Environment

ANCTUARY Preserving Land for Wildlife

This is a story about a short stretch of a very long river.

It's a story about how we assign names to big chunks of ground, names such as "wildlife refuge" or "wilderness preserve," and then we begin to think of those places as having forever been what we named them.

It's a story about a strip of desert upland recently set aside as a federal Wilderness where once silver and other precious metals were gouged from the earth, and mining camps and mills sprang up.

It's a story, too, about one man's love for that short span of river, and his efforts to save the stories of other people who once lived there.

The river is the lower Colorado, but only a short 40-mile span north of Yuma, from Walter's Camp down to Imperial Dam, much of it lying within the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge. The Wilderness area is a skinny corridor of some 10,000 upland acres running 20 miles or so parallel to the refuge.

The man is Robert Knowlton, "Smokey" to his friends, who lives upriver from the dam and, with his son, Ron, operates Yuma River Tours from Fisher's Landing at Martinez Lake.

Untracked, unsettled, unspoiled, unstoried. These are the words we attach to "wilderness," as if to define a concept by what's missing. In the popular imagination, wilderness is remote, too, and wild, inhabited only by plants and animals people included that evolved with the ecosystem and belong there. Everything pristine, existing in natural harmony, unaltered by human hand.

A rizona hosts an abundance of wildlife.

(CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT, TOP) A male gilded flicker. G.C. KELLY A mule deer. PAUL A. BERQUIST A box turtle and a black-tailed jackrabbit. BOTH BY JOHN CANCALOSI (RIGHT) Ocotillo blooms in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

(FOLLOWING PANEL, PAGES 28 AND 29) A rock overhang frames a desertscape in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains. BOTH BY JERRY SIEVE Created by the Arizona Desert Wilderness Act of 1990, the 9,660 new federal Wilderness acres in the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge are anything but pristine.

European settlement on the lower Colorado goes back to the 16th century. Before then the area was wild in all the senses we now attach to the idea, save one: to the Cocopah and Quechan peoples, who lived on the land, it was simply home.

At one time in the late 19th century, numerous settlements mining camps mostly dotted the river's banks. Gold, lead, zinc, and manganese were taken from the ground, but silver was the principal metal. Arizona's famous Silver Mining District, with more than 60 mines, was just north of where refuge headquarters is today.

With a population of around 500, the gold-mining town of Picacho on the California side was one of the bigger communities in the area.

Until the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1877, the lower Colorado, at one time called Arizona's Nile, was the supply line. Steamboats such as the Mohave, Cochan, Colorado I, Cocopah all shallow-draft stern-wheelers navigated the tricky, shifting river channels, carrying ore 157 miles downstream from Yuma to Puerta Isabel and returning with supplies shipped in from San Francisco and other ports. In their heyday, steamers ran the lower Colorado's entire length, all the way to the mouth of the Virgin River, 590 miles above the gulf.

In 1854 Lt. Nathaniel Michler, at Fort Yuma with a boundarysurvey party, described the "bright green foliage" marking the river's course. "Large cottonwood trees, different varieties of willow thickly matted together, and impenetrable thickets of arrow [weed] and grease-wood, grow near the river; further back the mezquite [sic], of two kinds the flat pod and screw bean thrive and flourish."

Before long, however, the riverbanks were cleared of native trees to fuel steamboat boilers. Opportunistic exotic species hastened to fill the void. Now, tamarisk, a Middle-Eastern import, is the dominant tree; cottonwoods and willows grow only in secluded side channels and backwater lakes.

Damming, dredging, mining, hunting, trapping, diversion of river water for irrigation, and the introduction of alien plant and animal species so altered the lower Colorado's environment that whatever may have been its "natural state" had long since ceased to exist by the beginning of the 20th century.

In time, as ores petered out or were too low-grade to be processed profitably, the mines closed. People abandoned the river to seek their fortunes elsewhere and overnight mining camps became ghost towns. The townsite of Picacho is now a State of California Recreation area. Acres of white mine tailings and the original mill's broken-down stone foundation are the only reminders of its past.

Some mines in the district reopened, then closed again. A few die-hard prospectors hung on, packing supplies into the backcountry on burros. Accompanied perhaps only by a faithful dog, they combed the already picked-over hills hoping to strike it rich, just as Charlie Eichelberger had done in 1897 when he struck the gold seam that became the King of Arizona Mine.

But as the years passed, the old-timers moved on or died off. Now only dedicated rock hounds bother to search the abandoned mine tailings.

Over time, the disturbed areas along the river were vegetated with native and exotic plants. Trees and shrubs sprouted amid crumbling foundations; roofs and walls weathered away. Whether sparked by lightning or set afire by vandals, some structures burned to the ground. Wild mustangs and burros came at dusk to water where deer and desert bighorn sheep also drank.

Today, gliding past the old Silver District in a canoe you see no sign that Clip, Norton's Landing, Eureka, and Picacho once buzzed with life.

In 1941 the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge was established on 46,793 acres along the lower Colorado as habitat for migrating and wintering birds.

Burro trails

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 30 AND 31) traverse a basin in the Imperial Wilderness. (LEFT) Desert sand verbena colors a wash in the Havasu Wildlife Refuge Wilderness. BOTH BY JERRY SIEVE (CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT) A young desert bobcat. PAUL A. BERQUIST A collared lizard. BERNADETTE M. HEATH A roadrunner. JOHN CANCALOSI A pair of fledgling screech owls. PAUL A. BERQUIST Continued from page 26 Wilderness acres were set aside at Arizona's Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, 800,000 at the Cabeza Prieta refuge, and 14,000 at the Havasu refuge. These game refuges are all in the arid southwest corner of Arizona; two of them, Imperial and Havasu, lie along the lower Colorado River. The combined 1.3 million Wilderness acres protected at Kofa and Cabeza Prieta comprise more than half of the total created in Arizona by the 1990 Wilderness legislation. It's not likely that weekend boaters, fishermen, canoeists, water-skiers, and other recreationists on the lower Colorado near Imperial will notice the change in designation - many, in fact, are scarcely aware that for 50 years the area has been a wildlife refuge. And the change will have virtually no effect on the way most visitors use the river. The one exception is that with the change to Wilderness status no vehicles of any kind are allowed on these lands. But at Imperial it's the waterway not the rugged desert hills of the nearly 10,000 Wilderness acres that attracts weekenders. Attracts them in droves. On any given weekend, the boat landings hum with activity. Powerboats, ski boats, jet skis, canoes, fishing boats - watercraft of every description wait in line to launch or to load up to be trailered home. The river channel is clogged with boats, many of them overpowered jobs, glazed to high gloss in colors like candy-apple red or lime green. It's a scene that seems wildly incongruous. A national wildlife refuge overrun with wild things of a different stripe: young men and women in coordinated bikini swimsuits that also are colormated to their boats, and sometimes even to the cars or trucks that hauled the boats to the river. Powerboats with enough horsepower to tow a barge are asked to do no more than pull a water-skier to the surface and whisk him along the river channel. On some weekends, the staff at Imperial are more occupied with law enforcement than with resource management. There are areas off-limits to water-skiers, of course, but the sheer pressure of human presence causes most of the wildlife protected here to flee the river during times of peak human use.

It's near dusk when he spots burros browsing a hillside on the Arizona shore. He cuts the outboard engine to catch a drift pattern that will carry us to a point near the burros. I squint hard along a line defined by Smokey Knowlton's pointed finger, yet I can't see them, so perfectly do their color tones blend with their surroundings. I focus on the spot and wait for something to move across my line of sight. Finally, I see the burros, a trio, moving very slowly, keeping a wary eye on us. It's three days after the Memorial Day weekend. We've been out on the river all day, and these burros, a coyote pup, cliff swallows and white-throated swifts, a few herons and egrets, and a small herd of mustangs are the only wildlife we've come across. Over the weekend, most birds retreated to the backwaters, beavers retired to burrows in the mudbanks, bighorn sheep that come to the river along with burros, javelina, foxes, and mule deer to drink still were more furtive than usual. Earlier, I'd driven out Red Cloud Mine Road from Imperial refuge headquarters toward the boundary of the new Wilderness acres, stopping at Palo Verde, Mesquite, Ironwood, and Smoke Tree points along the way. It was there in the marshes and sloughs, the quieter regions of the refuge, that I saw concentrations of birds herons, egrets, ducks, shorebirds and trails, well-worn by the hooves of ungulates, leading toward the water. The animals, it seemed to me, had conceded temporarily to the recreationists' claim on the river. Now, as the boat drifts into shore, I watch the burros and wonder about this guy next to me who seems as delighted with the burros as with the coyote pup we saw earlier. I wonder why he's taken it upon himself to try to save some of the river's history: patching up old cabins, seeking out and recording the oral histories of old-timers. When Smokey Knowlton first came to the lower Colorado as a teenager in the 1950s, many artifacts of turn-of-the-century river life were still there. The river was a vacation playground then, for swimming, fishing, exploring mining-camp ruins. Year after year he returned, learning the river's side channels and sloughs and seeking out old cabins tucked up in out-of-theway coves.

When alerted to danger, black-tailed prairie dogs (LEFT) quickly disappear into their underground burrows. PAUL A BERQUIST. (RIGHT) Cholla cacti thrive in the rocky ground below the dry and rugged Kofa Mountains in southwestern Arizona. Bighorn sheep live in the Kofas, and the only native palm trees in the state are found there. JERRY SIEVE

Then he came back one day, this time to stay, and saw all that river history crumbling into dust.

Over the years, his sense of the importance of other's lives had quickened, and he thought, “It's interesting how much history is here; maybe I can help pass it down.” So he set to work restor-ing broken-down cabins and tracking down old-timers to get their stories.

One is Mike Mendivil. Born in Picacho, he now lives just across the Colorado River from Yuma in Winterhaven, California. Some accounts credit Mike's great-grandfather, José Mendivil, a former Army scout, with discovering Picacho's rich gold veins.

Another is Dave Egenhoff. Knowlton found him in Sacramento, California. Egenhoff, who had lived on the river between the ages of 4 and 14, described the Hoge Ranch where Mendivil had worked as a kid and backed up details Mendivil recalled about the Draper homestead, another area ranch. They both remembered Draper as a sullen man who married a much younger woman and built her a large house. When she left, he became a recluse.

Mendivil showed Smokey where the workers at the Hoge Ranch bunked, a dugout in the side of a hill. As a kid, Mendivil had eyes for the Mexican housekeeper there and tried to get all his chores done early so he could do yard work around the ranch house. But he was too shy to speak to the housekeeper. After all these years, he still complains about the oatmeal he had to eat while working there. We've drifted in close; the burros measure their flight distance. “What does Smokey Knowlton get out of all this?” I ask. He pauses. “It's a shame to lose it, knowing how much these people had to endure, how tough they were to let that blend back into the Earth without having done something to capture it.” I remind him that most of the old cabins he's worked to restore are on state or federal land. Land managers could order them razed as unsafe.

“Yep, and that's sad. Whatever happens you've got to accept it. I'll take as many pictures as I can, do the best I can. You don't know what you can do until you try. I doubt if I've made anything better or brought it back to its original condition. All I'm trying to do is keep intact some river history, to hold onto something.” We're too close now, the burros move into a ravine, out of sight.

Next month: “Arizona's New Wilderness: The Riparian Connection.”