A Cliff House in Southern Arizona’s Redfield Canyon

Redfield Canyon Cliff House by Randy Prentice

By Sam Negri

​There are places in the desert we will never find in our slippery city shoes. Redfield Canyon, a dense jumble of cliffs and boulders about 40 miles northeast of Tucson, is one of those spots. A place with a running creek, massive cottonwood trees and crags dimpled with smooth caves, Redfield Canyon conceals an abandoned cliff house built into a secluded overhang that is nearly as isolated from the madding crowd as you could hope to get.

Many canyons throughout Arizona contain cliff dwellings abandoned some 700 years ago by the ancestors of the Hopi Indians. But this one had nothing to do with Indians and evidently everything to do with a cowboy who loved the land and wanted a little bit of privacy. Maybe a lot of privacy.

I first heard some of the intriguing history of this unique house from an acquaintance in Safford who knew the way. He even had some snapshots of the place, as well as a colorful yarn to go along with the package.

​“There’s an incredible abandoned mansion in that canyon,” he declared. “You have to drive 10 miles on a jeep road and then when the road ends you have to hike down another mile to find it. The place was built by a writer from England who came out here and went riding out there with some cowboys from a dude ranch near Benson. She loved the place so much she went home to England, packed up her belongings and came back and built a mansion in a shallow overhang in one of the cliffs.”

​“What was this writer’s name?” I asked. “Hope Jones,” he replied.

“What did she write?”

“Beats me,” he said.

I wrote to a friend who is a research librarian at a university in Wales. She looked for information about a British writer named Hope Jones and came up empty handed and perplexed. What kind of a phantom was I dealing with? she wondered.

A few months later, I called Vay Fenn, a friend who lived in Pomerene, roughly 40 miles southeast of Redfield Canyon.

“Vay, you ever heard of some kind of mansion buried in a cliff in Redfield Canyon?” I asked.

“Mansion? I don’t know about a mansion,” he said. “People around here call it the cliff house. It’s Hope Jones’ old place. You want to go there?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You know who Hope Jones was?”

“Was? Did Hope die?” he asked. “She used to stop by and visit with me and Barbara whenever she went into town. She’d be well up in years by now but I didn’t know she’d died.”

That was, more or less, the beginning of a journey which sounded, in a way, like a game of telephone. My original source had one or two of his facts right, but evidently information about the cliff house in Redfield Canyon had been passed through too many people. By the time it reached the man in Safford, it was a romantic and colorful tale that had little to do with reality.

The reality was a better story. It unfolded as Vay and I left his adobe home in Pomerene and headed into what is now the Bureau of Land Management’s Redfield Canyon Wilderness Area in the Galiuro Mountains.

We left Pomerene, which is a few miles north of Benson, and headed north and west for 38 miles through the high desert. Saguaros swollen from the summer rains, dark mesquites and graceful yuccas covered the hills around us. We passed the site of Tres Alamos, where there once was a Butterfield Stage Station, and continued through Cascabal to the outskirts of the ranching community of Redington.

As we approached Redington, Vay said, “As soon as we cross that bridge, the road into Redfield is on the right.”

The unpaved road leads through state lands and ends up on lands administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management. As soon as we turned right and went through the unlocked gate, there was a registry where we recorded our names and the time we were going in. That sign is the only one we encountered in the canyon.

Passing through a second unlocked gate about 100 feet beyond the first one, the road looked like it had been paved with river rocks. Not paved exactly but choked. We took it slow and were rewarded with a smoother ride for most of the next 9 miles.

However, it was by no means clear where we would find the cliff house. After nine miles we came to what looked like a circular drive. Two roads, both of which were worse than the one we were driving, took off at either side of the circle. We puttered around and made some mistakes and ended up on paths that were better suited to donkeys than trucks, the kind of rutted, rocky roads that dip into washes so steep and narrow that you can scrape the rear bumper of a truck trying to get up the other side.

Roughly a half-hour later, we went back to that first turn around. Somehow we had convinced ourselves that the rocky crags that were clearly visible east of that circle had to be where we’d find the cliff house. We drove about an eighth of a mile down the road that appeared headed that way from the traffic circle but quickly realized if we continued there’d be no way to turn around. Backing up on a road like that seemed as though it might not be as enjoyable as a root canal.

In retrospect, we can tell you the best thing to do is stop at the turn-around at the top of the hill and walk down that steep and narrow jeep road. When the trail reaches the creek, follow it to your right, or just follow the creek bed, where there is usually running water. ​

The abandoned Bradbury Cabin on the way to Redfield Canyon. Photo by Sam Negri

About 100 feet downstream, the stone cliff house peeks out from the side of an overhang. Even though we expected to find it –for no more logical reason than we had worked so hard to get there—we were still startled. The house is a three sided structure wrapped around a small patio that faces the creek and the granite walls of the opposite cliff. All of the walls were done with carefully placed stones and mortar. A circular window sits above the arched entryway; rectangular windows on either side of the circle provide a great few of wild terrain out front. Most of the living area is within the cave, or overhang, and covers about 900 square feet, all covered in hardwood floors. The house, horribly vandalized over the years, was a gem when it was built. Why did someone build this beautiful structure in place where everything –mortar, cement, wood flooring, windows, water storage tank, and even a huge bathtub—had to be packed in? How did they do it?

The process of finding some answers started with a black and white photograph of a smiling infant, who had nothing to do with our elusive Hope Jones. Inside the abandoned cliff house, Vay and I had found a loose-leaf book that contained notes from previous visitors. One of those visitors had been Leann Taylor who left a photo of herself taken outside the cliff house in 1941. She also left a photo of her father, the late Leon Taylor, sitting astride a mule and dressed for work in a wide brimmed hat and bat-wing chaps. In her note, Leann said she and her family lived in the cliff house when her dad worked as a cowboy for Hope Jones. Fortunately, she also left her phone number in Tucson.

“I was born in Texas and my dad came out here to cowboy for Hope,” she would later tell me. “I was 6 or 7 months old in that photo. We lived in that house 2 years. To get materials down there, they used to load up these big wire cages and then mount them on donkeys to get from the holding pens at the top to the creek at the bottom. That’s how they usually carried me down there, too. At some point they would have to skid stuff down because the incline was too steep. My Uncle Curtis used to carry me down in his rifle scabbard.”

Through Leann and a few others, I eventually discovered that it wasn’t Hope Jones who had built the house but a couple of newlyweds named Chick and Harriet Logan. According to a newspaper column, Chick was a cowboy who had been gathering wild horses in Redfield Canyon. During the 1930’s, he made a trip to Reno and there he met Harriet, a divorcee with two children. In 1936, the two started building the cliff house in Redfield Canyon and finished it three years later.

The Logans didn’t stay at the house very long, but evidently it was long enough to make a lasting impression on one of Harriet’s son’s. Years later, Frank Logan wrote a short novel, “A Cave House Ranch,” based on his mother and stepfather’s experiences in Redfield Canyon.

Hope Jones, who was born in 1905, came to Arizona in the 1930’s when she was still Hope Iselin and soon afterward started buying up land around Redfield Canyon. A source who is still in contact with Hope, but who preferred to remain anonymous, said Hope was not from England but from a socially prominent Rhode Island family, and she was never a writer. Her family, wealthy financiers, also owned thoroughbred horses, which may be why she developed a love affair with the West.

She was only in her twenties when she came to Arizona. As of this writing, she is still alive, 94 years old, wheelchair bound and suffering various ailments that 90 years on earth will bring to a human being. And yet, those close to her still bring her to her small horse ranch on the East Side of Tucson –she eventually divided her time between Redfield Canyon and the place in Tucson—so she can feel and smell the animals she loves.

In the 1930’s, Hope married a cowboy named Honeycutt Jones who supplemented his income by playing a guitar and singing and also performing magic acts. No one I talked to knew where Honeycutt had ended up, but it wasn’t with Hope. They had one son, named Archer, and divorced. For awhile, Hope raised the boy in the remote cliff house she acquired in the late 30’s. Archer eventually married and moved back to Rhode Island. In 1988, after his retirement, he returned to Arizona and died of a heart attack while hiking in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson.

​Hope Jones’ C-Spear Ranch is still operating in Redfield Canyon. For the last 15 years or so a cowboy named Johnny Lavin has managed it. Hope now lives in an apartment in Tucson, where she gets 24-hour care. Seven horses and a mule continue to roam around her small ranch on the far East Side of Tucson. A caretaker daily drives her out there. She sits in the car, trapped by fading vision, smells the animals in their pens, hears their hooves shuffling in the soft ground, smiles.

​A source close to Hope said, “I don’t know why she came out here originally. She was raised in wealth, once dated Fred Astaire, still speaks French fluently. The beauty of that setting in Redfield Canyon was what appealed to her. She initially bought that place to raise horses and let them run wild. The BLM eventually told her to get her horses off that rangeland and then it became exclusively a cattle operation. She was definitely physically involved in the ranch. She lived in the cliff house off and on for a decade, and even though her memory is not in the best of shape these days, she still has strong feelings about that place.”

​No wonder. Even though vandals have done some damage to the interior of the cliff house over the years, it remains a hauntingly beautiful surprise –difficult to find, difficult to get to and capable of generating a dozen mysteries about its origins, but well worth the effort to see.

Note: This was published in Arizona Highways Magazine in January, 2001. A few months later, I had a call from Allan Black in Australia, who knew Chick Logan. He said after leaving Arizona Chick moved to Australia and worked as a saddle maker and ranch hand. He admired Chick. He was a kid when Chick got to Australia and Chick kind of took him under his wing and taught him to make saddles. He said Chick was born in 1909 and died of leukemia in 1971, just short of his 63rd birthday. He died in Queensland and was buried in Helensburg NSW.

The Redfield Canyon area of the Galiuro Mountains, Photo By Sam Negri