Desert Preserve

Sonoran Desert National Monument

ITS CAPTIVATING WILDERNESS EMBRACES MOMENTS IN HISTORY

TEXT BY BILL BROYLES PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK DYKINGA

'M GUILTY, BUT WE'VE ALL DONE IT: Ignore the kid next door

who eventually becomes our best friend. Drive right past the better restaurant. Ask everyone to dance except the one we eventually choose to marry.

Of the 2 million people a year driving Interstate 8 past the Sonoran Desert National Monument in central Arizona, few know it's there, and fewer stop to enjoy it. I was one of them. Four million urbanites live within 60 miles, but few can tell you its name.

It may not even be on your map yet. Created in January 2001, it's Arizona's newest national monument.

Located southwest of Phoenix between Gila Bend and Casa Grande, the monument spans half a million acres of rugged mountains and rutted valleys. It's known for its bighorn sheep, spellbinding scenery and saguaro cacti forest. It has not one or two, but three wilderness areas. It's so good that many states would use it as a model for a license plate motto: "The Monument State."

To many of us who've lived in Arizona more than a couple of summers, the monument is both new and old. My first memory (Continued from page 2.3) the road between those blocks of ice. It was two lanes back then, and wound through tall saguaros and strange trees. Invariably we'd see a fox or coyote cross ahead of us. Once we saw a deer. The countryside was magical, one without towns or many cars.

On another trip, we drove that stretch during a lunar eclipse and stopped by the roadside to take in the full sweep of the event. There was absolute silence-and no lights, no noise, no breeze, only black space from horizon to horizon, from us to the moon. On later trips, when driving to California on my own, I saw the golden moon rise and the full moon glare off granite cliffs as the radio blared rock 'n' roll from a high-watt station in Oklahoma or a disc jockey named Wolfman Jack from a transmitter in Mexico. If you had the Wolfman on, you could drive all night.

One of my University of Arizona English teachers was Byrd Granger, who's known for writing a second edition of Will Barnes' Arizona Place Names. I knew her as the no-nonsense instructor who cared about words and people. During World War II, she served in the Women Airforce Service Pilots and ferried planes for the military. In the classroom, she talked about ballet and art, aircraft engines and folklore, and in one unguarded moment mentioned that she still wrote letters to her deceased husband. Her glare could strip wall paint. Her praise could raise the sun.

Her poetry class was one of the two best college classes I ever took-and I took some dandies. An Emergency Medical Technician class taught me to check breath and blood, heart and bone; Doc Granger taught me to triage every word, healthy or sick, of the body we call language. One day she came to class almost giddy and announced, “I finished my manuscript at 4 this morning.” She walked the talk, just as she expected us to do.

Dr. Granger, as we underclassmen called her, loved our word heritage, particularly the names of places. She loved derivations and geography, saying that names told little histories of the countryside and biographies of people who had mattered. Marana, a growing town in southern Arizona, may have been her favorite, since she mentioned it several times. The name sounds euphonious, but in Spanish it means “an impassible tangle of briers and brambles,” because the original town sprang up in a mesquite thicket along the Santa Cruz River. She admired that. It also has impish connotations of a puzzle or a mess.

Although I still feel 16, my age is closer to the reverse of those digits. And somewhere in between those numbers, I found myself compiling place names not yet in Dr. Granger's book. And somewhere I grew interested in exploring that country between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, so I've been to many of those places named on the map and have met not only the butte, arroyo or well, but sometimes also the people behind the name.

One of the prettiest arroyos within the new monument you'll ever see is named Bender Wash, broad and sandy, lined with mesquites and desert willows. I met two of the Bender family, Letty Hofstra and Anita McGee. Their family moved to Arizona in 1913 to escape Oklahoma's panhandle. One thing and another, they ended up along the lonesome dirt road that eventually became U.S. Route 80.

There were no neighbors. Their dad started a gas station at a spot on the highway they called the Big Horn. Mom sold sandwichesand collected money for the gas. The girls started school and grew up in that country. Their father built and named places now in the monument, like Hog Tank, Big Horn and Jake's Tank. Though they left the ranch in 1952, the Bender sisters still return every winter to pick up litter along the 1-8 near the Big Horn.

At the northern end of the monument, Margie Baker Woods has a cove, a trail and a peak named in her honor. She and her husband ran the Cosmo, a bygone restaurant and nightclub between Gila Bend and Buckeye.

Some of the monument names are descriptive. In springtime, the Brittlebush Trail passes hillsides splashed with yellow brittle-bush flowers. The Lava Trail, as you'd expect, winds for 7 miles through the lava flows on the west flank of Table Top Mountain. The waterholes at Sand Tanks have sandy bottoms, and at twilight the Blue Plateau looks blue. Wildlife is represented by Antelope Peak, Big Horn and Javelina Mountain.

The monument names are unexpectedly tame. There's no Poison Well, Deadman Gap or Rattlesnake Hill. And, there are too few names from the Pima, Maricopa or Tohono O'odham languages. Vekol, a Pima word for grandmother, has been applied to Vekol Valley and to a silver mine south of the monument.

Place names can be lofty goals. The Table Top Mountains, in the monument's southeastern corner, have a summit trail beginning at a campground on the edge of the Table Top Wilderness area. The lower stretches provide easy walking, but it becomes rocky and loose on the upper slopes. The elevation gain is 2,000 feet over the 4.5-mile rise. Quail call from the hillside; a roadrunner crosses ahead of us, chasing a lizard. A mile later, two mule deer stare at us from behind a paloverde tree.

During springtime, yellow bladderpod and brittlebushes, orange poppies and pink owl clover may cover the slopes. Along the trail, mallows, chicory and phacelia lend spots of color against the dark rock. Later in the year, the cacti will bloom, with magenta hedgehog, yellow barrel, orange cholla and white saguaro blossoms

These are leftovers—relics—of previous cooler, wetter times, stranded after the last ice age. They manage to hang on here by rooting in shady canyons, on north-facing slopes and on the shadow side of boulders.

attracting insects, birds and bats, as well as photographers. When the trail nearly crests, we're confronted with a mysterious wall of stacked stone blocks. Lore differs on who built it and why. Did Indians build it as a fortified wall to guard against their enemies? Did someone pen domestic sheep on the summit? Could the Civilian Conservation Corps have built the trail and wall to pave the way for airline beacons that guided planes from one airport to the next? Perhaps cowboys built the wall to keep cattle from straying across the summit from one valley to the next. Take your pick. Whatever the purpose, someone moved tons of rock. The top of the mountain is not quite as flat as we'd expect from its name or distant profile. It appears more like an open book being read by someone sitting to the northwest, the two flat pages tilted into a gutter that drains the infrequent rains. The Table Top Mountains were known as Flat Top prior to 1941, but the Pimas called it Mo'obad for “mountain with its head cut off.” Doc Granger would say Mo'obad is much more poetic than either Table or Flat Top. Some of the names throw us off the scent. Maricopa Peak forms the summit of Javelina Mountain. The 3,183-foot summit of the sprawling Maricopa Mountains is unnamed. Go figure. Maricopa Peak, like Table Top, has another twist. They both are in a monument dedicated to the Sonoran Desert, and their slopes are covered with magnificent saguaros, paloverde trees, cholla and ocotillo. But near their summits we begin to notice plants that are not in our desert flower books: Arizona scrub oak, roseberry juniper, Arizona rosewood, banana yucca and canotia, as well as ferns and grasses such as curly mesquite and little barley. These are leftovers—relics—of previous cooler, wetter times, stranded after the last ice age. They manage to hang on here by rooting in shady canyons, on north-facing slopes and on the shadow side of boulders to save them from the summer sun's full fury. In the monument can be found at least 450 of the Sonoran Desert's 2,500 or so plant species, as well as many of the typical animals. Page upon page of history have plunged through the monument, but few structures have stuck. A few ranch houses and barns, rail sidings, a gas station, some roads and mine tunnels, and water tanks and wells were built over the centuries, but no towns. Better land, with water or gold, beckoned farther down the trail. In 1699 Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and his entourage became the first Europeans to visit the monument. They “discovered” many small Indian villages along the Santa Cruz and Gila rivers and mapped them, writing trail directions for future travelers. Early explorers and travelers going from the East to California used a trail through the Maricopa Mountains to shave 80 miles off their trip. The trail went directly west from what is now the community of Maricopa to Gila Bend, instead of following the Gila River and looping north through Phoenix. This stretch undoubtedly was traveled earlier by Pimas, Maricopas and Cocomaricopas, as well as their Hohokam and Patayan ancestors before them. They went on foot to hunt and to gather wild foods. A dozen or more Indian tribes fit the monument into their histories and religions. Perhaps the most historic spot in the monument is Butterfield Pass, first called Puerto de los Cocomaricopas by Francisco Garces in 1775. He also named Sierra Maricopa, in honor of the tribe, although another member of the expedition, Pedro Font, called it Sierra de Comars. Garces and Font were part of an expedition led by Juan Bautista de Anza, a Spaniard, captain in the army and commander of the garrison at Tubac in what became southern Arizona. New Spain was growing as settlers and missionaries came. They needed a fast and safe route from mainland Mexico to California. Travel by sea was risky for both passengers and

[RIGHT] Aglow with the lowering rays of late-afternoon sunshine, teddy bear cholla and saguaro cacti stretch to the base of the Sand Tank Mountains.

cargo, so Anza set out to establish a commercial route along the trails mapped by Kino 75 years before.

The safest way was along the riverbanks of the Santa Cruz and then the Gila to the Colorado. Anza started from the presidio of Tubac, south of modern Tucson, with 240 people, 165 pack mules, 340 saddle animals and 302 head of beef. During the journey, they lost cattle, mules and horses, but they gained a few souls when wives traveling with their husbands gave birth along the trail. They would seed the settlement of San Francisco when they arrived March 27, 1776, five months after they began.

The route was also used by many of the forty-niners on their way to the goldfields of California and by the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War. You'll find segments of it called the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, Gila Trail, Mormon Trail, Leach's Wagon Road, Butterfield and Southern Overland Trail. Someone sitting on a rock overlooking Butterfield Pass could have cheered the long parade of Arizona's history.

The road was so hot and dry that it became known as the Forty Mile Desert, and travelers raced across as if holding their breaths. John Russell Bartlett, who crossed it in June 1852, reported "as there was no water the whole distance, the journey must be made in one march without stopping. ." His pack train went at night and traversed the 45 miles in 13 hours. Near exhaustion, they reached the banks of the Gila River where they found water and pasture for the mules, and the men, "creeping under some mesquite bushes soon fell asleep, rest being more desirable than food." Stagecoaches and regular freight-wagon service began in 1857.

The most famous of several stage lines was the Butterfield Overland Mail. Travelers with durable bottoms could ride from St. Louis to San Francisco in 25 days. Butterfield service ended in 1861, but the pass was well traveled until 1878, a year after the railroad came to Arizona. The railroad line, still used, runs through the monument a bit south of the dusty stage road.

There's something nostalgic as well as humbling about sitting near the tracks and watching freight or passenger trains rumble by. The ground shakes, and we're grateful that pioneers built rail routes to serve the growing nation. The railroad itself brought names to the monument. Ocapos siding was coined from the reversed first two letters of Southern Pacific Company.

All Byrd Granger would have loved adding this new monument to her place name book. All Bill Broyles of Tucson was one of many public citizens who worked for creation of Sonoran Desert National Monument. His book Our Sonoran Desert was published last summer by Rio Nuevo Publishers in Tucson.

This was Jack Dykinga's second time exploring the monument. The solitude and dense population of saguaro cacti keep him returning-even in 119-degree heat.

LOCATION: Approximately 60 miles south of Phoenix.

GETTING THERE: From Phoenix, drive south on Interstate 10 and turn onto Maricopa Road at Exit 164. At the town of Maricopa, turn right onto State Route 238 and continue to the monument area.

TRAVEL ADVISORY: If you plan to visit the monument, carry plenty of water and check your route with the Bureau of Land Management, as travel on some of the dirt roads requires high-clearance vehicles. Spring and fall are the most comfortable seasons. Spring flowers may bloom in the desert from late January through June.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Bureau of Land Management, Phoenix Field Office, (623) 580-5500 or their Web site, azwww.az.blm.gov/sonoran/sondes_main.htm.