Mildred Takes A Trip 5

Well, I did warn people that the album itself was more interesting than the handful of photos.

The top photo is of Coolidge Dam on the Gila River.  Its reservoir, used for down stream irrigation, is on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, so it's no surprise that the dam was built, and is owned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Near as I can tell, the Apaches don't get a lot of benefit from Lake Coolidge.  There are boating and fishing concessions, but farm use seems to be off reservation.   When the dam was dedicated, in 1930, by President Coolidge, the water had yet to back up and fill the reservoir.  As Coolidge made his speech, with nothing but grass were the lake now sits, Will Rogers remarked, "If it were my dam, I'd mow it."

The second photo looks like a return to the Imperial Dunes in California.

I wonder if Mildred, with little more than a single roll of film from her trip, had a reason for the order of photos in her little album, or did she just paste them in as they came out of the envelope from the film lab?

I guess it's not necessary since I posted the album without interruption, but hey, click on Mildred's album to bring up the whole lot.

Mildred Takes A Trip 3

It doesn't look like Mildred keeps her album in a nice, easy to follow format.  In our first two posts, she bounced around from California, to Arizona, and back to California again.   Her rambling ways continue with this post.  The top photo makes some sense if she was, in fact, going between Arizona and the Pacific fleet at San Diego.  To me, it looks a lot like the Imperial sand dunes, in California, right up against the Mexican border.  The Algodones Dunes, to use the proper name, is a large sandy area that's pretty much on a straight line between Phoenix and San Diego.  When these pictures were taken, I-80 wasn't even a dream in some road planers eye.  There were a couple of recently paved roads (They replaced old fashioned plank roads.) and a Southern Pacific rail line that carried both freight and passengers.  So why am I linking the Pacific coast and Phoenix?  Well, there's no coast in Arizona, and the Pacific is the closest ocean, and that bottom photo, well that location I recognize.  It's Roosevelt Dam (Theodore, not Franklin.) in the mountains north and east of Phoenix on the Salt River.  It was started in 1902 and finished in 1915.  On completion, it was the world's largest masonry dam, and Lake Roosevelt was the largest reservoir.

Click on Mildred's Album for more views.