SABINO CANYON

Entrance to Sabino Canyon is between the walls of Santa Catalina Mountains. Road drops to the canyon floor before starting climb.

Sabino

Story and Photographs by By LANDWEHR and LANDWEHR Just a stone's throw from Tucson is Sabino Canyon, play ground deluxe, and all free. Other cities have their lakes and amusement parks, but Tucsonians are luckier. They may combine the pleasures of swimming, picnicking and hiking with the grandeur of mountain beauty.

In the canyon, which lies between mountain peaks of the Santa Catalina range, an exciting road has been built as part of a national forest. It winds around and up the mountains its sometimes precarious way, ending a thousand feet from the top. Motors are usually panting. and individuals holding their breaths or screaming, depending on their mental and intestinal fortitude and individual character, by the time the top is reached. Some, who no doubt possess mountain goat blood in part, finish the climb on foot by the trail that snakes about mesquite and boulders. It's a hard way, and most are content to sit and peer cautiously over the edge of the cliff and regard the heights and rocks with speculative eyes.

The park is complete with mountain stream which in summer runs with rains, in winter with melted snows. The forest service has bridged it and dammed it, and you may splash through picturesque fords, or sit on the bridges and dangle your feet in the water. Whirl-pools and quiet pools, rapids and plain stream curl and twist around huge boulders and varicolored poplar trees. The boulders, striated with blacks and reds, play host to sun seeking humans who stretch themselves like so many lizards to soak up the tan for which Arizona is famous.

Canyon

If you can take your eyes from the scenery long enough, you may eat your picnic lunch at one of the nooks equipped with tables and fireplace. Or if you prefer, you may take over a natural table of rock under a tree and munch your lunch.

People come to the canyon with bows and arrows, cots and lean-to shelters as well as lunches, bathing suits and inner tubes to spend the day. They bring their cameras, for Sabino is a snap-shooter's paradise. There is the quiet of a woodland nook, branches drooping over the stream, with only the prickly pear to remind you that the desert is just over the nearest height and down again. There is the majesty of rock and cloud to capture.

There is a lot of pleasure in hiking and climbing, swimming and sunning, and in just plain "setting" Sabino, with its beauty is the perfect place to enjoy them. Here desert meets the mountains.