It’s the Climate

Arizona has a winter sun land approximately 400 miles wide and 150 miles deep, which provides one of the world's greatest, and vastest winter play areas from October to the first of June. There is also a vaster area in the mountain regions where summertime is playtime.

"All right, so what?" asks Mr. Tourist, looking over the airlines, railroads, buslines, and gasoline companies tourist material. That's a fair description of the quantity. What Mr. Tourist wants to know is, "How's the quality?"

There are several ways to describe the quality. For instance, the old familiar Description by Comparison: Southern Arizona has more than 90 percent of the possible sunshine. Is there any other habitable area in America which can claim such a record? The Weather Bureau says not.

Furthermore, the humidity is low almost to the vanishing point. Now that will let you take off your shirt and sun bathe on a sunny Christmas Day, and will make you put on a topcoat several hours later when night has fallen and the star-filled sky looks down on you through the thinnest sort of blanket of crisp, rare atmosphere.

You'll love the tingle of de-humidified air in your lungs. If you need such a climate, you'll thank God it's Here for you to have. If you're a thousand percent sound and healthy, you'll thank God you're so healthy that you don't miss a bit of the fun in the sun Southern Arizona offers.

"When precipitation, humidity, temperature, wind, and sunshine are considered collectively, Arizona has one of the most remarkable climates to be found in the United States," writes H. V. Smith, weatherman at Tucson.

It is a climate for horseback riding, with the breeze billowing out one's shirt and blowing through one's hair.

Or for swimming. There will be days when only the hardier swimmers will venture into a pool. But I have swum on every day of the year in Tucson and never have felt more exhilarated than right after a Christmas Day plunge.

Or for motoring. One of the few disadvantages with being a longtime permanent resident of Arizona is that in the winter I am generally pretty heavily occupied work-ing for a living. So I do not get a chance to travel around as much as I would like to but Arizona roads are marvelous all-year around, and particularly in the fall and the spring.

Or for hiking. The experience of walking along the floor of the desert, of climbing through the foothills to the chill summits, and of returning to the warmth of the lower altitudes again after the thrill of poising on the peaks, is something you will have to live through to know. Or for tennis. We play on concrete courts in Arizona, and they are a little faster than clay. Also, we play all the year around. In fact, a brisk winter day-with the temperature perhaps as low as 72 (you'll find that marked "Summer Heat" on the old, old thermometers of a bygone era)-is ideal for a fast set of tennis, badminton, ping pong, or any other of a dozen such sports. Statistics need not be lifeless things, if they pertain to the Arizona sun. Let us return for a moment to what the United States Weather Bureau has to say about Tucson, Douglas, and Phoenix. All three places have high temperatures in the eighties in October, when the winter season starts; these highs slip a little to the seventies by midwinter, and pull back up to the eighties again by late March or early April. While the highs in May get up sometimes to the hundreds, most of the time May and even June have only moderately warm days and crisp nights. I have slept under a comforter and a sheet as late as the 27th of June in Phoenix; and I have worn a topcoat between 2 a. m. and dawn one Aug ust night in Tucson when I was sitting still, observing a shower of Perseid meteors. And my wife and I have piled wood on to a steak-broiling bed of coals so that a real flame would spring up, on a June 12 evening in Phoenix that was cool enough so that a light wrap felt very comfortable. Wickenburg, Nogales, Yuma, and Cottonwood, which represent centers of activities in the sun country, can boast (and can show records to prove their boast) of superb winter climates. Fun in the Sun doesn't mean all laziness, all enerva tion. Nor does it mean all Eager Beavering every moment, with the whole body in a high state of electric tension be cause of the extreme vitality of the sun's rays. Fun in the Sun in Southern Arizona means having just the right proportion of sunshine and darkness, of dazzling days and of days when people are happy for an opportunity to sit indoors while a half inch of rain falls gently over a four-hour period. The latter is all too rare for us old-timers; but I have heard one New Yorker state that he didn't give a darn. He liked lots of sunshine and even the occasional rain wasn't necessary for his happi ness. True, there is (as you would gather from the start of this story) more than the normal sunshine. For winter rains are rare, indeed, in Southern Arizona; and most of the scanty rainfall comes in the summertime.

It's the Climat

The cities and counties of Southern Arizona recognize that tourists, and their own people, are entitled to have places where they can enjoy this marvelous midwinter climate. There are public parks in every community of any size. Phoenix maintains its huge South Mountain Park, filled with sun-drenched riding paths and picnic grounds, including several at a summit which is more than 1700 feet above the floor of the valley. Pima county has Colossal Cave Park and Old Tucson Park, the former a stalactite-stalagmite cave, with picnic spots nearby, located about 25 miles east of Tucson; and the latter a movie setting used for Clarence Budington Kelland's "Arizona," located a half dozen miles west of Tucson. Cochise county has the Wonderland of Rocks (Chiricahua National Monument), which entices tourists the year around, including sometimes for skiing.

Among the people seeking Fun in the Sun is that particular breed known as the Sun Loafer. He is a revered and honored character in Arizona's sun country. His habitat generally is an enclosed backyard, or a foothill on the southern slope of a range of mountains, or a rooftop, or just a plain patch of desert.

For a time some years ago I lived and I wish to emphasize that word lived on a 200-acre homestead about a dozen miles northeast of Tucson, in the foothills of the Catalina mountains. This homestead was shared for a time by a friend who was seeking relief from respiratory troubles. I say, with no offense to him, that he was lazy enough anyhow, as most of us old-time Arizonans are; and he used his illness as an excuse to indulge his laziness. Well, I never saw a man who obtained quite so thorough a coat of gorgeous tan, or who knew better in the way a Thoreau would know them the birds and bees and coyotes and jackrabbits of the foothills. The sun and the out-ofdoor life he led restored his health. He let nature take her course with him.

I remember we used to set a thermometer in the sun, on winter days that were cool enough so that I took a topcoat to work (I was working at night). The thermometer would climb past 100, with us muttering all the while that it wasn't really a fair test because, after all, it was in a shaded place in the sun-but weren't we, too? At night the thermometer would hang in the night wind on our front porch, and the mercury would drop to the thirties. That's quite a range.

By the way, that difference between sun and shade is something every visitor remarks on. Having grown up in Arizona, I took it for granted, until one day a Pennsylvanian said to me that the thing he would remember longest about Arizona was how bountifully warm it could get in the sun in the wintertime, and how chilled to the marrow a man could be on that same day and at that same hour if he sat in the shade.

There are many technical aspects in telling all of this-Arizona's position in the so-called Sonoran Desert; Arizona's relation to the great thermal "low" (Weather Bureau term) which hangs constantly over the southern and western part of the state and which accounts for so many completely cloudless and satisfyingly warm days; Arizona's relationship to the Rockies, the High Sierras, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf of California; and other such things. But better than all the technical aspects in the world is the ability to enjoy what this superb climate, from October to June, offers you in out-door living.