Hike a Historic Trail

TO TUBAC

[LEFT] Mesquite trees frame the remains of the 17th-century church at Tumacacori National Historical Park south of Tucson. Established in 1691, San Jose de Tumacacori is one of Arizona's oldest missions. [THIS PAGE] The Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail meanders from Tumacacori to Tubac near the quiet flow of the Santa Cruz River. In a steamy morning 214 years after the death of a legendary Spanish explorer, I set out to retrace his footsteps on the southern Arizona portion of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, named after him. The 4.5-mile route runs parallel to the Santa Cruz River between Tubac and Tumacacori, some 40 miles south of Tucson. Rains have drenched the surrounding hills, and I find the trail this morning damp but not muddy, a ribbon of adobe brown that begins near some crude archaeological remnants at Tubac. The trail winds through a rich green meadow and over small embankments dotted with colorful daisies and desert paintbrush before arriving at Tumacacori National Historical Park. The complete national Anza trail spans some 1,200 miles, but Arizona's most notable and hikable segment stretches from Tubac to Tumacacori. As I set out, I'm mindful that over the previous 30 years I've spent an unusually large amount of time tracking Anza's life from his death backward to his birth. It began the day I saw what was purported to be his skeleton on display in a church at Arizpe, Sonora, Mexico. I later learned that Anza was, indeed, buried In the church, but the displayed skeleton was some other Spanish colonial soldier. In subsequent years, I found myself at Fronteras, Sonora, where Anza was born, then at Tubac, where he was commander of the presidio. Years later, I visited Fort Point in San Francisco, near the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge, where Anza ended his most important journey with the founding of San Francisco. I pause on one of the trailside benches that volunteers have erected and reflect for a moment on this man that I have been following for so many years. I knew Anza had fought Apaches in the Tubac area, had written his dispassionate but thoughtful reports from a camp or a tent in this picturesque valley, and had delivered babies on his expedition from Tubac to San Francisco. His footprints are all over northern Mexico, southern Arizona, New Mexico and California, and yet, just like this trail under my feet, he is not well known. In Tucson, where I live, Anza is best known as the name of a drive-in movie theater.

In October 1775, Anza left Tubac with a large group of settlers and livestock, determined to reach the remote outpost of San Francisco and establish a Spanish colony there. That group arrived near today's Fort Point and formed the nucleus that eventually grew into the present metropolis. Anza had recruited the colonists from among the poor of Mexico and led them north through the tiny village of Tumacacori,long before there was a mission church there, and on to Tubac, where the final preparations were made before leaving for California. Tumacacori, a leafy oasis of mesquite and cottonwood trees, lies along the Santa Cruz River.

Most of the year, the nave of the mission remains hollow as a bell except for the visitors who stop at Tumacacori National Historical Park, created to protect remains of the mission church. During the summer, nothing much happens in this part of Arizona, some 20 miles north of the Mexican border. Then, in September, you can feel a distinct drop in the evening temperatures. Soon afterward, as the honeyed light of October arrives, the change becomes obvious and the clock seems to stop. The rustic tranquility that surrounds the place drops away and is replaced with a burst of song and a remarkable procession that commemorates Anza's historic expedition.

Tubac's Anza Days, a festive re-enactment, celebrates the start of Anza's journey. Tumacacori's barren mission church, though no longer affiliated with any religious order, comes alive with the echoes of a Mass sung partly in Spanish, English, Pima, the language of a local Indian tribe, and occasionally in Yaqui, the language of Indians from northern Mexico and Arizona. The priest and his congregation dress like 18th-century Spanish settlers.

Years ago, when the Anza National Historic Trail was dedicated by the National Park Service, I met one of these costumed participants, Donald Garate. He works as an interpretive specialist at Tumacacori National Historical Park. Like Anza, Garate is half Basque, and he sports a handlebar mustache that any colonial Spaniard might have found pretty dapper. In most of the historic re-enactments each October for the last 10 years, Garate has played the role of Anza, wearing an old-fashioned white shirt and a flat-topped black hat, a red sash tied around his waist and a blue cape draped over his shoulders. He carries a sword that he borrows from the Coronado Memorial and a leather scabbard he made to sheath it.

Resplendent in his costume on the morning of Tumacacori's multilingual Mass, Garate mounts his horse at the head of the line of "settlers" and "foot soldiers" and clip-clops north to the Tubac Presidio, the actual final staging area for Anza's journey.

This section of the popular trail begins across the road from the Tumacacori post office, a stone's throw north of the mission. The trail, on an easement across private property, crisscrosses the Santa Cruz River over a series of small wooden bridges. During the summer months, floods sometimes wash out these bridges, but they're soon replaced or repaired. The trail meanders among shady cottonwood trees and across exposed fields to Tubac Presidio State Historic Park, a reconstruction of the fort commanded by Anza. The route is nearly flat and easy to walk. But, as the participants in the Anza Day festivities know, this trail also holds an almost palpable link to a time when Arizona was not yet a named place on any map. The route's story begins with the arrival of Fernando Cortez in the heart of the Aztec empire, and his conquest of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) in 1521.

As the Spaniards pushed farther north, the more vulnerable they became to the harsh landscape and the violence of the native people. Eventually, to protect settlers and the missionaries who were proselytizing in this region, the Spaniards sent soldiers to establish a network of presidios, or forts. Among these soldiers was Anza's father, also named Juan Bautista, who was captain of the presidio at Fronteras, Sonora, about 30 miles south of today's Douglas, Arizona. The younger Anza, portrayed in the commemorative festivities, was born at or near Fronteras in 1735. While he was still a toddler, his father was killed in an Apache attack. The younger Anza grew up with an intimate knowledge of the sparsely settled countryside, became an army lieutenant when he was 20 and was made commander of the San Ignacio Presidio at Tubac when he was 25. Seven years after he took command, Anza wrote a personal report that sheds some light on his activities: "When I took over my present command in 1760, my section of the frontier was faced with an uprising of over a thousand Papagos [now known as the O'odham]. After launching various campaigns to subjugate them, I attacked them personally on May 10, 1760, and took the lives of Ciprian, their captain, and nine others. All of the others then capitulated. . . ." The bloodshed did not bring him as much fame as the two expeditions he led that resulted in the founding of San Francisco. The first trip started in January 1774. Anza's party, including two priests, a California guide, a courier and 20 volunteer soldiers, left Tubac to seek an overland route to California through the harsh desert terrain that is now southern Arizona and northern Mexico. In the 1770s, the Spaniards had five missions and two presidios scattered from Mexico to Monterey, but military and civilian settlement in California had stalled. The problem was one of supply. Everything needed at the missions near Los Angeles came by ship from the Mexican port of San Blas. The boats were small and the winds, which blew southward along the Pacific Coast, made the trip north difficult. If an overland route could be found between the Tubac area and the California coast, the government reasoned they could steadily expand New Spain's northern frontier. Cattle, horses and agricultural products, readily available in Sonora, could be delivered to the new settlements more quickly by land than by sea. Anza's first expedition to California did not include any civilian colonists. Francisco Tomas Garces, an adventurous traveler who was also the priest at Mission San Xavier del Bac north of Tubac, told Anza they could follow the Santa Cruz River north from Tubac to Tucson and northwest to its confluence with the Gila River. Then they could follow the Gila to the Colorado River and California. Garate said that on the first expedition, Anza didn't take that route. Apaches had stolen most of his fresh horses at Tubac, so he and his soldiers set off to find replacements in Mexico's Altar Valley. They went south as far as Caborca without having much luck and then proceeded on their California trek, heading northwestward from Caborca and crossing what is now known as El Camino del Diablo ("devil's highway," so named for the hundreds of travelers who died along its waterless miles) to the Colorado River. At the river, they encountered the Yuma Indians, whose help was essential in fording the wide and unpredictable stream. The party continued west to San Gabriel Mission, near present-day Los Angeles, then turned north to Monterey, near San Francisco. Having established that it was possible to travel from Tubac to the San Francisco area on land, Anza returned to the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers. This time he avoided El Camino Diablo and took the shorter route east along the Gila River to the vicinity of presentday Gila Bend and then headed southeast to his presidio at Tubac, returning May 26, 1775. Six months later, after a brief temporary assignment to a different presidio, Anza was summoned to Mexico City to report on his California expedition. Word of the success of his remarkable journey had preceded him, however, and before he arrived, Anza

had already been promoted to lieutenant colonel. The Spanish authorities were now eager for Anza to launch a second trip to California, this one with the colonists. Anza gathered the civilian volunteers in Culiacan, Sinaloa, gave them guns and new clothes, taught them how to shoot and led them all to Tubac, the final assembly area for the trip to California's Monterey Peninsula. On October 23, 1775, they were ready to leave, including the chaplain, Pedro Font, a finicky friar who lamented the gap between his crude surroundings and the finer things of life. Font even brought along his harp and complained that Anza wouldn't let him play it as often as he would have liked. Authenticity being essential to any re-enactment, Garate one year recruited David Shaul, a visiting professor at the University of Arizona who plays the harp. Shaul, who normally dabbles in linguistics, dressed in a friar's frock and picked at the harp strings as he rode the trail. Shaul and a small group of musicians and singers now provide music for the Mass at Tumacacori Mission preceding the trek to Tubac. Everyone in the parade stops in Tubac to enjoy the food and frolic that marks the town's annual Anza Days. The real procession departed Tubac in October and arrived in San Francisco in April 1776, happy to have merely survived. Understanding the compelling need for survival, I complete my unhurried walk down part of Anza's trail in about four hours and head for the first restaurant I can find. AH

Living things STIR ANEW in a petrified LAND National park's wildlife flourishes in stony ancient forests

Petrified Forest National Park stands as a remarkable monu-ment to the Triassic Period, when, 250 million years ago, ancestral reptiles emerged to become the kings of beasts. Preserving one of the world's largest and most accessible repositories of dinosaur bones and of giant trees that long ago turned to yellow, pink, purple and green stone, the mile-high park takes in arid, sparsely vegetated landscapes of weathered rock and multicolored sand, places well suited for a science-fiction film set on some distant planet-and that look as if dinosaurs could be at home among them even today.

Winter weather in the rugged northern Arizona area known as the Colorado Plateau can be as austere as the land. In that season, stiff winds, cold rains, snow flurries and temperatures in the 20s and below combine to keep rangers close to the fire and visitors few, while animals disappear from view, winging away to warmer wintering grounds or burrowing to comfortable hibernation underground.

Come spring, Petrified Forest takes on a much different aspect-for, though dedicated to the remnants of a remote past, it remains in every way a living park. Its forests, grasslands, desert plains and stream and river valleys shelter hundreds of plant, bird, mammal, reptile and insect species, some of them not often seen elsewhere. And all of those creatures and plants, it seems, greet the new season with exuberant growth and an extraordinary amount of hustle and bustle, making the park a prime destination for wildlife watchers and wildflower enthusiasts as well as dinosaur buffs.

A typical spring day at the 93,533-acre park dawns cool, reminding the visitor of winter's recent departure. As it climbs in the sky,