Tombstone Arizona

Tag: Tombstone Arizona

Brief description of what to expect from posts here.

Tombstone’s Helldorado Days

by J. Joshua Placa | Nov 19, 2025 | Ride Life, Rides & Roads | 1 |

The way to Tombstone, AZ can feel like a wagon trail that happens to be paved. Passing through small, dusty towns that aren’t much more than stage coach stops, a place to get some grub, put up your boots, feed your steel horse and get back on the trail. For those of us who watched too many westerns, this is the way of the west. Whether you’re pushing cattle, prospecting for precious metals, running from the law, endlessly searching for a homestead or riding to the next cold beer, we are always trying to get somewhere else. Just passing through, gone before the dust settles. The West is less a place and more a state of mind. It embodies wanderlust, adventure, independence. Not much more needed than our ride, big black boots, and shoulders covered in well-worn leather. It is freedom. And for three days and nights in the third weekend of October for the last 96 years, it is Helldorado Days.

Haunted Highways, Part 3

by J. Joshua Placa | Oct 29, 2022 | Ride Life, Rides & Roads | 2 |

Valerie and I had ridden through Old West towns infested with spirits fun and foul. We galloped east near the New Mexico border and the stunning Chiricahua wilderness, a great place to hike or camp or eat a Bologna sandwich. It was a beautiful, sightseeing day, until deep and dark clouds, pregnant with rain, dumped their water on us. We got monsooned. If this has never happened to you, it’s a lot like somebody dumping a swimming pool on your head. Visibility zero, soaked to the bone in milliseconds, eyes filling with stinging sunblock runoff. Yes, it rains in Arizona, sometimes supernaturally so.

Haunted Highways, Part 2

by J. Joshua Placa | Oct 24, 2022 | Ride Life, Rides & Roads | 0 |

Tombstone remains a living monument to a romantic if murderous era. Its clapboard buildings and wooden sidewalks stir up images of cowboy heroes and villains, the likes of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo, as well as the Clanton and McLaury clans, now taking up permanent residence on Boot Hill, where moldering graves are marked by rotting wooden tombstones. Their historic shootout near the OK Corral is known around the world. The Wild West is preserved in the town’s original 1880s’ buildings. The celluloid stuff you saw on TV is here to experience, live and undead.