In Praise of High Places: Escudilla the Bountiful

(Below) Aspen thickets and wild flowers pave the north escarpment of Escudilla Mountain.

ESCUDILLA from page 26

Men could have stopped it.

“But it was so dry that year,” Ham-blin remembers, “I recalled the snow that winter before the fire, it was so light all the roads stayed open. The summer before trees on poor sites died and crops failed. So here we were in June, the worst part of the normal dry season, with a fire burning on a steep mountain side that had been growing fuel for more than 100 years.” Three hundred to 500 men fought the blaze, but it defied control. Three times the wind changed direction sending the fire back over itself. “The firefighters came from all over the Southwest,” Hamblin says, “there were four fire camps, and they worked for two weeks and were exhausted when they finally stopped those flames at the edge of Terry Flat.” Today, the extent of the fire can be visualized each fall when the entire north face of the mountain becomes a miles-long display of aspen gold. The áspens are replacements for the once heavy stands of conifer which were destroyed. This is a natural sequence in high country. Then, as a new forest of spruce and fir is re-established by nature, the aspen and a variety of shrubs will be overshadowed and finally die from lack of sunlight. In perhaps another 100 years Escudilla's north slope will look as it did before the big fire. Yet it wasn't a total disaster. There was a small silver lining. Before the fire raspberries were rare on Escudilla. Now they are plentiful, along with snowber-ries, strawberries, currants, elderberries and gooseberries. And people from miles around come each summer to harvest the rich crop. Wildlife benefited from the drastic vegetation change, too, but the price was high. All-important soil washed away and magnificent trees were killed by the heat and flames.

After the fire there was a pressing need to remove as many of the dead trees as possible. The scorched giants would still make good lumber. If left, the Forest Service knew, another fire would be likely and, even worse, would invite a plague of insects that could easily spread to healthy stands. Bids were called for from lumber firms, and the resulting harvest created the first roads into what had been horseback country. The motoring public soon followed, to enjoy the beauty and serenity of the mountain.

The fire did little damage to the top of Escudilla, however, where white fir, Douglas fir, spruce and white pine reign. Farther downslope the ponderosa pine dominates along with Gambel oak, Rocky Mountain maple and aspen. Here rich grasses and herbs cover the ground, which also make Escudilla an important summer range for cattle and horses as well as deer, elk, bear, turkey, lesser game animals and predators. It also is home to myriad small forest creatures and a variety of birds.

A new management plan for Escudilla would reduce the number of miles of roads on the mountain, following the harvest of about 10 million board feet of timber, and call for an 18,500-acre demonstration area to serve as an environmental education laboratory for present and future scientists. A focal point for the study area is Terry Flat, which includes meadows and varied vegetation. Perfect wildlife habitat.

When the Escudilla Demonstration Area Plan was distributed to interested citizens last fall, Forest Supervisor Jim Kimball said in an accompanying letter: “It has been our intent to blend various citizenry wants and needs into a program that is harmonious with Escudilla resources.” In formulating the plan, Kimball added, some interest groups wanted total emphasis on wood fiber production while others wanted the mountain left as nearly pristine as possible.

Escudilla also is a major watershed. The heavy snow and rain that fall on the mountain flow to the lowlands by means of the upper San Francisco River, the Coyote-Agua Fria drainages and the Little Colorado River.

Now the home of the black bear, Escudilla Mountain once was the territory-tory of the grizzly, some of which weighed over 1000 pounds.

Magistrate Leo Gibbons of Springerville, who was born in the shadow of Escudilla in 1911, remembers seeing what must have been the last grizzly killed on the mountain. “Silvester Hulsey, for whom Hulsey Lake was named, lived north of Nutrioso,” Gibbons says. “In 1922 he killed a grizzly and it was big. I remember seeing the hide when he brought it into town.” Lloyd Hamblin's grand uncle, Frederick Hamblin, described as a powerful man, earned a niche in Arizona history by living to tell about a hand-to-paw battle with a grizzly in November, 1888.

Fred Hamblin, according to two accounts, picked a cold November day to track a cattle-killing bear into the lower forest of Escudilla. He was about to give up, the story goes, when the bear attacked unexpectedly, five miles from Alpine. Fred's pony bolted. He fired once with apparently no effect on the bear, then jammed the rifle barrel down the bear's throat while being raked by claws, and finally used the rifle barrel as a club to smash the bear's head.

One account reports the bear turned tail after the clubbing, while another says Hamblin had to play dead before the grizzly left. When Hamblin was finally able to get on his mount he returned home and spent weeksrecovering from the mauling. An injury to his left shoulder bothered him until he died in 1922, at the age of 81.

Another bear story is told by Leopold in his Sand Country Almanac. He tells of the final destruction of a grizzly called “Old Bigfoot,” who for years had eluded local ranchers. “Old Bigfoot was a robber baron,” wrote Leopold, “and Escudilla was his castle.” Each spring he would bash in the head of a cow and eat his fill, and this was more than enough reason for the ranchers to want to see him dead.

According to Leopold, a government hunter tracked the beast for a month without success. Finally, he resorted to trickery. “He erected a set-gun in a defile through which only the bear could pass,” Leopold wrote. “The last grizzly walked into the string and shot himself. There was only one barn wall in town big enough to dry the hide on.” The government hunter probably was a man named Charlie Shimm, who killed a grizzly in 1910 on Escudilla, according to The Grizzly Bear in Arizona. But in Robert Housholder's account the bear was called “Old Clubfoot.” He also recorded that the last Arizona grizzly was killed in another part of the state on September 13, 1935.

Long before wildlife management became a science, another forest giant, the Merriam elk, disappeared from the mountain, the victim of excessive hunt-ing. Rocky Mountain elk were later brought in as replacements in 1927. Now the wolf also is gone from this part of the world.

Today, with the growth of knowledge on the needs and habits of animals, land managers have gained the ability to accommodate the wildlife resource. The Abert squirrel, for example, needs mature ponderosa pine groves for nest-ing and food. Old dead trees are left standing to provide shelter for cavity nesting birds, and timber harvests are timed so as not to interfere with turkey nesting and the periods when other ani-mals give birth.

Throughout its brief human history the Escudilla area people have come to the mountain for their needs, whether it be grazing for their animals, wood for their homes, wild game for their tables, or spiritual enrichment for their souls. All these things and more are still available and always will be under the professional management of the Forest Service.

Those who manage the mountain and all National Forests today still follow the maxims of the nation's first chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, who defined conservation as the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men. "To the use of the natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable," Pinchot said, "each generation has the first right. Nevertheless no generation can be allowed needlessly to damage or reduce the future general wealth and welfare by the way it uses or misuses any natural resource."