Hike of the Month

Some years spring seems to linger in the Sonoran Desert for little more than a lone weekend. For a few splendid days, this is practically the Garden of Eden (and our serpents don't pre-varicate; they just rattle).

Then, without warning, the solar afterburner kicks in, backpacks migrate to the closet, and for the next five months our out-ings are increasingly brief and squeezed into early mornings.

And so as we plod into the gaping mouth of Finger Rock Canyon in the Santa Catalinas, we are marveling about seasons and about life.

Often, walking in the desert, I'm reminded of the opposite. This has nothing to do with fear or morbidity, but with the fact that out here, death is exposed, not concealed in the shadow and underbrush of a forest. A coyote's skull bleaches in the sun, tufts of coarse, gray-brown fur still clinging to its lower jaw. A century-old saguaro fried by lightning stands for decades after its death, its naked ribs splaying like a fountain.

As Charles Bowden wrote in Blue Desert, “Here death is like breathing. Here death simply is.” But on this spring day following a winter of good rains, all bespeaks life. We grope through a mesquite bosque so luxuriant that its foliage In Tucson take Alvernon Way north and park where it dead-ends at the mountain. The trailhead is signed about 100 feet above the road's end. Just beyond Finger Rock Spring, 1.1 miles in, follow the trail branch to the right, up the canyon wall; the straight-ahead route is a false trail.

FINGER ROCK: A CANYON THAT'S AN EARLY MORNING GARDEN OF EDEN

forms a canopy as in a rainforest. Gardens of wildflowers flank the trail: the miniature pink trumpets of the penstemon, outrageous yellow sunbursts of groundsel, and the mendacious desert thistle with its hidden stickers.

A mile in, bees form a cloud over Finger Rock Spring. We gape at the craggy canyon walls rising beside us, and it looks as though every improbable square inch is claimed by some living thing.

Of all the canyons in the Catalinas, Finger Rock is the most spectacular. Its walls thrust almost 2,000 feet above its floor. Groves of ocotillo spray all but horizontally out of the walls, the tips of their thorny branches throwing flames of orange flowers.

Finger Rock, visible from much of the trail, is an impossibly thin hoodoo pointing skyward from a gnarled fist atop the west canyon wall. Unfortunately, this trail doesn't lead to it.

What this trail eventually does lead to is your musculoskeletal therapist. From the trailhead at 3,100 feet, it soars brazenly to the 7,255-foot summit of Mount Kimball in exactly five miles.

En route are some acrophobes' eyebrow-raisers where the trail becomes a slope of slick granite overlooking a 400-foot plunge to the canyon bottom. But the first three miles are fairly easy and offer so much spectacular scenery that nobody should feel guilty about retreating when the scare factor sets in.

A leftover winter chill hung in the air when we started; now, near noon, the canyon bathes in sunlight and is coming alive. As we stumble out, another hiker warns us: “A rattler slithered across the trail about 50 yards down from here.” A few moments later, another tells us she's just seen a Gila monster.

I've lived here for 20 years and never have seen a Gila monster in the wild, I tell her. “Neither have I, before today,” she says. She beams with accomplishment.

This vicarious encounter helps me appreciate the Sonoran Desert, my home, still more. This is a harsh and sometimes difficult land, and so we should celebrate all the life that thrives in it.

John C. Van Dyke wrote in 1901 that the desert.causes every living thing to be “more positive, more insistent.” A long, gentle spring renews their resolve.