The evergreens of Eastern Arizona’s Blue Range Primitive Area frame a view of New Mexico’s Blue Range Wilderness to the east. While New Mexico’s portion of the Blue Range has received wilderness protection, Arizona’s remains a primitive area — the last such area in the U.S. | JACK DYKINGA
Blue
LONG AGO AND OFTEN I DREAMED THE BLUE. Before I walked into and through parts of it, I awoke from it — sleep-drunk on the memory of being lost and found in woods thick and wild. Then, one October…
Bruce Simballa (on oars) and Kenton Grua (steering) guide an authentic Whitehall boat, the kind used by John Wesley Powell’s party, through the Grand Canyon’s Granite Rapids for an Imax film in 1984. Powell’s group portaged these rapids, but modern boatmen have the skills and experience to run these boats through the Canyon’s largest rapids. By Rudi Petschek
Whatever Boats You Float
The rapid we started with this morning gave us to understand the character of the day’s run. It was a wild one. The boats labored hard but came out all right. The waves were frightful and, had any of…
Photograph by Joel Grimes
It's Time You Got to Know Jack
Jack Dykinga scared the hell out of me. I grew up in a three-newspaper household in a four-newspaper town. Maybe I didn’t pay quite as much attention to bylines as to box scores, but journalists…
Unobstructed views stretch to the horizon from Monte Vista Peak in Southeastern Arizona’s Chiricahua Wilderness, where the highest point is 9,759 feet atop Chiricahua Peak. By David Muench
Desert Islands
Some places have water. Whole parts of the country leak from every pore and crack in the ground. Think of New Hampshire or the Pacific Northwest, where each little town has a glimmering river or…
Karen Pugliesi, writer Annette McGivney and McGivney’s son, Austin, hike out of the Hellsgate Wilderness along Hellsgate Trail 37. By Elias Butler
To Hellsgate and Back
There were plenty of sensible reasons to not go backpacking in Hellsgate Wilderness. For starters, the name raised suspicions that it could be a Godforsaken place. And then there was the fact that…
Toroweap Ranger Station, located near the Grand Canyon’s Toroweap Overlook on the North Rim, is one of the most remote postings in the National Park Service. The station’s buildings were built of local stone in 1935. By John Burcham
Fringe Benefits
Green after recent monsoon rains, Toroweap Valley spreads west, toward the Uinkaret Mountains. Rabbitbrush and sunflowers splash the remote expanse, more than 50 miles from the nearest pavement, with…
A sudden spring storm looms over the sandstone formations of White Pocket, part of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument north of the Grand Canyon. By Suzanne Mathia
It's a Hard Rain
A young man points south toward the only cloud floating in a deep blue October sky. We are part of a group of six with reservations to hike through Upper Antelope Canyon, east of Page, Arizona. We…
A picturesque hillside cemetery is one of the highlights of Dos Cabezas, a Southeastern Arizona ghost town that’s still home to a few residents. By Eirini Pajak
Arizona Ghost Towns
Editor’s Note: In 1994, we published a book titled Arizona Ghost Towns and Mining Camps. It was written by Philip Varney, and it went on to become one of the best-selling books in our history — it’s…