Great-Grandfather J.E. Thompson (1875-1950) used to vacation at a cabin in the White Mountains on a plateau about 1,000 feet above Greer, Ariz. Great-grandfather called the small, one-room building far from civilization his “hunting shack.” It’s unclear how much hunting he did there.
There will be no opportunity for forensics. The cabin burned a few years ago, leaving only a concrete foundation, a two-oven wood-burning cook stove, and some scraps of a metal roof. Fortunately, a Forest Service geologist, Robert Oldfield, took pictures of the cabin before it burned, and those photos grace this post.
Oldfield shot the photos when he assessed the house and land southwest of Big Lake at an altitude of 8,800 feet. At the time, the Forest Service was negotiating to buy and add the plot to the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, which surrounds the plot, reports intrepid historian Sylvia Lee.
“Because he built his house in that meadow, a pretty little stream just upstream was named Thompson Creek,” says Lee. “A Forest Service trail that follows the creek is called the Thompson Trail.”
J.E. owned a much grander lodge in Greer, where he used to take the family on vacation. The lodge was eventually renamed Turner’s Lodge. It was later vandalized and accidentally burned to the ground. More on the lodge later.
The Thompson trail, a 5.4-mile roundtrip, is considered one of the lushest and most picturesque in Arizona, which is saying something. The trail parallels the Black River and takes a little less than two hours to complete. Supposedly, you can see signs of the Wallow Fire, which burned 538,049 acres of the White Mountains in 2011. That may have been the fire that consumed the lodge.
