A Day out East. . .

On Wednesday we took a trip out east to see a member of the LDS church, Louise who is a native Apache 85 years old and has been a salward in the San Carlos Branch. Dad and Mom have been working on documenting her history for the Church. The taped an interview with her and now Dad is transcribing it into text. Pretty interesting. Anyway, we stopped to ask her a couple of more questions that came up during transcribing and wouldn't you know I forget to get her picture.

After our visit we headed east on I70 in search of these! (more info below!)

On our way we stopped to visit the nearly completed Gila Valley Temple and the new next door chapel.

We then drove out to and on HWY 191 to a area that was open to rock hounds. Here they allow hunting and digging of fire opals (not gem quality). Digging did not work out so well for me so we all spent our time searching for them on the surface. It was a lot of fun and we spend close to three ours looking. Anyone that knows me KNOWS I chould have spent much longer. However, we still gathered a boat load of rock to tumble as per my picture above.

On our way out from the area we hunted fire opals, we ran across this strange rock wall and decided to take a closer look by climbing up on the rocks to the right. Below is what I found.

It was a dam and was much deeper on the other side than one might suspect! The next series of pictures are each take to the right of the last one in order to show the size and lenght of this little project.

Pockets of water left from the receint rain. Channel off to the top right of picture.

On up the channel valley.

On our way home we stopped at this LDS church that we had seen earilier in the day as we were driving through.

It turned out to be the original 1953 Thatcher chapel (restored). I believe Pres. Kinball was from this area and attended this church. Almost a full block long!

Close up of the front of the chapel. Notice the unique steeple.