Blue Range Primitive Area

The Signal of Life in the Arizona Outback

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK DYKINGA MOST PEOPLE TAKE THE COLOR GREEN for granted. In the deserts, canyons and mountains of Arizona, it's revered - often as a sign of water.I have photographed in the rain forests and been confronted by walls of green vegetation where finding any suitable photographic composition challenges the senses. I literally could not see the forest through the trees. Yet, in my desert home state, the color green acts as a beacon in a sea of brown. It amazes me to see all the color variations resulting from plants' use of chlorophyll in harvesting Arizona's abundant sunlight.

In the high country of the White Mountains, you'd expect and are treated to fields of grasses, corn lilies and sedge, with their electric greens speaking of ever-present water. Yet, in the canyons of Aravaipa Creek in the harsh Sonoran Desert, the sight of watery seeps nurturing emerald plant life is unexpected candy for the eye. Gardens of columbines and monkeyflowers hang from the super-soaked volcanic tuff canyon walls.The Superstition Mountains' arroyos and ephemeral streams create mesquite bosques, or forests, where shaded microhabitats offer the perfect home to fields of shocking-green fiddlenecks contrasting the gray-green pads of prickly pear cacti. Even the majestic saguaro cacti change color, as flowers emerge full of the yellow-green coloration of new growth.

In the hot desert regions, green is not just a color. It represents life itself.

[PAGES 22 AND 23] Blooming fiddlenecks create a field of green among prickly pear cacti in a mesquite bosque along a desert wash in the Superstition Wilderness.

[PAGES 24 AND 25] In the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, vivid sedges bend to the rushing waters of the rain-swollen East Fork of the Black River.

[RIGHT] Reaching skyward, a stem of hemlock flowers skirmishes for space in a White Mountain meadow with an exuberant stand of blossoming false hellebore.