Break for the border and a beguiling fusion of frontier spirit and urban modernity

CRAIG BROWN

WHILE standing on a steep bank of sand, I sensed a disturbance in the Force. It might have been some lingering tremors from the escape pod which crash landed here with C-3PO and R2-D2 in the first Star Wars film. Or it could be that I was nearing the spot where, in Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia rescued Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt’s sand barge. But it was more likely to be the vibration of the passing juggernaut on the busy interstate at the bottom of the Imperial Sands, just outside Yuma in southern Arizona.

With its high undulating hills of shingle – and easy access to a four-lane motorway leading to Los Angeles – no wonder these dunes were George Lucas’s choice for the desert world of Tatooine. Even when I was there, recreating my own droid moment, a filmmaker had pitched up a few dunes away among the dune buggies, trying to evoke the majestic sweep of Laurence of Arabia, much as Lucas and his crew did 30-odd years ago. A visit to southern Arizona is full of these unexpected delights, a place where a roughhewn rural frontier past rubs up against a sleek urbanised present.

Minutes from the Mexican border and within touching distance of California, Yuma itself is a hidden gem. Once it was best known as the territorial prison that was the final stop for Glenn Ford’s outlaw in the 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma. Now the town is becoming a destination for tourists looking for a fresh entry point into Arizona.

Yuma prison perches on a rocky outcrop, overlooking the town. When it was built in 1875, it was hemmed in by the Colorado river, but irrigation and agriculture have reduced the crashing waters of Red River to a mellow stream about a quarter of a mile away.

Since doing time as a penitentiary, then a high school, a hospital, a homeless shelter and a film set, the gaol has become a museum, and you can investigate its cells, spend time in the dank punishment hole and browse exhibits that bring some of its most memorable inmates to life, including a serial killer who became noted in jail for his delicate needlepoint lacework.

Yuma is a sturdy base from which to investigate south Arizona. Agriculture is the backbone of the town, the self-anointed winter vegetable capital of the world, where fields of kale and lettuce stretch out like flat green lawns towards the brusque desert. The town is equally keen to reach out to new visitors. At the Lutes Casino eaterie and the Prison Hill Brewing Co pub, locals want to hear your stories, provide insider tips on their bustling theatre and arts scene, and suggest an early start if you plan a visit to nearby Castle Dome City.

Not so much a city as a ghost town, Castle Dome sprang up in the 1860s during a silver mining boom, then fell away during the bust. Since the mid-1990s, it has been lovingly restored by one man, Allen Armstrong. The result is a remarkable ghost town with real insight into frontier life – the properties are stuffed with discoveries from the mines that pepper the land around, including a pair of Levi’s jeans, preserved by the dry climate at the bottom of a mineshaft. Last worn in the 1890s, they are one of the oldest surviving examples of the workwear.

To walk among the abandoned buildings is an eerie experience, like a beautifully crafted film-set waiting the arrival of the cast and crew – except, unlike the wide, straight streets that people have come to associate with westerns, Castle Dome presents you with chaotic knots of wooden buildings linked by haphazard wooden pathways from the real west.

If Yuma presents a modern face of the frontier, and Castle Dome City a glimpse into the Old West, then a little further on the town of Tombstone is somewhere in between; a playground perhaps, for those nostalgic for frontier lifestyles.

Despite being barely 140 years old, Tombstone looms large in America’s psyche as the setting for the infamous outlaw showdown at its OK Corral. Along the town’s carefully preserved main drag, residents dressed in period costume recreate life as it was back in the heyday