ROADSIDE REST

Don't Believe Arizona's Just Sand, Snakes and Cactus, and (Almost) Nothing Else

Reduced to the simplest terms, a long career as a writer of Arizona outdoor subjects divides purely into two parts:

Stereotypes die hard. Only to be reborn. The image of Arizona as endless arid waste was sketched by the earliest travelers. "Horrid." "Utterly worthless." "A wolf couldn't make a living there." Vivid diaries and dispatches detailed painful passage through overheated hostile waterless Saharas that abounded in thorny vegetation and crawled with poisonous creatures.

If such ever were near truth, then was then. Now is now. Irrigation, air-conditioning, Five Star restaurants, helicopter rescue, backyard swimming, public transport, domed arenas, lush parks, posh resorts, rest stops, and genteel automotive access to the natural world reduce the hardships of Old Arizona to little more than quaint memories.

Yet the other day a professionally educated, globally traveled Chicagoan, the honored president of an international society, inquiring by telephone about the desirability of bringing his annual convention to Scottsdale, seriously asked: "Is there anything out there besides sand and cactus?"

It OCCURRED TO ME THAT I might quantify his answer by taking a census of the one acre of Arizona that I own a hundred miles into the mountains beyond Phoenix (which at last count was larger than Dallas or Detroit). My mile-high acre could be considered typical of the elevated woodlands that cover about one-third of the surface of our state. Much of Arizona upland is classified as Canadian climate zone, and near the alpine town of Flagstaff, a patch of tundra prospers.

On my day at 5,000 feet, the air was cool, the earth moist, the sun shaded. So in temperate comfort, I inventoried onto a clipboard all the sizable native plants. Here's the tally:

Mature ponderosa pine (90 feet): 1

Large ponderosa (20-70 feet): 7

Medium ponderosa (6-20 feet): 4

Ponderosa saplings (2-6 feet): 24

Large piñon (20-30 feet): 10

Medium piñon (6-30 feet): 9

Small piñon (under 6 feet): 3

Large hillside juniper (12-30 feet): 27

Medium hillside juniper (6-12 feet): 27

Small hillside juniper (under 6 feet): 10

Big alligator juniper (12-30 feet): 4

Medium alligator juniper (6-12 feet): 2

Small alligator juniper (under 6 feet): 1

Medium cedar (under 9 feet): 3

Large Emory oak (15-35 feet): 26

Medium Emory oak (6-15 feet): 20

Small Emory oak (under 6 feet): 20

Wild currant: 18

Fine leaf yucca: 8

Broad leaf yucca: 1

Century plant cluster: 1

Wild honeysuckle: 5

Manzanita: 200, estimated

At hand, too, for this in-town acre was a life list of wildlife sightings recorded during a decade of weekends and vacations. Of mammals: mule deer, raccoon, javelina, coyote, skunk, tree and ground squirrel, cottontail and jackrabbit, wood rat, (from sign) elk, chipmunk, fieldmouse, (track only) bobcat, bat, and (second-party report) fox.

As for birds: 52 species (of the 510 species documented in Arizona) casually noted. Often during winter as many as 400 Canada geese overnight on our little community lake. Our treetop nest, now expanded to a yard in diameter, has brought off three successful broods of ravens.

At the feeder or in the sky have appeared the mourning dove, golden eagle, magpie, cedar waxwing, turkey vulture, yellow-shafted flicker, great horned owl, ruby-throated hummingbird, sandhill crane, bandtailed pigeon, Gambel's quail, rufous-sided towhee, Oregon junco, nuthatch, red-tailed hawk, titmouse, grosbeak, Ross goose, sandpiper, robin, house wren, mountain bluebird, American kestrel, roadrunner, scrub jay, purple finch, blue heron, four varieties of flycatcher, three of tanager, and two of oriole.

Now emboldened, I multiplied my 198 native trees and 233 native understory plants times the 3 million acres of Tonto National Forest to arrive at a grand total of 1,293,000,000 trees and shrubs under federal care and open for inspection.

And the Tonto is just one of a half dozen national forests in Arizona.

My arithmetic may be off a bit, but not much. Uncounted and unextended is my garden of perennial grasses, wildflowers such as evening primrose and crimson penstemon, and yes, here and there, pincushion and prickly pear cactus. They fairly beg to be enumerated.

As I said in the beginning, learning firsthand is the delightful part.