Since 1870, when stories about the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains became a standard item in Arizona folklore, some 40 people have either disappeared or been found dead in and around the suspected location of the mine. The stories about the fabulously wealthy cache of gold supposedly hidden in the mountains are many and varied, but there’s always once constant — Weavers Needle.

Q: Why are sticks of butter sold here not the same as butter sold in the East? The Arizona kind is shorter and fatter. It doesn’t fit on the butter trays I bought years ago in Connecticut.

A: We have to confess that sometimes, in our darker hours, we sit alone under the light of a single naked bulb here at the shabby but genteel headquarters of Valley 101 and pull a bottle of root beer out of our battered desk and wonder if it’s time to give it up. Have all the great questions been asked? All the great mysteries solved? Are there no
mountains left to climb?

And then a question like yours arrives, and our faith in the essential oddness of our readers is restored. A new day dawns. Wiping the root beer foam from our lips, we turn our chiseled visage to face a new challenge.

And we learn, yes, indeed, butter is different here. Who knew? As it turned out, the exceedingly helpful Harold Metzger, sales purchasing manager for the United Dairymen of Arizona, knew.

There’s some confusion about the World’s Tallest Fountain. What used to be the World’s Tallest Fountain in Fountain Hills has been usurped by the Gateway Geyser in East St. Louis, Illinois, but the Arizona gusher is still the World’s Tallest Fountain sometimes. The Illinois fountain shots a geyser 627 feet into the air, the best the one in Arizona can do is 560 feet, when operating at full capacity.

Peter Wolf Toth arrived in Winslow in 1979, intent on adding one of his art works to the city’s landscape. When he left about four months later, he had turned a single ponderosa pine log into a 30-foot tall Indian head, and he left it there for posterity. The work was one in Toth’s series of giant heads that he carved in every state and four Canadian provinces. He called the effort “The Trail of the Whispering Giants,” and dedicated it to what he considered the mistreatment of Native Americans by early settlers and the federal government.