The Rincon Mountains' Happiest Valley

The name has been on the map for a long time now, so long that no one knows for certain who first applied the moniker Happy Valley to the stream-laced, forested basin on the eastern flank of southeastern Arizona's Rincon Mountains, one of the great "sky islands" within the Coronado National Forest. Perhaps it was a surveyor, or a rancher, or a miner, or a farmer. Perhaps it was a casual passerby. Perhaps it was someone homesick for some other Happy Valley far away-for the name pops up on the maps of Virginia, Maryland, New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in the East, as well as California and Oregon on the opposite coast. Or perhaps it was someone with a bent for wishful thinking. Scenic though the little vale surely is, after all, it seems to have earned its name in a decidedly unhappy time, an era when Apache raiders kept the handful of settlers along the nearby San Pedro Valley close to their fires and their rifles at night, and discouraged other settlers from spreading out into the valley. A pity, that, wrote a reporter for the Prescott Miner in 1876, for even though a couple of little towns had recently been founded in the vicinity, the Indian threat "leaves miles and miles of good farming and grazing lands along the banks of the San Pedro, only waiting for the plow to bring forth crops equal to any produced in Arizona."

Happy Valley never saw much of the plow, though its luxuriant carpet of grasses speaks well of the richness of the ground. Instead, when the era of Apache raids ended, the valley became, in the words of that same correspondent, part of the "vast stock range" that was southeastern Arizona in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In time, the region east of the Rincons nurtured herds of cattle brought in from neighboring ranches, including one sizable spread at the northern end of the mountain range whose original owners, Henry and Lem Redfield, are commemorated, though somewhat obliquely, in the name of nearby Redington Pass.

Those ranchers, it seems, mixed with some bad company. After the Wells Fargo stage that ran between Florence and the mines at Globe was robbed several times in 1883, investigators found that a gang of outlaws led by a man history knows as "Red Jack" had made the Redfield spread their headquarters. There, the Phoenix Republi-can reported, a U.S. mail pouch was found, along with a horse from the last stagecoach the gang encountered, evidence enough to convince the pursuing posse to take three of the ranchers to jail at Florence. There two of them, including Lem, were hanged by a mob that decided to forgo the niceties of a trial.

The third went free. "He went back to the ranch, but the strain on his nerves had been too much, and he died within a week,"

the Republican related. Red Jack, who had escaped the posse's first visit, was shot dead a few days later at the northern approach to Happy Valley, an act that "totally annihilated the Red Jack gang," according to the paper.Unhappy beginnings, to be sure, but Happy Valley has seen happier days ever since. A gently sloping, grassy bowl bor-dered by several perennial streams and stands of cottonwoods, sycamores and oaks, the valley receives ample rainwater-about twice as much as falls on the other side of the mountains, over by Tucson and snow-melt from 8,482-foot-tall Rincon Peak, the crown of the tall range that bounds Happy Valley to the west. In early spring, this snowmelt announces itself spectacularly in the form of great, gushing waterfalls that drop for hundreds of feet, painting the granite cliffs with what appear from a distance to be ribbons of silver.

The mightiest of those falls at least in the proper weather-feeds Paige Creek, which crosses the road just to the south of Happy Valley proper. A barbed-wire fence marks the spot where an unmarked but obvious trail leads to the sometimes-thundering cat-aract, which also flows when the monsoon season begins in midsummer.

All that water helps make Happy Valley, as with all the rest of the Rincon Mountains and San Pedro Valley, a natural wonderland. In her lively book The Mountains Next Door, botanist Janice Emily Bowers tells us that 16 species of muhly grass-that is, grass

Bucolic and tranquil, the air full of happy sounds of flowing water, the valley seems as if it might be more at home in more northerly and easterly climes than these.

of the genus Muhlenbergia-grow here-abouts, an embarrassment of riches for a biologist and a grazing pronghorn antelope alike. She attributes much of this diversity to the great difference in elevation between the mountains' peaks and the valley floor, which makes for a vertical distance of nearly a mile. “Diversity of habitat and climate,” she writes, “means increasing living space for plants, and the result is more species in a given place.” Other streams grace the valley, notably the long, meandering watercourse called Ash Creek, which follows Forest Service Road 35 for several miles until the creek curves off to join the San Pedro River. Sheltered in the shade of great cottonwood, ash, manzanita and other native trees and shrubs, those quiet streams make a fine haven for several kinds of fish, none of them quite big enough to worry about catching. It makes for fine entertainment, however, to follow the little flashes of silver as the fish move upstream and down, sometimes taking cover in the submerged, tangled roots of fallen streamside trees—and sometimes camou-flaging themselves in the paisley swirls of water that pop up here and there, born of chemicals in the tree bark that give the rivu-lets of Happy Valley an oddly psychedelic tinge.

Bucolic and tranquil, the air full of happy sounds of flowing water, the valley seems as if it might be more at home in more northerly and easterly climes than these. But the desert is never far away.Indeed, Happy Valley stands on the edge of an ecological borBorderline where the Sonoran Desert shades off into the comparatively higher, grassier, but less lush Chihuahuan Desert, and on the edge of another border-line where these two deserts meet the formidable mass of the Rincon Mountains.

The sentinels of this border, rising tall above the shindagger and Palmer's agaves and other midelevation desert plants, are thousands of saguaro cacti, the easternmost concentration of that species to be found in Arizona in any sizeable number. (There are a few isolated stands on the lower San Pedro River, and an even more isolated con-centration outside Safford.) One reason for the abundance of cacti, notes saguaro researcher Bill Peachey of Sonoran Science Solutions, a Tucson-based consulting firm, is the relative warmth of the small plateau on which the forest sits; nestled between the San Pedro River and the Rincon Mountains, it is largely safe from frost and receives a steady supply of water.

Another reason, notes Peachey, is geological: The 1.5 billion-year-old finger of diorite that stretches from the Rincons across Happy Valley and down to the river is supremelyhard, but all those years have worn little fis-sures into the stone that saguaro roots have used to anchor themselves to the soil.

“When you have a rocky substrate,” says Peachey, “you don’t have the rodents to eat the seeds that get down into the cracks. Mix that with warm temperatures and rainfall, and you have most of the requirements for a healthy population of saguaros.” The population is healthy, to be sure, and anyone curious about those cacti can bushwhack up the trail from Paige Canyon, which drops down from the east side of Happy Valley, into the Little Rincon Mountains, bordering the valley to the east. I’ve found that trail to be a prime venue for moonlight hiking, the saguaros rising like ghosts all around. But those mountains, though relatively low, are rough, and my shins have been dotted from time to time with agave-spike wounds and rock-induced punctures to remind me to keep my eyes open even when the moon is bright.

A visitor to Happy Valley is likely to see a hiker here and there, day or night, for the place has long been a cherished getaway spot for locals who enjoy getting a little dust on their boots. And not just locals: Thanks to the efforts of numerous hiking and conservation groups throughout the state and even farther afield, Happy Valley now lies near the Arizona Trail, which begins at the Utah border and extends allthe way south into Mexico.

For walkers who aren't quite as ambitious as that but want a solid workout nonetheless, the Miller Creek leg of the Arizona Trail follows one of the valley's perennial watercourses uphill for about 4.5 miles, crossing into the eastern confines of Saguaro National Park.

The views from Happy Valley Saddle, where ponderosa pine trees meet junipers and oaks, are sublime, but I've come to understand why someone -again, some unnamed someone-thought to give the path north into the mountains the daunting name Heartbreak Ridge Trail.

One path leads to another, and experienced hikers can find their way from Happy Valley all the way to faraway Mount Lemmon, the summit of the Santa Catalina range, before leaving the Tucson area. Far less strenuous trails await walkers in the lower elevations of Happy Valley, and they're just as satisfying, bringing walkers alongside flowing water and those coursing waterfalls, with plenty to see all around.

Bird-watching is another grand attraction here, for the San Pedro Valley has long been considered one of the nation's premier birding spots. In winter, nonmigratory desert and grassland birds, including an abundance of sparrows, convene in the lower elevations to the south of the valley through which the dirt access road passes.

As the road enters the Coronado National Forest and grassland gives way to dense thickets of trees and bushes, other winged species begin to appear, including spikycrowned phainopepla, brilliantly colored tanagers and kingbirds, wrens, flycatchers and an armada of woodpeckers, whose busy attention to the cornucopia of insects around them has kept me from sleep on more than one sunrise.

Whatever your pleasure may be proving yourself against the mountains, hearing the sound of water splashing in the desert, sitting in the shade of tall trees or visiting with birds and fish-Happy Valley lives up to its name.