TREKKING WITHIN THE WHETSTONES

LIE FACT AND FANCY WITHIN THE WHET

A propensity to lick a ledge of stone that contained gold. When the cattle "sweat, the gold which had thus been subjected to a sort of bovine smelter, or reduction works, was precipitated upon the hair." Aside from fanciful reports of honey dripping from the tips of acorns and gold dust emanating from cows, the mountain range contains some truly amazing points of interest. From the water sliding down impressive travertine ledges at Little Nogales LIKE FINGERNAILS raking on a chalkboard, the branches of trees and bushes along the narrow, rutted dirt road screech across the side of my truck loud enough to make me clench my teeth. Photographer Peter Noebels winces as he looks out the passenger's window to inspect the damage. Heading toward Wakefield Canyon's Little Nogales Spring in southeast Arizona's Whetstone Mountains, we wonder how much worse this bad road will get. We find out when we arrive at a turn where the track suddenly nosedives into a creek bed. Noebels and I get out of the truck to assess our situation. Keeping in mind that the scenic travertine spring we're trying to reach comes highly recommended - and our only alternate route crosses private land - I hold my breath, and we forge on. Among the handful of "sky islands" in the Coronado National Forest, the Whetstones remain one of the least accessible. We're here in early summer to avoid the hunters who brave this terrain from September to February. Even when the badmen of Tombstone and warring Indians started to color Arizona's history pages, these mountains skulked in lonely shadows and boasted a reputation. William Thompson wrote that the range had "about the roughest country you could get a horse through." This ruggedness and remoteness gave the tiny mountain range a mystique that encouraged tall tales. "The Whetstones are rich in phenomena," said a tongue-in-cheek article in the July 1915 edition of the Tombstone Prospector, commenting on the oaks in the mountains that reportedly dripped globules of honey from the tips of their acorns. This aberration, in turn, caused bees to "abandon the more laborious process of extraction from flowers and fall for this mellifluous get-rich-quick scheme." The article admits that the idea of honeyproducing oaks pales compared with the gold-producing cattle of the Whetstones. The cattle, the Prospector explained, showed Spring to the slow drip of a subterranean flow off Kartchner Caverns' colorful limestone formations; from intricate canyons where Indians hid in ambush to secret ceremonial caves where they worshipped; from unusual geological formations in French Joe Canyon to the scrubby grasslands of the foothills that drone into the horizon. Fact and fancy - the Whetstones encompass both. Getting to know these mountains takes some blood, sweat and tears. With just one recently developed maintained trail and only a handful of difficult roads not gated on private land, the Whetstones do not make the most user-friendly destination. Explorers here must accept scratched vehicles, strenuous cross-country hiking and scrapes from prickly vegetation as part of the territory. The severe terrain keeps out all but the serious - or as in our case, naively curious - explorers.

"It's a pretty little mountain range, and it's wild in that very few people have spent much time in it," said U.S. Game and Fish biologist Dale Turner, who worked on a her-petological inventory in the Whetstones for two years. "It's not a place I recommend most people go for recreation. It's really rough. You push through a whole lot of prickly vegetation, and getting from one point to the next can be a painful experience. "On the other hand," Turner continued,

STONES

IN SOME OF THE WHETSTONES' FANCY, I SECRETLY LOOKED TO SEE IF THE BRANCHES MIGHT DRIP WITH GLOBULES OF HONEY.

“It's a special place because it is so untouched. If something truly untamed appeals to you, then the Whetstones are a good place to go and get lost.” Noebels and I follow the jeep track to Wakefield Canyon in the range's northwest foothills, jostling and grimacing much of the way. Just outside the canyon, the road deteriorates further with chasmlike cracks our cue to park and start breathing normally again. At first blush, the landscape gives us no clue that a verdant travertine spring exists nearby. Then we spot a windmill we knew about from our topographic map and notice an emerald array of vegetation heading across soggy ground into the canyon.

Wakefield Canyon has a completely different makeup than the other three canyons we explored in the Whetstones. All were wider, craggier and oftentimes drier. At the start of our trip, Noebels and I had hiked the range's only maintained trail, the Guindani Loop Trail at Kartchner Caverns State Park on the mountains' tamer eastern flanks. The trail travels a painless route that follows the tumultuously eroded Cottonwood Canyon.

Farther along that trail, we got a good feel for the Whetstones' remoteness and geological composition. Unlike the razorbacked ridges and sheer walls often found in Arizona's mountains, the Whetstones' peaks slope smoothly into oak valleys then crumble into shallow canyons.

At our next stop, French Joe Canyon, we followed a path cloistered in oak, willow, walnut and ash trees to French Joe Spring. We heard the buzzing of bees busily swarming the flowering tree branches. Indulging in some of the Whetstones' fancy, I secretly looked to see if the branches might drip with globules of honey. After all, I'd seen some strange things on previous trips there.

The last time I had visited French Joe Canyon, a group of coatimundis dropped from the trees onto the autumn-crisp carpet of oak leaves on the canyon floor. Plop. Rustle. Again and again. From every direction. At least two dozen coatis landed then scurried up the canyon walls with their tails standing proudly in the air.

Named after an early-day miner, French Joe Canyon has never relinquished any proof of his existence. French Joe seems to fit into both the fact and fancy categories of the Whetstones. Though many historians remain unconvinced, some references say French Joe and his partner made the canyon their home base as they mined the mountains. Several mines are located near the canyon, but none attributable to French Joe or his partner.

“The Whetstones were certainly considered good prospecting ground,” said Ken Phillips, chief engineer of the state Department of Mines and Minerals. “But they never ended up as a large-production mining district. The miners who prospected the Whetstones during Tombstone's heyday did so with the hope of finding something big, even if they did something small. It's how they eked out a living.” A beaten path led Noebels and me out of the riparian part of French Joe Canyon into an area where a solid slab of slickrock slammed up against a shallow canyon wall. A dainty thread of water rippled through a trough in the slab, gathering occasionally in pools.

We plunked our feet into one of the larger pools. Soon a red bat flitted erratically toward us. After circling close enough for us to see through its parchment-thin wings, the bat dipped into the pool for tiny sips of water then flew away. A frog chattered a diatribe, perhaps in rebuttal to our presence. When it finished, the atmosphere, again, seemed sealed in an envelope of silence.

In another riparian section of the canyon, Noebels and I found a tunnel, hidden in a tangle of bushes and oak trees, that led into a fantastic rockwall dripping with limestone. Entertaining fancy again, I wondered if maybe we had discovered one of old French Joe's mines.

“Probably not,” engineer Phillips later surmised. “It was probably a horizontal well dug as long as 100 years ago. Ranchers would dig in rockwalls to release water for their cattle.” Years ago, like today, ranches skirted the sides of the Whetstones. Noebels and I had to cross the Empire Cienega Ranch, now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, to access canyons in the western slopes of the range. In wide and shallow Apache Canyon, we found a shack nestled in a shady crook near Apache Spring. Used mostly by hunters who outfitted the shack with the comforts of home, it held every-thing from books to bandages.

Near the southern tip of the mountains, the Babocomari Land Grant created some of the best cattle country in the Southwest. Consequently, the Babocomari like other land grant parcels awarded to Sonora, Mexico, ranchers in the San Pedro Valley made a prime target for warring Apaches. After they burned ranch homes, killed cowboys and ran off cattle, Apaches often dashed to safety or hid out in the Whetstones.

During the Battle of the Whetstones in June 1861, the cavalry pursued Cochise's Apaches in hopes of retrieving stolen cattle. As the battle wended through the Whetstones' intricate gorges, the soldiers stopped at a side canyon. Immediately, according to Capt. Daniel Robinson's writings, “a shower of arrows and defiant shouts from another band of Apaches that had been lying in wait to attack from the rear” in-undated the troop. Though Cochise made repeated bold dashes to break through the front lines, the soldiers prevailed by the skin of their teeth, some with only two or three rounds of ammunition remaining in their cartridge boxes.

While Indian signs appear to the trained eye at Little Nogales Spring in Wakefield Canyon, the dense vegetation makes them difficult to see. As overgrown as a rainforest that barely allows a beam of light to hit the ground, the canyon's vegetation slows us down considerably. We spend more than an hour bushwhacking through a half-mile of thickets, some of which Noebels figures out later harbor poison ivy. Each time I'm nearly swallowed by waist-high grasses in the streambed, I remember Dale Turner telling me how many snakes he'd found on his herpetological survey in the canyon.

As Turner and others had promised, however, Little Nogales Spring proves worth the effort to get there. At the spring, water cascades down travertine walls laced with yellow columbines. The stream then travels through a jam-packed jungle of greenery, pausing occasionally in emerald pools beneath cottonwood giants from which lovely little warblers break the silence.

As special as Wakefield Canyon is, we must leave soon. Noebels and I opt for an alternate route back to the truck, hoping for an easier hike. Climbing out of the canyon, we trek cross-country where pointy agave, catclaw and appropriately named shindigger cactuses resist our efforts. Along the way, I pick up a piece of rose quartz with a scattering of tiny golden flecks. Noebels and I look at each other and, indulging in fancy, wonder if we might have found a little gold.

“Nope,” a geologist at the Department of Mines and Mineral Resources back in Phoenix says as she scrutinizes the rock. “The flecks aren't gold enough. It's only pyrite.” Fact and fancy the Whetstones have both for those adventurous enough to seek them.

WHEN YOU GO

Location: Approximately 65 miles southeast of Tucson.

Getting There: To get to the Guindani Loop Trail, take Interstate 10 east to Benson Exit 302; drive south about 10 miles on State Route 90 to Kartchner Caverns State Park; follow signs to the trailhead. To get to French Joe Canyon, take State 90 past Kartchner Caverns State Park to almost Milepost 300; turn west (right) onto a dirt road, and drive about 2 miles and park. To access the western side of the Whetstone Mountains, follow roads indicated on the Coronado National Forest map. A permit from the Arizona State Land Department is necessary.

Additional Information: Sierra Vista Ranger District of the Coronado National Forest, (520) 378-0311. For information on Little Nogales Spring, Bureau of Land Management, (520) 722-4289. For topographic maps with current land status, contact the Bureau of Land Management Public Information Office, (602) 417-9300.