The Plateau, the Rim Country, the Basin and Range

ALL ARIZONA

IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS: THE PLATEAU, THE RIM COUNTRY, AND THE BASIN AND RANGE.

Scholars picked the terms for the three physiographic provinces. But people live on the land and explain the nature of these three different terrains. Meet three such people...

(PRECEDING PANEL) Representing Arizona's three physiographic provinces, from left: Monument Valley with slender Totem Pole and Yei Bichei “dancers,” the Plateau. PETER KRESAN Forested Mogollon Rim, northern limit of the Rim Country province. JERRY SIEVE Kofa Mountains and desert slopes of western Arizona, the Basin and Range province. PETER KRESAN

(RIGHT) This aerial view of the Vermilion Cliffs and the Colorado River shows an austere section of the Plateau province. PETER KRESAN She lives in the rock, safe from the pounding of history. From her door, she looks out at the Vermilion Cliffs. At her back, Marble Canyon knifes down through the stone toward the Grand Canyon. Her home is a place called the Colorado Plateau, a huge sedimentary slab laid down by vanished seas, a stone crown that dominates northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Rona Levein is around 50 and has come here for the calm. She chose well. For 600 million years the Plateau has absented itself from the major contortions and upheavals of the earth. The surface glows with colors-red, yellow, gray-and scant vegetation dots its parched desert soil. A few volcanoes, a few faults nicked its serenity. But while all around the Plateau mountains rose, while ground buckled and twisted, while the surfaces of the West warped and altered, this geologic entity rode out the storms of the planet's crust and remained relatively level and unchanged. That is why she has come here: to find the place that mocked time and yet meant time.Behind her home, a small orchard flourishes, fed by a nearby spring-a great treasure in this land of stone, where the Colorado River crashes onward fat with water yet the terrain itself is almost bereft of so much as a trickling spring. Below the orchard she has constructed a trapeze, where she works out nearly every day. She is embedded in a world of musical words: Kaibab, Hualapai, Kaibito, Shivwits, Kanab, and on and on. To the east rise the Echo Cliffs where Major John Wesley Powell and his party delighted in the answers to their shouts; she stares at formations called Coconino, Toroweap, Moenkopi, Chinle, San Rafael.

I am lying on the floor of her home listening to the pop of piñon in the potbellied stove. On the wall is a drawing by W. H. Holmes, the great artist of the stone country. The plate is part of a famous late 19th-century government study, Clarence E. Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District. Remove the dwelling and the highway, and the drawing is exactly what I see out the window.

She wishes to explain. Her work is simple and intricate. She delivers the mail, and because of the rock and the canyons cutting through it, her route takes hours and brings her to very few people. This is the country where a few minutes' flight for a bird can mean an hour's labor or more for a machine, much longer for a person on foot. The Plateau has chastened human beings for thousands of years: Ute, Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, Spaniard, American. Here settlers pushing out of Utah found ground that exhausted their genius at wresting communities from the desert. Human beings are islands here in a sea of stone. This is the American Tibeta high cold desert almost empty of people.

I have hiked 50 miles down a canyon and seen no one but a mule deer, a hawk, and rock sketches of bighorn sheep and man-the-hunter scratched by ancient ones on the cliffs. I have forgotten the world and found the earth.

She tells me of her work in New York City, the frequent trips to Europe to consult on campaigns for new fashions. The fine restaurants of the Continent, the charm of old centers of civilization. In 1976, as a lark, she came to Arizona to ride a raft through the Grand Canyon. She had never done such a thing before. The first day the party hit a rapid, and she raised her camera to take a shot and froze. Overwhelmed by the Canyon's beauty, she handed the camera to another member of the group; she knew her photo taking was over.

She speaks in a calm, reasoned voice. She is determined to be logical. Deep in the Grand Canyon, the party peered at the Precambrian rock, dark Vishnu schist, the material of this planet that has slumbered almost two billion years, the oldest rock in Arizona. She reached out and touched stone. She could feel the hard surface vibrate.

In the next year, she came back two or three times. And then she closed out New York, left her career, found odd jobs among the boatmen and hangers-on of the Colorado River and the surrounding Plateau. There are very few people in this place, and almost all tell similar stories.

She looks down at me to see if I can comprehend her message. She offers one more clue. She once followed an old Indian trail near Navajo Mountain. The route dead-ended on a cliff face. She reached out and found tiny fingerholds and footholds used by the ancients. As her hands reached toward the stone grips, an image of hands reaching out and guiding hers came to her. She is certain of this. She looks at me again. Do I understand?

He lives far up Cherry Creek, un-der the crumbling lip of the Colorado Plateau. This is the second great region of Arizona, the Mogollon Rim Country or central high-lands. Here the edge of the great stone wafer to the north slowly erodes backward into itself and spills soil onto the deserts below. The dissolving edge pulsed with periods of uplift, warped with faulting, and wound up higher than either the plateau to the north or the deserts to the south. The lip has shed the more recent rock of the geologic clock and is down to Precambrian stone, material a billion or two years old.

Here the rain clouds that sweep across the hot deserts come to rest. The Rim and its mountains are the state's water machine, feeding the rivers that sustain Phoenix and its surrounding communities. The Rim Country arcs the heart of Arizona and includes a maze of canyons running side by side but isolated from each other.

This is his home ground. His kin came here from Texas in the late 19th century. The journey went like this: They unloaded their cattle and horses and women and children at Willcox and began to drive the herd north. When they reached Tonto Basin, beneath the wall of the Rim, they settled and founded a great ranch.

Now Nathan Ellison clings to a remain-ing fragment of that great holding. Within his mind, a century of the Rim Country flows like a constant present. At the bottom of Cherry Creek, saguaros tower beside the dirt road. At the top, pine forests sweep in the largest contiguous stretch of ponderosa in the nation.

Nathan Ellison was raised in a world that owns a piece of the American imagination. Zane Grey settled nearby, and his stream of books concerned both this jagged ground and the hard people who thrived in the canyons, people whose descendants still work it and live it. I have come here because he is the great hunter. His home is studded with heads of beasts, and one particular prey, the mountain lion, tells the essential facts of the Rim Country and of the people who settled it. Nathan Ellison has been in on the kill of 249 of the great cats. For a century, the men of the Rim Country have waged war on the lions to little or no effect. The wilderness of rough rock is the womb of the lions that range throughout the state, the place where they thrive and from which they go forth to claim new ground in the deserts below.

He is a hearty man, the face red from living under the sky, the hands scarred with work. He speaks carefully until he gets to the matter of the hunt, and then suddenly details spill out, and he has instant recall of the moves of a long-dead

COMING YOUR WAY IN THE MONTHS AHEAD

Get ready for the year's most beautiful, most awaited issue: our annual Greeting Card to the World: Each December, Arizona Highways reflects a special theme that touches the hearts-and minds-of millions of people throughout the world. This year, the magazine has outdone itself in pictorial splendor with a special multicultural issue, "Home for the Holidays." So come home with us. In December.

John D. Lee, executed for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, lives again as we track his escape from the law through the exotic land of Paria Canyon in midwinter. Then it's on to the Grand Canyon with a recounting of the adventures of one man and his 30-year devotion to exploring this matchless wonder. Also: the life and times of mountain man and soldier Kit Carson, plus a wild ride with the Hashknife Pony Express. In January.

A year after the informative report "Water and the Desert Dweller," we bring you a follow-up review of Arizona's water outlook. We also give special recognition to that marvelous animal, the horse. And we probe the mysteries of the desert night, meeting hunters and hunted, and some of the strange beasts that for centuries lurked in the dark regions of superstition. Finally we focus on the night sky-as you've never seen it before. In February.

Give an Arizona Highways subscription. Use the enclosed order form or call (602) 258-1000 or (toll-free within Arizona) 1-800-543-5432.

Give Adventure this Holiday Season.

This is a holiday gift that will be remembered all year: a subscription to Arizona Highways. Each month your family, friends, and business associates can share the state's wonders in colorful photographs and informative articles. And it's all so affordable and easy to give. You can start or renew a one-year subscription for $15-then each additional gift subscription is just $13. And we'll send you scenic cards to announce your gifts to every name on your list. To give subscriptions to beautiful Arizona Highways, just complete and return the enclosed gift catalog order form. Subscriptions may also be ordered by writing or visiting Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009. Phone orders may be placed by calling (602) 258-1000 or dialing toll-free within Arizona 1-800-543-5432.

All foreign subscriptions are $18 per year. Gift cards will be mailed to you upon receipt of your order.

Text continued from page 8 deer, a passionate memory of a particular bear, a vivid recollection of roping a mountain lion as a teenager. His life has been the animals, and through their habits he has found an entryway into the secrets of the Rim.

Ellison points out the door to a nearby low pass and says he has taken 33 lions there alone. He bemoans their stock killing, denounces their appetite for deer. He is in his 50s and still hungry for the hunt.

I ask him if he would like a country where the lion had been conquered, where the killers were gone for good.

He pauses and then whispers, “I couldn't stand that.” Scholars call the physiographic region Basin and Range, a huge tract covering the southern half of Arizona with sharp mountains rising like islands from a sea of soil eroded off their slopes. In the central and eastern part of the state, the peaks have crowns of pine, spruce, and fir while the lower flanks host saguaro, mesquite, and paloverde. Here the biological universe of the Rocky Mountains collides with that of the Sierra Madre, creating a wonderland of plants and bewitched naturalists. One small range, the Huachucas, has more species of mammals than the whole state of Illinois.

This region is a record of accidents. Between 650 and 250 million years ago, shallow seas ebbed and flowed across Arizona, and the region hosted the continental shoreline. When the great supercontinent of Pangaea ripped apart around 225 million years ago, western North America became active. Arizona experienced volcanoes, earthquakes, and movements of the earth's crust. The floor of the Pacific Ocean began to slide under the western shoreline of North America-just about all of the ground west of the Colorado River was added by this process. One explosive phase of volcanism (between 35 and 25 million years ago) blasted thousands of cubic miles of rock out of the depths and onto the surface of southern Arizona and New Mexico.

Then, about 15 million years ago, the forces reversed, and the crust of Arizona began to be pulled apart. This act formed the Basin and Range region; the Colorado Plateau escaped the violence of this episode. The flanks of the ranges eroded and filled the valleys with deep deposits of debris and soil. The rains saturated some of these basins, leaving a legacy of underground storage water, and rivers etched drainage patterns in the new landform. When all this mountain upthrusting, faulting, sinking, erosion, and sporadic volcanism ended, one of the most arresting landscapes on the surface of the earth had emerged. Ranges rise up all rough-edged stone, yet flanked with soil fans that appear as soft and plastic as pudding.

The man sitting under the ramada does not concern himself with these academic details.

He is somewhere in his 70s and lives alone with his 90-year-old sister 20 miles from Ajo, Arizona, a sometime mining town on the edge of a huge uninhabited desert that stretches more than a hundred miles to the Colorado River at Yuma. His name is Chico Shunie, and he is a Sand Papago, the end of the line of a certain stamp of desert people.

He has no car, no electricity, no running water. His home is a shack made from scavenged sheets of metal and cardboard. He speaks no English and hosts few visitors. The site is a dying village, and he and his sister are the last residents it is likely to have. Once the Sand Papagos ranged through southwestern Arizona and northwestern Sonora, the last true nomads operating in the lower 48 states. Their homeland was a desert almost empty of water, a place where the rains totaled maybe three to five inches a year, brief showers in a life of dry winds.

Now parklands, military gunnery ranges, wildlife refuges have taken their ground, and they as a people have all but melted away into the towns bordering their ancient homeland. Chico Shunie is an exception. He lives within a federal wildlife refuge; the government chooses to ignore his presence rather than tangle with his possible legal rights. Around his ramada and his shacks, the ground is plucked clean of vegetation, so that, he explains, he can see the rattlesnakes coming.

Inside his head lives the lost world where men and women and children survived without anything except what the desert offered. He still knows the seasons for each plant on the desert floor and where the game gathers and when it beats away. He knows where the tinajas arethe small, cistern-like holes in the rock where rainwater collects and lingers awhile. He chides visitors if they go to doctors, and proudly announces that his medicine chest is the desert the right leaf, seed, root, and gum for whatever ails him.

But then he claims very little ails him. He has quit the drinking; the drinking, he says, is what killed the other Indians, and now he plans to live forever. He cooks over mesquite gathered from the desert. He has no radio, television; he cannot read. He sits out here under the ramada day after day and floats his mind across the idea of the desert.

He is a fragment of a great challenge to our world. Everything required to create and sustain a culture he and his people found in a landscape most Americans consider barren beyond belief. A thick shock of hair, still mostly black, crowns his head; his eyes are clear, and a smile flashes frequently across his face. Think of the mountains of the Basin and Range province as islands, the valleys as the sea, and then realize that Chico Shunie and the all but crushed world he represents were the great voyagers on the ocean of heat and thirst.

Until this century, landscapes in the Southwest created the peoples of the Southwest. Now this has ended, and the electric wire, the machines, the air conditioner, the thousands of artifacts of our mills and factories and laboratories make every place safe and similar for us. We can find no higher use for much of the homeland of Chico Shunie than as a place for testing our cannons and bombs, and sheltering wild animals from our habits. From this same ground, his ancestors forged art, gods, and families.

We get up from our chairs under the ramada and walk down the wash. His sister remains behind; she is blind. He is going to show me the burying ground. The old man moves nimbly, his shoes cast-offs that do not fit his feet, his legs short, stumpy and yet powerful. We move through the mesquite and up a slope and find a jumble of tilting crosses on a hill. Many of the graves have collapsed into themselves. He points out the graves of his father, his mother, grandparents, and on and on. The names have weathered off, and the only map to the dead is his memory.

Clouds move across the desert to the west, and rain rides the air like a rich scent. Chico Shunie's face is at ease. He is at home here, at peace with the hard rock mountains, the big dry valleys, the prickly vegetation. He plucks a flower and deeply inhales the scent.

He is not a theory about the tight connections possible between human beings and the natural world. He is the fact.

The ground of the Southwest has forced us to new insights. Here the naturalists, zoologists, botanists, geologists have peered into the interplay of the earth and the things that live on the earth.

Such work has been possible because the terrain of Arizona forces everyone to confront it. This state hosts a modern urban civilization that must on a daily basis face wild animals, odd plants, and stone so old it seems to hail from Eden. The woman embedded in the sweep of the Colorado Plateau, the lion hunter with deep generational roots in the Mogollon Rim, the old Indian sitting under a ramada in the desert empire we call the Basin and Range province, each of these points out the possibilities available to us. This is the country where nature does not stay quietly in the treatises, or slumber in a drawer.

Arizona is where the riddles of creation brush against everyone's life. Charles Darwin once scribbled a passing thought in his journal: "If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering, and famine...they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor-we may all be netted together. Welcome to the net of existence as it has been played out in the stone, the leaf and thorn, the gleam of light in the eyes of the beasts. This net covers the surface of the earth like a mysterious statement, but in Arizona its message is written in a plain, bold hand.

Selected Reading