A LITTLE-KNOWN RIVER

Wild River A NATURAL SANCTUARY FOR BIRDS AND DESERT CREATURES, THE REMOTE BILL WILLIAMS ON ARIZONA'S WEST COAST REMAINS A WELL-KEPT SECRET

Turkey vultures, to all appearances, are creatures of leisure. They prefer gliding on bumpy desert thermals to flying under their own power; they'd rather hunker down to a found meal than hunt for themselves. The ones you'll see perching atop Arizona's power lines and cliff edges seem almost like caricatures, emblems of easy living. But on one bright early-March dawn, the turkey vulture perched just across the slender Bill Williams River from me had taken leisure to unusually laid-back extremes.Far from flying off in alarm at my ap-proach, as just about any other bird would,this specimen of Cathartes aura greeted me with the avian equivalent of a yawn.

The turkey vulture's nonchalance made me wonder whether or not it had encountered humans before. I suspect that it had not. The Bill Williams, easily Arizona's remotest, least-visited river, lies far from paved roads except at its beginning in west-central Arizona and its end at the Colorado River between Parker and Lake Havasu City. Only a handful of people know the Bill Williams well, and to the flood of Arizona literature the river has contributed just a few drops. It took me nearly two decades' worth of collecting Arizona's wild places before I stumbled across it myself, finally filling in an uncharted quadrant of my personal map of exploration. Humans, I conjectured, were an equally rare find for its wild denizens.

The Bill Williams River has languished as a footnote in Arizona history. Even the prehistoric record shows little evidence that humans settled there in any sizable number and, apart from a Yavapai wickiup or two, the early European explorers found few signs of people living along the river. Maj. John Wesley Powell, who boated the length of the Colorado River in 1872, found the Bill Williams emptier still. The river did not impress him much; he wrote in his 1895 book, Canyons of the Colorado, "It is but a muddy creek." Judging by my sojourns along its clear course, Powell must have seen the Bill Williams on a bad day.

Because it is so little-known, this river represents a near-perfect slice of wild Arizona, especially hospitable during the half-year when the temperatures of the western desert remain subdued.

Named after a famed mountain man and trapper who roamed the area in the 1820s and 1830s, the river rises in a broad valley among the low but rugged Rawhide, Buckskin and Arrastra mountain ranges, where the Big Sandy and Santa Maria rivers combine to form it. Both are perennial streams, and so the Bill Williams flows year-round, a rarity in this extremely dry part of the state, and a beacon to wildlife and flora of astonishing variety.

Most Arizonans see the Bill Williams only at its upper reaches, 37 miles north of Wenden, at Alamo Lake, a man-made reservoir that was completed in 1968. The lake boasts large populations of bass, blue-gill and catfish, prize catches that draw anglers from all over the country. On one quiet winter weekday, I counted license plates from California, Utah, Kansas, Florida, Michigan and New Hampshire, along with those of several Canadian provinces and Mexican states.

Dropping away from the lake's earthen dam, the Bill Williams River proceeds to flow 45 miles in a more or less east-to-west line to the Colorado River. It first tumbles down into a deep canyon with cliff walls reaching 1,000 feet. A switchback dirt road descends to the water.

Negotiating the canyon requires the intrepid packer to ford the stream several times, negotiating a way around big boulders and ragged tree trunks torn loose by occasional floods. The arduous journey is well worth the effort, for within the canyon stand thick groves of shade-giving cottonwoods and abundant wildflowers, the kind of place where the expression “getting away from it all” takes on new meaning. If you stay long enough, unobtrusively enough, you'll likely even catch a glimpse of the upper river's resident nesting pair of bald eagles.

THIS IS WILD COUNTRY, FULL OF CREATURES NOT OFTEN FOUND ELSEWHERE IN QUITE SUCH ABUNDANCE.

The canyon opens about 8 miles downstream of the dam onto a wide, fertile valley reached through the network of graded dirt roads that run from State Route 72 to several points on the Bill Williams. One of those roads, from Bouse to the ghost town of Swansea, crosses through the transitional zone where Sonoran Desert saguaros and ocotillos begin to shade into the Joshua trees and creosote of the Mohave Desert, and where the geology changes from the interior's lava chaos to the solar desert's stabilized sand.

Rock hounds have long found this transitional region fascinating, an imposing, low landscape where every telephone pole comes equipped with its own lightning rod (and, it seems, its own turkey vulture). Antonio de Espejo, a Spanish chronicler who traveled along the river in 1582, was one such rock hound. He reported finding silver ore “so close to the surface that it can be dug by hand.” Juan de Onate, the conquistador who founded the Spanish colony of New Mexico 16 years later, also found rich deposits along the river, but for reasons unknown - perhaps because of the river's distance from their settlements in Yuma and Tucson - the Spanish never established the mining posts that the land invited.

It would be some three centuries before mining towns sprouted along the river's banks, most notably now-empty Swansea, founded in the mid-1890s. It once had a population of more than 1,000, a rail depot, several good restaurants and a movie theater that offered the latest silent films. Every time I stand among Swansea's crumbling adobe ruins, which stretch out for a mile or so below the stern front range of the Buckskin Mountains, I find it hard to imagine that this silent place once thrived as an economic hub.

On one warm spring evening there, in fact, my only company was a curious kit fox that scampered into my campsite, as if to determine where the unaccustomed light of the campfire was coming from. Throughout the night, several more kit foxes came to call, accompanied by the braying of wild burros, a raucous chorus of coyotes and, once, the faraway yowl of a mountain lion. Venus had risen, and the sky was a great carpet of stars such as city dwellers like me rarely see.

This is wild country, full of creatures not often found elsewhere in quite such abundance. Among the most ubiquitous are the wild burros, descended from renegades that long ago fled a prospector's lead or a miner's corral and headed for the hills. Through the years, these runaways adapted to the harsh desert climate by developing an ability to store heat in their bodies and release it at night something like a solar panel on the hoof. That adaptability has in turn led to an exploding population of these canny creatures, so much so that state wildlife-control officers occasionally have to round them up and remove them from public lands.

On the 6.5-mile road south to the Bill Williams River from Swansea, which drops roller-coasterlike down steep hillsides and into narrow arroyos, great herds of burros stampede at the mere sound of a vehicle zigzagging to safety across broken terrain. This country remains a rough jumble of (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 34) The Bill Williams River begins its journey to the Colorado River at its source below Alamo Lake in the Rawhide Mountains.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 35) With a wingspan up to 6 feet, the carrion-eating turkey vulture is one of North America's largest birds of prey. The V-shaped angle of its wings when the bird flies distinguishes it from other avian predators.

SO MUCH HAPPENS THERE THAT I ALWAYS FIND MYSELF ADDING TO THE MUSIC WITH THE RAT-A-TAT RIFFLE OF FINGERS OVER THE PAGES OF MY AUDUBON FIELD GUIDE AS I VAINLY ATTEMPT TO KEEP UP.

desert pavement and cholla cactuses, and the place-names bespeak the nature of the region: the East Cactus Plain, the Rawhide Mountains, the Gibraltar Peak Wilderness. The Bill Williams River below Swansea offers a bonus for bird-watchers, harboring avian and animal populations that have few equals in this sere part of Arizona. On my recent visit there in late spring, a flock of ducks took flight the minute I hit water; a turkey vulture spread its wings and rose up on its talons in a nice impersonation of Dracula; and phainopeplas, tanagers, kingfishers, hummingbirds and swallows filled the air with the whirring of their beating wings.

In its marigold-choked channel, the river brimmed with tadpoles and small fish, and in the sand, tiny chips of mica glittered like gold. Their sparkle, I thought, must have fueled the dreams of the miners of Swansea, who came down the demanding road on weekends to picnic under the tall cottonwoods and wash away their cares in the cool water.

The dirt roads that run north of Swansea are easier to negotiate, but they're long and winding; even in a four-wheel-drive vehicle expect to cover only 10 to 15 miles an hour. Those roads remain empty most of the time. One summer morning, driving down the long Planet Ranch Road, which branches off from the Swansea Access Road, I encountered just one vehicle, a battered pickup driven by a man who identified himself only as Teddy from Vegas. Following Espejo and Onate's example, he and a partner were installing an alluvial placer mining system on the Bill Williams River, hoping to make their fortune in gold. Teddy admitted that the pickings had been awfully slim, but he loved being tucked away on the remote river, far from the bustle of his hometown.

the time. One summer morning, driving down the long Planet Ranch Road, which branches off from the Swansea Access Road, I encountered just one vehicle, a battered pickup driven by a man who identified himself only as Teddy from Vegas. Following Espejo and Onate's example, he and a partner were installing an alluvial placer mining system on the Bill Williams River, hoping to make their fortune in gold. Teddy admitted that the pickings had been awfully slim, but he loved being tucked away on the remote river, far from the bustle of his hometown.

About 15 river miles downstream from the ranch, the Bill Williams joins the Colorado at a reed-choked confluence surrounded by gnarled mountains. The noted Southwestern author Mary Austin, who traveled along the river while writing her 1924 book, The Land of Journeys' Ending, noted the "many colored walls, and then the long, winding slide to where the river turns" at the junction of the two rivers. An access road to the Bill Williams River National Wildlife Refuge that emerges onto State Route 95 between Parker and Lake Havasu City, between Mileposts 160 and 161, provides four-wheel-drive access to those "colored walls" and the confluence.

Even there, so close to the whine of tires on asphalt and the grinding gears of tractor-trailers, the Bill Williams offers its visitors an ancient music that all too few people have a chance to hear: the distinct calls of kingfishers, ducks, great blue herons, canyon wrens; the whirring wings of hummingbirds as they descend to feed on greasewood blooms; the slow, deliberate wingbeats of hawks, egrets and eagles. So much happens there that I always find myself adding to the music with the rat-a-tat riffle of fingers over the pages of my Audubon field guide as I vainly attempt to keep up.

There, below tall volcanic cliffs, the crystal-clear water of the Bill Williams River flows at a good clip, full of trout that pick insects off the floating bankside algae with alarming gulps, a wholly unexpected pleasure to find in this dry, sunbeaten, craggy country.

Every one of my visits to its banks has brought some new epiphany, some new encounter with the wild desert. I cannot help but think of the remote stream a well-kept secret even to longtime Arizonans, hard to get to and harder to forget as a slender ribbon of Eden.

WHEN YOU GO

Getting There: Alamo Dam Road, a two-lane paved road, leads from Wenden on U.S. Route 60, 38 miles north to Alamo Lake State Park.

Phone Numbers: All are area code 520.

Travel Advisory: Most of the dirt roads leading to the Bill Williams River from Bouse and Parker are well-maintained, although for serious exploration, a four-wheel-drive, high-clearance vehicle is recommended.

Warning: As with any adventure into desert country, be sure to pack plenty of food and water. Services are available only on numbered highways in the region.

Additional Information: Bill Williams River National Wildlife Refuge, 667-4144; Alamo Lake State Park, 669-2088; Bureau of Land Management Lake Havasu Resource Area, 2610 Sweetwater Ave., Lake Havasu City, AZ 86406; 505-1200.