ORGAN PIPE

PHOTOGRAPHS HUBERT A. LOWMAN Etched against the deep velvet of an Arizona sky, the Teton-like profile of the Big Ajos becomes ebony as a golden February moon, just past the full, lifts itself majestically above their jagged horizon to take up its friendly watch over the desert night. A faint breath from the Gulf stirs the drooping branches of creosote bushes, pungent with yellow bloom. Out of a shadowy thicket of palo verde drifts the somber voice of a great horned owl, and a coyote atop the ridge lifts to the stars his tenor plea for good hunting. From beneath the protecting pads of a prickly pear a kangaroo rat ventures into the moonlit open, completes an erratic course to a clump of Indian wheat and, cheek pouches bulging, bounds back to cover.

Off to the south in Mexico, the Sierra de Cubabi have shaken off the shadows of moonrise, while to the west the Growlers and Agua Dulces stand out boldly above the wide sweep of La Abra Plain and the tangle of mesquite, cholla, ironwood, and senita that marks the wandering course of the Sonoyta Valley in its short trek across northwestern Sonora to the Gulf of California. Spring has come to Organpipe Land.

Nearly half as big as Rhode Island and larger than either of its famous national park cousins. Rocky Mountain of Colorado or Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina-Tennessee, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is our nation's finest example of arboreal desert and a winter vacationland supreme if you like nature in the rough. There are no golf courses, tile-lined swimming pools, nor orange tree-shaded lawns where you can sip a tall-and-frosty the while you loll in pampered ease. National monuments are not resorts, their purpose being to preserve and protect in a natural state nationally important areas of historic, prehistoric, or scientific wealth for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. Organ Pipe Cactus is no exception and, although its principal values are scientific, its climate and scenic attractions are not to be sneezed at. In fact, many people go to the desert just to keep from sneezing. Bright, sunny days, bracing breezes, crisp nights when the stars gleam like transplanted diamonds, wandering roads firmed by light winter rains, and a green carpet of ephemeral herbs whose springtime is the autumn and whose seeds mature in May; these add up to shirt-sleeve weather. All this is in sharp contrast to howling blizzards, ice-sheathed walks and pavements, brief gloomy days, and nights when piercing cold threatens the water pipes and empties the coal bin; a heritage of discomfort endured by northlanders during the very same months.

Gateway to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is the famed mining town of Ajo (Ah'-ho) with comfortable and growing tourist accommodations. Ajo, "garlic" in Spanish, is a name that has become attached togeographic as well as man-made objects because the Spanish pioneers found growing profusely in this valley a lily whose edible bulb reminded them of an onion. And so the valley, the spectacular range of mountains on the east, and the town became "Ajo" in tribute to the beautiful Desert Lily. Ajo is on Arizona State Highway 85 which, en route from Gila (He'lah) Bend to Tucson (Too-sahn), passes through some of the most exciting desert scenery, including the Papago Indian Reservation, in the Southwest. Twelve miles southeast of Ajo the highway forks, an all-paved branch taking you straight south across the national monument to the international boundary and Sonoyta, Mexico, thence southwestward some sixty miles to Punta Peñasca (Rocky Point if you don't savvy Mexican) on the Gulf of California whose depths, according to Edwin Corle in his book "Desert Country," "are supposed to have the greatest variety and abundance of game fish of any waters in the Western Hemisphere." But that is still another, and longer story.With Ajo as your headquarters, you can easily make daily excursions into the monument, turning from its one highway to its scores of byways, exploring its 513 square miles of rugged mountains, alluvial valleys, canyons, washes, abandoned mines, and wildflower gardens. You will find strange plants whose names you have never heard before, will see coyotes, deer, such birds as the phainopepla and cactus wren and, if you are lucky, you may come suddenly upon a drove of javelinas (have-ah-leen'-ahs) or peccaries, the wild hogs of the desert.Better yet, with trailer or bedroll, check in with the custodian of the monument, who headquarters near the highway about five miles north of the port-of-entry on the international boundary. He will give you a camping permit and offer you your choice of delightful spots like the grove of palo blancos near the mouth of Alamo Canyon or the little amphitheater below Dripping Spring. But whichever plan you follow, be sure to take along plenty of grub, extra gasoline, a shovel and bumper jack, and water. Even in winter there are hot days, and In the dry atmosphere of the desert, thirst is always just around the corner.If photography is your hobby, double the amount of color film you planned to bring, especially if your stay includes March, the month of flowers. And Sonoyta, colorful and as yet unspoiled little Mexican town, has more authentic native atmosphere to photograph than a half dozen synthetic border cities. It is four miles below the international boundary, and only 48 all-paved miles from Ajo. Oh yes, you will surely want to photograph the organ pipes!

Do I hear you asking “just what are these organ pipes, anyway?” Well, the Organ Pipe is a species of columnar cactus growing in great clumps with a dozen or two spine-covered arms some of which reach a height of 18 or 20 feet. It is the most spectacular of a great variety of sub-tropical desert plants such as the Mexican jumping bean, the leather bush, sangre de tigre, and scores of others found in abundance in Mexico but venturing into the United States only where the extreme tip of a southern life zone follows the Sonoyta Valley northward from the Gulf until it crosses the international boundary.

Although named Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument because of this particularly abundant species, the reserve actually protects from exploitation by cactus collectors, from destruction by grazing and other non-conforming uses, and from damage through commercial developments this one finger-tip of a rare biological community with its great variety of typical plants and animals.

Because the organ pipe cactus is, in this area, at the northern extremity of its range, you will find it growing only in the warmest loca-tions; those having southern exposure. Absent in the wide valleys or among the higher mountains, organ pipes cover the southern slopes of the Agua Dulces, the Sonoyta Hills, the Puerto Blanco Range, and the foothills of the Growlers and the Big Ajos. You will find it great sport to hunt for the tallest plant, the one with the most arms, or the stand where the clusters are densest; to photograph a particularly rugged specimen silhouetted against a billowy cloud or, when the sun is low so that each ridge of the great, fluted stems stands out in sharp re-lief, to capture on celluloid the atmosphere of virility and individuality expressed so eloquently by each of these magnificent plants.

But the organ pipe cactus is more than camera fodder. For centuries its fruits, and those of the giant cactus or saguaro (suh-wah'roe), have provided the Papago Indians with winter food. Blossoming in May and early June, the bulbous fruits called pitahayas ma-ture in midsummer, at which time the Papagos migrate from their villages to harvest camps. Fruits are knocked from branch tips with long poles, split open, and the juicy scarlet pulp filled with myriads of tiny black seeds is cooked in huge, clay ollas (oh'-yahs) over open fires. Some of the sweet juice is set aside to ferment making the intoxicating drink, tizwin. The remaining juice is boiled down to a thick syrup and stored away for winter use as the Papago family's principal sweet. Pulp is made into jam and marmalade, and seeds are pressed into cakes to be ground into rich, oily meal. Harvest time is fiesta time for the Papagos and, after the day's work is done, men and women gather about the fires to join in the ceremonial dances and songs of their ancestors. Cadence of gourd rattles, pulse of the drums, the rhythmic shuffle of feet keeping time to the singing chant which swells in volume and quickens in tempo as the fervor of ancient rites and the day's brew of tizwin combine to stimulate a climax of the festivities!

How long have the Indians lived in the desert? Ask the archaeologists. Recent findings of the University of Arizona in Ventana Cave on the Papago Reservation northeast of the monument, point to a civilization far older than indicated by any previous local discoveries. You can find numerous signs of early habitation on the monument; mounds resembling the game courts of the Hohokam at Casa Grande, petroglyphs and ashes in dust-dry caves, mortars and metates with shards of pottery of an ancient culture. Who knows, some day revealing discoveries may be made on the monument? Until that day when archaeologists can systematically excavate the caves and mounds, these secrets are well protected against the vandalism of commercial pothunters and the destructive carelessness of souvenir collectors.

Incongruous as it seems, this remote and almost unpopulated corner of the new world untouched even by the brilliant spotlight of war, was the scene of some of America's earliest explorations. In 1539, Esteban the Moor and de Niza the priest, followed in 1540 by Coronado and his conquistadores, passed to the east in their search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, opening the way for settlement of the Rio Grande Valley. But Melchior Diaz in 1541, on his historic journey from Altar to the Rio Colorado, must have seen the Growlers and the Ajos although there is no proof that he set foot within what is now Organ Pipe National Monument. However, the zealous Jesuit explorer-priest, Padre Kino, in 1691 established San Marcel, as a visita of Caborca Mission, near what is now the village of Sonoyta. It was Kino who brought Christianity, European sheep and cattle, and Castilian cereals and fruits to the friendly Pimas, Papagos, and Sobaipuris. Today you can follow his footsteps over the pathway he pioneered to the Colorado, a route which became, in the goldrush days, the no-torious Camino del Diablo (Highway of the Devil), its parched and dusty borders, between 1849 and 1864, strewn with the bleached bones of more than 300 emigrants and their beasts of burden. Over this same Camino in 1776 passed Captain Bautista de Anza and his followers returning from the founding of the city of San Francisco, all unmindful of the turmoil east of the Mississippi incident to the birth of a new and virile nation.

After the goldrush, the Camino was a major artery of travel from Sonora to the coast, ox-carts and mule teams followed its well-worn ruts with tons of copper ore mined in these selfsame Agua Dulces and Sonoyta Hills, and destined for the smelters of Wales in the holds of square riggers making the perilous journey around the Horn. At that time important objectives along this hot and thirsty Camino, whose dim traces you can still find today, were the dependable Rincon and Quitobaquito (Kee'-toe-bah-kee'-toe) Springs just within the southwestern corner of the national monument. Although tepid and teeming with small aquatic plants and animals, the water meant life to the parched and weary men and beasts of those crawling caravans. Today, not the water but the tiny plants and animals, attract men from great distances, biologists who find here such strange creatures as the Pursey Minnow, the females a battleship grey, the males a brilliant, flashing blue.

Following the Gadsen Purchase of 1853, which secured for the United States a low-level railroad route to the Coast, the international boundary was surveyed and posted although much of it is still unfenced.

The monument was named after the organ pipe cactus, a columnar cactus, with long arms and sometimes attaining a height of twenty feet.