, sprawled over the side of the mountain with a big chimney on one end of Main Street. It wasn’t a planned community, it just grew from the first mining boom in the 1870’s onwards. Most of the homes are territorial style or adobe, and the streets meander in that mining town way. We looked for a place to have lunch. We drove past Los Hermanos (with a hundred Harleys outside), a pizza place and a Mexican food place. Mom insisted that we find a restaurant with an outside patio for her two dogs, and I insisted that no such place existed in a town like this. We got to historic Main Street, and lo and behold, found a place with a patio.

It was actually one of the funkiest little Arizona joints I’ve ever been in. Dollar bills signed by decades of customers pasted on the wall, Barry Goldwater for President poster behind the bar, full of people. We got a picnic table outside and all three of us ordered burgers with a huge green pepper laid over the top. Mom laid down on the floor under the table to make sure the beds for her dogs were ok. She wasn’t even drunk.

After lunch they helped me shop for supplies. We were all a bit tired and the town got weary looking in the hot afternoon. After shopping, they helped me check into my room at the Copper Mountain Motel. As we drove up, a woman opened the door to the room next to mine. She had dyed black hair, tight denim cutoffs, a tank top and many tattoos. Behind her in the room was another woman, food and bottles on the table, and a baby on the bed. Mom was silent. I asked meekly at the front desk if I could change rooms and was told it was all they had.

As Mom and Dad drove away, I did laundry in the coin operated machines at the motel, packed all my new supplies in my bag, and got dinner at the bar at Los Hermanos. The bikers were gone. Just Norteno music on the jukebox and a few folks playing pool. The flautas tasted great and the beer was ice cold. It was a good rest day. Two days later, three hikers told me that they too had stayed at the Copper Mountain for their rest day, and they had watched a steady flow of clients go in and out of the room next to mine all day. Good old Superior.