EDITOR'S LETTER

The Banks of Sonoita Creek
Cottonwoods are edible. The bark, in particular. It’s bitter, like a handful of Bayer aspirin, but you could make a meal of it, if you had to. The sap is edible, too. It’s starchy and sweet, and tastes a lot better than the bark. It doesn’t taste good, just better. Nothing about a cottonwood tastes good — not like the blueberry pie at Bear Wallow Café — but the fast-growing willows serve a bigger purpose: Arguably, they’re the hardest-working trees in the ecosystem.

Among other things, their canopies provide shade for wild roses and coatimundis, and help reduce water evaporation in desperate streams and rivers; their roots create overhanging banks that provide habitat for Apache trout and Chiricahua leopard frogs; and the Hopis, who consider cottonwoods to be sacred, carve kachinas from their roots. The trees are also big and beautiful.

One of the biggest I’ve ever seen is on the east end of Aravaipa Canyon. It’s not the biggest, though. The giant sequoia of cottonwoods lives along the banks of Sonoita Creek in Patagonia. Even if you are a tree hugger, you’re going to have a hard time getting your arms around this one. At 100 feet tall and 42 feet around, it’s considered the largest Fremont cottonwood in North America. We have a shot of it on page 24, but the photo doesn’t do it justice. The big tree is one of those things you have to see in person. And so are the other 30 things in this month’s cover story.

As we were putting the collection together, we tried to stay away from the term “bucket list” — my brother Hoss says the world doesn’t need anymore bucket lists — but that’s the gist of the story. It’s our recommendation of what everyone should see and do in Arizona before they die. We’ll get a lot of feedback on the things we didn’t include, but it’s hard to argue with those we did: watching the sun set over Hannagan Meadow, camping at Indian Garden, dangling your feet in Havasu Creek.

The creek is what you see on our front cover, and of all the Mother Nature in this issue, that spectacular travertine water is perhaps the most unlikely — it looks more like something you’d see in Maui. Unlikely is a good word to describe the Desert Bar, too. The place is bizarre, to say the least, and it’s about the last thing you’d expect to see in the rugged mountains north of Parker. In fact, a herd of bighorn sheep wearing pantsuits would be less surprising.

As Kathy Montgomery writes: “When you see a copper steeple atop a chapel welded from steel plates, you’ll know you’ve arrived.” But that’s only one of the oddities. There’s also a pair of sheet-metal cooling towers, an outdoor concert stage, and a main barroom with glass refrigerator doors for windows. What’s more, the place closes down at sundown. Sundown. It’s different, but if you’re tired of following the plow, a road trip to the Desert Bar is a good way to mix things up. And if you can do it in a 1929 Model A Ford pickup, even better.

That’s how writer Iver Peterson and photographer Terry Moore got from Parks, Arizona, a small town near Williams, to Cave Creek, another small town just north of Phoenix. The Model A belongs to Terry, and as Iver writes in Truckin’, it provided an exciting trip back in time: “We knew that a light car, one that wouldn’t go very fast, was the perfect way to explore millions of acres of public lands away from the paved roads ... We wanted to experience what travel was like in the first decades of Arizona’s statehood ... when car travel was still an adventure.”
 

With or without an old Ford, it’s a trip worth taking. But instead of stopping in Cave Creek, continue south to Sonoita Creek, where you might run into Jim Harrison. Like the Model A, Harrison is a classic. If his name sounds familiar, it should. He’s the author of Legends of the Fall, the book that was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. It’s Harrison’s most famous work, but it’s hardly the extent of his catalogue — he has dozens of novels to his name, as well as countless poems.

In her beautifully written piece titled The Man in the Creek, Kelly Kramer profiles the prolific writer, who’s a character not unlike those in his books. “He writes and he smokes,” Kelly writes. “American Spirits, one right after another. They’ve turned his voice to silt and his skin the color of an old catcher’s mitt, yet he lights them with the longing of a man consumed. Harrison works in longhand and eschews technology, with the exception of the fax machine he uses to send pages to his longtime assistant.”

Although people in Paris “treat him like Hemingway,” Harrison likes the quiet life in Southern Arizona. He also likes Sonoita Creek, and the cottonwoods that grow along its banks. Whether he’s seen the old Fremont upstream — the largest in North America — I can’t be sure, but it’s something everyone should see at some point. Before it’s too late.