The Small Town Atop a Mountain

“I made 60 pies so far today,” says Pam Renella as she wipes the remnants from her hands and the sweat from her brow. “I can't even think.”Renella owns the Mount Lemmon Cafe in the tiny town of Summerhaven. The menu of authentic Pennsylvania Dutch cooking lists 14 varieties of pies including strawberry-rhubarb, boysenberry, peach, Belgian chocolate, sour cream apple.

“And, if God is good to me,” she says, “coconut cream.”People cross a desert for one of her pies and climb a mountain for her crab cakes. That is, they drive up the Catalina Highway from Tucson and beyond. And they don't travel the road to Summerhaven alone, not during the summer months.

That's when desert dwellers turn their wheels, thoughts and eyes upward. They aren't all looking to the skies for a cloudy sign of relief. Some gaze at the craggy brown crest of the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. They know or have heard the story that up there, hidden from view, sits a place far different from the one they inhabit, a smaller place, quieter and much cooler.

Summerhaven, Arizona - few places have been so aptly named. When the June sky above Tucson turns almost white with heat, when the July sun in Phoenix makes your eyelids sweat, temperatures in Summerhaven register 20 to 30 degrees lower than in the desert below. You can start your summer days here wearing flannel shirts and end them sleeping under flannel sheets. And this has to be the only place within a 200-mile radius where people joyfully dive into steaming bowls of chili during this time of year.

Don Underhill owns the Alpine Lodge in Summerhaven, where chili stays on the menu and in demand.

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Summerhaven offers a cool 8,000-foot escape above Tucson Text by Kathleen Walker Photographs by Jack Dykinga

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"It's a forest paradise in the middle of the desert," he says of the town nestled in the pines a mere 30 miles from Tucson. The paradise description comes from visitors as well as residents. The air alone earns the accolade. At 8,000 feet, it has a crystal quality, breathtakingly clear to match the sky. A forest of fir, oak and juniper trees provides the Christmas card-pretty setting.

The year-round population of Summerhaven hovers at about 100, swelling up to three times that size with summer residents.

At 4,000 feet, you turn off the air-conditioning. At 8,000, you make the left turn into town.

"You have everyone from young guitarplaying rock 'n' rollers to the most sedate senior citizens," says Underhill.

Underhill added to the mixture when he arrived in 1994 inand nobody up here has forgotten this a white Bentley. The license plate read MOUSKTR. Translation: He was the boy who danced with Annette. Underhill was one of the original Disney Mouseketeers.

"I was looking for something to do and answered an ad for this place," he says of the lodge on the town's main street with the hifalutin name Sabino Canyon Parkway.

Although less than half a mile in length, that street comes complete with restaurants, gift shops and a few places with rooms to rent. Guest cabins dot the land around the town. No surprise that weekends find the shops filled with day-trippers. The surprise is that they weren't knocked down in the stampede of others trying to get here. But Summerhaven has maintained all the graces of a small town, including relative anonymity.

Every year thousands pass near, around, above and below Summerhaven. They camp and fish on the lower levels of the Catalinas. They drive up Mount Lemmon for winter skiing or off-season rides on the lift. They don't all know that by taking a left instead of a right turn at the top of the mountain they would find themselves in an alpinelike village. On such miscalculations, has more than one paradise been missed.

Surrounded by what is now the Coronado National Forest, Summerhaven was born in the days of mining claims and homesteading. The first cabins in the vicinity housed prospectors in the late 1800s. Back then, the Catalinas offered the promise of mineral wealth. But the cooling properties of the mountains were equally inviting to the residents below. By the end of the 19th century, women and children had started traveling up the mountain from Tucson to live in communal camps from May until Labor Day. Mules brought supplies. Husbands stayed behind.

A road up the north side of the Catalinas completed in 1921 provided increased access. Families built summer cabins. The early community proved a great fit for those in the teaching profession with their long summer vacations.

The late Tony Zimmerman, a Tucson teacher, became a kind of founding father to today's town. He went up in 1937 to hunt. By 1942, he had set up a sawmill. He built a store, lodge and a number of those getaway cabins. But what made Summerhaven both a full-time possibility and a day-trip destination came with the completion of the Catalina Highway in the early 1950s.

The road up the mountains' southern face took 18 years to build with labor supplied first by the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s and later by convicts, prisoners of war and men arrested as illegal aliens who applied the finishing touches. They left behind quite a gift. The highway rises gently from the desert to the high country. Drivers, be warned; you will have to resist the urge to gape slack-jawed at the vistas that include the great stretch of Sonoran Desert below and the blue-gray cuts in the sky of the distant mountain ranges surrounding Tucson. At 4,000 feet, you turn off the air-conditioning. At 8,000 you make the left turn into town.

Michael and Dawn Hecht of Tucson have made their weekend visits up the mountain.

Need a gallon of gas in Summerhaven? Ask a friend. The town has no gas stations. A week's worth of groceries requires a trip down the hill.

"It's only an hour away," Michael says, "and you feel like you're in another country." Make that a whole bunch of countries. Summerhaven's homes and business buildings range from wood-fronted Swiss chalets to Georgia piney-woods cabins, to one green stunner with gingerbread trim that seems right out of Dr. Zhivago. The toeach-his-own look extends to visitors. In Summerhaven, you find bare-legged hikers looking fit enough to climb any hill, along with bikers who have already proved their mettle by pedaling their way up the big one. Walkers stroll at their own leisurely pace. Families mill around each other. Dogs lead their owners down the street. Tony Zimmerman's son, Bob Zimmerman, a realtor, remembers a time when the dogs of Summerhaven wore something besides leashes. They and their owners showed up with the '70s. "Everybody was looking for this mecca where you could put a bandanna on your dog, be real cool, be one with nature," he remembers. And, he says, they could and did squeeze as many into a cabin as humanly possible. Now cabins would require a lot more cheek-to-jowl friendliness. Rentals can run $850 and up per week. But the mood of the '70s has not disappeared entirely from the mountain. Meet Alan Ward. Ward comes up to Summerhaven from Tucson to sell to the visitors. He turns antique silverware into key chains, charms and jewelry. His profit motive seems under control with some of his work going for five dollars. "I leave my spirit in every piece," he says of his creative recycling. "It sure beats workin'," he adds, laughing. Suggest that his craft, attitude and ponytailed appearance seemed tied to the '70s and he points across the street. He comments, "As a matter of fact, I came up in that bus over there." Across the street an old Volkswagen awaits his return. If Summerhaven visitors want to socialize with other regulars and residents, they can join the community hike, which leaves from the post office every Saturday morning. They can take part in community dinners. Back on the tourist track, they can take a ride on the Mount Lemmon ski-lift for the spectacular view. Mid-May through June, they can be part of the Ladybug Launch. They don't launch the ladybugs. The ladybugs launch themselves, newly born into their own mountain residency. Understandably, some visitors end up thinking they might want to stay forever. Underhill, who exchanged the big mouse ears for an equally far-reaching expanse of a handlebar moustache, made his decision. "I have no plans to move on," he states. Others have to leave. "It's hard up here," says Bob Zimmerman. Need a gallon of gas in Summerhaven? Ask a friend. The town has no gas stations. A week's worth of groceries requires a trip down the hill. You can't have a pizza delivered or see a first-run movie. And summer will end. When winter hits, you face an average annual snowfall of 120 to 150 inches - window-high snow. That magnificent highway can seem far less so when you're scrambling in the ice for chains or navigating your 4-wheel drive while hoping the dang road stays open.Still, Alex Carrillo, a Summerhaven resident since 1991, contends, "Even the worst day is a happy one here." From his vantage point, the world at the top looks just fine. He and his wife, Char, own the Aspen Trail Bed & Breakfast. Hummingbirds dive-bomb their balcony, deer come in for the salt lick and human visitors de-stress around the dining room table. "I wouldn't go down there at all if I didn't have to," he says of the world below the mountain.

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[OPPOSITE PAGE] Yellow columbine flowers make a colorful splash in the watery recesses of Marshall Gulch. [ABOVE] So near and yet so far: The lights of Tucson twinkle only 30 miles from Summerhaven. [LEFT] Alex and Char Carrillo own the Aspen Trail Bed & Breakfast.

That's okay, some of us are coming up there. All we need is that one day in June or July or August when even the most hardened desert-dweller looks for the best way out of the city. Then we remember that little town in the mountains that wakes up wrapped in pine trees and wool. Relief on this southern Arizona summer day will come not from the heavens above but from a place sitting just a few feet below. AH