Sandia Mountains Hold Nutty Attraction
By Frank Zoretich
For The Journal
Editor's note: The following story was written as part of a series called "Cheap Thrills" for the Albuquerque Journal. The criteria for these "thrills" are 1) a day-trippable circle roughly 150 miles from Albuquerque and 2) fees of no more than $10. Enjoy.
SANDIA PARK - On a recent Sunday when the temperature in Albuquerque threatened to soar beyond 100 degrees, I sought refuge from the heat by driving to Sandia Crest.
On the way, I stopped at the Tinkertown Museum, 1.2 miles up Highway 536, the backside route to the top of the Sandias.
Tinkertown MuseumLocation: 1.2 miles up Highway 536 in Sandia Park Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day from April until November. For more information, write Tinkertown, Box 303, Sandia Park, NM 87047, or call 281-5233. Cost: $2.50 adults, $2 seniors, $1 children, children under 4 are free. Features: Displays of hand-carved wooden figures in scenes like the Old West and other collections of nostalgia.
Tinkertown —"Wood-Carved Miniature Village and Glass Bottle House"— is more than another roadside attraction. To visit the place is like walking through the ramshackle corridors of an attractively eccentric mind.
Ross J. Ward, artist, woodcarver and collector of old stuff, opened the museum in 1984 as a showcase for an obsession that has consumed him since he carved his first small wooden figures in 1952.
Ward was out on the day I visited—he was down in Albuquerque, showing his drawings at an arts fair -- but in every detail of Tinkertown he'd left something of himself.
"The patience!" exclaimed one woman, gazing at an entire Old-West town populated with wooden people, many of them able to make repetitive movements all day long: a little girl jumps rope, a knife-wielding chef chases a chicken, a prostitute at the Monarch Hotel ("High Class Accomodations and Genteel Staff") raises a mirror to her face, a man rocks in a chair on the porch of the miner's supply store, waitresses swing their glass-laden trays in the Lucky Nugget Saloon while a donkey sips from a beer placed on the floor, a construction crew hammers, saws and drills to build a house.
The main street of the town stretches, behind glass, along the length of a hallway. Most of the buildings are of open-front construction, so that you can peer into the rooms at the inhabitants.
Take a turn at the end of Main Street, and you come to a room with a three-ring circus and accompanying side-show behind glass: a magician pulls a rabbit from his hat, the Fat Lady fans herself, a woman with an umbrella sways on a tightrope, polar bears ride a teeter-totter.
Adults crowding in front of the displays seemed as fascinated by the detail and breadth of the displays as the children were by all the small movements within toyscapes only an adult child could have constructed.
Ward's official motto for his museum: "I did all this while you were watching TV!"
The displays at Tinkertown are animated by humor as well as by hidden vending-machine motors.
The anomalies stand out: A horse may be bigger than an elephant. A seemingly giant Mr. Peanut figure observes the sideshow oddities. Here and there, like alien visitors, plastic people try to blend in with the local wooden populace.
The original four-room cabin Ross Ward bought on the site more than 20 years ago is concealed today behind the high mortar-and-glass-bottle walls he has constructed to expand the place.
The museum contains things he has collected as well as things he's made. (A slogan pasted to one wall quotes the conservationist Aldo Leopold: "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.")
Among the pieces of the past Ward has saved, I think my favorites were in the extensive collection of wedding-cake bride-and-groom figurines dating back to the 1840s. (Off their cakes, but still together, all these little couples yet manage to exude the ironic tang of hope.)
The Tinkertown Museum is open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day from April until November. Admission is $2 for adults and 50 cents for children 4 to 18. Children under 4 get in free. For more information, write Tinkertown, Box 303, Sandia Park, NM 87047, or call 281-5233.
I emerged from Tinkertown and resumed my drive to Sandia Crest. I wasn't the only person trying to get above the heat -- there seemed to be hundreds of people up there. Most of them were concentrated near the restaurant, gift shop and observation platform at 10,678 feet. But lots of us also went strolling southward along the crest to the stone house at Vista Point.
I kept looking out into that vast baking space called the Albuquerque Basin. After peering into Ross Ward's miniature worlds, the scale from up here seemed somehow wrong. I wanted to lean closer, bring my face up against the lives of all those people so invisibly small in the distance.