Visit to an Unspoiled land

The butterflies flit about from flower to flower. They won't be driven from this spot. And neither will the trees, the snakes, or the hummingbirds...and other living things no one may have noticed yet....

Ramsey Canyon - A Visit to an Unspoiled Land

The kitchen table feels cool to the touch. The desert heat has been left behind. Only quiet fills the Ramsey Canyon cabin a mile high in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona. Outside the door, the creek gurgles faintly over the rocks. Cabins hide under the trees, but no telephones ring, no radios blare, and no televisions flicker. The Army's Fort Huachuca, with its electronic proving ground, is 10 miles away. In the canyon such technology represents a century that has been largely dismissed. Here, people are interested in only one thing. The birds. Ramsey Canyon today belongs to The Nature Conservancy, a national organization which, since 1954, has been involved in the preservation of 1,821,406 acres of forests, marshes, prairies, mountains, and islands throughout the United States. Ramsey Canyon's specialty is hummers. People come from around the world to view its 15 species of hummingbirds and to savor its peaceful setting. Sighting a new species of hummer is big news here, and nothing else is news at all. For 100 years, the canyon has survived the settling of Arizona. This came to pass because one man loved the land and lived William Berner, a German immigrant, went to the Civil War in Wilder's Brigade, Company H of the 17th Indiana. He was wounded at Selma, Alabama, and came home on crutches. Later he married, fathered four children, and wandered the West, selling shoes and harness in Texas, peddling ice in Tombstone, and prospecting. In 1882, he found Ramsey Canyon and never left. When Berner arrived, others had already been there. Apaches had made camp under the towering shade trees, and prospectors had poked at its rock walls looking for that heart of gold. Like many places in the West, it had come by its name casually. Frank Ramsey was a cowboy out of Dodge City, Kansas, when he tried his luck in these mountains. He left nothing behind but his name. The Tombstone Epitaph reported the canyon was full of "characters" who had trouble keeping the peace. People came and tossed cabins up along the creek. Some were searching for a golden bonanza; some settled for simply running saloons and dance halls. Berner was a new kind of man for the canyon. He kept busy planting pine and

Ramsey Canyon

The canyon he left to his doctor, Nelson C. Bledsoe of Bisbee.

I'm up at first light. Dozens of seemingly identical birds flit around the feeders. The high rock walls keep the canyon floor in shadow for most of the early morning. Big sycamore leaves float lazily to the ground while the air vibrates to the whirr of hungry hummingbirds. Jugs of sugar water are suspended everywhere. The tiny gluttons go through three to five gallons of the syrup in a day. A poor box begs alms for the hummers. I flip through a bird guide and focus my binoculars on the hummingbirds feasting 10 feet away. (All my previous birdwatching has been done down the barrel of a shotgun.) The hummers look drab and uniform as they dive and spin around the jugs. Once in a while, a brief glint of green flashes from their busy bodies. I keep glancing from the book to the birds and back again, but the hummers remain stubbornly disguised. I can't seem to tell one from another. Plop! A half-eaten apple rolls across the ground. A squirrel in a nearby tree has almost brained me. No one is up yet. The cabins, Cliff View, Garden Cottage, Creek Cottage, Crow's Nest, Juniper, are all still filled with snoring birders awaiting better light. After an hour, Edna and Barbara show up. They are in their 60s, and they have been watching birds for decades. They toss names back and forth like tennis balls; an Anna, an Allen, a Black-chin; "look! A Rivoli." They take me, so to speak, under their wings and give me a short course on the art of bird-watching. Birds come in parts, they point out, and I must learn to notice the wing, the head, the breast, the chin, and so forth. I bone up on the text and have another go at it later. At last my turn comes. "My God," I shout, "I see a Broad-bill." Edna and Barbara exchange a knowing glance. Like a vampire, I've been made with one bite, and now I'm going to live forever as a bird-watcher. I'll have to buy good binoculars now and keep a list of everything I sight. There are over 700 bird species in North America, Barbara has more than 600 on her list. At the moment, I have one. As it turns out, I am in the promised land of birders. Cochise and Santa Cruz counties in southern Arizona attract around 50,000 birders a year, and they may spend a good $5to $6-million. According to the federal government, a little creek like the one in Ramsey Canyon produces about $12,370 per acre per year in tourism revenue from visitors who do nothing more than stare at birds. I sit and watch the hummers for three hours. The birds live at what seems a killing rate. They can hit 56 miles an hour. A resting hummer has a heartbeat of 480; when excited, it can soar to 1260. They should be the national bird. Edna and Barbara and I sit there letting the stress drop from our urban bodies as the hummers do their stuff. We have all come a long way to get here. Edna and Barbara are from California, and the hummers have flown from Colombia to Alaska. Ramsey Canyon is a haven for all of us high-speed zombies. I am warned by the ladies that it will not always be this easy. After awhile, birds for the life list are harder to come by, and I'll have to change my idea about what constitutes a swell place. A swell place is wherever birds hang out.

Edna confides to me her first birding experience. Back in those days she didn't know a hawk from a handsaw. She went out with a bunch of birders on a field trip. Around noon they stopped at a sewage pond. The aroma knocked Edna over, but everybody else spread out their lunches and started to dine while birds swirled overhead. The group just sat there and gobbled and glassed, and Edna couldn't eat a bite. But that was then. Now Edna buys guidebooks that tell her where the best sewage ponds can be found.

Nelson C. Bledsoe had some miles on him before Ramsey Canyon fell under his care. He'd been a surgeon for a mining company in Bisbee since 1904. Born in Ventura, California, in 1876, he had come to the small Arizona community fresh out of medical school.

Doctoring meant leaving the hospital in those days. A lot of times Bledsoe performed operations in the dank air of mine tunnels or with his patient spread across the kitchen table of a lonely ranch house. In 1906, a smallpox epidemic broke out in Bisbee and those exposed to the disease had to be kept in a corral under guard around the clock.

Bledsoe kept up with the times. He bought an automobile in 1910, and he got the first X-ray machine in Arizona. No one thought much about the danger of radiation at the time, and Bledsoe was plagued with skin cancer for the rest of his life because of the excessive exposure he suffered.

Bisbee's 12,000 people made it the queen bee of Arizona's mining camps, and Bledsoe was a leading citizen of the town. He was an active Mason and served on the town council in 1917 and 1918.

Ramsey Canyon became his summer home after 1922. He moved to Tucson in 1930 and established a practice during which he treated 8000 patients in a 20year span of time. The doctor had a good life. During his Bisbee years, his townsmen were his patients. The streets were full of children he had brought into the world, and the saloons were lined with men he had saved from death in the pits.

And then he had Ramsey Canyon under his care, and he treated the canyon very well indeed.

At 9:30 a.m. I finally budge from my chair and head up the canyon to a half-mile nature trail that snakes along the creek. Oak limbs hang over the road, and at this 5000-foot elevation, the night chill is still melting away. The sun warms my skin as butterflies bounce off the ground, sweeping their wings lazily in the still air.

The trailhead sign requests: Please Do Not Step On Our Rattlesnakes. Ramsey shelters three protected types, the Willard's, the twin spot, and the green rock. I vow to step lightly.

A small wooden bridge leads across the stream where clear mountain water splashes over the rocks. Vinca, a domestic plant gone berserk here, clogs the banks, and horsetails stab through the leafy mat.

Apple trees, their limbs heavy with yellow and red fruit, make me bend to pass. The path wanders into a small clearing where grass comes to my waist. No cattle graze the canyon.

At the edge of the clearing, a woman sits on a bench. She asks me if I saw the doe and the fawn in the grass, but when I spin around they are gone. I do not know how to look, and everything testifies to my blindness.

We sit under the oaks looking down at the sycamores and apple trees lining the banks. No birds fly by, and no songs come from the boughs; a deafening silence rolls over us. A butterfly drifts past with brown wings splattered with white and orange.

A California sister, the woman says, a frequenter of oak groves from Washington state to Mexico. We talk softly.

A form slowly comes out of the brown hillside above us. A javelina ambles into view, hair bristling on its back. The massive head bobs from side to side. It senses our presence, but it does not care.

Later, I walk up the canyon following the path by the creek. A sign says speak softly and stay on the trail because birds are nesting nearby. The path crisscrosses the stream on tiny wooden bridges. Splash! An apple bobs in the water with a big bite missing from it. I hear a squirrel ransacking the tree over my head and notice a flotilla of apples each with a bite missing. Apparently, nobody can handle abundance.

The trees give way to a big meadow, and up the slope an abandoned house rots back into the earth. The trail cuts through a grove of sycamores, their pale trunks angling off like madly waving arms. Nearby is a small cabin newly chinked and wired for spotlights. It's empty now. Vinca covers the ground here, catching the big sycamore leaves that fall slowly to earth. The forest canopy blocks out the sun, and the water of a small pond shimmers with darkness. Above me the canyon goes on and on, but special permission is necessary to venture further. Bledsoe's place is up there and in Ramsey's higher reaches, rare plants that hide from the hurly-burly of the late 20th century.

Ramsey Canyon

I cannot absorb any more of the canyon at the moment.

It has taken me one hour to cover half a mile.

Back at the cabins, I spy a Cassin's finch, bird number two for my life list. Edna and Barbara have retired for a while to plot out their reservations for next summer. From May to September, the cabins here are booked solid. Unless plans are made six months to a year in advance, a visit will probably be futile. Ramsey Canyon is no place to seek lodging on impulse.

Suddenly, I snap to attention. Could that be a Violet-crowned hummer at the third feeder? I race for the glasses, but I'm too late and fall back into my daydreams. The squirrels are still bombing the place with apples as I doze, but I've grown used to this local thunder. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a brown form slipping past. I whip my head around and see something that looks like a cross between an anteater, a raccoon, and a weasel. The animal, a coatimundi, undulates by. I'm told it comes through once a day. After that, I find it hard to believe that this land was settled a cen-tury ago and Ramsey Canyon somehow survived the experience intact.

The canyon floor where I stand is pockmarked with dozens of stone foundations where once cabins leaned out over the creek. More people stood on this ground a hundred years ago than do today. The mark of man and his works is everywhere, but somehow the plants and birds and other animals have not been destroyed in the doing.

Ramsey Canyon is exceptional. Thanks to some exceptional people.

Bledsoe's wife could not abide the neighbors. The doctor had inherited a canyon stuffed with honky-tonks and miner's shacks. But every time a property went up for sale, he bought it and leveled the buildings. And when the mine above his place finally played out, the people left, and Bledsoe absorbed the canyon.

He kept Berner's old house and built another cabin. A few hundred yards away, he made a study out of a hut, hung an anatomical chart on the wall, and moved in his correspondence and records.

In time, they took on a caretaker and a cook. Bill Brown and his wife Nell served the Bledsoes for 50 years, keeping strangers out of Ramsey Canyon, sometimes at rifle point.

In the meantime, Dr. Bledsoe watched the decades heal the canyon. Up on the high slopes, grasses and herbs nibbled at the rock debris crumbled by the earthquake of 1887, a wrenching of the surface that had shot a blast of dust out of the canyon all the way to the San Pedro River. Flowers and ferns colonized foundations.

And sometimes people wandered in, but they were promptly booted out.

In the 1950s, Carroll and Joan Peabody, who had come to Ramsey Canyon to escape city life, took over the Mile Hi Lodge which had been built below Dr. Bledsoe's place and made it a haven for birdwatchers.

Bledsoe died in 1975 at the age of 97. He left the canyon to The Nature Conservancy who in turn bought out the Peabodys. The couple has a renewable lease on a cabin in the canyon. Bledsoe's will ordered that the ranch be used for scientific, educational, and aesthetic purposes "without any disturbance whatever of habitat, plant, or animal populations."

The lemon lily stands five-feet tall with a slender stem supporting a whorl of leaves and yellow flowers three to four inches long. The plant grows in Ramsey Canyon and Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains, Bear Canyon in the Huachucas, and a few canyons in California.

Lilium parryi is an endangered plant. A census found 83 in Ramsey.

The lily grows from the root and blooms year after year in early summer. No one has found a way to use it or sell it. This makes the lemon lily a kind of problem for our civilization. While we don't have any desire to destroy it, we lack reasons for saving it.

I have never seen an endangered plant and decide to make the lemon lily my first. A guide takes me into the upper canyon. The ground is dark and damp in the early morning, and sunlight fights to break through the roof of leaves. Berner's Ramsey Canyon's incredible scenery and varied wildlife make it a delightful escape for people oriented to the out of doors. (Left, below) The lemon lily (Lylium parryi) is an endangered species found only in Ramsey and a few other canyons in the Southwest. Jack Dykinga photos

Ramsey Canyon

cabin comes into view first. It looks like the kind of place a man would go to after a civil war.

A short stroll brings me to Bledsoe's place, which hovers over the stream. The rooms are nothing fancy. Smoke from a thousand fires has blackened the mantel of the stone fireplace. A Charles Danastyle print dated 1904 is the center of attention. The plain beds and chairs and dressers announce the cabin is really a camp. The Bledsoe that kept strangers out of his canyon kept gewgaws at bay with equal fervor. Outside, a bronze plaque on an alligator juniper commemorates a soldier lost in the island campaigns of World War II. The doctor and his wife adopted and raised a string of local boys. This one did not make it back home.

The canyon narrows and soon trees hide the cabins from us. A stone-lined hole marks Berner's old root cellar. Foundations are everywhere-memorials to the more than 30 neighbors Bledsoe bought out. A small dam corks the stream creat-ing a pond now largely silted up. The doctor had it stocked with rainbow trout. When he died, the story goes, folks flocked into the canyon and fished the pond clean.

Ramsey chokes on quiet. A blue-throated lizard scoots up a tree. The snap of a twig gives away a white-tailed deer moving up the slope. There is bear scat heaped by the trail, bristling with javelina hair. The bruin mauling the canyon's apples evidently found a lion kill. Above us, a hawk wheels on a thermal.

I cross a wooden bridge and head further up the canyon until the guide calls me back. I have walked past the lemon lily. The blooms are dried husks. The lily looks plain next to the throng of horsetails by the stream. I can't muster much of a reaction to the drab plant.

It is one of 100 or 200 of its kind on the planet. I am one of 4.5 billion. What can we say to each other?

On the hill above the lemon lily lives a succulent, Talinium marginatum. It may only exist in Ramsey Canyon. The entire population, perhaps the world supply, exists in an area maybe 100 yards long.

In this place, they have had a break. Berner and Bledsoe probably did not know they were rare; they may not have even known of their existence. But they survived in part because of the habits of these two men. Now they persist because of the habits of The Nature Conservancy.

We head back down. I wander over from Bledsoe's cabin to the hut that served as his study. The door creaks on opening and flapping wings explode into the sunlight. Dozens of bats pour out into the blinding day. The anatomical chart lies against a wall, and old letters and pamphlets carpet the floor. Bat droppings litter everything.

I don't think the doctor would object. The bats flit back in and settle down to wait for nightfall. They won't be driven from this spot. Nor will the lemon lilies, or Willard's rattlesnake or the twin spot rattlesnake or the green rock rattlesnake or the hummingbirds, the ferns, the deer, the bear, lion, javelina, coatimundi, and living things no one may have noticed yet.

William Berner left the Civil War behind him.

Mrs. Bledsoe did not like the neighbors. Sometimes it happens that way.

Editor's note: For visitor information concerning Ramsey Canyon, please write or phone: The Arizona Nature Conservatory, 30 N. Tucson Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85716, (602) 327-4478 or 795-9242.

Yours Sincerely

Comments and questions from around the state, the nation, and the world.

Dear Editor, My heartfelt "thank you" goes to Paul Dean for his most inspirational article "Arizona-A View from the Top," in your September issue. The green-eyed monster within me reared its jealous head as I read the article, and all I could think is how very fortunate Jerry Foster is to live in a place where escaping from the daily grind can be done in such a spectacular but tranquil way.

Then I realized that it takes a very special talent to be able to put all those experi-ences into words-thus making it possible for us to share them. Please extend my thanks to Mr. Dean and accept my thanks to you for printing the article.

Sincerely, Mike (Mrs. Bert) Clardy Houston, TX Dear Editor, Your Arizona Rangers story in the August issue was very interesting, and brought back happy memories of one of the rangers. My Grandfather Robinson's brother, Milton McDonald Robinson, was one of them. I worked with him as a cow-boy in my early days. A story is told about him capturing cattle thieves in the book called Fighting Men of the West. Mac was an interesting man, huge in size, and a wild cowboy. We worked together at the Cross S in the days when they still had wild longhorn cattle, and I look back on those days with nostalgia. There are only a few of us old longhorns left.

Sincerely, Robert A. Robinson Whittier, CA Dear Editor, As a native New Yorker I never had much exposure to the western regions of our country, and often thought of places such as Arizona as somewhere at the end of the world! Well, I recently had the opportunity to visit a friend in Tucson and was awed and mystified by the beauty and uniqueness of the Sonoran Desert. When I got off the airplane in Tucson, I felt like I was in another country. The hot, dry air and the magnificent mountains greeted this Northerner with open arms. Throughout my week-long stay I was constantly amazed at the peaceful feeling I had when I looked out onto the vast desert. The saguaro cacti held a particular fascination for me with their age-old grandness and stateliness. They have learned to adapt to such harsh weather conditions that they radiate a sense of quiet accomplishment. I saw many beautiful sights in the Tucson area, from Sabino Canyon to Mount Lemmon and thoroughly enjoyed each one. I cannot wait to return to Arizona someday to see her other fascinating sights.

Sincerely, Alison C. Bouchard Massapequa, NY Dear Editor, In April '81 I took a holiday and drove with a friend from Houston to L.A. We stopped for a day and a half at the Canyon, good tourists as we were, and after much oohing and aahing drove on. However, unlike many other "beautiful sights" the memory of this one did not fade. Consequently I decided to subscribe to Arizona Highways (I had bought the Grand Canyon issue as a souvenir) to see what the rest of the state is all about.

Now I sit here in the eastern province of Saudi and remember. From the roof of my building I can see two trash heaps and three dust bowls. As far as I have driven, except for one trip to the deep south, the country here is grey; grey dusty bushes; grey-yellow sand; always haze-ridden sky. The brightest colour is the orange paint of my company's vehicles, and that quickly fades.

So one day I shall return. Arizona Highways captures the past for me. I beg Arizonans to defend the present so that my future may again be bright.

Yours, Ty Tate Dhahran, Saudi Arabia Dear Editor, Regardless of what subject you choose, your magazine is one of the finest of its kind in the world!

Having spent many wonderful hours in sunny, beautiful Arizona, and because I cannot be in two places at once, I am able to relive those hours every month thanks to the postman, who delivers to me and my family, your beautiful state in an envelope. My three children probably know more about Arizona than any other pupils in their school-thanks to your magazine.

Keep up the good work.

David S. Hardy Pretoria North, South Africa Dear Editor, What nostalgia and homesickness overcame me when I read your June issue, "Welcome to Flagstaff Country." A lifetime Arizonan and six-year Flagstaff resident, I now live in densely populated Mexico City. Seeing such gorgeous photographs of beautiful Flagstaff and its surrounding area made me long for clean air, blue skies, and the warm, friendly ambience that is Flagstaff's alone. Just the sight of the San Francisco Peaks inspired me to remember that such beauty and tranquility actually do exist, something which is easily forgotten when living in the world's largest city. I long for the day when I can return to my home, for there is no other place like northern Arizona anywhere. Until then, however, I'll be treasuring those wonderful, all-so-familiar shots of places that are always just a thought away.

Sincerely, Lori E. Appleby Mexico City, Mexico

TRAVEL NOTE

For detailed information about many more exciting tours through Arizona's colorful wonderland, write or call: Arizona Office of Tourism, 3507 N. Central Ave., Suite 506, Phoenix, AZ 85012. Telephone (602) 255-3618.

(Right) Aravaipa, the Apaches called the canyon. It means "Little Running Water." The deep gorge, between the Pinaleno and Galiuro mountains in western Graham County, is rich in history and western lore as well as bird and animal life.

(Following panel, page 48 and inside back cover) Texas Canyon, south of Interstate 10, is the setting for the world-renowned Amerind Foundation, see the story beginning on page 33. The canyon got its name from a family of Texans who settled there in the early days.

(Back cover) The massive pinnacles of Rhyolite Canyon, Chiricahua National Monument, are the eroded remains of volcanic activity which took place millions of years ago. Today, more than 17 miles of paved road and trail take visitors through the fantastically carved canyon and other scenic areas of the monument.