South Mountain: A Park for All Seasons

Sun-bleached. Ash gray. Burnt to a crisp. The South Mountain hillside before me appears utterly lifeless, victim of a Sonoran Desert summer. It is July, and even in the early morning, heat waves shimmer off the rocks sweltering in their coats of black desert varnish. I have only walked halfway up the slope, and already I'm thinking about getting the canteen out of my backpack. In the parched silence of the desert, the sounds of my footsteps in the gravel of the trail are all I hear.

So why am I here, hiking in South Mountain Park?

I am here because this is a place of great beauty, the subtle beauty of the desert, and there is real pleasure in getting to know it in all the months of the year, in returning often enough to the same place to absorb its cycle of life.

It is easy for those of us who live in greater Phoenix with our irrigated lawns, imported Bermuda grass, oleanders, and mulberry trees, our air-conditioned everything, to lose touch with the rhythm of the desert. We can easily overlook the austere harmony of our natural environment; we can ignore the annual pattern of a desert world evolved over 30 or 40 million years to accommodate extreme aridity and punishing summer heat.

That's what makes South Mountain Park so important. Surrounded by a flat urban plain occupied by nearly two million people, it is a natural mountain island, a retreat from civilization that preserves a remnant of the upper Sonoran Desert in the midst of concrete and asphalt, condominiums and shopping malls. And not such a small remnant, either. Sixteen thousand rugged, boulder-strewn acres with 40 miles of trails, all just a short distance from downtown Phoenix. The biggest municipal park in the world. Big enough so that on the hillside where I am walking I cannot see city or suburb or new subdivision.

When the park was acquired by the city in 1924, during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, Phoenix had fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. Yet a small group of far-sighted citizens recognized the need for recreational land close to town. They solicited the help of then-Representative Carl Hayden in Washington, who engineered the passage of a bill giving South Mountain to the growing community for a little more than a dollar an acre.

The acre in which I am standing is dotted with ocotillos. From the trail I can see clearly each thorn on the ocotillo stalks. Six weeks ago, at the tail end of spring, there were still some little yellow leaves left, softening the sharpness of the strange plants. And six weeks before that, those same leaves were a rich green, part of a crop that popped out of the ocotillo arms after a spring rain.

The rhythm of the desert is based on seasonal rainfall, which predictably comes in late winter and early spring and then again, more fiercely, in the thunderstorms of late July and August. There are no permanent streams in South Mountain, only gravelly washes-bone dry 99 days out of 100-and just three springs, each well known to the long-gone Hohokam Indians whose petroglyphs pecked into rock walls contain uncertain messages from an ancient desert culture.

Today the leafless paloverdes expose their green-barked trunks and limbs to the sun, waiting for the rains. Like the ocotillos, they have dropped every one of their tiny water-conserving leaves to achieve a still more extreme degree of conservation. If the August monsoon season arrives on schedule, they will respond with a new cycle of leaf production in time to exploit the more moderate sunshine ofText continued on page 10

A Park for All Seasons

(OPPOSITE PAGE) In these desert uplands, tribesmen of an earlier time stalked small game, sought out the healing medicines borne in plant stalk and root, and kept watch for enemies. GEORGE WUERTHNER

A Park for All Seasons

A Park for All Seasons

Text continued from page 5 the fall and winter months. The paloverde seedpods dangle brown and dry, rasping softly in the wind. They contain the fruit of the past May when these trees, so spartan in appearance now, were covered with yellow flowers. I remember the view from the trail then, the hillside marked with explosions of yellow, the air resonating with the humming of bees flying from flower to flower, tree to tree. Some of the pollen and nectar gatherers were familiar honeybees, but most were native desert bees that time their annual emergence to coincide perfectly with the seasonal flowering of paloverde and ironwood trees. These digger bees do not nest together in a hive. Instead, each female builds her own underground burrow, which she stocks with pollen, nectar, and an egg that will become a bee grub, a baby that will feast upon the provisions she supplied. At the moment, not a single adult digger bee survives anywhere in the park, but in the ground beneath my feet I know there is a new generation on hold that will emerge to enliven the desert next April and May. The mechanical whine of a single cicada reaches across the hillside, one long cry of summer that breaks off as abruptly as it began. A white-winged dove tumbles from its perch in an ocotillo and clatters away on noisy wings. I stop to catch my breath and wipe my forehead. The brittlebush shrubs that grow profusely on the slopes by the trail look even more dehydrated than I feel. The few twisted leaves they have retained are white, not green, covered with a mat of fine pale hairs that reflect the sun's rays and help keep the leaf cooler, much like the reflective blanket of white spines on the tender growing cap of the hedgehog cactus. In March, before the paloverde bloomed, the brittlebush offered an even more exuberant display of flowers. It had