THE LAND OF LOST OPPORTUNITY

IN 1932, L.C. Bolles proclaimed himself a “press agent for Paradise” in the pages of this magazine. To Bolles — a road engineer, history buff, and student of archaeology with outlandish ideas — paradise could be only one place on Earth: the White Mountains of Arizona. He proposed the creation of a new national park so tourists would see Arizona “as an immense region of magnificent forest and snow-capped mountain,” rather than as a barren desert.

It was a bold scheme. At the time, Arizona had a dozen national monuments but only one national park, Grand Canyon. Monuments, which can be created at the stroke of a presidential pen, require scientific or historical significance. Parks, established by Congress, demand something more: a kind of curb appeal. Parks need sublimity, marvel, zing.

Bolles’ proposed name, Apache Paradise National Park, acknowledged the land in question belonged to the White Mountain Apache Tribe. But he dismissed Indigenous claims — an all-too-common attitude for national park boosters in his day. He dreamed of a park not because of the area’s rich cultural history, but for its splendid scenery and picturesque wildlife.

“To me,” Bolles wrote, “the high mountains are as near to Paradise as I ever hope to attain.”
 

AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, Bolles’ dream lived and died in Arizona Highways. When I tried to trace the fate of his vision, however, I stumbled upon a hidden history of proposed parks that never made the grade — and a niche group of scholars who investigate them.

“If there is a concerted effort to make something happen and it fails — in business, anyway, and somewhat in politics — people want to know why,” geographer Lary Dilsaver says.

Dilsaver likely has collected longer lists of failed park proposals from National Park Service archives than any other historical scholar, but even his lists are incomplete. They show the 1930s were an era of park mania: That decade, the Park Service received more than 40 unique proposals for park units in Arizona alone. Some came from geologists and archaeologists hoping to protect sites of interest; others were from politicians, community groups and newspaper editors who dreamed of Depression-era tourist dollars.

The first criterion for park or monument is national significance — emphasis on national. “That’s a hard one to get by,” Dilsaver says, adding that the Park Service “turns down the vast majority” of proposals. The agency deemed unsuitable, or never investigated, dozens of schemes for Arizona parks, including the dinosaur tracks near Tuba City, the historic prison in Yuma, the town of Tombstone and a bat cave southeast of Tucson.

Obstacles remained for the few places judged worthy. The Park Service tried and failed to purchase the Winslow area’s Barringer Meteorite Crater, a site of “rare scientific interest,” from the mining company that owned it. Funding shortfalls hampered attempts to acquire the Clear Creek Ruins in the Verde Valley and a natural travertine bridge near Payson. Other ideas fizzled when tribal communities objected: Navajos stood firm against a 1933 bill that would have expanded the tiny Navajo National Monument into an enormous park, and the Hopi Tribe refused to hand over the village of Old Oraibi, where tribal members live and practice ceremonies to this day.

I find it hard not to get lost in the lists, full of tantalizing hints about dreamers, detractors and behind-the-scenes drama. By 1958, the Park Service had received 60-plus pitches for Arizona parks and given glowing reports to a dozen, but none of them succeeded. Dilsaver suggests these failures highlight the extraordinary nature of parks that did make it. Today, Arizona has 22 Park Service-managed sites, ranking it third in the nation behind California and Alaska.   
 

But not all places that achieve park status can keep it. Consider the now-defunct Papago Saguaro National Monument, the first Park Service unit in the nation to lose its status. It’s the homeland of the Maricopa and Akimel O’odham peoples and was tribal land before President Woodrow Wilson declared it a monument in 1914.

At the time, The Arizona Republican expressed high hopes. “The setting aside of this land at the present time,” it exulted, “saves to Arizona what may someday be a splendid park.”

That day never arrived. The Park Service had a paltry budget and spent hardly anything on monuments, so Tempe resident J.E. McClain became Papago Saguaro’s custodian for a token salary of $1 a year. “Last summer,” the Republican reported in 1922, “he received from the government a number of excellent signs to be erected in the park, but no posts on which to erect them.”

The lack of resources dismayed residents. Vandals and saguaro poachers had their run of the place while basic tasks went undone. That’s one explanation for why Congress delisted and sold Papago Saguaro in 1930. Joe Weber, co-author of The Parks Belong to the People: The Geography of the National Park System, offers another. “It seems like there was just a competing vision between the Park Service, who wanted to keep this area unspoiled and largely undeveloped,” he says, “and locals who thought they were going to get new facilities.”

A common perspective is that Papago Saguaro and other decommissioned parks were mistakes, unworthy of the label. Weber disagrees. “Parks are made,” he says, “and not just found.” A decade-long program called Mission 66 poured money into parks in the 1950s and ’60s, and many neglected monuments finally received roads and visitor centers. “Every park today has been developed for tourism, often so skillfully we don’t realize it,” Weber says. Had Papago Saguaro survived to the Mission 66 era, he adds, it “could have been a desert showpiece in the system today.”

The core of the old monument is now Papago Park, owned by the cities of Phoenix and Tempe. It’s home to a zoo, a botanical garden, a golf course, an archery range and trout-stocked fishing ponds. It still has the scenic beauty that caught Wilson’s eye: The reddish sandstone monoliths that rise out of cactuses and mesquites come as a welcome surprise amid the bustling hub of Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale. “It’s super cool to have the city growing and moving around us,” says longtime park ranger Cody Huggins, “but we have this little chunk of heaven in here.”

The park’s most popular spot, Hole-in-the-Rock, is a natural window once used by the Hohokam people to mark solstices and equinoxes. In a busy week, it can get up to 15,000 visitors. It’s a place to “unplug and get grounded again,” Huggins says. Still, as in many parks, it’s a struggle to balance the area’s popularity with preservation. Near the pyramid-shaped tomb of Governor George W.P. Hunt, Huggins gestures to young cactuses that volunteers have planted in a patch of trampled dirt.

“We’re all about sustainability, too,” he says. “I want my grandkids’ grandkids to be able to come here.”
 

AFTER THE LOSS of Papago Saguaro National Monument, Park Service officials began to search for another area to preserve a pristine piece of the Sonoran Desert. They found it in Southern Arizona’s borderlands, a place some said constituted the true heart of the desert: wickedly hot and home to plants even

Dr. Seuss would find bizarre, such as organ pipe cactuses, elephant trees and crucifixion thorns. Here lay El Camino del Diablo, the road tramped by Spanish missionaries and California gold seekers, and here threaded the older pathways of O’odham people who journeyed south for salt and shells until the U.S. government banned the pilgrimage.

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set aside 330,000 acres of this land as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument over the objections of miners and ranchers. Prospecting and some cattle ranching, including by an O’odham family, continued. Some Arizonans wanted to end those activities and elevate the monument to a park, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall endorsed this dream in 1966, calling for a “Sonoran Desert National Park” sized at an impressive 1.2 million acres.

Hunters opposed the idea, as did some hikers and wildlife advocates who wanted the area to remain isolated — free of “litterbugs, vandals or $7 stickers,” as one journalist put it. Advocates, though, spun visions of an astounding international park in which Americans and Mexicans could travel freely. “There probably would have been some lively discussion,” Udall said in an oral history. But the debate sputtered out when Congress quietly let the bill drop, and President Lyndon B. Johnson rejected the backup idea of enlarging the monument.

I have to wonder if the strangeness of the landscape played a role. Even those who advocated for Sonoran Desert National Park struggled to give it a description that would appeal to politicians. “Weird” was a word used by Weldon Heald, a Tucson naturalist and longtime Arizona Highways contributor who investigated the area; others he used included “inhospitable,” “brooding” and “barren.” And The Arizona Republic headlined an article about the proposal “A Land of Death.”

Dreams of an international park never died, but Bill Broyles, who led a revival of that effort in the 1990s, says that today, “Virtually every conservation group, every sportsman group or outdoor group, is focused on saving parks, monuments, refuges, forests, wilderness areas and public lands.”

Sanober Mirza, Arizona program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, says the current era is one of defending what exists, rather than proposing new parks. Last year, for example, a list of national monuments under federal review for their energy potential included two in Arizona, Ironwood Forest and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — both of which are under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management, not the Park Service.

“But we do work outside of our parks, because our parks are not islands,” Mirza adds. “They are connected to the greater landscape.”

That greater landscape includes all those places that failed to reach park status. One or two have been drastically altered by dams or vandalism, but few are truly lost. They’re now city, county or state parks; wilderness areas; wildlife refuges; and private or tribal tourist attractions. Some are tiny, others vast. They include caves and canyons, forests and deserts, entire mountains, cliff dwellings, military forts, a church and a courthouse. Each one had a champion who loved it enough to believe it belonged among the nation’s “crown jewels.”

That strikes me as the most worthwhile lesson to take away from failed park proposals. “There are these places that are known around the world, like Grand Canyon,” Mirza says, “but there are so many little corners of Arizona that only Arizonans know.” They all have a story. Perhaps they all deserve storytellers — or, as L.C. Bolles put it, “press agents for Paradise.”