Incredible Arizona

Out of the half-light in the lee of a sprawling range of low, barren hills trudged a boy and a burro, and ranging in front of them scampered a dog, exploring the brush for rabbits and flushing an occasional startled bird from a bush. There was no other human for miles around.

It was the hour after daybreak. A great husky sun rolled from the eastern horizon turning the little wisps of cloud that hung overhead a molten gold that merged into pinks and lavender and purple toward the south and west. A gentle breeze was stirring and such life as the desert supports was awakening to a new day on the high plateau of Northern Arizona.

Out of the half-light in the lee of a sprawling range of low, barren hills trudged a boy and a burro, and ranging in front of them scampered a dog, exploring the brush for rabbits and flushing an occasional startled bird from a bush. There was no other human for miles around. Save for his dog and the burro, the boy was alone in an isolation that was unbroken by any sound except the sough of the wind and the twitter of flitting birdlife.

As far as the eye could reach stretched desolate sandy land, with here and there an intruding hill, equally as forbidding, or a low ridge of stratified rock sliced out by the erosion of ages. All this broad panorama now, in the early sunlight, was a welter of color, from white to pinks to browns, from mauve to vermilion, and back again through the cycle, with spots of deep gray and purple where the shadows from clouds and hills lay over the floor of the valleys.

It was before the day had worn on to the hour when the brilliant rays of the semi-tropic sun begin to bear down with the vigor that brings on that unbelievable glare of a Southwestern midday and the morning colors give way to dead flat browns and glazy heat waveswhen the desert grows formidable, harsh and cruel to all who encounter its rapidly changing moods and whimsies.

The Northern Arizona wastelands were neither forbidding nor formidable on this late summer morning in the year of 1934 to the boy and his dog and his burro. All was well in their world and they were supremely contented. For Everett Reuss was by choice a wanderer of the wilderness. All, or nearly all, of his adult life, four years out of his twenty, he had roamed alone through the hills and desert and forests of Northern Arizona.

He was a poet and a painter, a child of comfortable circumstance, a product of city life who, like many another of his kind, had been irresistibly drawn from the classroom and the games and the social affairs that other

All this broad panorama now, in the sunlight, was a welter of color, from white to pinks and browns; mauve to vermilion incredible Arizona.

southeast. The region to the north of this line is a high plateau of essentially flat-lying strata, disturbed only here and there by local breaks and volcanic eruptions. The country to the south is formed of tilted fault blocks of both simple and complex structure that account for a great succession of mountain ranges and intervening valleys, falling in places almost to the level of the ocean.

The northern plateau comprises expansive desert to heavily-wooded plains ranging in altitude from 4,300 to 9,000 feet above sea level, and cut by the deep, sharpsided canyons of the Colorado River system. Along the diagonal line of severance this plateau terminates in a range of raggedly indented cliffs that rise abruptly from a few hundred to 1,500 feet above the country below, known to geographers as the Mogollon Rim. Through the heart of the plateau the Colorado River since Cenozoic time has excavated hundreds of cubic miles of solid rock to form the Grand Canyon, the world's deepest chasm, which in its mile of depth and 12 miles of width itself harbors a number of miniature mountain ranges, a distinctive climate of its own and vegetation which resembles the Sonora type of Northern Mexico and the extremely low Southern Arizona valleys.

South of the Grand Canyon lies a 3,000 square mile area of volcanic rocks extending across the plateau and over the Mogollon escarpment. North of Flagstaff are to be found many ancient volcanic cones, the greatest of which is San Francisco Mountain, the most prominent landmark of the Southwestern States, heavily wooded with pine trees and rising to an elevation of 12,611 feet above sea level.

Thirty-five miles east of Flagstaff is Meteor Crater, a great bowl shaped depression 4,000 feet in diameter and 600 feet deep, encircled by a narrow ridge that rises 120 to 160 feet above the plateau surface, formed, most geologists believe, by the impact of a giant meteor, though others contend that it is merely the pock-mark left by a volcanic steam explosion.

Between the two lies Sunset Crater, so named by Maj. or J. W. Powell, early Arizona explorer who made the first boat trip down the Colorado through the gorge of the Grand Canyon, because "when seen from a distance in the setting sun the bright red cinders (descending from the crest of the cone) seem to be on fire," giving it a golden glow like sunset.

Arizona is widely known as a desert state but, land of contrasts, along the edges and in the breaks of the Northern Plateau grows the world's largest virgin forest of Ponderosa pine, and luxuriant smaller vegetation of many varieties carpets the slopes of the mountain and valleys.

When precipitation, humidity, temperature, wind and sunshine are considered collectively Arizona has, perhaps, the most remarkable climate to be found in the Nation. Compared with 40 to 70 per cent for most other parts of the United States, and 60 to 70 per cent in Florida, this state's annual sunshine, as reported by four official weather observation stations, runs from 73 to nearly 90 per cent of the possible maximum.

Yet Arizona, with all its sunshine and its world renowned for heat and dryness, is not all hot and not all dry. In season and section it is quite the contrary. Yuma receives but 3.10 inches of rain per year and Parker only 5.35; but Crown King, in almost the exact geographical center of the state, receives an average of 32.42 inches of moisture per annum.

Parker has recorded a high temperature of 127 degrees, Yuma 119 and Phoenix 118, while lows of 12, 20, 25 and 32 degrees below zero have been recorded at Prescott, Holbrook, Flagstaff and Chinle respectively.

Phoenix expects a high temperature of 110 or 112 in the summer and a low of 27 or 28 at least once in the winter. The mean maximum temperatures at Flagstaff correspond almost exactly with the mean minimum temOn this pleasant morning the boy wriggled out of his bedroll, kicked out his campfire and trudged off, toward the far horizon. (Josef Muench.) peratures at Yuma. In the lower valleys, land of paradox, house flies are scarcest in the middle of the summer and most numerous and stickiest in the middle of winter. A comparison of mean annual temperatures reveals that Mohawk, Arizona, is similar in temperature to Miami, Florida, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tucson is comparable with Mobile, Alabama, and Lima, Peru; Flagstaff with Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Toronto, Canada; Bright Angel Ranger Station with Glacier Park and Leningrad, Russia. A world tour, climatically, all within a radius of 200 miles.

Take your map of Arizona and lay it on the table before you. Close your eyes, as I did, and put your index finger on the map. It comes to rest near Flagstaff. (For the purpose any other point of the state would serve as well).

With dividers set to the scale of miles, describe a fifty mile circle around Flagstaff. In that circle what do you find?

San Francisco Mountain, highest peak in the Southwest, snow-capped the greater part of the year and scene of many winter sports; Sunset Crater; the Ice Caves; Sycamore Canyon; part of the Painted Desert; the Dinosaur Tracks, footprints in the sandstones of a long extinct reptilian monster; the Pumpkin Patch, petrified pumpkins covered and uncovered through the ages by the shifting desert sands; Tuba City, Western Navajo Indian Agency and trading post; the Great Falls of the Little Colorado; Moenkopi, one of the ten villages of the Hopi which were the Cities of Cibola of the Conquistadores; Mormon Lake; Meteor Crater; Tonto Natural Bridge; Oak Creek Canyon; Montezuma's Well, bottomless natural cistern which supplied the native savages with water through countless centuries; Montezuma's Castle, Tuzigoot Ruins and Wupatki National Monument, imposing ancient cliff dwellings and pueblo cities mysteriously deserted by their peoples centuries before the Spaniards came; the picturesque mining camp of Jerome, insecurely perched upon its mountain side; Bill Williams Mountain, legendary burial place of Old Bill Williams, most colorful of the many colorful characters of the early Southwest.

Here is splendor, beauty, grandeur; here is romance and history, suspense and drama in the fullest measure. Do you wonder that artists like Everett Reuss, wanderers of the wilderness like Bill Williams and Kit Carson and Leroux, explorers like Powell and Whipple, and pioneers like Jacob Hamblin sought it out?

We pass the names lightly, but each of those men and many others equally as celebrated spent the better years of their lives here, not for any measure of personal gain but because they loved it, because they were enthralled by its grandeur and its splendor and its mystery, because it presented dangers and adventures as gripping as any that could be dreamed up by a Stevenson or a Dumas. Widely differing by nature and in character,

Old Bill quit the ministry and dropped out of sight, a trait that became a habit in the forthcoming years. He went to live among the Indians of the Osage Nation, and in search of solace took to whiskey and to squaws. The inevitable involvements drove him out, and he drifted westward into Colorado and north New Mexico where he joined up with the Utes and acquired more squaws. There he dwelt in relative quiet and opulence until one day his conscience, spurred by a brand of liquor that was none too good, goaded him into informing the soldiers at Taos that a party of his Ute brethren was about to abandon the righteous ways of peace and move out upon the ugly path of war. Then he sobered up and realized what he'd done. He had exiled himself from his happy home. He couldn't go back. The Utes passed sentence in absentia, and Old Bill sadly gathered up his long rifle and his traps and resumed his westward trek. In succeeding years he trapped for beaver along all the water courses of the Northern Arizona plateau. For months on end, alone save for an occasional few days with a chance acquaintance whose trail he crossed, he would tend his traps and treat his furs, then with three or four thousand dollars worth of pelts in his pack he would return to Taos and convert his take into cash. which he forthwith expended with a lavish hand. From barrels in the public square whiskey flowed freely for all who cared to come and drink, and the brothels got a prodigious play. Finally, broke and disconsolate, Old Bill Williams would borrow money for new traps and a fresh outfit, and return to the beaver country to recoup his fortune and regain his self respect. When General John C. Fremont set out to find a short route to the Pacific through the formidable Sangre de Cristo passes, he chose Bill Williams for his guide. Caught in early snowfall, the expedition almost perished. On their rescue and return to Taos, Fremont unjustly blamed Old Bill for leading them astray. Again the Williams pride was sorely hurt and Old Bill once more dropped out of sight, headed westward toward the beaver streams, never to return again. What happened no one knows. There were many stories of his end, but none with sufficient proof to authenticate the tale. Old Bill just didn't come back. That, briefly, is Arizona - as it was in the beginning and as it is today. I wonder if there is any other place in the world that affords so many surprises, so many paradoxes, so much human interest, so many strange contrasts. I do not believe there is. Land of the unexpected, it is a region of capricious but incomparable cli mate, unbelievable grandeur, exceeding beauty and amaz ing people. Incredible Arizona!