Canyons of the Catalinas

IN THE PERILOUS

In the environment of the Sonoran Desert, no strategy seems too extreme for an animal or plant to try in order to hang on to life and reproduce. This is why, on a lateDecember day along the trail into Romero Canyon, there blooms a single Mexican poppy, as self-congratulatingly yellow as a lemon in a potato bin, flashing its cup at the winter sun and hoping to attract the attentions of some wayward bug whose timing is equally scrambled.

Mexican goldpoppies are supposed to bloom in March. But there's been an unusually wet October, a mild November, and a run of 70-degree December days, and, well carpe diem, enjoy the moment.

Which is what we're doing in Romero Canyon-seizing the day. No, it's more than that. We're seizing a mountain. An entire mountain range, the Santa Catalinas, the big rock towering over what used to be the north edge of Tucson, a craggy pile of gneiss and granite that presides over the sprawling urban conglomerate like a castle overlooking a medieval village. Like that lonely poppy, we have a good reason for being here.

The Catalinas are the soul of Tucson. "We do not know who we are until we look at the mountain," wrote Charles Bowden in Frog Mountain Blues. The range's jagged skyline defines the horizon and establishes direction in the obvious geographical sense, and maybe by the spiritual compass as well. Years ago I asked a Tucson psychologist why people keep crowding into the foothills, wedging their homes into the Catalinas' flank. It was something more than the view, he speculated. "Snuggling up to something permanent seems to offer us a connection to permanence ourselves."

There are ways to connect to this mountain other than buying a swath of its foothills. Nearly a dozen desert canyons radiate from the mountain's spine, corrugations of ridges and depressions "laid out side by side like a bony hand," as botanist Janice Emily Bowers wrote in Fear Falls Away.

Well-maintained trails are scratched into most of the canyon floors and many of the ridges, and they offer incredible opportunities to investigate wildlife, oasislike ecosystems that cheat the desert, ephemeral waterfalls that may run, with luck, a month in a year, and 25 million years of geologic time etched into the rock. And as immutable as the mountain may appear from below, up close and hands-on it seems never the same on any two occasions. Weather makes the canyons act like living organisms: They brood, grumble, sulk and exult. As the light cycles through a day, the apparent texture of the canyon walls can change from satin to stubble, the color from charcoal gray to burnished gold. To know these canyons intimately, you'd have to spend a lifetime in them-and get yourself roughed up some. As my friend Larry Winter once observed in a fine essay on Pima Canyon, "This is the desert primeval. To survive, everything-plant, rock, critter-is prepared to hurt you."

That doesn't mean these are connoisseurs' canyons, accessible only to sturdy mountaineers with the outdoor smarts to outgun a hostile environment. It means that we accept the canyons on their terms, not ours. As Bowers observed, they are "selfcontained world(s) that exist without reference to the city nearby"which is what makes them such treasures.

WATER remains the primal force in the canyons of the Catalinas. It carved their distinctive "V" shapes, it sustains the microforests in the crooks of the "V's" and it provides much of the entertainment for us flatland interlopers. The canyons all hold standing water, trickling water, rushing water and falling water, though never all the time and seldom very much at any one time. On the rare occasions when a spectacular flash flood comes roaring through, we had better not be around to witness it. On my last hike in Bear Canyon, as I easily hopped across boulders in the one-footdeep creek, I noticed a nest of flotsam from the last flood wedged in a riparian sycamore 10 feet above the present water level.

Unique to desert mountains. "Desert streams don't roar, they tinkle, like ice cubes in a glass of tea...." Desert waterfalls, I have observed, make a kind of spatial counterpoint that Bach or Handel would have appreciated: Each different instrument in a cascade, like the Seven Falls' seven tiers, supplies a sound of a different timbre and character. One tier will whisper, another sizzle and another rumble. It is music, fleeting and unpredictable but finally as much a part of the desert as the rasp of carpenter bees and the arias of coyotes.Desert pools prove more persistent than waterfalls, and they automatically become destinations in these canyons-Maiden Pools, 2.3 miles into Ventana Canyon; Romero Pools, 2.8 miles deep into Romero Canyon. People who come from moist, green places may not understand, but we native desert rats have some atavistic homing device in our headsor maybe our hearts-so that we will cheerfully undertake any grueling slog in order to sit on a rock beside a washtub-size pool of water that we would never dream of trying to drink. Somehow, the simple fact that it exists-that it perseveres in the face of outrageous odds-reassures us. Life in the desert, it says, will abide.

These are the rain forests of the desert-living testimonials to

I once hiked Ventana Canyon during a winter when the Pacific storm express had derailed, and Tucson appeared to be hosting Seattle's winter. The canyon was alive with liquid sibilance-rustling, splashing and slamming water. In five amazing hours on the trail, it never left us. At the apogee of our climb, we perched on a precarious ledge and watched three waterfalls that had not been there the week before tumble over escarpments and crash into a pool 50 feet below.

Waterfalls in the Catalinas are startling because they defy the context of the land and cannot be taken for granted.

"We need a musicology of water," wrote Janice Bowers in The Mountains Next Door, and she began cataloging the water music Happily for the hiker, neither Maiden Pools nor Romero Pools asks for strenuous effort, and Romero's oasis is a particularly lovely reward. The pools are embraced by a shady bosque of junipers, scrub oaks and willows, and a few million years of patiently abrasive water has sanded the surrounding rocks into a gallery of flowing, sensuously grotesque Henry Moore sculptures.

Even when the canyon streams have ducked underground for a dry spell, the riparian forests standing on the canyon floors remain as biologically different from the desert flatlands as rain forests are from alpine meadows. In fact, these are the rain forests of the desert-living testimonials to the Earth's determination to make productive use of every inch of landscape.

[FAR LEFT] Springtime seeps nourish greenery on a rocky wall in Bear Canyon. [CENTER] Sotol and newly emergent bracken ferns create a riparian still-life at Romero Pools. [LEFT] Young saguaros require the shelter of a “nurse” tree for protection from the elements in the often harsh desert environment. The two juvenile specimens shown here mature in the shade of a paloverde tree in Pima Canyon.

[RIGHT] The perennial flow of Sabino Creek reflects the warm glow of an autumn sunset.

[FAR RIGHT] Prickly pear cacti cling to a granite slope in Pima Canyon.

[BELOW] Morning fog clears below the Santa Catalinas' Finger Rock, shown here at the far right.

to the Earth's determination to make productive use of every square inch of landscape wherever enough water, light and nutrients come into play. At their least, the canyon floors support dense and scrappy woodlands of mesquite, ironwood trees and thornshrubs-inviting environments for wildlife if not for off-trail exploring (these are not bushes that can be successfully whacked). Birders enjoy fine spyglass hunting here; these canyons harbor more than 200 species of resident and migratory birds. I have spotted bob-cats, javelinas, mule deer, Gila monsters and, of course, rattlers.

In winding canyons such as Bear, where the mountain soon walls off most views of the city, an easy day hike becomes a foray into that "self-contained world" that neither needs nor wants any active intervention from my meddlesome species. It places the frenzy of the city into perspective. "Cities give not the human senses room enough," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, and ironically, in a closed-in canyon such as this one, his insight seems to expand to its fullmeasure. A few acres of canyon bottom like this could provide years of lessons in how nature works. Years of photography or painting, too, if that's your inclination. At their best, the canyons sport luxurious groves of juniper, oak, cottonwood and sycamore trees, remnants of an ancient Arizona that was cooler and wetter than what we know today. Late on an early-winter afternoon, when the cool sun sets in the southwestern mouth of Pima Canyon, the backlight burns the last yellow cottonwood leaves into mobiles of stained glass, twinkling in the slight breeze. Above, the canyon walls extract the hue of rust from the sun. Like the waterfalls, these groves define the desert by establishing its extreme limits, illustrating just how courageous and rich the land is willing to be.

measure. A few acres of canyon bottom like this could provide years of lessons in how nature works. Years of photography or painting, too, if that's your inclination. At their best, the canyons sport luxurious groves of juniper, oak, cottonwood and sycamore trees, rem-nants of an ancient Arizona that was cooler and wetter than what we know today. Late on an early-winter afternoon, when the cool sun sets in the southwestern mouth of Pima Canyon, the backlight burns the last yellow cottonwood leaves into mobiles of stained glass, twinkling in the slight breeze. Above, the canyon walls extract the hue of rust from the sun. Like the waterfalls, these groves define the desert by establishing its extreme limits, illustrating just how coura-geous and rich the land is willing to be.

"You really have to hike these canyons month after month, year after year, to see all their phases," says my friend P.K. Weis, a photographer and frequent hiking companion. I agree. I've been away from Tucson for five years, and on a trip back to revisit five canyons in four days I'm struck more by their apparent newness than their famil-iarity. They're like old friends who have acquired new clothes, new interests, whole new languages. Of course, the canyons haven't changed substantially. I realize, eventually, that they've changed me.

ASCENDING the Romero Canyon trail on the west side, I'm astonished to see how the city of Tucson curls around the mountain on three sides, apparently scheming to encircle it. Since I was last here, the valley between the Catalinas and Tortolitas has become a suburban sea of red tile and khaki plaster. A couple of miles into the mountain-and a thousand feet above the stucco sea, we are in a demilitarized zone, where wilderness and civilization are facing off somewhat uneasily. From the valley comes the tireless throb of civilization, a commo-tion of engines, tires and assorted machin-ery. In a canyon falling away below the trail we can hear the polite trill of a creek.

The bigger Tucson grows, the more it will need this mountain-and the more we will threaten it. We need silence to give us room The canyons bloom with metaphor and parable - the piñon that practically grows out of a rock by thrusting deep roots into the land below.

There is the possibility of learning from everything we see in these canyons.

to think, and wild places to show us, however belatedly, how to live more gracefully in the natural world. If the mountain remains wild-and accessible - it can do that for the city clawing at its skirts, even as the crowd continues to spread. In the 1970s, private landowners and developers were beginning to wall off the mountain, but Pima County adopted a trailaccess plan in 1979, which opened the canyons again-though not without some wrangling. Obtaining a 15-foot-wide public corridor into Ventana Canyon took 11 years and more than $500,000 of taxpayers' money, much of it going for legal fees and settlements with landowners, county trails coordinator Steve Anderson told me. According to Anderson, there remain only three or four "access issues" in the Catalinas and nearby Santa Ritas, and he's doggedly chiseling away at them.

In the 1970s, private landowners and developers were beginning to wall off the mountain, but Pima County adopted a trailaccess plan in 1979, which opened the canyons again-though not without some wrangling. Obtaining a 15-foot-wide public corridor into Ventana Canyon took 11 years and more than $500,000 of taxpayers' money, much of it going for legal fees and settlements with landowners, county trails coordinator Steve Anderson told me. According to Anderson, there remain only three or four "access issues" in the Catalinas and nearby Santa Ritas, and he's doggedly chiseling away at them.

"We need opportunities to go into the mountain, but not at any cost," Anderson said. "We have to understand that as one of our greatest assets, we have to care for it and nurture it. It's a responsibility as much as it is an opportunity."

I ponder that awful 14-letter word, "responsibility." Most of us are etiquette-savvy hikers, and we easily perform at the basic level-packing out what we pack in, taking only photographs, leaving only footprints. Our bigger responsibility is to see and learn. The canyons bloom with metaphor and parable - the mesquite that demurely folds up its leaves to minimize moisture loss in the driest days of summer, the piñon that practically grows out of a rock by thrusting deep roots into the land below. There is no single example in nature that offers a blueprint for a human civilization more artfully adapted to the Earth (though the wily coyote comes close). There is the possibility of learning from everything we see in these canyons.

So on this warm winter day we're "seizing" Romero Canyon. We belong here (temporarily, at least), no less than that poppy, because this is part of our own survival strategy. The canyons provide a quiet retreat for those who want it, a lesson in humility for those who need it and illustrations of the exquisitely managed gearworks of nature for those who are willing to discover. AH ADDITIONAL READING: Two excellent guidebooks are Tucson Hiking Guide by Betty Leavengood and The Santa Catalina Mountains: A Guide to the Trails and Routes by Pete Cowgill and Eber Glendening.

Desert Delights

FOR 50 YEARS, THE ARIZONA-SONORA DESERT MUSEUM HAS SHOWCASED NATIVE FLORA AND FAUNA