Clifton — the Town in the Canyon — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
Coming down into Clifton now, and the town is squeezed into a canyon so narrow that the buildings, the road, the railroad and the river are all fighting for the same few hundred feet of floor.
Look up at the cliffs above the main street and you'll see why the town looks improvised — there was simply nowhere else to put anything. Houses climb the rock on stilts and stairs. And look for the old jail cut directly into the cliff face, which Boone has a story about.
Clifton is the old town — the miners' town, founded in the eighteen seventies, with a genuinely wild early history — while Morenci up the hill is the company town, and the modern one was built after the original Morenci was eaten by the pit.
The San Francisco River runs through here, and it has repeatedly and catastrophically flooded the town; you can still see high-water marks and the flood walls built to stop it happening again.
There are hot springs here too — mineral water coming up warm out of the rock — which is part of why people settled the canyon in the first place.
It's a fascinating, hard-luck, hard-nosed little place, and it has survived boom, bust, flood, fire and strike. Stay with me for the last word.