A WALK IN THE WOODS

My summer sunrise walk of a couple miles, round-trip, usually takes me along Tonto Creek. It begins anytime from 4:30 to 6:00 AM.. depending on the weather and my degree of indolence. I saunter. It is not exercise. It is total relaxation and opening of the mind. I have found my habitat at this location an enormously varied home base, as I have learned of more and more of its treasures. It is part of the whole physical world, of course, which I try to understand to whatever extent I can, thus to be more appreciative of my own land and my own role in protecting it. I have trouble with that. I need no company on this walk. Folks met along the way, if any, seem as preoccupied as I by the grace of their surroundings. They need nothing from me.

There is always the old, always the new, and always the arching sky, the rich, moist earth, the creek hustling toward its destiny. There is so much to enjoy in the first few minutes, the first few hundred feet: a clear day ahead in the forest and its understory; the subdued voice of the stream; the squeaking, chirping, chattering of small creatures already out and about. Adrenaline flows. The small fry are after the apples, pears, grapes, and berries around the houses and yards of this little colony of summer homes. They appear to tolerate humans pretty well, if we are quiet and unabusive.

Almost involuntarily I turn eastward this morning, away from the road and creek. There is a trail of sorts that provides a scenic vantage. After a few long pulls up the ridge, there it is, in all its pristine wildness: the vast, brooding Mogollon Rim. It rises to a crest some four miles northward and (we calculate) 2600 feet above my cabin door. That door, so Donna Willcutt, my friend and neighbor, tells me, is about 5300 feet above sea level. (She lives near the official surveyor's bench mark.) Tonto Creek with all that elevation slides away from the Rim in high gear, sending some of its water eventually, I hope, all the way to the Sea of Cortes.

The crest at Promontory Butte is one of the highest spots along the Rim's 200mile length. It is about the same elevation as the Grand Canyon's North Rim, which, generally speaking, is about 8000 feet.

Several of the layers of rock seen in the Canyon walls are exposed in our Rim's escarpment, too. I feel an acquaintanceship with all this, for Grand Canyon was my base more than fifty years ago. I think about that little feisty, whitehaired lady of mine and our forty-seven years together (she's still snoozing in her cabin bunk), and I hope I turned off the flame under the coffeepot.

I find a log to sit on as the first rays of the sun strike high on the Rim, outlining it in preliminary yet stark detail. The bulk is still in deep subdued color, a quiet receding mauve. It is a silent, spectral mass of many moods each day, representative of the whole plateau's essence, becoming an inspiring drama when illuminated by the rising sun. The scene changes, constantly, subtly. And I stare at it in wonder. The Rim forms an enormous backdrop for all I see and feel from where I'm sitting-in great detail close by, more diffused in middle distance. My eye moves on to the crest, where I have stood many times, thence to the boundless sky. In contemplating the Rim Country, I come to feel myself a part of it. I think about mankind and its function. For all I know, the human race may be important, although I have yet to see much evidence that it is indispensable. But before such majesty as this, humans are moved to examine their own fitness and maturity.

(LEFT AND RIGHT) The Tonto Basin, beneath the thousand-foot-high escarpment of the Mogollon Rim, is rugged forest with deeply cut canyons. It contains the Sierra Ancha mountains and two major creeks, Tonto, at left, and Rye. In the early days, the area was a hiding place for Apaches and white renegades. DAVID ELMS JR./DICK DIETRICH Human history in the Southwest deserves no great tribute. I think we are foreigners-quite different from any other mammal-almost illegal aliens on this turf. At times in our egomania we are terribly destructive, have been so all over the world, to the land and to ourselves; that seems to be the nature of life. Still, I respond to and admire the concept of the oneness of man and the natural world as defined in Hopi Indian philosophy, evolved over the centuries by those who have dwelled on quiet mesas only a threeor four-hour drive from where I am sitting. The Hopi may be far wiser than I, and I should see them more often.

Prowling back to the road, I ignore the trail and step very carefully. (How would they find me if I fell and broke a leg, even this close to the cabin?) My trifocals are of little help, but the rewards are splendid.I see small dikes of gray rock that appear to be limestone. There are chunks of other rocks, broken, some weathered smooth, some sharp as razors, some bare, some lichen-covered. I am told this is a special area geologically because there is so much here from elsewhere.

It must be fertile ground. Oak and cedar and giant old pines abound, discolored with age and weathering, some down and crumbling, others dead from lightning and fire. Two ravens sit high in the crown of a dead pine, croaking as usual, at me no doubt. I always enjoy ravens. They are the confident politicians among birds wherever I've seen them, clear into the Arctic wilds or in the streets of remote villages. Forever muttering or calling raucously about nothing.

Blundering into a tangle of catclaw (I am well scratched before getting out), I discover a fine specimen of oak burl. Although I've wandered here before, I haven't seen it until now. Growing on a slender limb six feet from the trunk, it is sprouting shoots three to five feet long. I must come back and see it again.

I find a lone Douglas fir twenty-five feet high. I see no others anywhere around. Why is it doing so well where it seems not quite to belong? This walk is one mystery after another.

My wife and I planted a small aspen in our cabin yard several years ago. Now it is

Beneath the Mogollon Rim. The land of natural enchantment today was very much a "dark and bloody ground" in the nineteenth century, where the infamous Pleasant Valley War occurred and thirty men lost their lives. The Basin, situated in the 2,812,060-acre Tonto National Forest, remains largely uninhabited and little changed.ten feet tall, shaking and shimmering like a fan dancer. It too is somewhat out of place, perhaps. A fan dancer: across my mind there glides a picture of Sally Rand, as I saw her in 1933, early in her career, at the Chicago Theatre. She fluttered just like our aspen. And I like the thought-a credit to her and to our lovely tree. There are many junipers, as large and dense as any I've seen. They are called "alligator" because of their rough, segmented, warty bark. As fireplace logs, they burn pungent, hot, crackling. Sparks fly. We keep the firescreen closed. Back down on the road, I think about how we live here in the Transition life zone. We overlap downward into the warm Upper Sonoran zone and upward into the cooler Canadian zone. As attested by another friend and neighbor, Dee Haggard (who has been here forever), this is a one-of-a-kind place even for Arizona, where grandeur is standard. Oddly, not a great deal has been published about upper Tonto Creek. Being on the road anyway, I amble up to the mailbox. Letters from children and grandchildren. They will make my little lady hop around like a chickadee tracing the seams of a ponderosa pine. After enjoying the Rim and all the sights and sounds of this morning, it occurs to me that the source of Tonto Creek is itself a special phenomenon. It flows at the rate of 1500 gallons per minute; the headwaters maintain a constant temperature of forty-eight degrees. The state fish hatchery, where trout are raised to stock streams in the vicinity, occupies the head of the valley. Established in 1936, it is an absorbingly interesting place, educational and useful, worth far more than it costs. Up around the hatchery, we overlap into the Canadian life zone, with Colorado blue spruce, Engelmann spruce, an occasional white pine, and a lot of Douglas fir. There are sycamores, box elders, willows, maples, oaks. Manzanitas (in the old days a favorite firewood of campers and ranchers) are prevalent. There are many flowers and small shrubs. And it is the habitat of wildlife in many forms. The land above the Rim, stretching away to the north, is called the Mogollon Plateau. It is, of course, a part of the Colorado Plateau, one of the three main physBiographic divisions of Arizona. The drainage is generally toward the Little Colorado River, partly toward the Verde. There must be a great deal of moisture from rain and snow percolating down through the Mogollon and Colorado plateaus to relatively impervious layers, formations that hold the water and allow it to escape here and there into such declivities as are at the heads of Tonto, Horton, Christopher, and other streams. For the most part, they flow from the Rim's walls, not off its edge. The Rim, the escarpment of a gigantic fault with numerous cross-faults, gives us an almost self-explanatory demonstration of Arizona topography and its relation to natural resources-water as a prime one, but many others as well. It is an enthralling display, scenically and scientifically. We live with evidence of deep-seated, repeated movement of the planet's crust. We see it graphically at the Grand Canyon and at the Mogollon Rim. Massive layers have slipped, slid, buckled, risen, lowered, shoved against each other. With our own eyes, we can see the results. During any few millions of years, mountain ranges come and go, seas invade and recede, weather patterns change. By comparison, our little moment of seventy years or so is no measure of time, but our minds can comprehend some of it, at least the realization that creation is a continuous process. For us as for the land. The surface we live upon is formed, sloped, cultivated, seeded, fertilized, irrigated, vegetated, composed, and decomposed by wind and water, freezing and thawing, gravity, centrifugal force. So. I meander down the creek to the little white-haired lady and a second cup of coffee, this one with a cigar. And the letters from the kids to read to her. This land indeed is a many splendored thing. Love personified. For Nature never jokes. No man has ever superseded her will.After thirty-five years with the National Park