A really good friend of ours, Ivan Marshall, came to visit back in October. He was one of Jake's groomsmen and has visited us several times. On his last day Jake had to works and we were trying to find something to do. I looked up somethings on the internet and we decided we'd go try and find a ghost town to explore. There are several of them around here, most are within 20-30 minutes of sierra vista. The San Pedro river used to be a busy trade route, but over-irrigation has turned it into a small creek and it hasn't been used as a trade route for a very long time. There are several ghost towns along ther river. Also there are a number of old mining communities that were shut down 100 years ago and are now ghost towns. Anyways, we set out to find Charleston, AZ. We drove to the river (only about 10 minutes from town) and tried to find a trail to follow. We learned that most of these towns aren't touristy ghost towns that are easily found, we tried to take our best guess at where we thought it would be based on the crude maps that we saw on the internet. After awhile of sloshing through the river we went up and started treking, but it was hard going and I had Jaxon strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. I wasn't expecting it to be as much of a hike as it was. The brush and growth was very thick and thorny so we had to give up. I just had capris on, because I really was expecting there to be some sort of trail or something, so both Ivan and I had cuts all over our legs. We headed back and just let Jaxon go crazy in the river crawling around and I snapped a few photos. I did some more research at home and just for curiosity sake looked it up on google maps. If you look at the satelite imagery part of it you can see some ruins of buildings, they are about a mile or so away from where google says the town is supposed to be, but it is the only thing that looks town like in the area. I plan to go back sometime with Jake to see if we can find it again.
This is a link to the google map of it: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=charleston,+az&ll=31.635735,-110.176365&spn=0.002727,0.004726&t=h&z=18&iwloc=addr
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