is featured in a Sedona Red Rock News Article
June 6, 1974 copyrighted and written by Elizabeth Rigby.
In truth, however, "Smoke Trail" is an example of the former owner's poetic way with naming. Along the creek frontage of the modern ranch, Helen Varner Frye explains, there is an ancient Indian trail, well marked by smoke stains on the rocks, the residue of many campfires, while scattered about wherever you look are bits and pieces of the artefacts the old ones left behind them in their wanderings.
They considered it a sacred healing ground, she says, and she shares the belief. Although Helen disavows the term for herself, she is by any usual definition a mystic. She is also a down-to-earth realist, and the product of this combination has been a life of singular interest.
Helen Varner was born in 1908 in the hill country of West Virginia near Clarksburg, the oldest of three children. Her mother was a musician, her father a country doctor.
Helen learned to drive a car when she was 8 years old. "The roads in that country were so bad, my father kept two Model T's so he'd have one to use when the other was in the shop."
Helen, who often accompanied her father on his calls, learned how to get the car out of mudholes while the doctor was with his patients. When, years later, she came to live in the red rock country of Arizona, the primitive roads of that time didn't bother her. "I've never even bent a fender," she says.
After graduating from high school, Helen attended the Chicago Art Institute for a year. She married at 22, but the marriage only lasted seven months. It was 1930, and she took a train to Reno to get her divorce.
Vanderbilt, however, had caught a glimpse of Helen, who, according to contemporary accounts, was a dazzling beauty. He had been headed east, but now he changed trains and boarded Helen's westward bound. Later he came into the club car, where she was writing letters, and sat down beside her. Three years later they married. The marriage lasted six years, and the two spent much of their time traveling.
It was January, 1941, when she married Jack Frye, president of TWA, who was, she says, part Cherokee. The marriage was performed with the principals on horseback on the side of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix.
Jack was constantly on the move, and Helen was often in the cockpit beside him as he flew back and forth across the country.
Frye's parents were cattle people with a ranch in Texas, but Helen didn't like it there, so she and Jack started looking for a place to live that would appeal to them both.
In January 1941, on one of their trips together, Jack flew the plane low over what later turned out to be the red rock country and Oak Creek Canyon.
Helen has vivid memories of that moment.
"It was so beautiful, it took my breath away. I can still see the white clouds spiraling around the rocks like little corkscrews, and I cried out, 'This is where I want to live.' I'd been living out of suitcases for years and never cared where I went, but when I saw this country, I knew it was home."
When they arrived in California, Jack got out the maps, but he couldn't locate the place they'd seen. In those days the area wasn't considered important enough to chart.
He must have kept trying, though, because the following June he flew with Helen to Prescott. He didn't tell her why.
Jack got out to look for a real estate office and found one, but the day was Sunday and the office was closed, so he went into a bar and asked where the realtor, Andrew Baldwin, lived.
"Way out in the country," was the answer.
Baldwin was the man for whom Baldwins' Crossing, now known as Red Rock, was called for many years. He had owned what is now Crescent Moon Ranch bordering on the famous creek crossing there.
"What about his secretary?" Jack asked.
Well, yes, she could be found, and she got a man to take the Fryes out to the land they wanted to see.
"He brought us to a field below what is now the Cup of Gold," Helen says. "It was a hot day, and Jack sent the man up to the house above so we could go skinny dipping. After that we joined him, and we made arrangements to buy the ranch that same day."
The ranch was one of the earliest in the area. According to Albert Thompson, writing in the Sedona Westerners' book, "Those Early Days," Juan Armijo and his son Ambrosio, cattlemen and farmers, had homesteaded two separate ranches in the late 1890's. About 1913, L.E. Hart and Sons came to Oak Creek and bought the Armijo cattle. The Armijos then rented their places out and moved to the Holbrook area. After the death of his father, Ambrosio returned for a while. Then, in 1939, he sold both homesteads, 320 acres, to Andrew Blackmore of Los Angeles.
It was from Blackmore that the Fryes bought the first portion of their ranch that was eventually expanded by them to a total of some 700 acres. Within a year they had purchased the Fritz Schuerman ranch and 50 acres above it. Still later they traded withe U.S. Forest Service for the additional acreage they felt was needed to round out the property.
The portion of Smoke Trail that the Fryes bought from Fritz Schuerman had been patented by Rich Huckaby, also before the turn of the century, according to Thompson. It was purchased by Henry Schuerman, Sr. and 1901 and was rented out most of the time until after Schuerman's death. When Schuerman died, this part of his property went to his son.
In the early days, Helen was often at the ranch alone. She lived first in the old Armijo tool room because it had a fireplace. Later she lived at Willow House on the former Schuerman ranch, so called for an enormous willow tree "that made the place look like a little doll house." In 1948, she started building the House of Apache Fires, a huge structure high on a hill above Oak Creek. It is a part of the 306-acre property that has now been purchased for development into "The Resort On Oak Creek."
In 1950, Jack and Helen Frye were divorced, and the red rock country property came to her as a part of the settlement. "He wanted to move to New York and I certainly didn't, so you might say that I gave up my husband for the ranch."
In 1952, Helen bought the place on which she will now continue to live. She built a new home there, Wings of the Wind House, again high on a hill, in 1961-62. Asked about the name, she says, "If you were to watch the big birds soaring out there above the valley on a windy day, you would understand."
In 1954, she started developing a portion of her holdings as the Cup of Gold subdivision, which has long since sold out.
In 1957, Helen sold 10 acres to two friends, and in 1961 she sold another 40 to a local developer. Over the years, many others have tried to buy the property, unquestionably one of the loveliest in the area, but never until Development Sales Corporation and Turco Properties, Inc. came along could a deal be consummated.
Helen claims that she always envisioned the potentialities of the ranch as a resort. "I put the first restrictions on the land and was the first to ask a high price. Jack couldn't see it. He said people would think I was mad. But I think I was right. You can't beat the climate or the beauty of this place.
"When we split, Jack had two other cattle ranches and they paid, which was what he wanted. This one didn't, but I loved it, and so it came to me; but of course I'd already paid for it and made Jack a profit with that first 120-acre sale."
In the forties, Jack Frye and Howard Hughes were working in secret on the first Constellations. They were by far the fastest planes up to that time and the two planned to build a fleet of them for TWA and render all the other airlines obsolete. Even those who were working on the planes didn't know what they were doing, Helen says, but the Air Force got wind of the operation and insisted on being given the information. It ended up with a deal whereby the Air Force would buy the planes and TWA would fly them for the service, she says.
During this time, Jack was in Washington a great deal on business and Helen had to be there often to play hostess to foreign dignitaries and other people important to TWA. It was a social whirl on the big-time scale, but she got back to the ranch whenever she could.
One of Jack's close friends was Dick Kleberg, the colorful Texas Congressman who came to Washington wearing a Stetson and pointed cowboy boots. "He wasn't a show-off," Helen says. "He was the real McCoy, and everybody loved him.
Kleberg was one of the owners of the famous King Ranch which at that time was experimenting with a new breed of cattle, the Santa Gertrudis, bred from crossing the Afrikander, Brahma, and shorthorn. While on a hunting expedition with Kleberg during the war, Jack tried to buy some of the cattle, hoping to make his Arizona ranch a working one, but he was told the cattle weren't for sale.
"It was a big disappointment for him."
"I thought that was strange for one of the richest men in the world, until he told me the bets weren't for money but for nylon hose."
Nylons were almost impossible to obtain during World War II, but Jack had foreseen the coming shortage and had bought Helen 100 pairs some months before. Now Helen offered Kleberg as many as he wanted, if the woman could wear them. Turned out they were too small, but Helen managed to come up with another suggestion, and Kleberg got the hose.
"Two weeks later we received word that a young Santa Gertrudis and one of the original Afrikander bulls were being shipped to our ranch. They were to be ours, and we were only asked to carry on with the experimental work."
The second time Jack and Helen visited their ranch, they were called on by a group of men from Cottonwood, who told them that there was a strip of land on their property that was suitable for an airport. They asked if Jack might clear and develop it.
"Jack was delighted, but because of the war it was never done. Later, from the air, Jack spotted what he thought would be an even better spot. It was the top of Table Mountain. We walked it off together and determined that it would do. It's where the Sedona Airport is now, and the project was initated later by Joe Moser."
In 1941, Helen had a serious case of undulant fever, and the doctors gave her little hope of a cure. She believes firmly that she was cured by drinking and swimming in the waters of Oak Creek. The water's curative properties, she believes, come from certain minerals, including silver, that she says it carries.
As she stands on the terrace of Wings of the Wind House, Helen talks of the early days in contrast to the present.
"There's an irrigation ditch on the south side of the property. It must be at least three miles long and has two long flumes. It is a beautiful piece of construction, and it was built by hand by Armijo's wife and sister.
"Did I tell you about Armijo? He was an old man when I knew him, tall and thin and straight, with hands like a violin player's. He loved this land, and he used to come back sometimes just to walk over it. He had an orchard and a vineyard. This is a natural place for grapes. They grow wild everywhere. But the first summer we were here, we couldn't give them away. Probably you could buy a bottle of wine in Jerome cheaper than you could buy the gas to come here and pick grapes."
The pull of the land and its inhabitants. It works on Helen, too.
"I used to hunt, but never after I came here. It would have seemed like killing one's own relatives. I got so I couldn't kill anything, not even a rattlesnake. They have a built-in sense that tells them whether you are hostile or friendly. But I have to admit that it takes some doing to overcome the fear."
She believes that plants have feelings, too, and judging by some recent experiements, this idea is not as far out as it might once have seemed.
She cares deeply for the restoration and protection of the land and has done some experimenting on her own. "Tumbleweeds, bullheads, and other noxious plants don't come in until man has disturbed the soil. If you leave distrubed soil alone for about seven years, it will go through its own cycle, through "bad" and back to good grasses again," she says.
Helen Varner Frye hopes and believes that they new resort owners will also care and become worthy custodians of Smoke Trail Ranch, no matter what they name it.
Sedona Legend Helen Frye