ARIZONA'S NEW WILDERNESS LANDS

ADVENTURE FOR THE SPIRIT AND THE SPIRITED...

Arizona's New Wilderness Lands Promise the Perfect Getaway Experience

Fifty miles south of the Grand Canyon are the San Francisco Peaks, highest in Arizona. I first grew aware of their historic significance on a day in late April while circling the peaks in a green van with Don Freeman of the Coconino National Forest. In the 1880s, pioneer biologist C. Hart Merriam observed how altitude alters the vegetation on these same San Francisco Peaks. In 1890 and 1894, Merriam published papers that described these changes and fitted them into a continental pattern of what he dubbed "life zones." The junipers Merriam saw around the base of the mountain were like those that grew in parts of Sonora, Mexico. Mosses he found near the summit of Humphreys Peak, 12,670 feet above sea level, also grew in Arctic regions-and, in fact, may have been stranded in Arizona thousands of years ago when Ice Age glaciers retreated into the far north as the climate warmed. The "refrigeration" the isolated Arctic plants required for survival was provided by the heavier precipitation and cooler temperatures that occur in high altitude life zones. Today the coolness that prevails in the high country when lower regions swelter attracts people as well as elk, bear, and a broad variety of such birds as juncos and chickadees. To protect these havens from overuse, the tops of Arizona's three highest peaks have been included in a new wilderness area. Kachina Wilderness, named for the spirits the Hopi Indians believe dwell there, embraces the San Francisco Peaks: Humphreys, Agassiz, and Fremont. It is the only one of the wilderness units that rises above timberline. Its lower boundary corresponds roughly with the lower edge of the belt of shimmering aspens that girdles the peaks. A few miles northwest of Kachina Wilderness is another unit that encases the dome-shaped, knob-topped summit of Kendrick Peak, 10,418 feet high and covered with magnificent conifers. Far southeast, close to the New Mexico border, is Escudilla Mountain, about whose dominance of that green and lovely land Aldo Leopold, one of the fathers of the American wilderness system, wrote so vividly in A Sand County Almanac.

Merriam's life zones have been given various designations, one of which uses geographic areas as identity keys: Lower and Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian (for Hudson Bay) and Arctic-Alpine. The Transition zone, a broad belt favored by stands of scrub oak, piñon-juniper woodlands, and ponderosa pines forests, marks the change between extremes. Remarkably, all the zones are represented in the new Arizona wildernesses areas. Zones are not layered like cards in a deck, but interlace with each other. Soil types and special climate conditions (rain shadows, for instance) and exposure to the sun all have their effects. A southfacing slope may produce prickly pear cactus and runty juniper bushes while across the way handsome Douglas firs flourish on a cooler north-facing hillside. Micro-ecosystems will sometimes appear in shaded hollows, around seeps, or in north-facing tributary canyons. To all this, Arizona adds riparian environments of great charm. These occur not only in the highlands but also wherever stream water flows often enough to nurture, even in the midst of a desert expanse, rich green threads of oaks, sycamores, and cottonwoods, or, at lower elevations, mesquite and paloverde. Birds and animals, of course, can migrate from one zone to another as the seasons change. Even so, many of them, particularly birds, return again and again to one favored ecosystem to raise their young. If this niche to which they have adapted is destroyed and man is the most destructive agent known-the creature is in trouble. So, too, are plants and the less mobile reptiles and amphibians. Maintaining these essential niches for endangered species has been another primary consideration in the selection of wilderness areas. These complexities characterize the four Coronado National Forest wilderness areas that touch on or lie close to the Mexican border. They are, from west to east, Pajarita, Mount Wrightson, Miller Peak, and Chiricahua. All are segments of the isolated "islands-in-the-sky" mountain ranges that rise steeply out of the surrounding deserts. Nowhere else in the United States does elevation, and hence zone changes, play so critical a role. Smallest of the southern quartet is Pajarita, named for a ridgetop butte that some viewers think looks like a small bird. Elevation varies from 3500 to 5400 feet, a maximum that is more than 4000 feet lower than the high points of the other sky islands.

WILDERNESS

Sycamore Creek, its convoluted canyon, and thick riparian cover have created what researcher Leslie N. Goodding called a "hidden botanical garden" filled with an extraordinary diversity of micro-habitats. Scores of different kinds of birds are found here; so are 624 species of plants, many endangered. Here, too, are striking examples of "disjointed ranges." One puzzle is a fern that grows only in the Himalayas of Asia, in Mexico-and in Pajarito's Sycamore Canyon. Another is a butterfly pea found only in the Chiricahua Mountains -and Pajarito. How did these species make the long jumps? No one knows.

Northwest, across the Santa Cruz Valley from Pajarito, and visible from Tucson, are the Santa Rita Mountains. Their jewel is the Mount Wrightson Wilderness, named for the pyramidal peak, 9453 feet high, that crowns the thin spine of the uplift. In the morning, as one crosses the Santa Cruz Valley toward the range, it looks like a powdery blue wall, deeply serrated along its smoothness. Anticipation builds. Getting there is indeed part of the fun.

One of the gaps is Madera Canyon. Bird-watchers swarm to it, for it is almost as rich in species as Pajarito. Most gaudy of the rewards is a glimpse, if the birder is lucky, of a male elegant trogon. A trogon is about the size of a robin; its glossy green head is separated from its rosy-red body by a white collar. The trogon nests in all four of Arizona's southernmost wil-derness areas, where it is just one of some 170 species, many of them rare in the United States.

Wrightson's lower parts are blanketed by impenetrable thickets of mingled black oaks, Arizona white oaks, silverleaf oaks, Emory oaks, and what not. The clean scent of its fresh high-zone forests and the sight of the creased, pale granite cliffs that wall the peak's north-west face-cliffs reminiscent of some of the formidable precipices of California's Sierra Nevada-are all but guaranteed to keep adventurous hikers and riders huff-ing and puffing upward along the sharp switchbacks of the Old Baldy Trail or the gentler Super Trail, so named because its grades nowhere exceed eight percent.

Southeast of Wrightson, overlooking beige-colored San Pedro Valley and lying close to Mexico, is the Miller Peak unit, 20,190 acres. Two peaks on Miller's crest top 9000 feet (Miller Peak itself is 9466), and the rest of the ridgeline exceeds 8000 feet. The elevation means Transition and Canadian zone forests like those that cloak Wrightson, affording choice niches for several rare and endangered species of plants, birds, and small reptiles. Steep canyons, punctuated with bold rock out-crops, furrow the slopes of the crestal ridge, and travel would be arduous except for the fifty or so miles of trails that make the area a summer haven for residents of nearby Sierra Vista. But, of course, even these admirable trails will lose their charm if users litter them like city alleys.

Still farther to the east, near New Mexico, are the Chiricahuas, surely high on any Arizonan's list of favorite mountains. Though the area's high point, Chiricahua Peak (9796), is not much higher than Mount Wrightson and Miller Peak, the range itself is more massive. Rocky Mountain birds edging southward mingle here with Sonora and Chihuahua birds ventur-ing north. Plants abound. Mountain lions seem to be holding their own against hunters; and Mexican wolves, on cautious forays into lonesome sections of the Chiricahua Wilderness, may be the last wolves remaining in the United States.

The Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 dramatically increased the size of the original Chiricahua unit from 18,000 acres to about 87,700. Though granite knobs and ribs appear frequently throughout the enlarged wilderness, the bizarre stone forests of Chiricahua National Monument farther north-the famed Wonderland of Rocks are missing. Actually, their presence would be distracting. As Ranger Johnny Wilson and I walked along the crest trail from Pole Bridge Canyon past Johnson Peak toward the magnificent viewpoint of Monte Vista, and then dropped steeply down Morse Canyon, nothing took away from the region's overwhelming dramatic sense of stateli-ness. For an example: Morse Canyon runs north. Coolness and shade cause the trees to reach high for sunshine. Ponderosa pines, barely tapering, their once-black bark turning yellow and deeply fissured with maturity, stand well over 100 feet high.

In the grasslands. Here and there red cliffs break through what one hiker described as Galiuro's "merciless jungle" of catclaw and manzanita. Here, too, as in the Chiri-cahuas, the original wilderness was expanded; so the acreage now amounts to 76,317.

Inside the area are two parallel ridges separated by Rattlesnake Canyon, the scene, in 1918, of a vicious shoot-out between the Power brothers, World War I draft dodgers, and a posse bent on running them down. Because an old dirt road once led up Rattlesnake Canyon, the creators of the original wilderness excluded the "highway" by encasing it in a narrow, unprotected corridor of the sort sometimes called "cherry stems." The new bill includes it. Cheers! Nature is reclaiming the road; the abandoned ranch has historical interest, and the closure helps preserve the deep solitude of the area. Except for the old road, only a few trails exist there, and some stretches of them are hard to find in the chaparral and the dense conifers on the higher ridges.

Farther down Aravaipa Valley loom the remote, jagged, naked-looking Santa Teresa Mountains, home of the wilderness of the same name. The pink-stone Pinnacle Ridge forms a coxcomb boundary in the south; the spine of the Cobre Grande winds snakelike in the north. In the center is Holdout Mesa, drained by Holdout Canyon, a maze of outcrops, caves, and alcoves. No need to say why these 26,700 acres are wilderness; the whole, twisted conformation proclaims it.

Now the valley narrows to a salmon-pink canyon. Once administered by the Bureau of Land Management as a twelve-mile-long primitive area, Aravaipa Canyon was elevated to wilderness status in 1984 and its side boundaries pulled back to give added protection to its rich riparian heart and to the desert bighorn sheep that live there.

Marvelous cottonwoods, sycamores, ashes, walnuts, and willows shade a murmuring stream that lies within the Sonoran life zone. Again the biota includes a dazzling variety of species. Unfortunately a raging flash flood in 1983 ripped out many trees and left a broad litter of cobbles where once were meadows. Until Nature restores the ground, compensation can be found in exploring the fantastic side canyons. But check first. For the sake of the fragile environment, the number of daily visitors and the time they may stay is limited. Fortunately hikers seem to appreciate the privilege extended them and-as far as I could see on a recent visit-leave little evidence of their passage.

Four more areas that encase mountain summits remain to be accounted for: the Rincon unit, thirty miles east of Tucson; Four Peaks, east of Phoenix; the enlarged Superstition Wilderness, near Apache Junction; and Granite Mountain, nine miles northwest of Prescott.

In the case of the Rincons, the classification is a bit strained. By itself the new area simply brackets three sides of the older Saguaro National Monument. Only in combination do the two units take in the whole of the timber-crested Rincon range. Total acreage amounts to 110,000, mostly rough, brushy, gulch-furrowed mountainsides that not only protect wildlife habitats but also provide, for humans, expanses of solitude practically next door to a major urban center.

East of Phoenix, a quartet of linked summits bite like teeth into the sky. They are the crown jewels of Four Peaks Wilderness, 53,500 acres big, as diverse as any unit in Arizona. Their steeply-rising slopes pass through four life zones, ranging from the saguaros, paloverdes, and steel-needled cholla cacti of the Lower Sonoran to the mixed pines, oaks, spruce, and fir of the Transition and Canadian. On the south, dun-colored desert bluffs drop to the blue waters of Canyon and Apache lakes. On the east, long slopes dotted with ocotillo and creosote bush climb steeply out of Theodore Roosevelt Lake. There are bighorn sheep on Goat Mountain, in the southeast corner, and the state's biggest concentration of black bears in the higher, brushier sections.

South across the reservoirs from the Four Peaks area is Superstition Wilderness, probably the best known and in some ways the most spectacular unit in the state. Big already-124,000 acres laced by more than 150 miles of trail - it received, under the 1984 act, another 36,000 acres. Most of the addition has been strung around the cliff-bristling perimeter of the old unit. The new acres eliminate some of the former cherry-stem corridors, embrace weird boulder fields, and add, in the southeast, summits high enough to support conifers. Also included are several canyons in whose bottoms serene growths of sycamores and oaks mitigate the long miles of harshness and heat.

North, now, to Prescott's Granite Mountain. Viewed from the trail-head, it looks like an inverted bowl seamed with granite ribs and studded with huge granite boulders. Fifty percent of the 9800-acre area is exposed stone.

WILDERNESS

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth (the earth which bore us and sustains us), the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see.

it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth (the earth which bore us and sustains us), the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see.

This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. - Chief Seattle

WILDERNESS

The real heart and core of the country are not to be come at in a month's vacation. One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine woods that take two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots that lie by in the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that grow fifty years before flowering these do not scrape acquaintance. -Mary Austin

Text continued from page 9 There are striking promontories beloved by rock climbers, and the apex of the mountain is a collection of fractured spikes, the main one 7626 feet above sea level. Fortunately, a fine six-mile trail leads upward through the maze of stone arid chaparral-so fine that on the day I went up, so did thirty-two agile seniors of a Sun City hiking club.

Mountain forms other than dramatic peaks have furnished material for wilderness areas. Woodchute, southwest of Jerome, is a small (5600 acres), flat-topped, pine-clad promontory that provides a pleasant walk to striking views of the red rock country around the mouth of Sycamore Canyon. Still closer views of that chromatic section are commanded by Munds Mountain, a hefty, timbered 18,150-acre mesa overlooking Sedona. Its western boundary has been drawn at the base of its own highly colored cliffs in such a way that wilderness legislation acts like a zoning ordinance.

Much more remote is Juniper Mesa, forty miles or so northwest of Prescott. This flat-topped tableland is about seven miles long-7600 acres altogether-and girt by escarpments; especially striking are those on the south side. Notable among its woodlands are massive alligator junipers, sturdy specimens of a tree common throughout Arizona's piñon-juniper belt. Diameters may reach three feet on trees 800 years old, but tops are only twenty feet above the ground. The dark bark is crazed into small squarish plates like those on an alligator's hide.

More brush, junipers, and piñons swathe the 5400 rolling acres of the Apache Creek Wilderness, a few miles south of Juniper Mesa. Its dominant features, apart from remoteness, are a granite thumb about 500 feet high and the miniature riparian forests of Apache Creek.

Southeast of Prescott, Castle Creek's 26,000 acres sprawl across the eastern slope of the Bradshaw Mountains-a hill-side unit riven with canyons, its lower regions spiked with saguaros, its mid-zones dense with chaparral, its high ridges topped with conifers.

In the rough country due east of Castle Creek is a complex of wilderness areas designed in part to protect the integrity of an undeveloped twenty-seven-mile stretch of the Verde River, recently designated as a orange, bright yellow, green, and gray lichens that spread surrealistic patterns across some of the grotesquely shaped lava boulders. Strangely, these lichen-coated boulders are found mostly along the cone's northern and eastern bases, not on the south.

In addition to mountains, the state's wilderness system includes several distinctive canyons. For river runners, the prize is the Salt. Its 32,800 acres embrace a deep, often narrow, almost vertically walled gorge through which the Salt River pushes with enough volume, from February to May, to float rafts and kayaks. Dramatic views of promontories 2000 or more feet high, the slitted mouths of side canyons, colored cliffs, Indian ruins, and marvelous pockets of Sonoran Desert vegetation-these mingle with the excitement of really challenging white water and the quiet of long glistening pools to create memorable recreational opportunities in a unique environment.

Elsewhere, wilderness streams are not big enough for rafting; although, as we shall see, small inflatables are sometimes used in special ways. A characteristic of most of these smaller drainage basins is a deep outer canyon into the bottom of which impetuous streams have carved thin, twisting slots. Water in these jagged gashes drops abruptly, creating cascades and deep pools where trout often lurk.

Such is Salome Creek, heart of a 19,000-acre wilderness dropping from an elevation of about 6000 feet to desert slopes not far from the northeastern shore of Roosevelt Lake. Salome's "narrows," as the bottom slot is called, consist of discontinuous pieces of relatively low but almost unscalable granite walls. Impressive, too, are the pinkish volcanic bluffs that collar Dutch Woman Butte near the unit's southern tip.

Well to the east of Salome, beyond the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, are the 11,000 acres of the Bear Wallow Wilderness. The Indian lands form its western boundary, the precipitous Mogollon Rim its southern. Bear Wallow Creek, a major tributary of the Black River, flows through a deep, steep-sided but broad-bottomed canyon. This is good ponderosa country, filled with mature trees that escaped harvesting because of the roughness of the terrain. Elk winter in the area; deer and mountain lions can be seen the year around. It's a cool, restful place, far from major centers of population.

North and a little west of Salome Creek, overlooked by the monumental cliffs of Wild River-the nation's only such desert stream. For another thirteen miles above that stretch, the river is called "Scenic." It is the only Arizona river to receive either designation. Overlooking the Scenic sec-tion-bald eagles nest nearby-is the frowning, bluff-fronted, hard-to-reach new Cedar Bench Wilderness. Farther south, the old Pine Mountain unit functions as a rampart for the Verde's wild and scenic stretch. Across the way, new additions to the original, popular Mazatzal unit embrace the full wild part of the river; it stretches from a short distance below Verde Hot Springs to the mouth of Tangle Creek. These additions, incidentally, plus a pair of "rabbit ears" hooked onto Mazatzal's northwest corner, lift the preserve's total acreage to a whopping 252,000 acres.

Farther north is still another mountain unit, of a sort: Strawberry Crater. It surprised me greatly. Compared to Sunset Crater in the nearby national monument, it has a very low profile. The eruptions that built up the rusty-colored cone occurred 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. The geology of that buildup and blowout are complex. But the eye-catchers here for artists and botanists will be the garish red,

the Mogollon Rim, is the irregularly shaped Hellsgate Wilderness, 36,780 acres. Its protruding prongs are the result of drawing boundaries to follow storied Tonto Creek and its tributaries, Houston, Spring, and Haigler creeks, through the wild, timbered heart of upper Tonto Basin. The name of the wilderness comes from the awesome breach that Haigler and Tonto creeks make in the resistant granite as they come to their turbulent junction. The slot's colorful walls reach heights greater than a thousand feet. White water foams among and over giant boulders. Travel at times necessitates swimming the deep, constricted pools or inching up almost vertical cliffs. Wildlife abounds. Hard to reach, this one is for the rugged only. The Mogollon Rim bends north near here. Streams form near the base of the cliffs and then drop sharply in vast canyons toward the Verde River-such creeks as Fossil, West Clear, Wet Beaver. Like Salome and Hellsgate, both Wet Beaver and West Clear creeks flow through narrows where hikers either have to climb precariously to advance or swim the deep pools, often pushing their equipment ahead of them on small inflatable rafts. Here, however, the soaring walls are composed not of granite but of layered sediments-pale Coconino sandstone above, red Supai lower down. Once again access is difficult, more so in West Clear Creek than Wet Beaver, and explorers emerge knowing they have confronted real challenges. The Fossil Springs Wilderness is different. The two tiny tributaries that unite to form Fossil Creek meet in a wide, deep, shaggy basin that gradually narrows but never becomes a slot. Instead, the creek, its small pour-overs chuckling softly, leads into a phenomenal oasis. Masses of vivid green blackberry bushes grow out of the red soil of the low right bank (right as one faces downstream).

Widely spaced springs, the largest in Arizona, gush out of the brushy soil into the creek-a total of about 20,000 gallons a minute. Considerably enlarged by the springs, the creek spreads into wide pools shaded by contorted sycamores and robust oaks. West Clear Creek and Wet Beaver may indeed be stimulating-and harsh - but the adjective that immediately comes to mind in Fossil's soft glades is "tranquil."

Finally, there is the region around Sedona, where the elevated Colorado Plateau attains its southern limit at the Mogollon Rim, and with startling sudden-ness breaks into a labyrinth of colored stone. The heart of the area, once pro-posed as a national park, is protected now as north-central Arizona's Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness. The "red" in the name-every shade from pink to reddish-brown-derives from exposed Supai sandstone eroded into gothic forms, wrinkled cliffs, twisting clefts. "Secret" is for a cliff-fronted table-land tucked far back into the maze. The word also fits the sense of mystery that accompanies any effort to penetrate the rumpled topography and the thick vegeta-tion that changes rapidly from thorny Sonoran plants around the warm feet of the precipices to cool boreal forests near the top of the Rim.

There is a feeling of fantasy to the carvings along the edges of the outer pinna-cles. Back of that airiness is massiveness. One sees it in the great cliffs that line the sylvan water-sweet glens of Oak Creek's West Fork, and in the rearing mesas that block attempts to go up the canyons that split the area's southern facade. Topped with buff-colored, beautifully crossbedded Coconino sandstone, these mesas are reminiscent of the massive stone temples in Utah's Zion National Park.

The western snout of the wilderness smooths out a little as it nears broad Casner Mountain. There it butts up against a power line built along a high ridge. Only that corridor-and it is neither very wide nor very long-separates Red Rock-Secret Mountain from older Syca-nearly 9000 protective acres to Sycamore's lower reaches.) Together the two units provide explorers with 100,000 acres of wilderness. In most places, the terrain is hard to negotiate. Except for the West Fork of Oak Creek, whose upper section is as cramped as the narrows in West Clear Creek, the canyons are achingly dry. Many cliffs can be mastered only with ropes. Yet the difficulties are part of the allure.

Meanwhile, dazzling sights and sounds and smells delight the senses. On every side there are vivid contrasts to ponder. Ponder. In the end that may be the key word for all the wilderness areas-learn-ing not only something about the truths of the natural world that sustains all life but about ourselves as well.

Selected Reading

Speaking for Nature, by Paul Brooks. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1980.

Hiking the Southwest: A Sierra Club Totebook, by Dave Ganci. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA, 1983.

John Muir's Wild America, by Tom Melbam, photographed by Farrell Greban. National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, 1976.

Walking Softly in the Wilderness; the Sierra Club Guide to Back-packing, by John Hart. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1984.

The Common Sense Medical Guide and Outdoor Reference, by Newell D. Breyfogle. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1981.

Forgey's Wilderness Medicine, by William W. Forgey, M.D. Indiana Camp Supply Books, Pittsboro, Indiana, 1979.

Furthermore Canyon Wilder-ness, famed for its alter-nating red promontories and deep, seldom-trod bays. (The 1984 act added