Those of you with a wandering spirit may already know about Atlas Obscura, a travel company that, among other things, has an online directory where people can post guides to interesting places they’ve visited, all over the world.
If you look at the listing of such places here in Arizona, there’s one person who’s posted more than anyone else: Brett Iredell, a wildland firefighter in Flagstaff.
When he’s not putting out fires, he travels all over the state, documenting underappreciated historical sites and sharing their curious backstories. Iredell joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
BRETT IREDELL: We are firefighters, but specifically we are trained and dispatched to wildfires, rather than perhaps structure fires or medical incidents like your standard, what most people would conceive of as a firefighter.
SAM DINGMAN: Got it. OK. So you do this, wildland firefighting, which is interesting in its own right, but the thing I'm really interested to talk to you about is you have added all of these fascinating Arizona locations to the map of places that folks can explore via Atlas Obscura. I wanted to ask you about a couple of them specifically, cause I've only lived here for about a year, so I'm still looking for interesting new places to go, and some of the places that you have found are totally intriguing to me. One of them is the Mayhew Lodge.
IREDELL: Oh yes, I bought a book on, kind of, the history of Flagstaff and the surrounding area, and they mentioned an early Flagstaff figure, Jesse Jefferson “Bear” Howard, who made his living as a bear hunter in Oak Creek Canyon after his friend was mauled to death by a bear in the canyon. And at the time, Arizona still had grizzly bears. Bear Howard, as he was known, did the unfortunate work of making sure Arizona did not have grizzly bears anymore, and he built a cabin in Oak Creek Canyon, and it went through several other owners. It became kind of a resort property and —
DINGMAN: Well, yeah, but before we get to that, let's go back to Bear Howard for a second. Do we know, did he just kind of take this grizzly bear mitigation operation upon himself? Did somebody ask him to do this?
IREDELL: He, yeah, seemed to just get into that to avenge his friend. He just had a mission of vengeance.
DINGMAN: Wow. And one of the amazing details that you share in your, the post you made about this is that he hunted bears armed with only a knife.
IREDELL: That's the legend, I don't know how true it was or how often that's how he went out, but the word about him.
DINGMAN: That’s a good legend. OK, so another one that you've added to the Atlas Obscure directory that I was very fascinated by is the grave of Johnny Ringo.
IREDELL: Yeah, people may remember Johnny Ringo as a character from the movie “Tombstone,” played by Michael Biehn. He was kind of a cattle rustling outlaw, but I guess was fairly charismatic. He was alleged to quoted Shakespeare and I guess he was a little more well read than most of the cattle rustlers.
DINGMAN: I don't think of cattle rustlers wandering across the prairie, wondering whether they're a quintessence of dust, although I don't know, they're probably around dust a lot.
IREDELL: Right, and his death is, still a mystery, I guess he's probably committed suicide, but there's some mystery in that, and, a local rancher found the body, leaned up against a tree. And he's, to this day, buried on that private property down in southeast Arizona. You can visit his grave, the property owners let you stay on a little path and go check out the grave and the historic marker.
DINGMAN: What does the grave look like?
IREDELL: It's mostly a mound of rocks. I'm not sure what was added to it over the years. There's an obelisk and a gravestone with his name and date of death carved into it. It's mostly a mound of boulders that were probably found in the vicinity of his body.
DINGMAN: OK, and then the last one I want to ask you about is El Camino del Diablo.
IREDELL: Right, so El Camino del Diablo was a trail going back hundreds of years, across the very arid southwestern Arizona desert. It's a very treacherous route, sometimes days of walking between water sources, and it's estimated that over 2,000 people have died crossing this trail. It was the most direct way to get to Yuma from the east, until the railroads were built. So, it goes back, you know, hundreds of thousands of years before Europeans arrived.
DINGMAN: And you hiked this trail?
IREDELL: I hiked part of it, but I just did a day trip of it, hiked out and then returned to my vehicle.
DINGMAN: So, I mean, I know all of the places that you are drawn to are not like this, but something that these three places we've been talking about sort of have in common is just a little tinge of the macabre, and I wonder, is is that something that you feel drawn to as an explorer? Because I mean that, you know, it seems like there's maybe a little bit of a connection between that and doing the work that you do, which seems like it could get somewhat harrowing from time to time.
IREDELL: You know, I hadn't thought about that before. Maybe that's something I would have to speak to a therapist about, I don’t know.
DINGMAN: OK, fair enough, fair enough. But I mean, I'm partially asking this because not long ago I spoke to a guy named Richard Grant, who wrote a book about Arizona called “A Race to the Bottom of Crazy.” I don't know if you're familiar with that book, but, I think it would be up your alley based on the the writing that you've done, and one of the things that he talks about in that book is that Arizona is many things, but among them it is a haven for the Johnny Ringo-cowboy-rustler-poet types, also the Bear-Howard types. The person who's like, “We got a bear problem in Arizona, I am gonna go there myself with just a knife and solve it. It's gonna be me, I'm the guy.”
And not to put you in the same category as those guys or to call you crazy, to be clear, but it does strike me also that, you know, particularly right now, wildfires are in the news and there is this quality amongst most people that you talk to about fires of just kind of throwing up their hands like, “Ahh, what a scary problem. I don't know what we're gonna do about it,” and you are somebody who is like, “No, I'm, I'm gonna go put out those fires. I'm gonna be the guy.” Do you, do you see any like yourself in the Johnny Ringo's and Bear Howards of the world?
IREDELL: Well, I hope not too much in regarding maybe Johnny Ringo.
DINGMAN: Again, to be clear, you are not a criminal, no malfeasance, alleged.
IREDELL: Right, I mean, we are facing a pretty catastrophic wildfire future unless we take some, pretty large actions regarding, a lot more prescribed fire. People are gonna have to accept a lot more smoke maybe than they're used to, and just, you know, uncomfortable solutions, or else catastrophic wildfires are gonna rise, and maybe accepting that kind of unconventional daring is part of that.
