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Blog Posts by the characters.

Emily’s Blog: Who Were the Peraltas? Part 2 (by Morgan)

Hey there guys. It’s me. Likely branded your local party pooper. But I’m the other person on this team of cultural research and I’ve got my own take on some of this stuff. I know it’s really easy to romanticize it, because who doesn’t love stories of cowboys vs. indians and buried treasure and mysterious, marauded bodies out in the desert? It’s great stuff for movies and books, but we’re also dealing with real life. Not to get super preachy on you, or anything. But Rose is still missing and, yes, I’ll admit the fact that she believed this stuff does make the fictional stories relevant, but I don’t want to run the risk of sensationalizing this and losing sight of things. So, in an effort to make the playing field as factual for our efforts as possible, here’s the real story behind the Peralta family.

First of all, you should know that there’s actually been at least four accounts of “Lost Dutchman’s Mines” in the southwest. Two of them, including ours, is said to be in Arizona. One’s supposedly in Colorado and the other is located in California. All huge mining areas during the 19th century. The very first Dutchman’s Mine was located over a hundred miles from the Superstition Mountains in Wickenberg where supposedly the miner was found dead in the desert next to his saddlebags full of gold.This could be the origin of the folktale, and it’s not the only outstanding legend that probably inspired the others.

Dr. Thorne, who was mentioned in part 1, apparently never existed. At least not the way people think. There was never a “Dr. Thorne” in the army at any point during the 1800s but there was a private practice Dr. Thorne in New Mexico who claimed to have been kidnapped by Navajos. During his captivity, he claimed they took him to a rich vein of gold. When he got free, he told the story to anyone who would listen and several people went looking for this gold vein but never found it. That’s a story I believe. And likely one that inspired the tale of our fictional Dr. Thorne.

Now, about those Peraltas. You heard me mention on the podcast that the only known Peralta family wasn’t even in Arizona, and, for the most part, that’s true. The governor of New Mexico was Pedro de Peralta and likely the source of the name. We have no historical evidence to back up the claim that the Peralta family had any kind of land grant from the king of Spain or that they ever owned and/or settled land in the area of the Superstitions. Miguel Peralta existed but his mine was in California and the mining rights Peralta owned in southern Arizona were sold off to someone else when the mine became unprofitable.

So, who were the Peraltas? No one, really. Various people with the last name Peralta did exist but not at the same time or same location. And this is a perfect example of how folklore gets built from fragments of truth. It’s like when you’re at camp, telling a story about some serial killer on the loose and everyone fights over “No, I heard it this way.” Which is all well and fun, but we’ve got a missing girl. What she believed is important, but keep your feet planted on the ground because we’ve got a shot at finding out what happened. Don’t know if Emily’s going to let me back on her blogs after this, but you’ll see (hear) me on the podcast soon. Adios pals.

Eve’s Blog: Your Gay Playlist

On to wilder and happier things kids. And that means picking your jams for your next gay as af party. Or the next time you’re feeling gay af. Which is, hopefully, always. Amirite? As this podcast’s resident DJ (you’re welcome) I’ve decided it’s my place to educate you rascals on the music you need to be listening to. And maybe give you a taste of what I like to jam to at my uber secret shindigs.

Despite all your emails, yes, the Rainbow Redlight Club is still invite only. Sorry ladies.

But, let’s get started on some gay playlist essentials. Kay? Kay.

Tegan and Sara

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You had to know this would be first right? The ultimate lesbian music duo is a must on any uber proud playlist. Not to mention remixes of their stuff make for some great club hits if you’re into that kind of party (which I am). These two aren’t afraid of being open about their relationships or blatantly referring to their lady loves, which is great for those of us who don’t feel like having to change pronouns to make a song relevant to us.

Also, who doesn’t love Canadians?

Mary Lambert

Mary Lambert's new album is called Heart On My Sleeve

If you ever need to slow it down at your party, or just give everyone a really good cry, this is the lady for you. She’s got that whole slow, sensual thing going on with some crazy good poetry skills. She’s uber honest and basically just wants everyone to hug it out and cry and live happily ever after. She’s also openly gay. Which is A++

Elohim

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Ever heard of her? Probably not. Not to go all hipster on you guys, but it’s true. This chick is sick. She wears masks and shit constantly to keep herself anonymous for some artisty statement on letting the music speak for itself and yada, yada. She’s got good party music, fo sho. But she won my heart when she depicted a lesbian couple in her music video for “Sensations” (a song about sex, fyi). So now she owns my heart forever. Thanks babe.

Halsey

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Duh. Went to a Halsey concert once and it was practically crawling with girls who looked like they walked straight out of Blue is the Warmest Color. Plenty of girls on dates at this one, even if they were all like 15 years old. Whatever. You do you younglings. But Halsey is a cool cat and openly bi. Her music is also super rad and hot shit right now.

Troye Sivan

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A guy had to get on this list eventually, right? Besides the fact that EVERYONE is obsessed with his music right now (and I can’t blame them) the thing that’s cool about this cat is he practices what he preaches. He made a pretty cool trilogy of music videos about two dudes falling in love as kids and having a tough go of it once they hit young adulthood. While we all might be sick of the queer kids killing themselves narrative, Troye used it for good when he provided resources in the video to suicide help lines and donated money for queer youth charities. Right on.

There’s a lot more I could talk about, but I like nice even numbers like 5. Lists are always in 5 or 10 or 15. Something like that. And since I don’t feel like going to 10, you get 5. Comment if you want more, I guess.

Adios.

Emily’s Blog: Who Were the Peraltas? Part 1

So this week we’re switching things up a bit…yaaaaay….Anyway. As a way to fulfill her duties as our other cultural expert, Morgan will be making a guest appearance in the second half of this blog post to “balance out” the content. Which I am totally for and support because local legends and American folklore can be tricky stuff and we could use all the angles. This post’s topic du jour is the family that started it all: the Peraltas.

For those of you new to this story, and those of you super familiar with it, the Peraltas are a name that will likely be intertwined with any Lost Dutchman story. They were a prominent family in the area generations before our fabled Dutchman ever set foot on the shores of America and held onto their wealth with a fantastic mine. The family came from Mexico and settled in the area that would one day become Apache Junction and the Superstition Wilderness. And there, they struck gold. Now, I mentioned before that the geographic make up of the mountain makes it unlikely that these enormous veins of gold could truly be there. However, the area surrounding the mountain and other places in Maricopa County are well documented sites of gold deposits (see my previous mention of known mines in the area). So, one theory I’ve come up with, and many others have as well, is that the mine and the Lost Dutchman’s were not one in the same. Most people, at this point, reason the Dutchman’s mine must have been a cache hidden somewhere in the mountain.

Regardless, the Peraltas seemed to have stumbled onto something bigger than themselves when they began discovering gold. The story goes that Miguel Peralta, patriarch of the family, stumbled upon the gold and began mining to return it to the family’s ancestral home in Sonora, Mexico. One day, he and his men were ambushed and massacred by local Apache natives on a site that is known to this day as Massacre Grounds. Miguel escaped and the Apaches then buried the gold and hid the location.

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This has lead many to believe the land and the gold it hid were not only known to the local tribes, but revered and protected. Some refer to accounts that the Apaches believed the mountain to be the home of a thunder god and therefore, sacred.  Another account is that of Dr. Thorne, an army doctor who healed a wounded Apache and, as reward, was blinded and taken into the wilderness and inside this vast cache of gold. He was told he could take as much as he could carry before he was blindfolded again and dropped back in town now several pounds heavier in gold. He was never able to relocate this mysterious cave of wonders.
Eventually the Peralta family sells the rights to this land to a wary immigrant named Jacob Waltz, and returns to Mexico. From there, the story takes another turn entirely. But, that’s information for later updates. For now I’ll hand it over to Morgan, who’ll give an opposing (read: cynical) version of these events and the histor

Eve’s Blog: The 100….Ugh

Okay, so I’m gonna be real with you…I never watched this show. I “watched” it through tumblr, translating some gifsets and crack posts and had a general idea of what was going on. There were some wlw ladies, something dystopian (bleh), kinda had a setting similar to Halo, all that jazz. And then I watched the internet IMPLODE when they killed off one half of said wlw ship, shortly after they reconciled their political (???) differences and did the do. Boom, stray bullet strikes again in a much less subtle and much more poorly written manner over ten years later.

The internet did some not great things, like get vicious and harass some members of the crew and writing team and the producer guy. Love him or hate him, internet harassment is still not the best outlet for getting anything accomplished when something like this happens. But the twelve year olds who learned how to work twitter might disagree with me, who knows. Apart from that though, I have to say, as much as it pains me to express an emotion…I’m actually kind of proud of it all????

???????

Anyway. The point here is in response to the most atrocious attempt at disguising killing off a woman, and a queer woman at that, a bunch of kids on the internet finally got their bunched panties together and did something good with all that energy. They raised a fuckton of money for the Trevor Project and started their own convention about queer representation in the media. Pretty cool right?

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I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the next iteration of the sci-fi, dystopian, for-some-reason-teenagers-are-in-charge TV show/film/book/whatever. But it was pretty cool to see genre representation of a wlw relationship right? And when it got taken away for a dumb reason, we really should have an intelligent discussion about it instead of getting nitpicky on twitter and sending some hateful emails. Everyone’s powerful behind a keyboard, but some people actually know what to do with that, right?

I’m not really sure what I’m saying with this one besides good game kids. I wouldn’t recommend this show on my list of Eve’s Gay Shit for Newbies (it was once) but I would say: look at this cool thing that happened in response, right?

Anyway.

Eve’s Blog: Buffy and the Invention of THAT Trope

So, as you probably have known for a while or just, unfortunately, found out thanks to a certain dystopian series, lesbians die a lot in media. Sometimes I’m willing to justify the deaths as imperative to the plot and all that jazz, and sometimes it’s just stupid (look at you The Walking Dead). And while lesbians dying as probably been a thing forever in the history of entertainment media, there’s one incident we can trace all this recent hullabaloo back to. And that is season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If you haven’t watched Buffy yet then I can’t help you. It’s 2016. That show is required viewing for basically every American who wants to form a coherent opinion on TV shows and movies. But for those of you still lagging: it’s a show about a girl who hunts vampires. Well, mostly. It’s a bit more complicated than that but there’s magic and demons and vampires and hot girls and an apocalypse every other season. And despite the fact that Buffy and her gal pal Faith were like the lesbian-couple-that-never-was of my 90s, there was an actual wlw couple in the show. Actually there were two. But the one we’re talking about mostly today is Willow and Tara.

I mentioned Tara for a quick, hot second in my last post and unfortunately, her name is tied to a very crappy trope in film and TV that involves killing off one half of your lesbian couples and causing all sorts of heartache for everyone. Well, here I’m going to do something that might make me WILDLY unpopular but I thrive off the haters…Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a big problem that queer female characters seem to get picked off like flies in TV shows and movies but I don’t really think Joss Whedon and Buffy is really as much to blame as people think?

To get some context here, Willow and Tara had the first on-screen lesbian kiss on network TV. Joss Whedon was so adamant about its inclusion that he threatened to leave the show if the network cut the scene, as they expressed a desire to do. Ultimately, it made it into the final cut of season 5’s The Body and we all got one step closer to some massively good representation. And then disaster struck in season 6 when Willow and Tara broke up, then got back together just in time for Tara to find herself the victim of a stray bullet.

I think we need to look at the context of this stray bullet. For sure, the bs with The 100 was poor writing and garbage and an annoying attempt at replicating this, but again, dear friends, context. Willow and Tara had possibly the most long-lasting, healthy, flaw-free relationship. Since their beginning in season 4 they had virtually no fights, no relationship arcs, nada. They were a smooth sailing ship. Which, there’s nothing wrong with, but when you’re talking entertainment, at a certain point you need to make your couple be an actual human couple with some eff ups. Not too mention, Willow herself was kind of a pristine character who needed some emotional turmoil and growth since everyone except her seemed to get that.

So season 6 was all about the consequences of Willow’s reliance on magic. It starts with her guilt at bringing Buffy back from the dead against her will and spiraled as she found herself going to the magic equivalent of crack houses to get high on the power, using magic to make her girlfriend forget a fight, and being a neglectful babysitter to Buffy’s sister. Tara, like many other halves in a relationship with an addict, breaks it off until she can prove her magic sobriety. And it seems to be working after some struggling episodes for Willow. She’s forced to deal with the consequences of her actions and she seems to be getting a handle on herself. But not so fast.

Just as Tara and Willow decide to reconcile, in the first and only episode where Amber Benson (Tara) was credited as a series regular, Tara finds herself the unintended target of Warner’s stray bullet as he attempts to shoot Buffy (he does end up hitting her too, eventually). Tara drops dead in Willow’s arms and my girl goes APE SHIT. For two episodes she goes on a heartbroken rampage to track down everyone responsible for Tara’s death and, when that’s not enough to quell her pain, decides she’s just going to end the world before she’s brought back to her senses by her oldest and best friend and spends a good portion of the show’s final season recovering and coping with what she’s done and her connection with magic.

So why does context matter here? Because it’s super meta. Tara’s death was one of the few where the intent to shock was purposeful to put the audience in Willow’s position, right down to the tricky use of the opening credits to fuck with you. You needed to understand how someone who spent 5 seasons as a quiet little mouse was now willing to obliterate everything and everyone. And Tara didn’t go away, she played an important part for Willow’s growth in the next season and Willow eventually had a relationship with another girl, Kennedy, one of the Potentials, who ultimate helps her not to fear her magic. So the representation did not disappear with Tara’s death.

So, what’s my point? The trope is real, but its source gets distorted. People much less intelligent and caring made a poor man’s version of Joss Whedon’s writing move and the result is homophobia and garbage.

Until next time, pals.

Emily’s Blog: Gold Rush History

Welcome back friends! Hope these blogs end up being helpful and not a bore. But there’s got to be some Willow types out there itching for the research side of things, right? This week might not prove my point though since it’s going to be less of a campfire story and more of a history lesson. As every red blooded American has had shoved down their throat since grade school: there was this thing called the gold rush. And that’s our focus this week because the gold rush plays an interesting part in the history of these mountains.

Most of our European ancestors actually came to this country long ago on some voyage to look for gold (when they weren’t looking for religious freedom). Jamestown, Virginia, our first town, was the result of a gold hunt and much farther down south, Cortez famously tore the native empires apart trying to find the fabled City of Gold. Little did he know all he would have to do is wait a couple hundred years for rumors to circulate that the largest cache of gold in North America was hiding somewhere up in these mountains.

Alright, time for some nerd shit (don’t tell Eve). You ready? Gold is actually thought to have been born during the collision of neutron stars and basically as old as the solar system, if not older. I’m sure this expensive star dust origin doesn’t dissuade the people who come to town claiming to see aliens in the sky, but scientifically speaking, stars are the result of some crazy nuclear reactions in the heart of stars, not unlike us. Pretty much all the gold that was here at the beginning probably sank right down and into the earth’s core. The flakes and motherlodes people still find today were brought here by asteroid impacts. Now, later we’ll talk more specifically about our fabled “mine” but you should know that the geography of the mountains suggests it’s likely a cache. Gold was present in this area, hence the Mammoth Mine which produced the ghost town of Goldfield. But the mountain itself would be hard pressed to produce as much gold as legend says.

So, the first deposit of gold in the United States was found in the late 18th century in Virginia. And just at the turn of the century on a farm in North Carolina, gold hysteria hit critical. Johanne Reidt found a 16 lbs gold nugget on his property and after being made aware of its value by a local jeweler, started a mining operation on his farm. Fast forward another forty years after Reidt died wealthy and the California Gold rush began in 1848. Jumping back in time again, gold mining in Arizona goes back to the late 18th century with the Spanish settlers setting up shop. But most of the miners answered the call of gold in California and left in the 1840s. Some notable mines that popped up in our area though were Mammoth Mine, Vulture Mine, and Oatman Mine. It’s all very Stand By Me.

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Why was this important? Well the lust for gold is not only going to figure into some later blog posts. Obsession has been the fall of many in this wilderness, as we’ll see soon. How does this relate to Rose? Well where she was hiking and why could very well be related to some things I’ve got coming up on a local mine I haven’t mentioned yet…Clues for that will be coming up but what I can point out is Rose’s direction would likely be in tandem with Weaver’s Needle, which figures heavily in a very interesting local legend we’ve hinted at and will be diving into soon. This outcropping literally sticks out like a sore thumb and very likely was a focal point in Rose’s hike.

Eve’s Blog: Carol (Harold)

 

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Hello. It’s me. This is like 8 million years late but I also don’t tend to watch things unless they’re on my computer screen. Yeah, yeah. Pirating is bad. But ain’t nobody got $12 to shell out every week for a movie and then get busted for sneaking in gummy bears so I didn’t have to pay an extra $3 on their crazy food price hike.

But I digress.

If you’re an academic of the queer variety, you’ve probably at least heard of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt from the good old repressed era of the 1950s. It’s a pretty gay book. Two ladies fall in love while one of them is trapped in a custody battle for her children and the other is dealing with a really annoying boyfriend. It’s dramatic, it’s intense, it was probably way ahead of it’s time when it came out (ha, puns). And it’s like, queer reading 101. And get this, it’s one of the only lesbian stories with a happy ending. No one gets shot or jumps off a building or moves away in heartbreak.

I know what you’re thinking, that sounds fake, but it’s not. Lesbians can be happy too, apparently.

Because of that, it’s been the ultimate lesbian novel, basically since it came out (ha). The thing is, this book was super duper helpful for cultivating and also combating lesbian stereotypes. Besides the uncharacteristically happy ending for our lady lovers, the novel also combated the gendered stereotypes of a lesbian relationship, aka the idea that someone has to be “the man” in a relationship. There’s this whole existential crisis that our bambi character, Therese, has when she realizes she and Carol don’t fit the butch-femme paradigm she’s come to know in lesbian relationships. It’s just two gals being pals. Important book right here.

It’s been adapted before as one of those boring radio dramas but the big one we all know and love is the movie that came out last year with Cate Blanchett (bless us for we are not worthy) and Rooney Mara (adorable). It was a pretty good movie, actually, it was one of the best movies of the year. People smarter than me (yes, they do exist) put on plenty of “best of” lists at the end of the year and it got all sorts of dazzling reviews.

SO WHY WAS IT SNUBBED AT THE OSCARS?

I’ll be real here, I don’t know much about the social hierarchy and popularity contest crap that goes with the Oscars. But I do know it’s pretty effed up when Brokeback Mountain, a queer film about two men falling in love gets all sorts of praise while the film adaptation of the ULTIMATE lesbian novel gets totally brushed off, despite everyone putting it on their shortlists. And they didn’t even fill up all their category slots.

But I’m digressing again, I guess.

The real point of all of this is to convince you guys to go read this book. I know we live in a better time and lesbian media is a lot more accessible than back then, but this book has persisted through the decades and is still one of the most positive representations of a wlw relationship. So do yourself a favor and dry those tears from when Tara was shot and read something heartwarming.

This is Eve, signing off and wishing you a very gay week.

Eve’s Blog: Could Be Gayer…

Howdy younglings. If you’ve found yourself stumbling onto my blog, congratulations, your life just improved a little. I’m kidding (no I’m not). On the real though, I thought I’d offer some counter blogging to the ever ending paragraphs of academia on other parts of our website…Not that our dear Emily’s blogs haven’t been incredibly informative and overenthusiastic. But I’m hear to give the kids what they really want.

Lesbians.

Amirite?

I know we’re a news podcast (ish) and have our journalistic duty and are playing at being the Scooby Gang in the desert. But hey, this is the internet and maybe you’re in the mood for a little freedom of expression right? After all, think of the countless generations of women loving women who had to slog through libraries and archives in secret to get their soul searching on. I’m your one-stop-shop for all that is gay in pop culture.

Or I try to be.

I thought I’d start out this first blog post pretty light with a nice, clean list of things that could be gayer. Which is everything. But specifically, some things that really missed their mark when it comes to going all the way on getting some ladies in love. So enjoy, be enraged, and go write some fanfiction.

Game of Thrones

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With the amount of boobies we see in this show, you’d think they’d let some of the ridiculously hetereosexual (and kind of weird) sex scenes fade away into something a little more diverse. DON’T WORRY. THERE’S SEVERAL SCENES OF TWO DUDES MAKING OUT AND DOING THE DO. That’s okay. But six seasons deep and we only recently finally got to see two women making out (thank the old gods and the new for Yara Greyjoy). Here’s to hoping for something more than flirting from Yara and Dany next season. I’m still licking my wounds that Sansa and Margaery will never be a canon couple now.

Ghostbusters

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When you got four badass ladies hunting down ghosts, how can you deny me an amazing ghosthunting girlfriends romantic subplot? COME ON. Kate Mckinnon is the first out female cast member of SNL whose character was very subtly coded as having a serious thing for Kristen Wiig’s character. But that’s as far as it got. I hope this one gets a sequel because I need to see Kate McKinnon at her full (gay) potential.

Jessica Jones

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Okay here me out. I don’t really vibe with the romantic lens on Jessica’s relationship with her sister, adopted or not. But I also got absolutely nothing from her weird, unstable relationship with Luke Cage. He’s a solid ally and friend, but there were zero sparks going on there. Get her some kind of superhero girlfriend. I’ve seen fanfiction, it’s 900% doable. Especially after what a scumbag the last romantic partner in her life turned out to be.

Agent Carter

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You do not, I repeat, do not kiss your friend as a diversive tactic without having some sort of romantic subplot show up. I’ve seen TV Tropes, I know how this works. You kiss as a cover-up, you get several episodes of unresolved romantic tension. Don’t mess with me Marvel.

There’s more. I can think of like five as I’m writing this. But I have a word limit on this dumb blog template (which I will fix for next time). So for now, adios my friends. I’ll be back with more, don’t you worry.

Emily’s Blog: Native Mythology

Hey guys! Today, I thought I’d introduce you guys to some of the older mysteries surrounding this area. Everyone has their local lore, but this stuff is ancient. And I mean like antediluvian old.

First things first: the science. Basically the dating in this big old hunk of rock goes back almost 20 million years to a time of crazy violent volcanic activity. As a result of the composite of the mountain, most people believe our fabled goldmine would actually have to be a cache of gold, but that’s something we’ll go into detail in later. But, the first people to attach crazy stories to this place were the Pima tribe who lived in the area.

One of the big ones that comes from the Pima peoples is that the top of the mountain housed a gaping hole that was not only the source of all the winds of the world, but the entrance to their underworld. Not spooky enough for you? Well try this creepy coincidence on for size: the Pima tribe, located thousands and thousands and an entire ocean away from the peoples of the Cradle of Civilization, had a flood myth. Most of us will know the idea of a “flood myth” from stories in the Bible and a forced reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh sometime during your high school career.

Flood myths are another animal entirely and traverse basically every known culture. There’s even some level of historicity with them, at least in a case by case sense. Whether or not these great deluges actually happened or not is a discussion for someone else’s podcast, what I have for you is a tale fairly similar to the one we all know of dear Noah but with a much more macabre ending. This story takes several faces of the years and has, unfortunately, likely been the victim of some cultural appropriation and unfortunate tampering but here’s the bare bones of how it went down:

Like all flood myths, the peoples in this were being punished for their actions or lack of fealty to their deities. As punishment literally rained down, a group of Pima tribe members made an escape to the top of the Superstition Mountain. Once up there, trapped by the risen water level, they were petrified–whether this was a punishment for escaping the flood or a tribe shaman did it sometimes changes on how people retell it. But from this petrification, they became the dangerous looking rock pinnacles on the top of the mountain. Take another look at them (or your first look, depending on where you live) and you might find they actually are strangle statue shaped.

Beyond this there is also talk of the Apache thunder god taking up residence in the mountain, among other stories. Essentially, this place lives up to its name. Which is going to make it some serious fodder for crazy media junkies but, it’s better to get the weird out before we delve into the real, right? Check my blogs for more supplemental updates and thanks for reading (and listening!)

 

Emily’s Blog: The Stats of Rose’s Hike

Hey there listeners–or, readers, in this case. I’ve decided to put together some supplemental information that didn’t have time to make it into our updates/would have bored you to tears to listen to for 45 minutes. So, these might have a chronological order or a logical order. Or it might just be relevant to what we discussed that week.

As promised, my inaugural blog post is going to provide you some statistical information on Rose’s current state based on hiking norms and all that jazz. It’s not exactly the most riveting stuff, but that will be coming later. For now, I wanted to provide you with some background info that would have bored you to tears on the podcast. Who knows, maybe it’ll bore you to tears now, but you can’t say I don’t keep my promises.

First things first, a girl in her late teens needs to be drinking nine cups of water a day. And that’s if you’re doing nothing but binge watching Netflix all day. Rose is a super athletic person which means basically everything going in her body is being used up a lot faster than the rest of us couch potatoes. But, if she was a good hiker, which we know she was, she likely prehydrated so she didn’t have to lug heavy amounts of water with her. Generally speaking, during the hike, you should be consuming a pint of water every hour and then finish off with a liter of water at the end of the day. Especially in the Arizona desert. Based on the police report of items missing from her room, she did take enough water bottles to account for that much water.

Rose was prepared, so we can (hopefully) rule out dehydration. Rose brought supplies and likely knew of any watering holes in the area of her hike. She was also an expert at detoxifying the water since she pulled out this fancy kit one time in chem class that boiled water twice as fast as an open flame. She was something of a nut about things like that. But it worked in her favor.

As for food? For a normal hike, 2,000 calories a day is the suggestion. But for more mountainous terrain, like the Superstitions, you need to bump that up to 4,500. This is especially true for someone like Rose whose metabolism probably runs at double the normal rate for a teenage girl. Again, according to the manifest of her items, she had several packs of granola, trail mix, and chia bars with her. Like I said, this girl was not just going for a Snow White walk in the woods to hang out with some wildlife, she took this seriously.

Why is this important? Well I’m building you a character profile on our missing girl since in the next several blog posts we’re going to be departing a focus on Rose to look at the wilderness she’s found herself lost in. That’s a history that’s going to take several weeks to map out for you in detail. So for now, that’s some info on what we know about Rose’s preparations for her hike. Next time I’m on here I’ll begin your newbie’s history to the very ominous world of the Superstition Mountains.