Hiking the City's Wild Side

PHOENIX URBAN HIKING Three Mountains Cast Blessings Across the Intersection of Nature and Civilization

A city is blessed in many ways by mountains around it or within it. They claw rain out of passing storms. They offer recreation and geographic identity. And there is an intangible fulfillment, perhaps something spiritual, about snuggling up to mountains. They seem timeless and imperturbable, anchors in creation that will outlive all the ambitions and tragedies of the civilization churning around them. Geology can be a symbolic relief valve, letting the steam out of the morning news. And here, in this intersection of nature and civilization, something interesting is always happening. The mountains of Phoenix aren't big or daunting-most Arizona peaks, as well as serious climbers, look down on them. But the modest ranges scattered around the city offer the ideal form of urban hiking: They're accessible to almost everyone, and they challenge our heads at least as much as our feet.

Formed 14 million years ago, the 2,608-foot high Piestewa Peak offers a panoramic view of downtown Phoenix. The peak was renamed in honor of Army Private First Class Lori Piestewa who was killed in Iraq in 2003.

SOUTH MOUNTAIN

South outh Mountain ripples across what once was the southern horizon of Phoenix like an immense dike heaved up by Ma Nature to contain the tumult of the sprawling metropolis. Silly girl-what made her think we hyperambitious humans would respect a logical boundary to anything? Phoenix started to leak around the east end of South Mountain in the 1970s; today the range is three-quarters surrounded. In a daylong 13-mile hike following the sun along the east-west spine of the range, I plod for three hours before I lose sight of subdivisions lapping at the mountain's southeastern skirts.

But South Mountain doesn't seem beleaguered or disrespected. Absolutely the contrary. Phoenix bought the entire rock in 1924 to protect it from development, and today touts it as the country's largest municipal park. At 25.8 square miles, it's 9 percent larger than Manhattan.

"Phoenix was 7 or 8 miles away when the city

SOUTH MOUNTAIN PARK/PRESERVE

bought it," said Jim Burke, the city's deputy parks and recreation director. "It was pretty visionary." Most of the trails on South Mountain are 600 or 800 years old. "They're essentially Hohokam," Phoenix city archaeologist Todd Bostwick told me, "the same trails they used."

Bostwick has written a provocative book, Landscape of the Spirits, chronicling the abundant rock art on South Mountain and proposing that some of it records the journeys of the tribal shamans into the spirit world, perhaps in meditative trances. They may well have undertaken these journeys on South Mountain. "It was a place for a spiritual experience and a retreat from the noisy, smelly villages in the valley-remember, they were an urban society."

I like the implied connection-that this big rock served the Salt River Hohokam people exactly as it serves us today.

An hour into my end-to-end traverse of South Mountain, I leave the National Trail for a side trip to one of the spectacular petroglyph panels I remember from a previous encounter. Bostwick says the difficulty of interpreting ancient rock art shouldn't keep us from trying, and I want to revisit the panel with this permission in mind.

Its most intriguing image is a set of parallel wavy lines abutting a human figure that seems to be dancing or leaping. It looks like a man running from a flash flood-and suddenly I realize that immediately behind this pile of granite is a monster arroyo. Studying the eroded backside of the boulders, it's obvious that floodwater regularly runs 10 or 12 feet deep here, and has done so for hundreds or thousands of years.

Was the illustration a warning-or a memorial? More likely the latter, I decide. But the puzzle only enhances my South Mountain experience. In most human cultures, mountains are harbors of mystery (nobody ever reported seeing a Sasquatch roaming the prairie), and they will always remain so-unless we keep civilizing them.

For a ridge that peaks at a modest 2,690 feet, South Mountain offers an amazing variety of landscape. The National Trail skirts steep canyons and deep arroyos, and winds through grumpy heaps of dark brown granite and granodiorite, alternating with soft hillocks fuzzed with desert grasses. To the halfway point, the trail offers frequent views of the city, but then it slips down between parallel ridges and civilization blinks out. For the last 6 miles and three hours, I encounter no people, see no buildings, hear no distant rumble of traffic. I could just as well be on the Arizona Trail, 50 miles from the nearest tendrils of civilization.

Except that I have five bars of signal on my cell phone. Which is good, because I have to call my ride and tell her where to extract me from my not-exactly-wilderness trek.

CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN AND PIESTEWA PEAK

Camelback Mountain/Echo Canyon Recreation Area Trails: Two trails designated as "easy" and two "difficult" (each 1.2 miles long). Fun Fact: President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Phoenix to celebrate the 1968 land exchange that returned Camelback Mountain's 2,700-foot summit to the City of Phoenix. Cholla Trailhead: From Camelback Road, turn north onto 64th Street/ Invergordon Road to the parking lot. Walk north to Cholla Lane to the trailhead.

Piestewa Peak/ Dreamy Draw Area Trails: Seven trails. Fun Fact: Summit Trail accommodates 4,000 to 10,000 hikers a week. Piestewa Peak trailheads: From State Route 51 drive east on Glendale Avenue/Lincoln Drive, turn north (left) onto Squaw Peak Drive and continue to the parking area. Information: (602) 2627901; www.phoenix. gov/parks/hikephx.html.

CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN, PIESTEWA PEAK

Starting up the Cholla Trail to the 2,704-foot sum-mit of Camelback Mountain, I overhear a teenager reassuring her companions that for her this is going to be, like, a walk in the park. "I hiked the entire Grand Canyon in a day, guys!"

Camelback and the nearby knuckle of Piestewa Peak are essentially Phoenix's outdoor gyms. Judging from the fast-paced walking (and running), the gear and snippets of conversation, it's a good guess that fewer than half the hikers are ascending these mountains for the scenery.

A two-legged mountain goat passes me, hop-ping boulder-to-boulder with a heart-rate monitor strapped to one arm and ultraminimalist provi-sions-a half-liter water bottle-cached in a waist holster. His female companion, working her way up more deliberately and sanely, is falling behind. "Slow down!" she shouts.

"We're not here to have fun," he yells back. "This is a workout!"

On 2,608-foot Piestewa Peak, I start a conversa-tion with a mellower hiker, who introduces himself as Nick Palomares, a 73-year-old retired military man and ROTC instructor. He says he's trekked to this summit every weekday for eight years-yes, including summers. "I'm diabetic, and this plus the diet keeps my blood sugar under control," he says. "I just don't think about the heat. I freeze my water bottle overnight, and when I get to the top I have a nice, cool drink."

We have an urge to climb mountains that is so powerful that it must be instinctive. A sweaty stream of humanity surges to the summits of Camelback and Piestewa day after day, while the more interest-ing 3.7-mile Freedom Trail around Piestewa Peak is usually as lonely as the moon. To reach a summit, even a modest one just a quarter-mile above the val-ley floor, is an unambiguous accomplishment that positions us above the rabble. It's harder to explain the point of ambling around a mountain.

I have almost quit trying to explain why we humans climb mountains. I only know why I do it. As essayist Scott Russell Sanders noted: "Time in the wilds... reminds me of how much of what I ordinar-ily do is mere dithering and how much of what I own is mere encumbrance."

Plus you see things. Plodding slowly up Camelback, I see plenty: polychromatic gardens of lichens, boulders harassed into wonderfully improbable shapes by erosion, hedgehog cacti scratching out a living in a meager fissure of decomposed granite and stray soil.

I also see oddities among my fellow humans. What does it mean that we attack Camelback outfit-ted with cell phone and iPod? I suspect that these devices symbolize our estrangement from nature, our inability to embrace the mountain without importing these trappings of culture. We have an intense urge to civilize mountains, especially those that happen to be right inside our cities.

A Lizard's Tail Some Like it Orange

In winter, the late-afternoon sun glances off the desert varnish on the rocks of South Mountain Preserve at the southern edge of Phoenix, causing the hillside to shimmer. The Akimel O'odham, whose tribal lands once included South Mountain, took note of this odd-looking phenomenon and called them the Greasy Mountains, saying Coyote once stole some meat and hid in the mountains, dribbling fat on the rocks and giving them an oily looking sheen.

Visit these rocks in April and May and you'll observe another phenomenon every bit as enchanting as the legend of the glistening rocks. It's breeding season for the common chuckwalla, the second largest of Arizona's 38 species of lizards. Measuring some 16 inches, the meaty lizards with their spatulashaped bodies and chunky tails sunbathe on South Mountain's "greasy" rocks and entertain hikers with their clumsy calisthenics-pushups and head-bobs that male chuckwallas use to intimidate rivals.

But scientist Matthew Kwiatkowski has discovered that although South Mountain's chuckwallas are common, they're anything but ordinary. Since the late 1990s, Kwiatkowski, an Arizona State University natural sciences lecturer, has spent countless hours sitting perfectly still in the searing heat watching creatures so skittery he can't so much as reach for a water bottle. But his tenacity has yielded findings that have made him famous in herpetology circles.

For instance, Kwiatkowski and his colleagues have discovered that the chuckwallas in South Mountain reach densities of 65 animals per hectare (the size of two football fields.) That's three to six times the density of the chuckwalla populations in the Santan Mountains southeast of Phoenix. In the desert preserves on the city's north side, the number of chuckwal-las drops to only three animals per hectare.

The reason? Prime chuckwalla real estate. South Mountain provides a smorgasbord of dietary offerings for this vegetarian lizard, especially the blossoms of ocotillos, paloverde trees and globe mallows. Now mix in South Mountain's unusual geology, which features boulders sheared and stacked on the slopes like slices of bologna. These layers provide sheltered nooks and crannies for chuckwalla nurseries and escape routes for adults fleeing hungry coyotes, roadrunners and hawks. When harassed, the animals simply duck

NORTH MOUNTAIN PRESERVE NORTH MOUNTAIN PRESERVE

The Phoenix Mountains were beginning to be civilized by developers in the 1960s when activists rang the alarms. Several bond elections later, 7,000 acres of crinkled-up desert slashing diagonally across north-central Phoenix have been saved as the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, including Camelback Mountain and Piestewa Peak.

"It's pretty amazing," says Dave Hicks, "that we can hike 11 miles across the middle of Phoenix and never have to cross a street."

That's exactly what Hicks and I are doing. He's a veteran hiker who lives a few blocks from its west end. We're trekking the 11-mile Charles M. Christiansen Memorial Trail from Paradise Valley to its opposite end near 7th and Peoria avenues.

The trail takes the path of least resistance through valleys instead of lurching over ridges and peaks. This offers an obvious advantage: It's an easy trek. And, the mountains rising on either side wall off the city along much of the route. I soon forget that the city encircles us, a place where clocks and appointment books form the grid of life.

As if to underline the corridor's wildness, three coyotes pop out of the creosote and amble nonchalantly across the trail-the perfect symbol of gridlessness. They roam where they please, ask for nothing and adapt to whatever nature or civilization throws at them. We could do worse than live like this, and we have. This is another reason why we crave mountains: We sense that we have something important to learn from them.

But the measure of a mountain is not its size or remoteness or degree of danger; it is in what we manage to take away from our experience with it.

From four days in the urban mountains of Phoenix I take connections-with nature, with a culture that evaporated almost 600 years ago, with a rhythm of time that is simpler and saner than what I tune in to in city life. For Phoenix to have preserved these mountains was visionary indeed. They are its best parks, its best neighborhoods, its best hope. Al

North Mountain/ Shaw Butte Trails:

Fun Fact: Phoenix Indian School students once used North Mountain as a campground.

Christiansen Trail Access:

Drive east on Glendale Avenue/ Lincoln Drive from State Route 51. Turn north (left) onto Tatum Boulevard and drive 2.5 miles to trailhead.

Information: (602) 4955540; www.phoenix. gov/parks/hikenort.html Arizona Hiking: Urban Trails, Easy Paths and Overnight Treks, ($16.95, published by Arizona Highways) describes more than 70 trails in the state. The 160-page softcover book is illustrated with 120 color photographs. To order, call (800) 543-5432 or go to our Web site: arizonahighways.com.

ADDITIONAL READING: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Phoenix Parks and Recreation, www.phoenix.gov/parks/ hikemain.html; South Mountain, (602) 262-7393; Phoenix Mountains Preserve, (602) 262-7901.