PALMS OF THE KOFAS

Palms of the Kofas! How melodious the words! Their lorelei name engages the ear of the wanderer, drawing him into the remote rincons of the precipitous Kofas; enchanting him alternately with green fans shining in the sun or silhouetting darkly in the rose shadows.In a distant time, many Arizona canyons were palm filled, but ever changing climatic and geological conditions have persistently bitten away at the virgin groves until, in all the state, only the Kofa palms remain, a present day testimonial of a moister, more verdant period.

The Kofa Palms are known as Washingtonia filifera, closely related to those at Palm Springs, California, and those found in scattered stands along the northern and western portions of the Salton Sea Basin of the Colorado Desert, the southern margins of the Mohave Desert, Yuma country and Baja California. Their source is obscure but they are believed to have come from the Pacific coast of Baja California north of Ensenada.

The trunks are from fifty to eighty feet in height and eight to sixteen inches in diameter above the base. The bark is less deeply fissured and the leaf blades less frayed along the edges than the California variety. This well known tree of the southwestern deserts has long been under cultivation in California and throughout the world; when not desecrated by fire or vandals, the densely thatched trunks provide deep shade comparable to tropical forest conditions.

The Kofa Mountains lie in the extreme west central portion of the state about midway between Yuma and Parker, some twenty-five miles east of the Colorado River.

It is a wild and lonely stretch of country, divorced from agriculture or stock raising, towns and the usual tourist attractions. Great sweeps of the surrounding desert are literally erally pebbled with volcanic stones whose flat, shining surfaces appear and shine as pavement in the sunlight. The Kofas, themselves many-hued, volcanic upthrusts of desolate rock, rise steeply above the sloping plain and have been made a national wild-life refuge for the protection of the rare bighorn sheep inhabiting that wilderness area.

On the map the Kofas are designated as the S. H. Mountains, a colloquialism applied to them by early prospectors who noticed the slant top of one of the serrated pinnacles resembled the little house in back before the days of inside plumbing. The more dignified name Kofa is a contraction of the name "King of Arizona," a mine which in the '90s provided its owners with one of the richest gold strikes in the state and permanently named the mountains in which it is located.

The trail to the palms begins at a box canyon in the western face of the range, passes a five hundred foot cliff at the base of which is a wallowed-out ledge that provides a bedding ground for the bighorn sheep. On passing the ledge, the trail swings sharply up to where the palms can then be seen-not on the canyon floor where one would suppose they could find water, but almost three-quarters of the distance to the top. The trail starts at the 1800 foot elevation; the palms start their skyward march at 2500 feet.

There is no free-running water apparent in the Kofa canyons; perhaps there are springs close to the top. At any rate, all the palms in all the crevices are found growing far up the canyons and only a short way down from the crest. Palm Canyon, in which the largest grove is located, is more of a deep wrinkle in the mountain face than a canyon; not more than thirty feet wide at the most and narrowing to half that distance toward the top, a slash in solid rock.

The trail, and I use the word as loosely as the rock that sloughs off with every step, is no wider than a thin man's skeleton and the seven hundred foot winding climb from where the trail narrows is vertical and slow. Ascending, your nose almost scrapes rock; looking back, your heels edge eternity.

Sun in the canyon lasts only a few hours at noon, during which time the rock walls act as a fireless cooker, retaining the heat and making it possible for the palms to exist in what would otherwise seem to be too cold an altitude.

When the sun leaves the canyon, the angry wind slaps the fans, producing the sound of tropical rain; the talltrunks, assaulted by intermittent gusts, alternately sway and steady again as the gusts pass; the green fans tremble, dark in the canyon gloom.

The last picture I saw as we slid and wound down the trail was the enormous face of the red granite wall; the palms, like green-hatted, grass-cloaked ladies, climbing in stately procession their sliver of canyon to the sky.

How strange that in all the rocky expanse-forbidding, apparently waterless, inaccessible, almost vertical-this remnant growth of natural palms should literally cling to life and habitat long after its family members have left the desert scene for all time.

YOURS SINCERELY

Dick Wick Hall of Salome, in an earlier day, dug humor and wit and laughter out of the desert. Harry Oliver is doing it today and we sure hope no old-age pension is going to stop him from digging. Anyway, old desert rats don't stop. They just get older and older and older and then show up finally haunting old ghost towns.

Ways carry bottles of this pure gall with them wherever they are, day or night. It never seems to spoil or lose its potency, though where we are the temperature is almost constantly between 100-110 degrees F. and it rains almost every day from November to May, and about once a week from May to November. Usually three drops of the pure gall is diluted in a cup of tepid water and taken orally. Later this is repeated. The Indians say that much more than three drops at a time would kill a person. They never do anything to the gall to make it last, just empty the gall bladder into a bottle and stopper it with resin. I can't say for sure what the limitations of this remedy are, or whether it works for every kind of snake bite. Nor do I feel in a position to experiment on the subject. But I do know that we have almost every kind of snake there is, and I know the Indian is not dying from snake bites, though he is bitten just as much as ever before, and he never bites and sucks the bite, nor will use any other remedy or manipulation whatsoever. I thought you might be interested.

Elvin M. Douglass Long Beach, California

Hilda O'Hendricksen Fresno, California

HOT DAY COMING

The orchestra of morning Can be heard By anyone who wakens: Flute of bird, Harp of breeze, Drum of bee, And fiddle note of branch In willow tree.

The backdrop of the sky And of the hills Is blue and red and purple; Rock wren trills, Cricket sings, Day's begun Beneath the swelling brasses Of the sun.

LOSS

I have seen blue moonlight caught in broken glass like minnows quivering against fast water; I have felt warm laughter bounce off chilly plaster walls and be a touch of life; I have heard the windsong singing in pine forests where such music is and is a memory; I have smelled flash rain pounding out of thunder to irritate earth's latent pungency; And I have held and lost these precious things to find them all again when I see yesterday in faces of today.

BISBEE

Bisbee's a peculiar townOne goes uphill and then goes down; Built in a canyon, tiered, so that A neighbor's roof is one's doormat.

THE STORM

The thunder caps were lazy against the blue, Their beauteous forms beyond imagining; The flight of frightened birds on hurried wing Presaged a storm of deep and ominous hue; When suddenly a clap of thunder rolled Like Rip Van Winkle's bowling in the dell, And lightning split the sky; a great tree fell, Its glorious heart all rent and fearsome cold. The jet black dome which gathered o'er the earth Let down its awesome torrent till it seemed As though the safe, sure ark that Noah dreamed Was not enough to float on this storm's girth. When suddenly it passed with muffled tread, And left a rainbow in my flower bed.

BACK COVER

"BEAVER LODGE" BY WILLIS PETERSON. Photographed on the Little Colorado, about one quarter mile below Sheep Crossing, with a 32x4% Speed Graphic, Ektar f/4.7 lens, one second at f.16 on Ektachrome. Here, all because of the beaver, is an idyllic trout pool, surrounded by lush grass, with wildflowers glistening with dew in the early morning sun. Beavers do much to beautify the mountains. "ANYBODY AT HOME?" BY WILLIS PETERSON. Yes, there's a beaver family living here. As the beaver and his family continue to live in the lodge, they heap on more mud and poles. Vegetation takes root and grows on the dome-like structure. You can tell by the vegetation on the lodge (right) many a family has lived here. Photographed four miles from Greer in the White Mountains of Arizona.

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