With Phoenix being the 5^th largest city in the U.S., there are many famous people who have claimed Arizona as their home.  One of my favorites is Author Zane Grey.  At one time you could visit the one-room cabin he built on three acres up on the Mogollon Rim near Payson.  He eventually abandoned it and it deteriorated.  It was later restored and in 1972, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It was not destined to live as it was totally destroyed by the “Dude” forest fire in 1990.  However, you cannot keep a good man’s cabin down.  In 2003, a replica of the cabin was built lakeside on the Rim Country Museum grounds in Payson.

Strangely enough, he didn’t originally come here to write; he came to fish.  I’m not sure how much fishing he did but he wrote many novels (I read 56 in one account and 90 in another – it was a lot!), at least a third of them taking place in Arizona.  Riders of the Purple Sage, supposedly his most famous novel, was written in 1912.  In 1939, he died after a massive heart attack in California.  He is buried in Lackawaxen, PA.  His life story is a busy one and most interesting.  He was also one of the first authors who self-published (Of course he wasn’t famous yet).

I once stayed with my oldest brother and his wife in Cumberland, Maryland for several weeks.  As an early teenager, there wasn’t a whole lot to do beyond going to the neighborhood pool to swim and flirt with the lifeguard but my sister-in-law’s mother lived just up the street.  She had the most amazing collection of the Old West Adventure Zane Grey books.  They were even more exciting than the cute lifeguard.  Late into the night, I snuggled under the covers using a flashlight to read every detail of those stories.

Ah, how life has changed since then.  I haven’t quite got the hang of snuggling under the covers with a Kindle but I might get there yet.   God Bless until next week. 

Minshall’s RVing Alaska and Canada is available thru Amazon.