Finding Circlestone

Finding Circlestone

by Bruce Peterson

Stone circles are common all over the world.  The most famous lay in Britain, but they appear in France, Poland, Scandinavia, and the Alps.  Often associated with Celts, most of them come from a far distant antiquity, Neolithic and early Bronze Age in particular.  Although most megalith circles are native to Europe, China has a few.  But in the Americas, stone circles are simpler, small and no one ever claimed they were constructed during the Neolithic.  We think most are Native American Medicine Wheels, right?  Constructed by Plains Indians, and today major attractions and frequented by New Agers and hippies.  Even though I’m a retired hippie, I never visited Medicine Wheel, Wyoming while hunting in the Bighorns.  I just never felt the lure of the most famous North-American wheel of life.  I did live in a tipi for a year though, and I am a stonemason.  I guess I got set up by fate and circumstances to eventually, get sucked into a stone circle.  In 2003 a stone circle in Arizona captured me.  Getting to the circle that discovered me was not easy, but sometimes the journey to a sacred place is as essential a revelation as one might find at a mystic destination.

Deep in the heart of the Superstition Wilderness, on a bench of Mound Mountain, the highest mountain of the Superstitions, rests an out-of-place, ancient stone circle, a place of mystery, a place of wonder.  It shouldn’t be there.  Medicine Wheel circles are found on hills in the Northern Plans, most in Alberta, a few in North and South Dakota, Montana, and the most famous, Medicine Wheel Wyoming.  What this forty-meter in diameter circle of three-foot thick sandstone walls is doing in the arid southwest is a question I would ponder for years.

I first ran into Circlestone on a tourist map in a cowboy restaurant in Gold Canyon, Arizona.  The graphic-art map exhibited local attractions.  The artist had woven an iconic representation of the stone circle into the map that included store fronts, dude ranch corals and little hikers in shorts wearing backpacks at forest trail heads.  It wasn’t the graphic art of the map that captured my interest though; it was the name, Circlestone.  As a fan of books on the Pyramid of Giza, Stonehenge and ancient temples, I thought, “What is a Circlestone?”  Being male, like asking for directions at a gas station, I didn’t ask the restaurant server or the cashier.  I went home and googled, “Circlestone, Superstition Mountains.”

I found an article written by a retired Apache Junction schoolteacher, Tom Kollenborn, at the Apache Junction Library.  The following italicized footnote on the bottom of the one-page PDF document stated:

“To learn more about Circlestone, there was a book published on the topic entitled Circlestone: A Superstition Mountain Mystery by James A. Swanson and Tom Kollenborn. The book is available at the Superstition Mountain Museum and Tonto National Monument. For information call 480-983-4888.”[1]

Too lazy to wander over to the Museum on the Apache Trail, I asked our college librarian to send me a copy out to the Red Mountain campus.  Mesa College didn’t have on-line request back then, but I could call the library from my office by punching only 5 numbers on my new Voice-Over IP phone.  I read Tom’s book.  It wasn’t enough.  Reading had been enough for me concerning Stonehenge or the Aubrey Circle, but going to Circlestone didn’t require an airline ticket. It was so close.  I decided to hike out to the “ruin”.  My only drawback to getting to Circlestone, my aversion hiking.

I recruited my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, to carry the heavier red backpack and I hoisted the smaller, “ladies” backpack and we headed up to the top of the Superstition Mountains for the vernal (spring) equinox.  Since this first trip into the Superstitions, my son Matthew hates hiking more than I do.  At one point on the hike, he asked, “Why don’t you just push me off this cliff!  Just push me.”

Just getting to the trailhead is not easy.  The Rodgers Trough Trailhead is at the end of the Tonto National Forest Road 172, 20 miles of cruel road.  We got a flat tire this first time up, and in subsequent trips I’ve earned 5 more in just under ten trips, a frustrating ratio, not to mention costly.  Of course none of the tires could be repaired from the sharp stone ruptures.  After crossing the tire eating Queen Creek once and then returning to it to use the wash bed for a road for a couple miles, finally, the saguaros stop reaching for the sky.  You are half way to the trailhead.  When you are sure you are almost to the top crest, you find a switchback a Volkswagen bug would have to turn, back up once, and then go forward to make the turn in order to continue climbing up.  Pinion appears, then Manzanita; finally, Juniper joins the mountains’ jacket.  A steep drop and Roger’s Trough appears.  It’s time to get out, arrange gear, sign the Entrance to Wilderness Book, and begin the walk of eight miles and a gain of two thousand feet.  But as we left the trail head, instead of up we started the hike walking down into the trough.

The first couple miles the trail is just an up-and-down descent as you visit the bottom of Roger’s Canyon and then climb back up the side of the canyon for fun, or because the Conservation Corps trail builders thought avoiding cliffs and boulders was the smart thing to do.   I am sure their decisions were right, but going up as you are ultimately descending is demanding, and with two-thousand feet to gain, starting out descending is disheartening.  On the last of many ups and downs Matt and I found the trail sign pointing left for FT110 to continue down the the canyon to the Roger’s Ruins cliff dwellings.  To the right, the sign pointed for us to continue on the Arizona Trail, the State’s number one hiking trail from Mexico to Uta,  here called Forest Trail 109.  This way, just as you pass Elijah Reavis’ grave, the trail begins a switch back and forth for the first sustained one-thousand foot climb to reach Reavis Saddle.

Elijah is the famous “Hermit of the Superstitions”.  He never allowed a woman to enter his cabin, which it is said was full of books.  A Scotsman and a scholar, Elijah sold fruit and vegetables he cultivated in his high fertile meadow to the pioneers in Phoenix and Florence.  The Florence paper reported on one of his visits to town saying he smelled so bad no one would approach to buy his taters and apples.  The story is told that once he was surrounded and pinned down in his high-mountain cabin by Apaches, so he took off all his clothes except his boots and strapped on his gun belt.  He busted out of the cabin naked, running, screaming, singing and shooting in the air.  The Indians figured he was crazy, touched by the mountain’s spirits; they decided to just leave him alone lest they be infected too.  Instead of acquiring spirits climbing up to Reavis Saddle, I lost all spirit.  Fortunately, so had Matthew.  When we made the top, Mathew decided he had gone far enough.  He sat down under the cool shade of the first Ponderosa Pine we had seen, and said with conviction, “Let’s camp here.”  We did.

Our three-and-a-half mile trek, at half a mile an hour, had brought us to real trees and Reavis Spring oozing out water form the pores of the ridge to form the headwaters of Reavis Creek.  Fresh water.  A wandering dope smoker was already camped there.  I pulled out my bedroll, took out a phone that had one bar, amazingly, called home telling Pinky about our triumph, and then I immediately fell sleep.  I think Matthew sat at the modern-day hippie’s fire enjoying the fellowship.  He awoke in the morning in a much better mood than he ahd been in the day before.  He seemed eager to stroll downhill along side the creek, covered in pine shade into Elijah Reavis’ quiet, sheltered, high meadow.  After only two miles of gently descending, idyllic scenery, we hit the Fire Line Trail njunction, number 118, the trail leading up to Mound Mountain and the Circlestone trail junction.  It was still morning.  I set camp; Matt went looking for firewood.  He even volunteered and said he didn’t need any help.  “Strange,” I thought, “The hippie must have given him some smoking herb he didn’t want me to know about?”  I contented myself with the fact he was a much more amiable companion today.

We agreed to hike up and find the ruin.  Just carrying a Camelback filled with drinking water up hill is so much easier than hauling a backpack uphill.  The Fire Line trail starts out steep and covered in stumble rocks, but still I delighted in, “No backpack!”  When we reached the open, boulder-strewn-but-grassy saddle above Whiskey Springs, I began to look for the place the Circlestone trail should connect to follow this northern ridge top up toward the summit of Mound Mountain.  The mountain is the highest peak of the Superstitions at six-thousand, two-hundred and sixty-six feet.  Circlestone is on the north bench of the mountain at six-thousand and ten feet.  Matthew kept looking at me as if he expected I knew where the trail junction should be.  We searched for a couple hours and didn’t find it.  Not sure how long it would take to get back down to Reavis Meadow and camp, I said,

“Let’s go back down.  We’ll look tomorrow.”

Matt looked at me inquiringly, but fathers hate to admit to their sons they have no idea whatsoever.  He’ll grow up to not ask for directions at the gas station too.  He has a good example to emulate.  I had no idea where the trail connected to 118.

Back at camp, after filling all the water skins with a filter pump, cooking some individually foil packaged spam and enjoying a fine tin bowl of Raman soup, we discussed where I went wrong.  The next morning we would discover the Circlestone trailhead was about another half mile further than the ridge top we had scoured that day.  The next day we would follow 118 down the other side of the ridge to find a ten-inch high cairn marking the trail delta, the beginning of the extremely steep climb up to the Circlestone Ruin.  But that revelation would track us down the next day.   Matt’s firewood and an endless supply of Ponderosa Pine Cones entertained us until the sleep demons overcame me.

Getting to Circlestone is not easy.  It took Matt and I three days to find the sacred ruin.  The sacred is not always easy to find or attain.  But sometimes the journey, the pilgrimage to the sacred, is just as revelatory as the sacred place. Finding Circlestone brought my son and I closer together, and that is something sacred.

[1] Kollenborn, Tom, “Circlestone” Apache Junction Public Library (1985)