Harqua Hala Letters: The Story of Arizona’s Forgotten Smithsonian Observatory

Harqua Hala Letters is a unique story of the lives of about a dozen people associated with making observations of the sun's radiant energy every clear day possible for a period of over five years in the early 1920s. Harqua Hala is an isolated mountain peak in the southern Arizona desert about half way between Wickenburg and Quartzsite, south of U.S. Highway 60. The nearest small hamlet, with a population of some forty souls at the time, was Wenden about fifteen miles distant. This factual story, that reads like a novel, is told by the author through the personal letters written under the most primitive conditions.