Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post about looking for and climbing public stairways in the Globe and Miami, Arizona area. The two copper mining towns have hilly terrain that is perfect for stairways. (Here’s the link to that post.) But you’ll see in that post that the stairways were not in the best of shape and rarely used.
About a year and a half ago I learned of a local initiative in Globe to freshen up their stairs and to feature them in a local walk. In my email exchanges with Regina Ortega-Leonardi and Thea Wilshire (the women behind the initiative), I learned that there were concerns from the city of Globe about ADA compliance and liability and assumed that the initiative would die on the vine.
But I was curious enough to put the proposed walk route on my radar scope and planned to follow it the next time I drove through Globe. And with my book project now in the hands of the designer, my dog Sparky and I drove down to Globe earlier this month to walk the route and climb whatever stairways came along.
This is map that was developed when the walk was proposed. We opted to follow the longer Purple Route and started in the center of Globe.
