Rivers Run Through It

PHOTOGRAPHER RANDY PRENTICE and Arizona Highways Editor Peter Aleshire join forces to capture the essence of the enigmatic and vital desert rivers that run through the state. They bring nearly 30 years of combined experience along those rivers to create the intimate portraits in the justreleased Desert Rivers book from Arizona Highways. Each chapter portrays a different river and its tributaries, set against Aleshire's mingling of riparian personality profiles and personal experiences in 20 years of wandering. Prentice, also a blues guitarist, drove his battered pickup through storms and floods to create thousands of 4 x 5-inch images, including this view of Havasu Falls. The creek runs through the Havasupai Indian Reservation and merges with the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. This photograph comes from the book, but other images in this portfolio are outtakes. Autum-

HISTORY'S HIGHWAY

n-bedecked cottonwood and willow trees line the Santa Cruz River south of Tumacacori, a touch of life on a tributary of the Gila River that now dries up intermittently. Once, the river's reliable flow made it vital to native cultures and Spanish missionaries.

GILA RIVER

THE GILA RIVER SURVIVES like an old man who fought in the Great War, invented the tango, lost a million dollars on a bad bet, climbed a sacred peak barehanded and loved a beautiful woman whose eyes he can now but dimly recall. But he has forgotten more than most people ever learn, so that even the seamed residual of the dreams he has dared can make poets weep and women with raven hair sigh.

The Gila River arises first in the jagged, volcanic wilderness along the Arizona-New Mexico border, where Geronimo was born, the last wild wolf died and the first reintroduced wolves were set loose. The major tributaries of the San Francisco and Blue rivers run out of the White Mountains and augment the parched drift of the Gila.

Once, the Gila ran in its muscular pride all the way to the Colorado River near Yuma, sustaining ancient civilizations, cottonwoods, willows, beavers, otters, native fish, wolves, elk, deer, lions and bears. Ice Age mammoth hunters gave way to other groups, including the 1,000year run of the Hohokam. History lurched, rumbled and bled along its banks in the form of missionaries, fur trappers, the Mormon Battalion, the Butterfield Stage and the gold-fevered prospectors rushing to California.

But modern times have been hard on the Gila. The headwaters still gush in a good year, offering wilderness rafting in the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area. But dams and diversions have starved it so that it only rarely flows through Phoenix, merges with the Salt and Verde rivers or reaches Painted Rock Reservoir near Gila Bend. Only in flood years does it find its way once again to the Colorado.

And so the old man, who has straddled mountain chains and cut canyons and raised up civilizations, dreams now in the long light, in its long limbo, on its long journey of blind and brave persistence, having learned the hard lesson that not all rivers run to the sea.

SAN PEDRO RIVER

THE SAN PEDRO RIVER appears like a little guy who won't stay down. He's a bird-watching, flower-picking poet who drives a backhoe and gets in too many bar fights, in which he triumphs by his sheer, gutsy insistence on getting up no matter how many times the big, dumb mugs knock him over.

This humble, vital wisp of a river is one of the few free-flowing, undammed rivers in the Southwest as it flows out of Mexico toward its fitful confluence with the Gila River near Hayden. Usually it soaks into the sand soon after crossing into the United States, although it often makes a showing in the Charleston Narrows near Tombstone.

The 176-mile-long San Pedro cuts no canyons and barely manages riffles. Only in the arid Southwest would anyone call it a river with a straight face.

But it's no less vital for its pint-sized stature.

The San Pedro runs north in the broad depression of the down-dropped valley that runs between the Huachuca Mountains and the Dragoon Mountains. Cottonwood and willow trees line its banks, which makes the San Pedro a biological superhighway connecting the Mexican tropics to North America. As a result, The Nature Conservancy has designated it one of the “last great places.” Biologists working the San Pedro have accumulated an astonishing species count: 80 species of mammals, 40 reptile and amphibian species, 100 varieties of butterflies, 20 species of bats and 350 species of birds. Once, it also boasted 14 species of native fish, but only the longfin dace and the desert sucker have survived a century of cattle grazing, elimination of grasslands and prolonged draught. The San Pedro River also suffers from groundwater pumping. Still, the little guy keeps getting up. Conservationists labor to reduce groundwater pumping and the federal government has established a protected conservation area. In the meantime, the gaudy tropical migrants still flit through the glimmering cottonwoods past the bone piles of ancient hunters, the vanished relics of civilizations, the Spanish fort and the abandoned homesteads of rustlers and gunslingers. All of which proves that when it comes to rivers and bar fights, keep your eye on the little guy.

VERDE RIVER

THE VERDE RIVER IS LIKE an absent-minded professor, tromping about in his many-pocketed birding vest and brandishing his bug lens and rock pick-vague and windblown, but bound to amaze anyone who follows his free-association conversation. Understated and modest, the Verde has nonetheless shaped the history of the region for millennia. Mostly, it muddles and puddles and daydreams along, running past ancient ruins, mining-towns-turned-artist-colonies, stock ponds and linear forests of cottonwoods and willows. Often, it slows to a trickle, but sometimes it gushes in flood. If it were a painter, it would work mostly in watercolor washes of greens and blues. The 283-mile-long Verde officially starts up in Yavapai County where the Big Chino and Williams Valley washes meet at the fitfully full Sullivan Lake. It runs 125 miles from there down past Perkinsville, through the Verde Valley, then on down to captivity in Horseshoe and Bartlett reservoirs near Cave Creek on the outskirts of Phoenix.

Usually, the Verde behaves with the eccentric and witty decorum of a classics professor. In the spring, the Verde gets ever so slightly tipsy, with spring runoff sufficient to please middle-aged kayakers and bird-loving canoeists. During the summer, it slows to a green trickle beloved of dragonflies and kids hunting crawfish. The river's flow rarely exceeds 1,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). However, its flows can swing wildly: In the flood year of 1993, it roared along at 145,000 cfs, but in recent drought years, it has dwindled to as little as 48 cfs.

Its scattering of tributaries are also fitful, including West Clear Creek, Wet Beaver Creek, Webber Creek, Granite Creek and Oak Creek, which rushes down through the layered, Technicolor red rocks of Sedona.

The Verde nourishes rich galleries of cottonwoods and willows along much of its length, thereby provid-ing a sanctuary for wildlife, including some 200 to 300 wintering bald eagles and a vital percentage of the migrating songbirds that gladden much of North America.

Although the river flows past settlements like Jerome, Cottonwood and Camp Verde, it also includes remote stretches designated as wild and scenic, where eight struggling native fish species, plus beavers, otters and muskrats that have been mostly exterminated hang onto their ancient ways.

So the Verde has made a comeback. Granted, the mammoths that drew Ice Age hunters to its banks have long vanished. But many of the same species that watched the Sinagua Indians build their handcrafted stone cities at places like Tuzigoot on the banks of the Verde now ponder the import of passing kayakers.

But that's the thing about spending the day with the Verde: You never know what treasure of knowledge you'll stumble over listening to birdcalls, watching water bugs and unearthing the odd mammoth bone.

THE SACRED SALT

Created by the merger of the Black and White rivers, the Salt runs down through mythic areas of the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation and on into a chain of reservoirs that sustain modern Phoenix.

SALT RIVER

THE SALT RIVER RIDES A MOTORCYCLE, has tattoos, takes peyote and attends sweat lodges, but now finds itself with a middle-management job that requires a lot of overtime at an Internet startup company. It is like an old soul with deep secrets and a mixed heritage, which runs through a raw and jagged land and has sustained a heady and contradictory sequence of civilizations. It originates in wild places fit for wolves and old stories of deep things in dark places, but runs down finally into the chain of cliff-sided reservoirs that nourish modern Phoenix.

The headwaters lie up in the wet wilderness of the White Mountains, where the Black and White rivers provide some of the best trout fishing in the state. These headwater tributaries run down through a sacred, closed area on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation. The merger of the White and Black rivers creates the Salt, which has cut the great gash of the Salt River Canyon, with its great stretches of raftable rapids. Along this wild and sacred stretch, the Salt River runs past ruins and myths-as the tattoos dance and the motorcycle roars.

But when the Salt leaves the protection of Salt River Canyon, it must report to work. Theodore Roosevelt Lake marks the beginning of a half-century of dam-building and water development that transformed the American West, including the chain of lakes and 1,300 miles of canals and ditches that water Phoenix.

By the time the Salt River leaves Saguaro Lake, it is but a housebroken mutter of itself, fit for inner tubers and irrigation ditches. Only in flood years does the Salt shake off its restraints and rampage through Phoenix, making freeway bridges shudder, like a middle-aged biker on a binge.

But mostly, the lower Salt now labors for the startup firms and the venture capitalists, with the tattoos just peeking out below his shirtsleeve and the motorcycle waiting in the parking lot.

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