Environment

DESERT LONDERLAND

The unspoiled Maricopa Mountains Wilderness is a land of history and hardy adventure At noon we pull our four-wheel-drive truck beneath the canopy of a large mesquite tree beside the narrow single-track road in the North Maricopa Mountains Wilderness. All morning we've been driving

Text by Tom Dollar Photographs by Jerry Sieve

DESERT LONDERLAND

the fringe of the Wilderness and tramping around in it. Sweat beads trickle down my spine beneath a loose cotton shirt; the crown of my broad-billed cap is sopping; my eyeglasses are fogged with salty runoff from my brow. I glance at a small thermometer af-fixed to the zip tab of my day pack: 101° F. in the shade.

Have I gone mad? It's midday in late summer, just one week before the autumnal equinox, a time when two-thirds of the nation are counting the days until the frost hits the pumpkin, but here in the desert it's still cooking.

For reasons I cannot now recall, I agreed to be ready at sunup to drive along the old Butterfield Overland Mail Route across ground that for one hundred years and more has been called the "40-mile Desert."

My companions are Arizona Highways' Related Products Editors Wes Holden and Bob Farrell. Holden because he owns the truck and, certifiably a desert rat, has logged countless weekend hours combing the hills, canyons, bajadas, and flats of the Maricopa Mountains desert. He's my guide. Farrell because he's a goodhumored sort who offered to bring lunch and cold drinks which, at this moment, he's unpacking from an ice chest.

Fiendish perversity, perhaps, or merely some warped desert-rat principle about accepting heat on its own terms, but Holden insists on doing this trip without switching on his vehicle's powerful airconditioner.

What's more, whenever he spots an aluminum can or glass bottle tossed by the roadside, he slams on the brakes, leaps out, and goes sprinting across the desert to retrieve it, leaving Farrell and me to roast in this metal box.

Even shards of broken glass he picks up, carefully scooping them into his palm to dump into a bag stowed beside the driver's seat. Nobody's going to foul his desert, by golly. Tin cans he leaves. "Cultural artifacts," he says. "They'll rust."

Lest I be misunderstood, I love the desert. It's beautiful. Afternoons, around the time of winter solstice, when pale light slants across the landscape to turn giant saguaros into long shadows that seem to hold forever, there's no more beautiful place on Earth.

And the North Maricopa MountainsWilderness is classic desert. Creosote and bursage on the flats give way to saguaro cactus forests upslope and along bajadas beneath lava-capped granite peaks. Colonies of impenetrable chain fruit and teddy bear cholla abound, and ocotillo, too, with floral banners flying red after a rain. Mesquite, paloverde, hackberry, and willow growing in or near the wash channels compete with other plants for moisture in a place bereft of surface water except after infrequent rains that sometimes flood these arroyos.

But today it is hot, undeniably hot and getting hotter. Already, after only a few hours out here, I'm parched. For nearly 10 years now I've lived on the desert, and I'm still cutting my desert-rat incisors, so to speak.

At this moment, I feel far from qualified to merit that dubious honorific: desert rat. Desert mouse, more likely. And although I've been guzzling from a cool two-liter water bottle all morning, right now I'm really thinking about one of those ice-cold drinks in Farrell's cooler.

Myriad feet have walked this trail ahead of us, walked it when the Gila River flowed year-round and travelers bartered with native villagers for fresh fish. Horses, oxen, mules, and the wheels of hundreds of wagons wore deep ruts into this road and packed its surface hard. When shifting sands and mud made the track impassable, wayfarers found another way around, imprinting many lines of travel across this terrain.

During the Mexican War, 10 years before the first stagecoaches began running through here, Col. Stephen Watts Kearny marched 1,650 men and 16 artillery pieces over this trail en route to California to establish U.S. control over the Southwest. That first stagecoach was the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line, dismissed as the "Jackass Mail" by its critics, who described it as "running from nowhere, through nothing, to no place." It operated for less than a year, starting in 1857.

About a year after Kearny's march, Capt. Philip St. George Cooke led a group of volunteers made up of Missouri Volunteers and members of the Mormon Church over the same ground. Under orders from Colonel Kearny, Cooke's

DESERT ONDERLAND

soldiers, known as the Mormon Battalion, built a wagon road as they went along. These military excursions were guided by mountain men, men such as James Ohio Pattie, Antoine Robidoux, Ewing Young, and David E. Jackson, rugged individualists who hunted and trapped along the Gila River and, having learned the territory, guided parties of settlers through to California.

Before the mountain men, there were Spanish explorers and adventurers, then Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries. The most famous of the Jesuits, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, a mathematician and cartographer, traveled in these parts often between 1691 and 1702 and charted all the Indian settlements. Some years later, in 1775, Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza led a colony of settlers bound for California along the Gila River near here.

What historical accounts often overlook is that before stagecoaches, before military forays, before mountain men, before European penetrations into the Southwest in the 16th century, native people of the lower Gila River forged a network of trails that blazed the best routes through this vast desert wilderness. And even before the Pimans, the Cocomaricopa, and the Quechan, the prehistoric Hohokam settled these lands, stringing farming villages all along the Santa Cruz and lower Gila rivers. Those who migrated this way fre-quently chronicled their journeys. There are accounts written by Padre Kino and the Franciscan missionary Francisco Hermenegildo Garcés, accounts by members of military parties, by settlers traveling west, and by John R. Bartlett, a 19th-century traveler who left the most detailed record of all.

But the account I'm drawn to most is that of Waterman L. Ormsby. Like me, he was city born and bred, and a writer. In 1858, Ormsby, a special correspondent for the New York Herald, was the only through passenger on the first west-bound Butterfield Stage. Started by John Butterfield, the stage line was called the Overland Mail Company and operated over this route between 1858 and 1861, carrying U.S. mail out to San Francisco from two eastern terminals: Memphis and St. Louis on the Mississippi River.

Over the entire route of 2,700 miles, the stage averaged just a tad under five miles an hour. The duration of the first St. Louis to San Francisco run, carrying only Ormsby and the mail, was just one hour shy of 24 days.

Ormsby's story appeared in a series of eight articles published in the Herald between September and November, 1858. He was 23 years old at the time. Although this was his first cross-country trip, Ormsby does not write about it as youthful high adventure, as one might expect. Instead, what's clear is that he feels lucky to be in something historically significant. Today, we'd call him a travel/adventure writer.

Seventeen days into the trip, on October 2, the stage arrives in Tucson, "a small place," Ormsby writes, "of a few adobe houses."

He writes of having grown accustomed to sleeping in the bouncing coach; to breakfasting on coffee, jerked beef, raw onions, wormy crackers, and a bit of bacon cooked over buffalo "chips;" to drinking water scooped from rain-filled water holes; and to pelting the tired mules with rocks occasionally, to make them go on.

Stoically he endures the bad food. "The stomach," he says, "does not remain delicate after a few days." In a moment of rare pique, he gripes that a Pima villager, apparently taking Ormsby for a greenhorn, tried to sell him a small melon for 37 cents, an exorbitant price, he thought, so he went without.

I bite deep into my sandwich - sliced turkey and cheese, chips and pickles on the side and take a long slurp of chilled fruit drink.

Almost 24 hours after his brief stopover in Tucson, Ormsby is jolting across the 40-mile Desert. The terrain is rugged, rocky most of the way, deep sand where it follows a wash bed. The time is only two weeks later in the season than my passing.

Ormsby says nothing of heat, nothing of the rigors of a more than eight-hour crossing of waterless desert. About one mile west of our lunch spot at a place now called Happy Camp, a Butterfield company driver built a storage tank that was filled with water from the Gila River. Ormsby records no stop there - perhaps the tank had not yet been built - and, almost indifferently, he notes the complete absence of water on this 40-mile stretch of desert. Had nearly three weeks on the road accustomed him to these hardships? Or were travelers of the 19th century, even city dwellers, made of stur-dier stuff than I?

DESERT ONDERLAND

Today, a remnant 6.5mile section of the old Butterfield Stage trail, designated as the Butterfield Stage Memorial, traces the south boundary of the North Maricopa Mountains Wilderness, one of two units in the Maricopa Mountains set aside for protection by the Desert Wilderness Act of 1990. Approximately 10 miles south of here lies the South Maricopa Mountains Wilderness.

Thirty-nine of the new Wilderness regions are managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Containing more than 60,000 acres each, the North and South Maricopa Mountains Wilderness areas together comprise 123,300 acres, one of the larger chunks in the more than 1 million new Wilderness acres managed by BLM. Of the 2.4 million acres in 43 new federal Wilderness sites in Arizona, 1.3 mil-lion acres, more than half, are contained within two sprawling national wildlife refuges in the arid southwest corner of the state: Kofa and Cabeza Prieta. Arizona now has 4.5 million Wilderness acres in 92 locations.

Most of it, like the two Maricopa Mountains Wilderness units, is desert, harshly dry places inhabited by plants and animals adapted to prolonged drought. Birds like the cactus wren and white-winged dove satisfy most of their moisture requirements by eating cactus fruits. Plants like the summer poppy grow only once in several seasons and only after sufficient rain rinses germina-tion-stalling chemicals from their seeds. And animals like the banner-tailed kanga-roo rat that never drinks, having evolved the ability to get all the water it needs by eating dry seeds.

But some animals need help. Part way across the Butterfield Stage trail, Wes and Bob and I come upon an ingenious water catchment built by the Arizona Game and Fish Department. It's a large triangle-shapedconcrete apron designed to capture and funnel rainwater into a cistern. Except for a small opening at one end, the cistern is roofed and covered with earth to slow evaporation. A fence that can be easily hurdled by bighorn sheep and mule deer and readily scooted under by the smaller animals, surrounds the water hole. A sign that is attached to the fence reads: "Game Water. No camping within 1/4 mile of water."

A few miles west of here, the Gila River makes a long bend to the south before continuing its westward trend. There where it bends west again, at a place called Gila Ranch Station, now Gila Bend, stage travelers came upon the first water since leaving Maricopa Wells, 40 miles east. They'd been on the road for more than eight hours.

Dammed and then siphoned off for agricultural use, its wetlands drained, the Gila is now a dry riverbed. Extensive mesquite bosques that swept away from the river's margins are gone, as are waterfowl, otters, and fish.

Remarkably, though, the land bordering each side of this old trail is still wild. In this hot, unwatered desert, travelers kept to the beaten path, a narrow corridor that headed up through Pima Pass before descending to the Gila.

In the canyons and along the remote bajadas away from the wagon road, native flora is little disturbed. Just 20 to 30 miles on a crow line from Phoenix, the Maricopa Mountains Wilderness provides backcountry as unspoiled as any hiker, backpacker, equestrian, or wildlife enthusiast might wish for.

Author's Note: The turnoff into the Butterfield Stage Memorial is approximately 10 miles west of the Mobile Elementary School on Maricopa Road. From the turnoff, signs point the way.

This is the last in a three-part series about Arizona's new Wilderness lands. Wildlife refuge areas were covered in the April issue and riparian areas in May.