Arizona's Four Lively Corners

Arizona's Four Untamed Corners

EARLY IN THE MORNING on a fall day, the sun struggles to fill in the deep contours of the Virgin River Gorge with light. A deep silence reigns, broken now and then by the shrill cry of a hawk that scouts the edges of Cedar Pockets Wash, looking for breakfast. From over the hills and far away comes the growl of a truck, making its way up the long grade through the river canyon. It passes, and then the silence falls again. Arizona's least-known region, a triangular island of rocky desert, is separated from the main body of the state by the Colorado River, and from the rest of the so-called Arizona Strip by the 8,000-foot-high Virgin Mountains and the towering Grand Wash Cliffs south of them. A few dirt roads, many passable only in good weather and in the sturdiest of vehicles, connect the Virgin River country to other points in Arizonaand then only to isolated hamlets such as Oak Grove, Mount Trumbull and Wolf Hole.

Outsiders did not often venture into this corner a century ago, leaving it the province of just a few Mormon ranching families. Even today, a traveler coming from the county seat of Kingman by road must take a roundabout course across Hoover Dam at the Colorado River, pass by the casinos of Las Vegas and swing back into Arizona by way of Interstate 15 all told, a trip lasting at least five hours, the mere fact of which does much to explain why officialdom has pretty much left the residents of this place alone throughout history.

Not that there's ever been much to keep a policeman or tax assessor busy in these parts. Apart from the small, but now growing, town of Littlefield and its nearby satellite, Beaver Dam, the northwestern corner of Arizona remains quiet today, the domain of a few ranchers, along with passersby and outdoor adventurers who come here to explore the hidden reaches of the Paiute Wilderness. This reserve, occupying about 88,000 acres, follows the Virgin River Gorge at an elevation of about 2,000 feet, then shades south to take in a good part of the Virgin Mountains.

A moderately difficult 13-mile hiking trail traverses the wil-derness, leading to the summit of 8,102-foot Mount Bangs, which offers panoramic views of the high-desert landscape - includ-ing, off in the northwestern distance, the point where Arizona meets Utah and Nevada, just a hair off 114 degrees longitude at the 37th parallel, a place dry enough to double for Death Valley and so little visited that the handful of cows browsing among thickets of Joshua trees along the Beaver Dam Wash seem sur-prised to see a human passing among them.

So this is what we find at the first of the four corners of Ari-zona, the remote points at which our state's outline cuts east, west, north and south.

These corners form the boundaries that contain 113,909 square miles of some of the most varied landscapes on the North American continent. Within that outline lie yet other corners and other bor-ders: the zigzag line where the mile-high Mogollon Rim gives way to the jumbled Arizona interior; the junction of rock and sand where the towering sky islands of the southeast find the floors of the Sono-ran and Chihuahuan deserts; the shaded coves along the Colorado River, dissected by imaginary lines that separate our state from its populous neighbor to the west.

The four corners of Arizona: Each stands remarkably unlike the others, containing different assemblages of plants and rocks, differ-ent histories and peoples, but sharing with the other corners a wide-open sky, rugged mountains and wonderful desert landscapes. Each corner contains worlds, any one of which would take a lifetime to know-and all of them worth a long visit.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 14 AND 15] Delineating a landscape of intriguing variety, the four geographical corners of Arizona define the state not only physically but also in the wild, sprawling diversity of its spirit. Clockwise from top left: Indian paintbrush, broom snakeweed and banana yucca gather in a meadow below Virgin Peak in northwest Arizona's Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument. A view from the pine-clad Carrizo Mountains in the northeast corner of the state reveals the distinctive profile of Ship Rock, across the border in New Mexico. Goldeneye flowers in southeast Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains signal the regeneration of a wooded hillside damaged in a forest fire three years earlier. Sand dunes near Yuma, in the state's southwest quadrant, have provided the backdrop for numerous Hollywood productions, including the Star Wars series. ALL BY ROBERT G. MCDONALD [OPPOSITE PAGE] Named Rio de la Virgen, or River of the Virgin, by the earliest Spanish explorers, the Virgin River cuts across the very northwest corner of the state on its way to join Lake Mead. STEVE BRUNO [BELOW] The Hurricane Cliffs mark a geologic faultline that straddles the Grand Canyon at Toroweap Point and continues north into Utah. MICHAEL COLLIER

Let US TRAVEL EASTWARD, a shade more than 260 miles as the crow flies, to our second corner, where, as it happens, the place actually named Four Corners lies. Here, just a few miles northeast of the Navajo hamlet of Teec Nos Pos, stands a monument that pinpoints the spot where Arizona meets New Mexico, Colorado and Utah - the only place in the United States where four states converge.

The first version of that monument, building on Territorial surveys dating to the 1860s, took shape in 1912, when Arizona and New Mexico attained statehood; then it was a simple boundary stone atop a small concrete pad. The marker became more elaborate over the succeeding decades, little by little, until a facelift in 1992 gave it its present form: a handsome patio of granite and brass, surrounded by flags of the United States, the four adjoining states and the Navajo Nation.

Teec Nos Pos, whose name means “cottonwood trees in a circle” in the Navajo language, is little more than a wide spot in the road, one of those places that a poorly timed blink will allow you to miss. But collectors of Navajo textiles know it well, not only for the elaborate weaving style that originated here, with its bold geometrical patterns and bright colors, but also for the trading post, established in 1905, that stands just off the road to the monument, beckoning with its ample stocks of rugs, cottonwood carvings and jewelry made of silver, turquoise, jet and other stones.

No other place on our tour of Arizona's four corners speaks so eloquently to the long presence of humans here, or to the continuing traditions that introduce the past to the future through the work of living artists.

This country is rich in reds, yellows and greens, in the hues of the sandstone pinnacles and pine-clad granite peaks that rise up from what was once an ancient seafloor. As they do nearly everywhere in Arizona, mountains cast their shadows all around: far to the northeast in Colorado, Mesa Verde, where ancient Puebloans, ancestors of today's Hopi Indians, built a labyrinthine city among windswept cliffs; to the south, the 9,000-foot-tall Carrizo Mountains, whose deep interior valleys lie under snow for much of the year; and to the west and southwest, the sprawling mesas that ring the northern approaches to Chinle Valley, one of the most scenic places in all of Navajo country.

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LOCATION: Apache County.

GETTING THERE: The Four Corners Monument lies on U.S. Route 160, 6 miles northeast of Teec Nos Pos, site of the historic Teec Nos Pos Trading Post.

HOURS: Open daily, 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., though subject to earlier closing in winter.

FEES: $2.50 per person.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Department, Window Rock, (928) 871-6647. For information about guided hiking tours in the Carrizo Mountains, contact Teec Nos Pos Chapter Government, (928) 656-3662. Teec Nos Pos Trading Post, (928) 656-3224.

NOW WE ZIGZAG, some 400 aerial miles, to the third corner, anchoring the southwestern portion of the state. Here the Colorado River flows between Arizona and California into the Mexican state of Sonora. Not far south of this spot, the river, born high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, ends its long journey to the sea. Despite the presence of perennial water, this is hot, dry country, and legendarily so.

As the traveler J. Ross Browne wrote after passing through here in the 1860s, “Every thing dries; wagons dry; men dry; chickens dry; there is no juice left in any thing, living or dead, by the close of summer. Officers and soldiers are supposed to walk about creaking; mules, it is said, can only bray at midnight; and I have heard it hinted that the carcasses of cattle rattle inside their hides, and that snakes find a difficulty in bending their bodies, and horned frogs die of apoplexy.... The Indians sit in the river with fresh mud on their heads, and by dint of constant dipping and sprinkling manage to keep from roasting, though they usually come out parboiled.

Browne wrote with tongue tucked firmly in cheek, but he had a point: The windblown dunes of the Yuma Desert, after all, have long done double duty for the Sahara in films and served to train soldiers going off to fight in the North African deserts in World War II. Even though the countryside is studded with paloverde and ironwood trees, ocotillo, beavertail cacti and other plants characteristic of the Sonoran Desert, they seem to be a little smaller, a little less luxuriant, than their counterparts in eastward climes, where the rain falls just a bit more abundantly.

But heat and aridity have not deterred people from making their homes along the southernmost reaches of the Colorado River. More so than any other corner of the state, the area is booming, as irrigated fields of cotton and alfalfa give way to housing developments and new stores. Drawn by a climate that could not be finer in winter, and by a growing economy, newcomers arrive daily in San Luis and Yuma, and the once-quiet, once-remote corner of the state is becoming ever more important in Arizona affairs. There is not much sign of the past here, scoured away by sand and sun and the occasional flood, but the future is everywhere.

ARIZONA'S FOURTH CORNER also lies along the line with Mexico, about 400 miles south of Teec Nos Pos, nearly 500 aerial miles from the Virgin River and 350 or so miles east of the Colorado River. Like the northwestern corner, it sees few people from year to year - a handful of ranchers who work the fertile grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert. History buffs wander out farther along the storied Geronimo Trail after having stopped at the headquarters of the Slaughter Ranch, one of the best-preserved historic structures in Arizona. Birdwatchers scout the gently rolling but rocky hills that fan from the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, where migratory species such as the Virginia rail and sandhill crane come to call at lush cienegas lined with cottonwood and willow trees. The paucity of human visitors owes to several reasons. The 40-odd miles of dirt road that lead from Douglas are as bumpy as they can be, as if they were expressly designed to rattle the teeth completely from an unwary traveler's head. Services are nonexistent, and signs of humankind are notable for their absence-a stock tank here, a dirt track there. The road ends abruptly at a closed gate, behind which stands an imposing mountain wall, the red cliffs of the Guadalupe Mountains, which form a particularly rugged spur of the vast Peloncillo range. Broken by steep canyons and thickets of cacti, the land here was made for privacy - and it's no accident that Geronimo, the famed Apache war leader, spent so much time hereabouts keeping a step ahead of half the U.S. Army, until finally surrendering at Skeleton Canyon, only a few miles from the point where Arizona, New Mexico and Sonora, Mexico, meet. These are Arizona's four corners, wild and scenic places, each offering a hint at what lies deeper within our state's confines, each splendid in its own right. Travel the long miles between them, drawing your own outline of our varied and beautiful state, and you will have charted a challenging but incomparable journey.

Tucsonan Gregory McNamee travels frequently throughout Arizona, calling on one or another of the four corners whenever he can. He is the author of Grand Canyon Place Names and many other books.

[LEFT] Uplifted and eroded volcanic rock creates the fanciful geologic features of Echo Canyon in Chiricahua National Monument. LARRY ULRICH [ABOVE] A lone one-seed juniper clings to a rocky outcropping in the Peloncillo Mountains. In the distance, the Dos Cabezas Peaks hug the horizon. JACK DYKINGA [RIGHT] Flowering verbena and goldeneye surround a charred ponderosa pine log after a Chiricahua Mountains fire. ROBERT G. MCDONALD