Back Road Adventure

Back Road Adventure Extraordinary Botany and Scenery Take Center Stage along the Old Redington Road

My sidekick Randy Prentice wants to photograph a New Mexico thistle, and I see right away that it's to be an epic struggle. The prickly purple heads on tall stems look fetching indeed in the mottled sunlight squeezing through a mesquite bosque, but the breeze also has them twitching like wizards' wands. Prentice will need wizardry himself to get this picture. Like most of the fanatic perfectionists who photograph landscapes for Arizona Highways, Prentice uses a 4x5-inch view camera, a contraption whose design has not changed appreciably since the formation of the Grand Canyon but which, under the right conditions, will capture stunning images. The 4x5 is excruciatingly slow, however, and Prentice says he will need an exposure of four seconds here.

In four seconds, these thistles will dance a minuet, do a fandango, and take three bows.

But Prentice is determined. He maneuvers his truck to fend off the wind, then hands me an enormous umbrella to hold beside the blooms. I plop down on the forest floor, barely missing a stray segment of rusty barbed wire, and we wait. And wait.

"Sometimes, if I start to pack up and say out loud, 'Aw, I give up; I'm leaving,' the wind'll suddenly quit," Prentice says.

We having fun yet? Well, yes. We're taking a full day to drive from the easternmost suburban tendrils of Tucson to the mining town of San Manuel and back, a round-trip of 86 miles on a well-graded dirt road. Prentice is doing the photography today, but I'm scouting, planning to return with my nice modern 35mm Canon and pick up some images of my own.

This road is a photographer's dream, and whether one is amateur or pro doesn't matter. All that does matter is the ability to see the not-always-obvious drama and intrigue of Nature by the roadside. And to have boundless patience.

Redington Road departs Tucson from the east end of Tanque Verde Road and winds over Redington Pass, the saddle that bridges the 9,157-foot Santa Catalina range and the 8,666foot Rincon-Mountains. There's a bit of history along the way.

Redington, a tiny ranch community, was founded by two brothers from New York, Henry and Lem Redfield, in 1875 and linked to Tucson by an Army supply road. The Army abandoned the road in 1895, leaving the ranchers with a 100-mile detour around the mountains to Tucson. After 41 years of detouring and lobbying, Redington finally got the government to open the present road.

The first photo op is Tanque Verde Falls, an attraction to be avoided on weekends (crowds) and any time that thunderstorms are brewing over the mountains (flash floods). Twentyeight people have died here since 1970; some were inexperienced in the outdoors, some fell victim to flash floods, and others indulged in excessive partying followed by a deadly fall. A Forest Service sign on the half-mile trail down from the road offers several emphatic

warnings, including the un-equivocal STAY OUT OF CAN-YON DURING UPSTREAM RAINS.

An upstream sprinkle is threatening today, but Prentice and I feel we can risk a foray to the falls. They're in a late-spring mode, which means there's barely a trickle of water. Prentice grumbles about all the footprints in the streamside sand, which would ruin his pictures. I think there still are possibilities here, at least in soft morning or evening light. An intimate landscape of a foot-wide stream tripping around a craggy boulder could speak eloquently about the precious-ness of water in the desert.

A couple of miles on, we park again and bushwhack up a ridge for a spectacular view of the Tucson basin more than a thousand feet below. I hear crackling in the brush, and six mule deer parade across the slope just below us, a perfect picture of desert grace. Would have been a picture, anyway, if the cameras weren't back in the truck. Prentice groans and invents an excellent rule for back-road photo adventuring: "I'm gonna nail the camera to my body."

At the top of the 4,295-foot pass, the desert yields to high-land chaparral of manzanita, scrub oak, and juniper. Stands of shin dagger are erupting with spikes; they look like eight-foot-tall mutant ninja asparagus stems bursting out of the Devil's vegetable garden. Nearly as bizarre, but rather more lovely, are the Southwestern thorn apple blossoms, giant wildflowers that resemble white trumpets four inches across. One could put together an amazing photo gallery of weird Arizona flora without venturing 10 yards off Redington Road.

Over the pass, the road begins to descend into the San Pedro River Valley, and the roadside botany does something Prentice and I have seen nowhere else. The Sonoran Desert seems suddenly to blink out, the hillside saguaros abruptly yielding to the Chihuahuan desert's conspicuous succulent, the yucca. A quarter mile farther and the Sonoran Desert struggles back into existence. Finally, on one as-tounding hillside the two grow together, like Serbian Christians and Muslims agreeing to share one land in peace.

Prentice and I wander among the giants. He stops in front of a yucca with two luxurious blooms. His fingers frame a picture of a background saguaro between the yucca blooms. "The cute shot," he says.

"Too cute," I scowl. "But some doofus editor in New York will love it."

The breeze dogs us all day. Nature photographers know the routine all too well: when the wind lets up, the light is flat; when the light grows rich and warmright, you guessed it. The yucca with perfectblossoms will always have a scruffy ocotillo groping around it. The photographer will stumble across the perfect ocotillo one spring day too late, just when its blossoms have started to wither.

It's an odd relationship. Photographers love Nature, but she clearly hates us.

We sit in the mesquite bosque for over an hour. The breeze teases us, dying out and then reappearing to tickle the thistles(OPPOSITE PAGE) North of Redington, a storm threatens above a patch of yucca and paperflowers.

(ABOVE) Graceful willows are reflected in the waters of Josephine Tank.

Just as Prentice's four-second count is about to end. At last it stops completely for a couple of minutes. Prentice gets his picture, but he's still not thrilled:

TIPS FOR TRAVELERS

Back-road travel can be hazardous if you are not prepared for the unexpected. Whether traveling in the desert or in the high country, be aware of weather and road conditions, and make sure you and your vehicle are in top shape, and you have plenty of water. Don't travel alone, and let someone at home know where you're going and when you plan to return.

the sun has ducked behind a cloud. We pop open a couple of the beers we fetched at San Manuel and wait for sunset, imagining the thistles in that lovely tawny light and knowing that the breeze usually settles down by then. And indeed it does. It also begins to rain.