Tucson's Sabino Canyon

SINCE THE LATE 1800s THIS ENCHANTED CANYON IN THE SANTA CATALINAS HAS REMAINED A CENTER OF ATTRACTION. SO MUCH SO, WE MAY BE LOVING IT TO DEATH.

TUCSON'S CANYON OASIS

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID W. LAZAROFF

In a bright Saturday morning in mid-March, an open-air shuttle bus rattles up the floor of Sabino Canyon, and passengers squint upward into the sun, entranced by the passing spectacle of towering cottonwoods, giant cacti, and imposing cliffs.

It is already the height of spring in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson. Wildflowers are in full bloom; willows are in leaf; and the shuttle is filled to bursting with refugees from colder climates, packed shoulder to shoulder with Tucsonans on a day's retreat from the city.

The shuttle slows for a fat lizard scampering across the pavement, and riders smile and wave at a jogger puffing hard on his way down the canyon. Nearby, children splash in Sabino Creek, while their parents gossip at a picnic table.

The driver keeps up a steady patter as the shuttle picks up speed, rounds a curve, and bears down on a narrow stonework bridge across the stream. "If this part makes you nervous," he says, "just close your eyes. That's what I do." Everyone laughs.

People have been enjoying Sabino Canyon, named after a pioneer Tucson merchant and rancher, for thousands of years. Holes worn into boulders near the stream speak of a time centuries ago when Hohokam Indians knelt beneath the sycamores to grind mesquite beans gathered on the canyon floor. Stone points found by archeologists tell us that hunters stalked rabbits and deer among the canyon's saguaros before the birth of Christ. It is even possible that mammoth hunters once camped on the banks of Sabino Creek, though no one has yet found evidence. These prehistoric folk must have basked in Sabino Canyon's great beauty The Knagge pack train became a traveling general store for vacationers in the Santa Catalina Mountains. It would haul families up the Plate Rail Trail at the end of May, then haul them back down again at the end of August.

just as we do today. Yet the visits by Tucsonans just for fun the latest chapter in the ancient story of human beings in Sabino Canyon go back hardly more than a hundred years. "Visitors to Sabino's Canyon, in the foot-hills of the Santa Catalinas, report the place to be indescribably lovely, nature having bedecked the canyon in her forest beauties," said the Arizona Daily Citizen on March 4, 1885. "As a resort for pleasure parties, the canyon is becoming immensely popular."

By the mid-1880s, Tucson had bloomed from a frontier backwater into a city with schools, hotels, newspapers, and citizens looking for ways to spend free time.

The last shots were being fired in the Apache wars, far from the city, and for the first time since the founding of the Tucson Presidio by the Spaniards more than a century before, ordinary Tucsonans were exploring the surrounding countryside without fear of Indian attack. City dwellers stumbled upon the beautiful canyon northeast of town, word spread, and by 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt established the Santa Catalina Forest Reserve (now part of the Coronado National Forest), Sabino Canyon was already a favorite getaway for Tucsonans.

When Sabino Canyon was a remote oasis at the end of miles of rutted dirt roads, a visit there was a real occasion, to be planned well in advance and savored as long as possible. Typical were the daylong outings enjoyed by the Ronstadt family, even then well-known for its talented musicians and successful carriagemaking business.

The large extended family awoke before dawn, piled sleepily into its wagons, and started down the long dusty road toward the canyon.

When the tenebrous sky brightened, they paused to hunt quail and dove among the cacti and mesquites. When at last they pulled under the tall trees in Sabino Canyon, they cooked a breakfast of wild game with beans and tortillas.

The heat of the day was spent lounging near the creek, picnicking, exploring, and catching up on family news. It was toward evening when family members finally packed up and headed back to town. The men made the journey shorter by singing and playing their guitars. The picnickers arrived home at eight or nine o'clock, tired but content.

Beyond the popular picnic grounds, a narrow horse trail, called the Sabino Canyon Trail, wound its way up the canyon floor, crossing and recrossing the rocky creek bed on its way to the high country of the Santa Catalina Mountains. (Legend has it that the Catalinas were named Santa Caterina in the 1600s by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino in remembrance of his sister. The misspelling is said to be the fault of an early-day mapmaker.)

Text continued on page 11

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 4 AND 5) Once a desert refuge for Indians, Sabino Canyon in more recent times has been a popular spot for picnicking, hiking, swimming, and birdwatching.

CANYON OASIS

Continued from page 6 This rugged pathway had been laid in the 1890s so that Tucsonans could escape the searing heat of summer in shady pine forests a precious relief in the days before evaporative coolers and air-conditioners. In 1911 a more direct trail was cut high on the steep eastern slope of Sabino Canyon, and a telephone line was strung beside it. Known back then as the Plate Rail Trail, it is now called the Phoneline Trail. You can still see some of the old telephone poles today. Soon after the new trail was finished, John Knagge, with his sons Ed and Tom, took over a burro and mule train serving the growing number of mountain cabins. The Knagge pack train became a traveling general store for vacationers in the Santa Catalina Mountains. It would haul families up the Plate Rail Trail at the end of May, sell them everything they needed all summer long, then haul them back down again at the end of August. The Knagges also brought supplies to miners, lumbermen, and forest rangers, and in December the burros trudged down Sabino Canyon piled high with Christmas trees. Through the years, the Knagges became masters of the arcane technology of mule packing, as Tom recalled a half-century later. "We packed up nearly everything that could be packed," he told Robert L. Thomas of The Arizona Republic on May 21, 1977. "I remember the biggest thing was an old Majestic wood-burning stove that weighed 250 pounds after we stripped it of everything that wasn't riveted together. We balanced it on top of a mule with some empty boxes below it to give it support. Ah, that was quite a feat." On that occasion, the Knagges sensibly took the easier trail up the other side of the Catalinas. The braying of burros and mules was heard in Sabino Canyon until 1920 when a new automobile road into the mountains put the Knagges out of business. Tucsonans now were driving cars instead of wagons into Sabino Canyon, but otherwise little had changed in the old picnic grounds.

Newspaper headlines, captured the imagination of Tucsonans, and provided needed work for hundreds of men yet it was never completed. The heart of the plan was a massive 250-foot concrete dam to be raised three miles upstream from the old picnic grounds at a site where the canyon narrows abruptly to a spectacular sheer-walled gorge. A great lake would be created, a recreationist's paradise with boating, fishing, camping, and cabins. Below the dam, streamside campsites and picnic grounds would be strung along a picturesque access road. This road would cross the creek nine times over rustic stone bridges, each of which would also act as a dam and form an inviting swimming hole. In the fall of 1934, laborers for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began blasting out the access road beyond the old picnic grounds. The workers were homeless transients uprooted by the nation's economic crisis and drawn to Tucson by its warm climate. Morale was high. Grateful to be doing productive work in beautiful surroundings, the men laid out 200 yards of roadbed in the first week to the astonishment of Tucsonans. Within a month, excited city dwellers were applying for lakeside cabin permits, and plans were being made to stock the lake with fish. The next year, after four bridges had been built, men from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) took over. The chamber of commerce and the Sunshine Climate Club printed a map showing the "Sabino Canyon Dam and Recreation Area" as though it already existed. The last of the nine stone bridges was finished, and the (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 8 AND 9) The trunk of a huge Fremont cottonwood spans Sabino Creek.(LEFT) At the sixth of nine Sabino Canyon bridges, water gushes from a culvert.

(ABOVE) Youngsters cool off on a flooded canyon bridge.

It wasn't until the Great Depression that the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area we know today suddenly took shape. In less than four years, almost all of the canyon's roads, bridges, and picnic grounds were built as part of a grand federal relief project.

CANYON OASIS

Road began climbing the eastern canyon wall in the final approach to the dam site. But amid all this enthusiasm most Tucsonans overlooked an essential fact: no funds had been allotted for constructing the great dam itself. In late summer of 1936, the Army Corps of Engineers held a public hearing in Tucson to settle the fate of the Sabino Canyon dam. The meeting room was packed. One after another, citizens and government officials testified unanimously in favor of the project. Then for a month the city held its breath, awaiting the engineers' report. When it finally came, it recommended that the dam be built provided that "local interests are willing to contribute $500,000 toward the cost of the project." This was the death knell for Pima County's greatest federal relief project. The county had offered to contribute only $600. Construction of the access road halted a mile short of the unfulfilled dam site. But the New Deal left more in Sabino Canyon than a road to nowhere. By this time, the Civilian Conservation Corps was helping to build recreational facilities. Meanwhile, the transients had turned to building campgrounds near the canyon mouth, working out of a base camp farther up the canyon. Life in the camp was somewhat less than luxurious, but residents like Bill Griffin accepted trying conditions with good humor. He told the Oasis, published by the Tucson Transient Camp, on Oct. 11, 1935: "Rain! In some of the tents we had all of an inch of water on the floor and two inches on the beds with a continual promise of more to come. I was warned not to put my hand on the wet canvas as that would cause it to leak. Leak? I came dern near drowning and I didn't touch the dd canvas. It's fun to lie on one's bed and look up at the water streaming down the outside (and inside) of the tent, and to count the tadpoles and pollywogs, along with fish worms, and wondering whether the next fish to slide down will be a trout or a perch." In June, 1937, after the unexpected demise of the great Sabino Canyon dam, the transients quietly began building a much less grandiose structure near the canyon mouth. The next spring, 2,000 Tucsonans turned out to hear the speeches At the dedication ceremony, held to the strains produced by a junior high school orchestra. It was far less than they had hoped for, but Sabino Canyon finally had a dam. The tiny lake it created was instantly popular. The centerpiece of the new Sabino Canyon Recreation Area, it was filled regularly with swimmers, and fishermen crowded the top of the dam angling for stocked bass and sunfish. The lake has long since filled with silt, and only a shallow pond remains. Trees have grown up in the sand, and Sabino Lake is a hot spot treasured by bird-watchers from around the country. The 1930s saw the beginning of heavy use of Sabino Canyon. Then the number of visitors along with Tucson's populationskyrocketed after World War II. The Forest Service built new picnic areas but could not keep up with the rising tide of recreationists. On busy days, traffic backed up at the narrow bridges, the canyon walls rang with the sound of automobile horns, and the air reeked of exhaust. The era of the private car in Sabino Canyon ended unexpectedly in 1973 when the Forest Service closed the gates temporarily for repairs and improvements to facilities. Visitors walking or bicycling in heard the quiet, smelled the clean air, and marveled as grass and deer reclaimed the canyon. Some people insisted that cars be banned permanently, others objected vigorously, and the debate raged in the editorial pages of Tucson's newspapers. In the end, the Forest Service compromised with a shuttle-bus service. Since 1978, when the first shuttle rumbled across the old stone bridges, it has itself become a popular tourist attraction. In the 1980s, Tucson's expanding suburbs reached Sabino Canyon. On crowded weekends today, visitors may see more of each other than of wildlife. A century after city dwellers began spreading their picnic cloths beneath the cottonwoods, Sabino Canyon faces an uncertain future. Will we "love it to death?" Or will we preserve the oasis to delight and inspire generations to come?