A Journey To Autumn

Water and lacing slopes of green forest with their captive sunshine.

Every open meadow is trimmed with the clear shining yellow, lightly strung on branches that white trunks hold aloft. If you stop to gather a few of the well-spent coins, the secret of their everlasting movement is not hard to fathom. Each one is hinged on a leafstalk long and flat, a pivot for any breeze to whirl in whispering dance to the accompaniment of music among the pines and firs that now serve as foils to the aspen's almost blinding brilliance.

At this time, too, usually the end of September into the first half of October, the aspens are "gilding the lily" of forest beauty in other highlands as well.

Driving south on U.S. 89 in southern Utah, the pageant of shades may be followed (with some pleasant detours) on the flanks of Cedar and Boulder Mountains, often picking their way over high rolling rangeland between picturesque "worm fences," of aspen-wood.

The drive from Cedar City up to Cedar Breaks is superb at this time of year. For miles and miles, clear to the faintly seen towers of Zion, yellow banners carry the season's motif, bright against conifer interludes. Here and at Bryce Canyon, individual specimens accent the amazing tints of the Pink Cliffs, vying for attention with carved statuary and erosion-chiseled pinnacles. Just so would a painter have them, without the need of improving on Nature for a perfect composition.

Farther south, Zion National Park is celebrating in highland and along the Virgin River with the flame of maple and warm yellows of cottonwood and sycamore and willow.

In Kanab Canyon, just before he reaches the town, the driver comes suddenly upon a seldom-mentioned miniature setting, cut from a roadside cliff. Maples crowd together for a startling mass of undiluted red against the rosy fretted towers that have as backdrop the blue sky.

The highway, when it enters Arizona over the Prismatic Plains and mounts to the Kaibab Plateau, comes into the world's largest stand of virgin western yellow pine, marching in open ranks for three hundred miles to the southeast. In our fall days, the gracious ponderosa seems to move back politely and give the younger, more volatile aspen the limelight.

Where U.S. 89 turns to drop desertward, State 67 heads on toward the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, every curve of its 44-mile run softened by gleaming cohorts, rows and groves-rivers of aspen.

Sometimes the leaves turn to orange or even red, as a pleasing variant on the burnished yellow, and when the late sun catches them through forest or vale opening, they take on tints hard to put word to. Look skyward in a group of these trees, straight up into the woven pattern on bending branches, through which the light seeps, and tell me what you would call the blended tones of luminous leaf and azure sky.

Another sixty to seventy miles of park roads ribbon down to the edge of the North Rim for wonderful look-outs. On the way to Cape Royal and Point Imperial, one almost suspects that reserves of aspens have been called up to make these solid effects. Surely the summer muster was less than Autumn boasts.

Around the quiet circle of Greenland Lake, the trees bend in the breeze, the better to admire their dainty

NOTES FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS A Camera Adventure in the Highlands of Southern Utah and Arizona in Fall OPPOSITE PAGE

"FOLLOWING AUTUMN DOWN THE ROAD" BY TAD NICHOLS. 4x5 Gundlach View camera; Ektachrome; 13.5 cm. Zeiss Tessar lens; early October; afternoon sunlight; ASA rating 24. This scene looking toward the San Francisco Peaks is along one of the little Forest Service roads that lead off of the Hart Prairie Road, about fifteen miles northwest of Flagstaff.

FOLLOWING PAGES

"CANYON AUTUMN COLOR CASCADE" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof camera; Ektachrome; f.16 at 1/15th sec.; 6" Xenar lens; October; sunny day. Taken in Grand Canyon National Park from along the park road near Pt. Imperial. Aspens set among fir, spruce and pine just off the Rim stand in a bowl of color, against the impressive rock formations seen so vividly from the North Rim.

"BRIGHT AUTUMN DAY-SOUTHERN UTAH" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof camera; Ektachrome; f.16 at 1/10oth sec.; 6" Xenar lens; end of September; sunny day. Taken along U.S. 89 north of Kanab, Utah. The Pink Cliffs formations here make a background for the brilliant red of the maple, a miniature setting of startling beauty. Southern Utah, a treasure house of scenic splendor, is most colorful in autumn. The area and Northern Arizona show off autumn at her best.

"AUTUMN-ZION NATIONAL PARK" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Graphic View camera; f.16 at 1/10th sec.; 8" Goerz Dagor lens; late October; sunny day. Taken in Zion National Park down in the canyon carved out by the Virgin River. The canyon walls are cut into many individual formations. Here are shown Mt. Spry (left) and the East Temple, their red sandstone facades soaring above autumn's yellow down along the river. The trees are cottonwoods.

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"AUTUMN SCENE ALONG THE SONOITA" BY RAY MANLEY.. 5x7 Linhof camera; Anscochrome; f.18 at 1/25th sec.; 8½" Symar lens; Thanksgiving day, 1958; clear bright sun, strong cross light; 400 meter reading; film rated at ASA 25. Taken near Patagonia in Santa Cruz County, just north of the Circle Z Guest Ranch. The photographer says: "Here each fall, which is about the middle of November, the cottonwoods turn brilliant yellow and for the past three years we have spent a delightful Thanksgiving afternoon at this beautiful spot."

"AUTUMN-BILL WILLIAMS MOUNTAIN" BY SCOTT HAYDEN. 4x5 Graphic View II camera; daylight Ektachrome; f.8 at 1/50th sec.; 150mm. Schneider Xenar lens; October; hazy bright; 15 foot-candles on GE meter; ASA rating 12. Picture was taken looking southward from the edge of the road up Bill Williams Mountain at a point 5.6 miles from the entrance gate off the Perkinsville road, or 2 mile above the Forest Service sign, "Chimney Rock Vista." It is about 1½ miles from the top of the peak. At this time of year on Bill Williams Mountain the frost-nipped foliage of the deciduous vegetation glows with incandescence like the end of an iron bar pulled from the forge. The dark greens of the spruces and firs, especially when backlighted, make the yellows and oranges of the oaks and aspens stand out with contrast so great that the whole scene seems to simmer with heat waves, and the eyes blur and swim before such an assault of primitive color. The camera is capable of capturing some of the color of this scene, but it is a feeble and helpless instrument for conveying the tremendous height and the sweep of open forest country which stretches out at the foot of the mountain.

"ASPEN SLOPES IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Graphic View camera; Ektachrome; f.22 at 1/5th sec.; 5½" Tessar lens; middle of October; sunny day. The photographer as well as sightseer is well advised to take to the byways in autumn, where he will find scenes like this along some little road hard to pinpoint. The aspen tree is the great color bearer of the West in autumn, where it glows against the dark greens of the conifers. The photograph was taken in the White Mountains. "AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON" BY FRANK PROCTOR. 4x5 Speed Graphic Pacemaker camera; Ektachrome; f.22 at 1/10th sec.; 203mm. Ektar lens; second week in October, 1958; bright day. Taken along the slope of the San Francisco Peaks near Hart's Prairie, not far from the water tank which can be seen in the picture. Going back to the same scene every year, a scene that differs each year, is always a challenge to the nature photographer. The photographer says: "I have been making the same tour to the San Francisco Peaks area for thirteen years, and yet have found pictures in spots that were not just right a year or so before. Sometimes it is the lighting condition, or it might be the intensity of the color in the leaves of the trees." OPPOSITE PAGE "AUTUMN AT SYCAMORE CAMP" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Graphic View camera; Ektachrome; f.14 at 1/5th sec.; 54" Tessar lens; November; sunny day. Photograph taken in a campground among the cottonwoods in the Tonto National Forest. This spot is below the Tonto Rim, south of the town of Payson. The photographer explains: "No photographer can resist the lighting and the colors offered by these great trees in fall dress. Even if he has forgotten to bring the fixings for lunch, he can have a picnic here in the lovely play of light and shadow."

costumes in the water, each leaf itself a tiny looking glass to catch a wink of sunbeam. The sixteen-mile unpaved route to Point Sublime, perhaps because a byway is more intimate, seems to go right to the heart of the season. Noisy jays scold among the foliage and if you don't find deer feeding on the grass beside Kanabownits Spring, it's only because you're a minute too early or late. Every mile of the way, aspens pass you from one picture to another of gold against green of pine and blue of sky.

At the rim, whenever you reach it, the formations beyond seem possessed of new sparkle, side gorges yawn deeper and the far distance clearer, because of the vibrant, never-still leaves of Populus tremuloides.

From the awesome edge of the world's greatest canyon, the South Rim is only a long look away, and visible beyond are cones of the San Francisco Peaks. Those streaks of yellow on the volcanic shoulders that might easily be mistaken for sunlight are really aspens.

A bird can cover the distance your eye does, in only a little longer time, but the car must head back to U.S. 89 for a more than hundred-mile loop to reach the Peaks.

You'll not find the time wasted, scanning this page of the Kaibab Plateau for a second reading, if only to confirm that the color it displays was no optical illusion.

Did you really see one solitary tree a red among all its saffron fellows? Yes, and another nonconformist-still dressed in vivid green.

It's hunting season and the deer, able to read the signs without knowing a letter of the alphabet, cunningly stay within the preserve boundary, safe from a gun. In the late afternoon you can count them, not singly, but in herds, feeding in glades among the lengthening shadows. At least one flock of turkeys is sure to cross the road and there's always a chance of sighting a Kaibab squirrel, found here and here only. The flanks of the San Francisco Peaks are favorite hunting grounds for photographer and painter. A road twists and winds up through whole forests of white trunks, painted in whorls and rings of black and the driver can almost watch the hourly progress of the season as it comes down to meet him. Leaves lower on the mountain may still be summery, only gradually taking on yellow as they climb toward the sun.

Wherever the state's peaks know the lightning of electric storms, forest fires burn off not just trees but humus. Aspen seeds thrive in the exposed minerals and grow quickly for perhaps half a century. By then, new humus and the trees' shade invite conifers to step back in, finally crowding out their benefactors.

Although the aspen gets the biggest writeup in any story on Autumn in mountains down the state, there are other sylva quite able to carry the story along.

The western sugar maple is, for reasons of its own, more seldom seen than its kinsmen who play such a bright role in any eastern fall. When you do find it, tucked away in canyons and along mountain streams, between five and eight thousand feet, the quality of leaf color in reds, yellows and orange is in no way inferior. Anyone who has met it, along with its spindly relative, the dwarf maple, a little ways down on the Kaibab Trail from the North Rim will agree. Another maple, alias the box elder, is a canyon dweller too and takes on a rich red or soft light yellow, just to be different.

The flaming aspen-an autumn bouquet

There aren't many trees with as famous a place-setting as Oak Creek Canyon (just south of Flagstaff on Alternate U.S. 89). Here one of them, the Rocky Mountain white, or Gambel oak, as if conscious of the honor, puts on a brilliant light red, which can be said of no other member of its family in the West.

Against the painted walls of fantastic shape, the oaks, canyon ironwood, sycamores, cypress and aspen join friendly forces in accepting the admiration meted out by visitors, local enthusiasts and even movie companies. A 2,500-foot drop in about fifteen miles, between Lookout Point and Sedona, assures not only a dramatic road and thrilling views, but variety in the vegetation. These,in combination with every kind of shade on the walls themselves, make Oak Creek Canyon a startling place, particularly when every deciduous tree and bush and the very ferns turn to the task of out-rainbowing the rainbow.

A dirt road up Schnebley Hills opens the canyon and the Verde Valley in vistas of color that are remarkable.

Of course, this one area has no monopoly on oaks in Arizona. They are numerous in variety and so scattered through all elevations that we come to take them for granted on a landscape like grass or rocks. If you would like to cultivate a speaking acquaintance among themchave non suala as the Arizons whhs-the hugout, the sad, dusty-gray fulaged scrab and the Thany eriny eak, the lather to completas among the Santa Crax Crad and and Adalo Mouansins in touchscreen Adsins. They can't be mind nương Côi. Bo as the highway palh thawigh canyon wat of Minden and on lopen excoind. Persibhasma-aast in thedr Terrapes estyn dress.

Avasarea in Zion National Park

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Just as we all like to turn our best profile to the camera, the sycamore's favorite pose is seen against the light. Then every leaf is incandescent and the whole mass fills its canyon bowl with a benison of soft haze.

Probably not by chance, we must look to another member of the poplar group - the Fremont cottonwood for the brightest of late Autumn color. Astonishingly large for the dry country it revels in, and growing from 50 to 100 feet in height with a broad trunk, this great shade tree seeks out, with unfailing accuracy, permanent water, even if it has to dig for its supply.

This is the tree you can see deep in the Grand Canyon when you look down from the South Rim and it adds a lovely touch to the tawny walls of Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo reservation. In Monument Valley several canyons lure visitors there in October for the pleasure of seeing the sycamores turn to almost amber. Which brings us to the question of why some trees are so much brighter than their neighbors and who works this trick of color magic. One leaf may not make an Autumn but we must go back to it for our answers.

Each leaf, whether on the stringy stalk of an ocotillo or a great spreading cottonwood, is an amazingly efficient little scientific laboratory, working with minerals and gases in its tiny retorts to make trees: wood, cork, flowers and fruit as well as oils and perfumes. Daily supplies of sunshine, carbonic acid mixed with air, and water from the roots must be shipped to it in a not too low temperature.

From the sunlight it makes chlorophyll, tiny floating green specks of it that color the leaf and trap more sunlight to do its work of building muscle and bone for the tree.

Green is the basic leaf color, or as one botanist puts it "the color of sober and decent work." You might almost say that when a tree's leaves are green you know they're healthy and happy at their job. Hidden under the green, so you never see it until the chlorophyll's gone, is yellow xanthrophyll-a flag hung out to warn of weariness in leaf or Mother plant.

The red of Autumn is a kind of sunburn on leaves that lie too long in the bright light after they've run short of chlorophyll's protective green. Maples and oaks are very susceptible to it, not like blondes with a "thin" skin, but because they've over-indulged in making sugar and tannins (among other substances) which must be present for the chemical change that produces red erythrophyll. A red leaf is, in the last analysis, a yellow one blushing.

A leaf may be brown for several different reasons.

Certain yellow sap material or tannins can produce it by oxidation, just as wood or bark browns with age. If the change is gradual enough, the yellow xanthrophyll can give that golden bronze so pleasing in some of the oaks.

Autumn color is a sunset, on the ground instead of in the sky, a major phenomenon of Nature and a thing of beauty. If the practical-minded insist upon pulling it apart to see how it's made, the botanist stands ready with explanations all down pat. Structure of leaf and tree, chemicals that happen to be present, the quality of available light-all go into the final effect, and even a dry or wet summer, with its consequent effect on the vigor of growth, has a word to say in the matter. Early frost doesn't cause the colors-it merely gives a sudden check to the vitality, and cuts off abruptly the production of the green cover to other tints. Bright, clear days are needed to hasten the production of yellow, red and bronze while the leaf still retains the power of producing them. Foggy England earns no gleaming gold, because the leaves die gradually. The crisp, brilliant days of Arizona in Autumn with cool nights reap a rich reward. Since cool nights and shining days come later in the desert, so does Autumn.

After a summer of hard work, you can hardly blame the deciduous trees for beginning to think of a vacation. From scratch they've brought out spring buds and then a host of leaves, trying to better their quota of bigger and better branches and more and more shade for picnickers; arranging restful green frames for sightseers' favorite vistas; providing browse for deer, seeds for turkeys and other winged creatures and nuts for the squirrels.

Unpensioned and disinherited, the leaf gives up, now just a skeleton with dry skin, stringy fiber and wornout cells-emptied of all but some mineral crystals. But how pretty they are when they fall and what pleasant music they make.

For the "color" of Autumn is not all in what we see. The swansong of the leaves has as much a part in the magic of the season.

No sound I know is quite like the "snowfall" of aspen petals as they come down in drifts through the October sunshine. They lend a carnival air to little spruce and fir that catch and hold them like small boys catching at new pennies. The wind rests after each shower and then, with a sigh, shakes loose more leaves to carpet the ground. Above, the great pines chant choruses of their "plain songs," as John Muir called it.

Heavy-footed cottonwoods and sycamores have a sturdier sound when they fall and the oak leaves erackle brittlely underfoot.

Yes, a walk through Autumn brings home to all the senses confirmation of the weighty changes going on underfoot, overhead and all around. Nature is shifting gears, as it were.

Autumn itself makes this annual journey through Arizona. Following her route is no simple matter of keeping to the highways. An adequate index to the color would have you get in your car and "ride rapidly in all directions."

We have suggested some of the places we find most rewarding, very much aware of having failed to mention many others, and suggested a little of the wonderful "people" responsible for the charming season.

Whether you take the high road or the low road and wish to see color as a thing apart or a matter of leaf and branch and trunk, you'll find color on your journey into Autumn in Arizona.

the mysterious

The enchanted Southwest has given birth to many strange tales and legends in the four centuries that have passed since white men first found their way across the deserts and mountains, over the mesas and plains. Among the strangest, most elusive, and most baffling of these is the story of the mysterious Lady in Blue.

For a long time after the Southwest was first discovEntered, it was a man's world. The saying that "it's a fine country for men and horses, but hell on women and dogs" may or may not have been literally true. Certainly, women get along fine in the Southwest today. But during the exploring, conquering, and converting stages, women were few and far between in the American Southwest. For that reason, as well as for many other unexplainable factors in the story, the legend of the Lady in Blue stamps a large and mystifying question mark on accounts dealing with Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona past.

Let us go back more than three hundred years, back to the days when Arizona was chiefly known as Pimeria, when Texas had a "j" in its middle instead of an "x," when California was thought to be the largest island in the world. Those were the days before the missions were built-before Tumacacori and San Xavier del Bac marked the northernmost limits of the long chain of missions that extended far down into Old Mexico. Those were the days when the Pima Indians cultivated their squash and beans in the river bottoms, when the Hopis lived comfortably in their apartment house-like-pueblo dwellings that Spaniards thought must be the fabulously wealthy Seven Cities of Cibola. Apaches-desert raiders then as they were two centuries later-lived on the fringe of things, rushing in now and then to raid, rob, and retreat once more.

Certainly, it was no place for a woman, especially a young, beautiful, and saintly woman who wore the habit of one of the holy orders.

Yet, time and again, between the years 1629 and 1631, Indians reported seeing a beautiful white-skinned lady, wearing flowing blue robes. That lady, they said, preached to them in their own language, telling them of the Christian beliefs, baptizing them, and urging them to seek priests for their villages.

Fray Alonso de Benavides, who was custodian of the New Mexico mission field from 1625 to 1630, was the first to record evidence of such activities. His account tells of a delegation of Indians from east of the Manzaño Mountains that urged the immediate establishment of missions in their territory.

"We asked them why they petitioned us for baptism with so much fervor and for missionaries to instruct them," the priest reported. "They replied that a woman . . . had come to preach to them in their own tongue, ordering them to go and summon the padres to instruct and baptize them."

lady in blue

Among the religious items possessed by the New Mexico mission was a picture of Madre Luisa de Cazion --showing her in the blue habit of her order. Shown this, the Indians cried out in recognition. Their visitor had been a woman like that, they reported. Only their visitor's face was different-she had been young and beau tiful.

The Lady in Blue visited tribes in many parts of the Southwest, and her memory lingered on for years. Nor did her teachings fall on unresponsive ears. In 1689 de Leon found the memory of her lingering among the Indians he met while searching for La Salle's fort near Matagorda Bay.

"They [the Indians] perform many Christian rites," he noted in his journal "And the Indian governor asked us for missionaries to instruct them, saying that many years ago a woman went inland to instruct them, but that she had not been seen there for a long time."

Further west, probably at about the same time, a band of five Indians from beyond the Pecos River visited the San Augustin mission in western Texas. Their request was a repetition of the others. They, too, asked that a priest be sent to them. Why? Once again the answer was the same. A woman, strangely dressed, had visited their people many years before and had told them about the life and teachings of Christ. She had visited them many times and had urged them to contact the missionaries, But as to where their mysterious visitor lived or how she arrived so miraculously to visit them, the Indians did not know. Recollections of the Lady in Blue sometimes evi denced themselves in strange ways. For example, when Fray Damion Manzanet visited the Indians in eastern Texas in 1690, the chief of the tribe asked him for a piece of blue baize from which to make a shroud for his mother when she died. The priest was somewhat baffled by the request, assuring the chief that black would be much more suitable. But the chief shook his head he wanted blue cloth, or none.

"Then I asked him what mysterious reason he had for preferring the blue color," Fray Damion wrote later as he reported his visit to the church superiors. "In reply he said his people were very fond of that color, particular ly for burial clothes, because in times past they had been visited frequently by a very beautiful woman, who came down from the hills dressed in blue garmens, and that they wished to do as that woman had done. On my asking whether that had been long since, the chief said it was before his time, but his mother, who was very old, had seen the woman, as also had other old people."

Whether or not the chief received blue cloth for his mother's shroud is unrecorded. However, that Texas chief was not the only Southwestern Indian to show a similar impression left by the mysterious Lady in Blue.

As late as 1714, nearly a hundred years after her visits were supposed to have taken place, the Frenchman Saint