EDITOR'S LETTER

editor's LETTER For the most determined

mountaineers, conquering the “Seven Summits” is an irrepressible obsession. Mount Everest, Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Mount Elbrus, Vinson Massif, Carstensz Pyramid ... those are the prerequisites for being considered an elite climber. They're the seven highest mountains on the world's seven continents.

"There is a queer urge in some people," Weldon Heald wrote in our August 1954 issue. “To see a mountain is to want to get to the top of it. I am one of these eccentrics with a bad case of mountainitis. The only known cure is a diet of high camps, vast panoramas and lofty summits against the blue sky."

Our writer was being seduced by the San Francisco Peaks. Turns out, there are seven summits up there, too. However, there's no club of elite mountaineers intent on climbing them. In fact, with the exception of mapmakers, forest rangers and maybe a few locals in Flagstaff, I doubt there are many Arizonans who can even name all seven. The one everyone seems to know is Humphreys Peak, the highest point in the state. The other six are Agassiz, Fremont, Doyle, Schultz, Abineau and Rees.

As a whole, Mr. Heald wrote in Arizona's Tip Top, “the San Francisco Peaks exert a special allure to mountain addicts, for they rise abrupt and isolated more than a mile above piney Coconino Plateau and they look down upon everything else in the state. Wherever one goes in the Canyon Country, each sweeping view includes the stately outline of this huge, old, peak-topped volcano, its summit snows often appearing to float in the sky like a silver cloud.” Ironically, despite the story's headline, Mr. Heald never actually writes about the highest point in the state. The “tip top.” And it's not clear whether he ever made it. He does, however, make it to the timberline, which he describes as “an exhilarating no-man's-land between the familiar world of vegetation below and the fascinating and mysterious arctic realm of rock, snow and ice of the high peaks.” “But the regions above timberline,” he adds, “are by no means as desolate as they first seem, and I came upon many diminutive gardens of bright alpine flowers, grasses and ferns in the lee of sheltering rocks. They grew only four to six inches high, and the largest covered a few square feet, but they were as lush and verdant as if they were daily cared-for and irrigated.” Although it's counterintuitive, Arizona ranks third in the nation in terms of plant diversity, with nearly 5,000 different species. Of that number, more than 800 grow in the San Francisco Peaks. To get a sense of the diversity, we sent writer Annette McGivney and photographer Eirini Pajak up the mountain. Their guide was a nontraditional botanist from Northern Arizona University.

“Glenn Rink is a guerrilla botanist,” Annette writes in Where the Wild Orchid Grows. “While more traditional scientists are in their labs, staring at computer screens and studying DNA models and species databases, Rink is out in the wild, in search of the real thing. He has a reputation among naturalists in the Southwest for hiking far and fast and for disproving widely accepted assumptions about Arizona's plants.” This trip was no different. Almost immediately, in Lockett Meadow, the guerrilla spotted an orchid, and another flower he'd never seen before. Later, they powered into the Inner Basin, where they found and photographed Franciscan bluebells, mountain monardellas and monkeyflowers. But what they really wanted to find was a graceful buttercup. “With its alluring name and delicate yellow flowers,” Annette writes, “the graceful buttercup has become something of an obsession for me. In all of Arizona, it grows only in a few places high on the San Francisco Peaks.” Mountainitis.

While Annette was searching for a holy grail in the Inner Basin, Kathy Montgomery was on the other side of the mountain, on the western flank of the San Francisco Peaks, seeking out another unique plant. Hers, however, was easy to find.

For more than two decades, Hart Prairie Preserve has protected what is thought to be the world's largest and southernmost grove of Bebb willows. The Nature Conservancy, which owns the preserve, first learned about the bushy trees in the early 1980s. Back then, the prairie was owned by Dick Wilson, who, as a dutiful steward of the land, agreed to protect the plants. Then, in 1994, he took it a step further and donated the entire property to The Nature Conservancy.

In Hart Is Where the Home Is, you'll learn more about the willows, and also the colorful human history of Hart Prairie, which served at different times as a hunting ground, a potato farm, a sheep pasture, a cattle ranch, a stagecoach stop and the state's first Arabian horse breeding facility. Today, it's mostly quiet. A living laboratory where a lucky few get to sit in Adirondack chairs, watch the seasons change and contemplate the seven summits of the San Francisco Peaks. It's a remarkable experience. But it's risky, too: To see a mountain is to want to get to the top of it. And if you sit in those chairs too long, you might come down with a bad case of mountainitis. Beware.