In Search of the Frontier

Life in Crown King has been for me a search for a new frontier. In the past year I have been fortunate enough to live a life filled with moments somewhere between car commercials and national park highlight reels. On one coast, I have worked on a 30,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge. Somewhere in the Southwest I have dropped into canyons no wider than my extended arms. On my way to Crown King, I hiked the narrows of an ice-covered river. These were the stories that preceded my arrival to the town of Crown King, Arizona, located in the fourth state I have called home in less than a year.


All of these activities were in different ways my attempt to find just where the 21st Century American frontier exists. I wondered…Could life in Crown King still hold the essence of what it meant to live in the American West years ago?

The story of getting to Crown King has been the story of Crown King since the town’s origin. The road, by the state’s own admission is primitive. I might add that both locals and visitors like it that way. It is composed of almost equal parts rock and dirt. The twenty-seven miles from the highway to the town of 150 people takes well over an hour and rises roughly three thousand feet from the desert floor to the Bradshaw Mountains. However, the drive, of which I have become accustomed to over the last two months, fails to tell the real story of Crown King.


Living in Crown King brought about a change in my understanding. During the first few weeks of living in Crown King I struggled to adequately wrap my head around just what the town was and how to talk about it. In some ways, it is largely a town only seasonally populated when the deserts around the mountains heat up and people escape to second homes in higher elevations. The rough road brings riders in ATVs, UTVs and dirt bikes up for a joy ride and a drink at the town’s one saloon. This temporary, cyclical population bulge is certainly one side of Crown King. It is the side that I barely know as I have been in town only for the offseason when snow is often forecast and nighttime lows freezing.

The side of Crown King that I know and have come to appreciate is the sixty or so people who call themselves “locals”. In the short time I have been here they have shown me true frontier hospitality inviting me to birthday parties, potlucks and film festivals.

I work for the local fire department, crew size - 6 people. Doing so was something that had never been on my radar of life goals or aspirations. Working for Crown King Fire Department has been a process of becoming part of the family. My days have become centered around two times, 8:00 and 20:00, the times of day that the crew and volunteers go into service to respond to any emergency call it receives. The weight of a radio has become a welcome feel and is a symbol that I too am a “local”. Calls for help in a town the size of Crown King are few but treated by all with upmost seriousness.

The town makes me think of the many small mountain towns spread across the West. Like them, Crown King was founded as a mining town. As the two trends of this type of towns tend to go, boom or bust, Crown King has almost stubbornly stayed consistent. I imagine this gives me, as near as possible a view of what Western mining towns must have been like when travel was by mule, horseback and foot. Yesterday in one of the stores named for gold prospecting, I overheard people still talking about the logistics required to operate one of the remaining area mines.

I imagine western ski-towns, before they became mega-attractions with multi-level condos and resorts, were once something like Crown King…small, filled with bad roads and independent frontier men, women and children living in cabins built for shelter that certainly did not double as summer recreational mansions. The wood stove that heats the home in which I stay adds warmth and comfort and offers a glimpse of life on a mountain that no theme park surrounded by hills could ever match. Sure, ATVs have replaced the horses, and jeeps the train, but the beauty, ruggedness and sense of belonging on the mountain remains.

The self-determination of the people, the pain-in-the-neck of getting down the mountain and back and the acceptance of strangers, whatever their quirks or stories, add to the nostalgia. I once referred to Crown King as a “city” to a local and was corrected. Sure, Crown King is a group of people living in close proximity but never had they heard of it being referred to as a “city”. Maybe the local was right. I still have much to learn about the place I now call home. If life in Crown King, Arizona is not the embodiment of the American frontier I was after, I rightly believe that I might just be able to see it from here. And, no doubt about it, the view is mighty nice.