Benson, Arizona is about 50 miles southeast of Tucson. Founded in 1880, Benson was named after Judge William B. Benson, who was a friend of the Southern Pacific Railroad that was heading east at the time from California in order to find passage over the San Pedro River.
Although Benson doesn’t have a notorious past like its neighbor, Tombstone, Benson is well-known for being the location of the Jay Six Ranch, where Joe and Jack Kennedy worked as ranch hands in the spring of 1936; both reportedly being very hard workers at the time.
Nowadays, there’s not too much to report from Benson. A dusty town with a main street, The Thing? souvenir shop, and a McDonalds with a dinosaur in front. Said another way, Benson isn’t a place to stay, but rather it’s a place to stop on your way to Tombstone or the Kartchner Caverns.
Kartchner Caverns is worth a stop. Discovered in 1974, Kartchner has some amazing stalactites and stalagmites. Not as large as those in the Carlsbad Caverns, or the Crystal Caves in Bermuda, but Kartchner does have “the world’s most extensive formation of brushite moonmilk.”
—ooOoo—
I definitely wanted to get away, so stopping and hanging-out weren’t on my agenda. I moved quickly through and out of California, taking Highway 49 through all of my favorite gold mining towns before heading out of California and into Nevada via Yosemite National Park and U.S. 6, which starts in Bishop, California and ends in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Murphys is my favorite gold mining town. Arising from the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party in 1844, the first immigrant party to bring wagons over the Sierra Nevada, Murphys has a unique voice in California history. I like to eat at the restaurant below the Murphys Hotel, which is one of the oldest operating hotels in California, and has names like Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain in its registry.
In between leaving California and arriving in Benson, it’s just one big hazy desert blur to me: Coaldale, Tonopah, Warm Springs; other than the Extraterrestrial Highway, which is a 98-mile stretch of Nevada State Highway 375 from U.S. 6 to U.S. 93, there’s not much to note but the visible heat trails flowing in the wind. I would’ve enjoyed abduction by aliens, so long as there was air conditioning.
