Kofa Country

YOU CAN ALMOST SMELL THE WATER THE MOUNTAINS' RUGGED, snaggletoothed crests offer

No soft edges, no invitation to saunter in nonexistent sylvan glades. Entry into them is formidable, save for the occasional burro or sheep trail or bushwhack up a dead-end wash.

Arizona is a land of extremes, they say, and nowhere are those extremes more pronounced than in the state's southwest corner. In this far reach, within 15 miles of each other rise the sunstruck face of the Kofa Mountains and the satin-soft waters of the Colorado River, the starkest desert in the country and the Southwest's mother stream.

The sighting of a waterbird one January morning vividly illustrated this disparity of moisture. Michael Collier and I were out in our little fishing boat on Martinez Lake on the Colorado. Michael killed the motor and rowed quietly into a marshy cove, crammed with American coots mewing like kittens as they paddled around. Handsome in gray, black and white, these birds look like they're dressed for a formal dinner. A double-crested cormorant perched on a snag, flaring its wings to dry the feathers. A congregation of white pelicans held close to shore, turning their backs on us as we entered their personal space.

A large bird, gliding fast toward us, captured our attention. By the size and light color, we first thought it was an osprey. The bird's presence rattled the calm of the coots, but they weren't the object of its attention. In one clean, swift plunge, the big bird dove into the water, nailed a small silver fish, then it skimmed away low over the surface, gobbling its catch en route.

Through binoculars, I noted the forked tail and cayenne-colored bill of the bird. Michael guessed it was a tern. Checking the bird list and my field guide, I discovered that the size and bill color suggested a Caspian tern, a winter migrant to the lower Colorado from northern climes. The biologist at the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge confirmed that terns had been reported in the area.

That spellbinding sighting contrasted strikingly with one made another winter day, up in the Castle Dome Mountains southwest of the Kofa Mountains. Bighorn sheep are the trademark animals of the Castle Domes and the Kofas, and are the main reason these ranges were incorporated into the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in 1939. An estimated 800 desert bighorns inhabit the refuge now, but after several days of camping and poking around old ghost towns, we had yet to see one. Now on our way home, we crawled through McPherson Pass, testing the four-wheel drive on our truck. I had just commented that our trip would be complete if we saw a sheep. At times, wishing can make it so. A minute later, as we topped out at the pass, I glanced up on the ridgeline and spied a bighorn ram, glorious horns nearly a full three-quarter curl. He looked down at us as if to say I'm allowing you the privilege of looking at me. We piled out of the truck and watched him step gingerly over the rocks, hoping he wouldn't spook before we'd gotten our fill of admiring him.

Bearing witness to these two creatures reinforces the contradictory nature of the Kofa country. The austere mountains rise up out of the desert without preface, their burnt ochre color bespeaking an explosive volcanic origin. The highest peak reaches only about 4,800 feet, and they are bereft of water, except for ephemeral tinajas (intermittent waterholes) and artificial tanks built by hunters to lure the sheep. The mountains' rugged, snaggletoothed crests offer no soft edges, no invitation to saunter in nonexistent sylvan glades. Entry into them is formidable, save for the occasional burro or sheep trail or bushwhack up a dead-end wash.

As Martin Litton wrote in a 1951 issue of Arizona Highways, he'd take an "outlander guest" to the Kofa Mountain area first. "I'd give you your big dose of desert all at once. I wouldn't lead up to it gradually. I wouldn't fool around with the small fry at all. I'd take you straight to the King." The "King" is the King of Arizona Mine, whose initials KOFA gave the mountains their name.

In 1862, discoveries of gold and silver unleashed the great Colorado River Rush. A herd of prospectors and miners thundered into the Kofa country, congregating in rough-andtumble mining camps and towns like La Paz, Red Cloud, Fortuna, Clip, the North Star and, of course, around the King of Arizona.

According to historian Frank Love, more than $4 million worth of gold-the most produced in Yuma County-was removed from the King of Arizona Mine between 1897 and 1920. Mining was low-tech in the early days: rawhide ore buckets and candles wired to miners' hats. Payment was in token or scrip, accepted only at company stores and saloons.

Camp housing was in such short supply that men were charged to sleep on the ground. Many miners built their own homes, like "Brass Band" Bill Smith's stick-and-mud house at the Kofa mine camp. At its peak, some 750 people called the Kofa camp home, while Castle Dome City, at its heyday in the neighboring mountains, had as many people as Yuma.

In 1899, the Kofa camp was going full blast. An elementary school for 16 students was to open the following year. One report noted that the general manager "hires mostly Cornish miners from Cornwall, England. They have brought their families with them, so Kofa tends to be a quieter mining town

TODAY, THE REMAINS of the... mines at the south end of the range consist mostly of crumbling buildings, tailings piles, mounds of broken crockery and blue glass, and rusted tin cans, plus signs on private property warning “Stay on Designated Roads” and “Danger Cyanide.” than usual.” But by 1907, the King of Arizona Mine was on a downhill slide. The ore played out, and the mine shut down for good in 1910.

Today, the remains of the Kofa and neighboring North Star and Polaris mines at the south end of the range consist mostly of crumbling buildings, tailings piles, mounds of broken crockery and blue glass, and rusted tin cans, plus signs on private property warning “Stay on Designated Roads” and “Danger Cyanide.” The sound of the wind rules the place.

The center of civilization in this areafor miners, steamboat captains, freighters, railroaders, soldiers, entrepreneurs, Spaniards and Indians alike - was Yuma Crossing, just below the confluence of the Gila River and the Colorado River.

Here the Colorado could be forded. Local Quechan Indians had been using the crossing for a long time before any Euro-Americans arrived on the scene.

In 1700, the Indians helped Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Spanish priest-explorer, cross the Colorado in a basket mounted on a raft. San Francisco's founder, Juan Bautista de Anza, likewise benefitted from the Indians' assistance when he was bound for California from Arizona. While these encounters were amicable, the arrival of Fray Tomas Garces turned disastrous. In 1779, Garces convinced Spanish authorities to establish a mission at Yuma. Settlers soon followed and built villages along the river. The initial friendliness of the Indians turned to hostility as the Spaniards began irrigating and putting their animals out to graze on the best farmand pasturelands. In a surprise attack on the morning of July 17, 1781, the Quechans killed more than a hundred Spaniards, including Fray Garces.

The Quechans controlled the strategic California fan palms are Arizona natives that have retreated to isolated canyons of the Kofas, where small seeps sustain them in an otherwise untenable landscape.

Crossing into the 1800s-until soldiers arrived during the United States' war with Mexico. In 1847, Philip St. George Cooke and his Mormon Battalion came down the Gila and crossed the Colorado River near Yuma. At the end of the war, forty-niners flowed through this natural funnel, ferried across the river by the Quechans and the soldiers. Further attempts to seize the ferry operations from the Quechans were unsuccessful, until 1852. In that year, Maj. Samuel P. Heintzelman occupied the crossing and set up Fort Yuma on the California side of the river. Two years later, Charles D. Poston and Herman Ehrenberg established Colorado City (later Arizona City, then Yuma).

Stagecoaches soon were ferrying across the Colorado at Yuma.

A reporter for an eastern newspaper wrote, “This is the hottest place in the world; so hot in the summertime that the wings melt off the mosquitoes.” Despite bad press, Yuma persisted as a key link in human movement across the formidable desert. By 1877, the Southern Pacific Railroad bridged the river and charged across Arizona. Railroads put the steamboats out of business, but in not too many years the automobile would supercede the railroads as a primary mode of human transportation.

By the early 1900s, automobiles were cruising along the southern Ocean-toOcean Highway (now Interstate 8 in Arizona), and in 1915 a new steel highway bridge was completed across the Colorado River at Yuma. But just to the west loomed California's Algodones Dunes, an obstacle that had stymied travelers even before the time of Model T Fords. To surmount the obstacle, 10 miles of wooden planks were laid through the dunes-a portable road that could be picked up and relocated as the sands blew over it.

The lower Colorado's seasonal flooding rampages created additional problems for Yuma. In 1909, Laguna Dam was built upstream, launching the federal government's era of “reclamation” of the desert, followed by Imperial and Hoover dams.

The Colorado is tamed and easily crossed these days. But birds still flock to the river, and you can almost smell the water from the stone-dry Kofa Mountains. Caspian terns and bighorn sheep bear witness that wildness remains in this land. Al EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is an excerpt from a chapter in the book The Mountains Know Arizona: Images of the Land and Stories of Its People, just released by Arizona Highways Books. Author Rose Houk and photographer Michael Collier use 10 mountain ranges as platforms from which to present Arizona and tell stories of its people and history. For two years, the pair traveled from their home in Flagstaff, putting more than 30,000 miles on their camper truck, fondly named “The Exploratorium.” The complete results of their travels and research can be seen in the special money-saving introductory offer on page 45.

Cars stampeded by my shoulder as I rode my bike in the narrow strip of asphalt between traffic and gutter. I tried to pay attention to them, while at the same time noticing a slight rise in the Phoenix topography around me. A hill lay buried beneath the street. I pulled into a parking lot and unfolded a map across the handlebars. Just as I thought, the map showed a pueblo that once stood here, a remnant of a lost civilization putting a bump in the middle of the city. I came to Phoenix to find this ancient, buried civilization. Seven hundred years below shopping malls and apartment complexes lies the Hohokam culture. About 600 miles of irrigation canals once streamed across the Phoenix Basin where communities had developed into elaborate pueblos,