Published in Arizona Highways, June 2009

Driving up the Catalina Highway on a summer morning, there comes a sudden rockslide of memory: Back to the summer of ’74, where my wife Patty and I are wedged into a minuscule pullout at the side of this same road, our brand-new Fiat roadster wrapping itself in a cloud of steam. It had seemed alluringly romantic, a spirited top-down drive up the big mountain on Tucson’s northern flank, watching the desert scenery blur into piñon-juniper woodland and then alpine forest. But the Fiat is having none of our romance. It will take two more attempts before a cooling-system improvement gets us to the mountaintop without overheating.

But now it is 2009 and everything has changed. The road is wider and luxuriously outfitted with pullouts and guardrails, and the Forest Service charges $5 for the drive. The mountain no longer serves as Tucson’s northern boundary; the city has lapped around it in the shape of a lopsided horseshoe. In 2003 the month-long Aspen Fire scorched 132 square miles of the mountain’s forests. I am no longer as interested in driving up the mountain as in hiking through it. And Fiat no longer sells cars in the United States.

Consider these changes in the context of geologic time, and they seem astonishing. And there are more coming, quickly. The tribe seething around the mountain’s skirts, now more than a million strong, has profoundly altered the mountain’s character. It seems like time to sound an alarm: Civilization is messing with an ecosystem that’s still too complex for us to be able to predict the consequences. But first it’s worth looking at how this mountain has messed with us.

For as long as there’s been recorded history, the Santa Catalina range has represented escape. Most obviously, from the desert heat: In the 1920s, editorial writers for the Tucson Citizen and The Arizona Daily Star pecked out rival editorials pushing, respectively, a paved road and an alpine airport for the mountain. Reluctant voters twice rebuffed $500,000 bond proposals for the highway, and the airport never got off the ground. But in 1933 the Citizen’s publisher, Frank H. Hitchcock, embraced the prospect of prison labor to build the road, and with his influence, work on the 25-mile-long highway began just three months later. The mountain resisted more than anyone expected. By the time the road ended in the ponderosa pines, it had taken 18 years, 8,003 federal prisoners, and even with all that free labor, nearly a million dollars.

A few determined pioneers built a town at the end of the road—Summerhaven, which until the Aspen Fire was a motley scattering of cabins with a year-around population of about 50. It would have grown larger, except that there was only 240 acres of private land, surrounded by Coronado National Forest. (Post-fire, Summerhaven is still tightly contained, but the “cabins” are being replaced by serious haciendas that just happen to be built out of logs. “Some of them have elevators!” an incredulous contractor confided.)

On the lower flanks of the mountain, there’s been nothing to stop Tucson from oozing into the foothills, right up to the National Forest boundary at about 3,500 feet. People who built in these heights won no reprieve from the desert heat, but when I was a reporter in Tucson in the 1970s and controversy was raging over the growing crust of foothills houses, I interviewed a psychologist who suggested people were trying to escape something even more onerous: mortality. “Snuggling up to something permanent,” he said, “seems to offer us a connection to permanence ourselves.” No dummy, he lived in the foothills himself.

As Tucson surges around the mountain, people are now escaping the crush of urbanity. On a perimeter drive around the range—an improvised 92-mile loop that at this point still includes some dirt roads and bullet-ventilated highway signs—I stop at Saddlebrooke Ranch, a new “resort community” that will build out to 5,800 homes. “We’ve got boomers coming out of the woodwork,” sales consultant Frank Caristi tells me. “Most of them are coming for the peace, quiet, serenity, and views of the mountain.”

Although Saddlebrooke Ranch qualifies in spades as urban sprawl—it’s a 35-mile expedition to downtown Tucson—I understand the impulse. The last house I occupied in Tucson squatted in the foothills, on a site as close as I could afford to the mountain’s southern flank. The Catalinas filled the windows, an ineluctable reminder of the towering dominance of nature. This is the most profound thing the big rock provides for Tucson: perspective.

“We do not know who we are until we look at the mountain,” Charles Bowden declared in his ode to the Catalinas, Frog Mountain Blues. I have chewed on that for 20 years, since the book first appeared. It seemed extreme—Bowden always is. Do people in Dallas or Paris not know who they are, lacking a handy mountain for reference? But that book prompted me to begin hiking in the Catalinas, and then I began to understand what a miracle it was to have a mountain bursting out of your city, a mountain in the backyard, a way to understand civilization in its real perspective in nature.

One Sunday at dusk, a Tucsonan named Bill McManus was plodding the Ventana Canyon trail some 1,000 feet above the city when he saw the tawny flash of a golden retriever ahead on the trail. Except that when he closed to about 40 feet, he realized it was not a canine but a cat: a mountain lion.

“I waited for it to run away,” McManus told me. “But it just stood there watching me. I tapped my pole against a rock. It walked off the trail, squatted, as if it was waiting for me to pass. It was acting more like a dog or somebody’s pet than a wild animal.”

McManus said he was fascinated, but when the cat slipped into some tall grass and he couldn’t see it any more, “I got a little worried.” He shouted, rapped on rocks with his hiking stick, and retreated down the mountain—wasting no time, but wisely not running.

McManus’s encounter encapsulated the collision of nature and civilization now occurring on Tucson’s backyard mountain. The big rock inspires us, entertains us, frightens us. In turn, we are remodeling it, sometimes inadvertently, through our presence on it and around it.

The best way to think about a desert mountain is as a “sky island,” an ecosystem dramatically different from its surroundings. There are about 40 ranges tall enough to qualify as islands in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of the U.S. Southwest and adjoining Mexican states, and the Catalina range, peaking at 9,157 feet, is the third highest. And it’s the only one in Arizona with a major urban area around it.

Ringing the mountain with roads and subdivisions has enormous implications for wildlife. Large mammals, such as bears, mountain lions, bighorn sheep and mule deer, become isolated on their island, with no way to migrate through desert and grassland to other mountains. With shrunken territory and lessened availability of mates, their numbers decline—most dramatically among bighorn sheep, which numbered about 170 in the Catalinas in the 1970s. The last verifiable report, in 2004, counted six.

Climate change, apparently the consequence of an energy-hungry civilization, is profoundly affecting the biology of the island. Bark beetles, encouraged by drought and higher temperatures, are killing increasing swaths of high-elevation forest, principally piñon and ponderosa pines. Some animal species appear to be migrating up the mountain. A Summerhaven store owner told The Arizona Daily Star she’d started seeing roadrunners in the neighborhood—an elevation of 8,200 feet.

Matt Skroch, executive director of the nonprofit Sky Island Alliance, told me in his Tucson office that climate change, more than anything else, is what keeps him up at night, worrying about the mountains. “The species that occur at the highest elevations, where do they go? The spruce-fir habitat supports thousands of species. What happens when that habitat gets pinched off the mountains?”

Biologists are also losing sleep over a seemingly mundane pest—African buffel grass, a tough, knee-high, shrubby exotic that over the past decade has rapidly begun clawing into the foothills of the Sonoran Desert mountains. It’s choking out native species and ferrying fire toward the forests. Probably the only way to challenge it is with massive chemical warfare, which will of course affect the entire ecosystem in unpredictable ways.

This is the short view, and it’s dismaying. But there is a long view, and its spokesman is an articulate Forest Service biologist named Josh Taiz. He grew up at the foot of the Catalinas, majored in evolutionary biology and ecology at the University of Arizona, and now works in a cramped office at the back of the visitors center at Sabino Canyon. Early on a summer morning, we take a little Kawasaki trucklet up to a foothill perch where we can look into Sabino’s yawn and across the craggy face of the Catalinas.

“I’m not sure we can say the Catalinas are ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ because we don’t have a baseline of what constitutes the ‘health’ of the ecosystem,” Taiz says. “Adaptation and natural selection are at work constantly. Certain species will thrive in certain conditions, and in others they won’t. What we’re seeing now is that these biological communities are changing—no question about that. We often automatically tag that as ‘bad.’ It may well be. But when I hear ‘bad,’ I say, ‘maybe.’ Wait and see.”

Taiz sketches a portrait of a mountain ecosystem—really, a network of ecosystems—so complex that it still defies modern science’s ability to predict and explain its behavior. For example, he cites the Aspen Fire, whose vast and obvious destruction has yielded some unexpected benefits for wildlife. “The Mexican spotted owl—intuitively, you would have expected the fire to have devastated it, since it took so much mixed conifer forest. But 2003-04 produced the largest number of young since the early ‘90s.” The apparent reason is that opening up the forest canopy and increasing mulch benefited small mammals. Their numbers boomed, which in turn encouraged their predators: the owls.

We peer across the canyon at the waves of houses lapping against the mountainside. Chipmunks, Taiz notes, thrive in the vicinity of humans. This ripples throughout the food chain. The rodents eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds, which may cause them to decline. Raptors swoop down onto the chipmunks, which may give the big birds a boost. Where it all ends, nobody knows. “Eventually the system takes care of itself,” Taiz says. “Maybe not in our lifetime.”

It’s reassuring that a biologist thinks this. Just as the mountain itself is a reassuring presence. That, in fact, is the core of its importance for the messy carnival of humanity teeming around it. The mountain tells us that as there has been a past, there will be a future; and that our mistakes, in the very long view of nature, might be forgivable.

Arizona Highways, October 2004

 

 

ormally I love staring into Arizona from an airline seat, savoring the mosaic of improbable colors, the spiderleg tracks of canyons, the mountain ridgelines that slice the sky like the serrations of a prehistoric stone knife. I see the fierce angularity of the land as a challenge to humanity’s relentless press to tame and settle and pave it, which in an increasingly crowded world seems immeasurably precious. We need places that resist us.

 

But this time, 35,000 feet over the Kaibab Plateau, I’m looking out the window with a knot of fear tightening in my throat. I have concocted a scheme to hike some 260 miles of the Arizona Trail, a not-quite-completed footpath from Utah to Mexico that comprises serious wilderness and an overabundance of that angularity. I’m spectacularly unqualified for this, aside from knowing Arizona fairly well and carrying not too much middle-age flab. I bought a backpack just two weeks ago. I pecked my first tentative waypoints into a GPS gadget five days past. I hate sleeping in a tent because everything that crunches a twig out there startles me awake. I’ve never done anything nearly as challenging as this.

 

So why try it? I moved away from Arizona eight years ago, with regrets, and this promised a powerful way to resume a relationship with a landscape I still loved. I wanted to get out of my office. I needed to confront an army of my fears and tell them what they could do with themselves, rather than the other way around.

 

For reading matter, I’ve brought—what else?—Edward Abbey’s classic Desert Solitaire, which helps explains my own mission to me. Landscapes like these, Abbey  wrote, have the power “to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful.”

 

Wonderful. If we live to enjoy reawakening.

 

ale Shewalter, a sixth-grade Flagstaff teacher, hatched the idea of the Arizona Trail in 1985. Pondering an Arizona map, he discerned a patchy north-south green corridor, signifying mostly mountainous National Forests, so he decided to try hiking south to north, Nogales to Fredonia, using whatever trails and two-lane roads presented themselves. “Unfortunately, it was July and pretty steamy,” he told me. “It became more of an endurance test than a wilderness walk. I did 540 miles, living on peanuts and raisins.”

 

Shewalter is an old-fashioned, no-nonsense outdoors guy; he hikes in jeans and cowboy shirts and has not been known to backpack with prissy titanium cookware. But he has a degree in physical geography and talks about the critical need to grow a community of people who understand, cherish and care for the land. That in mind, he took a year’s leave from teaching in 1988 and traveled the state, talking to hiking clubs and Forest Service officials. Six years later the nonprofit Arizona Trail Association incorporated and began carving new trails to link up with existing ones.

 

“We’re down to the last 100 miles,” Larry Snead, the ATA’s chief trail steward, told me over a Mexican breakfast. He’s reluctant to guess when the full 790 miles will be linked—“not many years” is all he’ll offer—but a few ambitious hikers already have made the border-to-border trek, bushwhacking where necessary.

 

Only a few. Snead said he knows of maybe 10 who have thru-hiked it in one continuous push; about 25 have gone the distance in segments of a few days at a time. The trail is tough, frequently a vertical zigzag, plunging into canyons and lurching over mountains. Even more daunting is its aridity. There are segments 10, 20, even 30 miles long where water is a fat chance. Weather is a caprice. Terry Gay, an experienced Tucson backpacker, started a thru-hike in the spring of 2003. She lost the trail in snow in the Huachuca Mountains just north of the Mexican border, then fell sick from heat in the desert north of Tucson.

 

“I overestimated my ability,” she told me. “The trail is a good teacher.” She’s now hiking it in segments, not unhappily.

 

Shewalter confirmed that the Arizona Trail is plenty challenging, even for veterans. “But you make your challenges into opportunities,” he said. “It’ll make or break your character.”

 

 

y character breaks on the first day.

 

 

It is the second week of October, which normally delivers ideal hiking weather in Arizona’s midlevel elevations. But this is no normal year. Phoenix will equal or break 57 daily heat records by year’s end, and today will be one of those record-breakers. We’re a long way from Phoenix, starting our hike in high desert at 5,000 feet on the Utah border, but even here today’s forecast high is 90.

 

I have a couple of companions for this leg: photographer Randy Prentice, who appears much more rugged than me but is just as leery of major backpacking; and Howard Greene, a friend from Taos, who looks more delicate than either of us but is actually a mountain goat who can read topo maps.

 

While planning this I read A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s wonderfully entertaining and useful book about his fumbling efforts to hike the Appalachian Trail. Bryson selected a hiking buddy who knew absolutely nothing about the outdoors and resembled Orson Welles “after a very bad night.” He provided a fine comic foil for the narrative but hardly enhanced Bryson’s chances of survival. Of the friends I drafted for assorted segments of the Arizona Trail, three were veteran backpackers and the fourth was an engineer who could, in a pinch, build a satellite phone out of twigs and pebbles.

 

So my anxieties begin to dissipate, at least regarding the hazards I’ve projected. Navigation proves easy—Arizona Trail Association volunteers have pounded stakes bearing “Arizona Trail” logos at every point where a doofus might wander off. The Yellow Brick Road couldn’t be easier to follow. Still, it’s a tough day’s stroll, even for Howard: 11 miles and a 1,500-foot climb with 35-pound packs onto the Kaibab Plateau, where we’re meeting Randy for first night’s camp. Groaning with camera gear, he’s driven his camper truck to a Forest Road rendezvous with the trail.

 

After a camp dinner of chile-laced noodles and landjäger sausage (my one contribution to this party may be that I can cook), Howard offers a radical idea: “You know, using the camper as a base, we could do most of this as day hikes.”

 

It’s eminently sensible, and not one at odds with the Arizona Trail’s spirit. This trail is intended for a galaxy of users—trail runners, mountain bikers, snowshoers and equestrians; casual day-hikers and fanatic thru-hikers.

 

“Revised itinerary coming tomorrow,” I say.

 

The point of hiking, I think, is not to push to the edge of exhaustion and injury, but to remain sufficiently alive to be open to whatever beauty or instruction the land has to offer. I’m out here to have my senses engaged and sharpened, not degraded and dulled by fatigue, and to leave behind the pressures of my everyday work and home life.

 

Terry Gay was right; the Arizona Trail teaches—and its first-day lesson was that I hadn’t designed an expedition to elude those pressures, just one that imposed different ones—a forced march, 12 to 15 miles daily with full packs. Fun for fitness fanatics, maybe, but not the reason I’ve come here.

 

In the morning I scribble out a kinder, gentler itinerary, and Howard and I plod off across the Kaibab Plateau with ten-pound daypacks.

 

 

t’s impossible to top John Wesley Powell’s thoughts about traversing the Grand Canyon. Years after his 1869 expedition through the “Grand Cañon of the Colorado” he wrote:

 

The traveler on the brink looks from afar and is overwhelmed with the

sublimity of massive forms; the traveler among the gorges stands in the presence of awful mysteries, profound, solemn, and gloomy.

 

But also this:

 

It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas,

But if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil

a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the

hither side of Paradise.

 

I’ve day-hiked into the Canyon—dipping in a toe, so to speak—several times, but this will be my first rim-to-rim. It’s the grandest obstacle on the Arizona Trail, in more ways than one. Arizona Trail trekkers can’t simply saunter up to the lip of the canyon and continue on through—not unless they’re prepared to commit the entire 25-mile hike in one day. The Park Service has a confounding permit system for overnight campers, and they’re getting 30,000 applications a year. They issue 13,000 permits.

 

They denied our application, faxed in weeks ago, so we shift to Plan B. We arrive at the North Rim’s backcountry office, a trailer nested beneath a towering skyline of ponderosas and golden aspens, at 8 a.m. on a chilly Sunday to apply for slots opened by cancellations. A cheerful ranger boots his computer, bends a rule or two, and tells us to return tomorrow when he’ll make sure we get our permit.

 

The process tells contradicting stories about our National Park system. Laboring under an impossible crush of visitors and shameful penury from Congress, the Park Service bureaucracy often seems to be trying to keep visitors away from the very attractions that the parks were intended to showcase. But I’ve never met an individual ranger who didn’t love the job, or who wasn’t helpful with any reasonable request. Few bureaucracies shine like this at their edges.

We pass Sunday night in relative luxury at the North Rim Lodge, where I have a conversation with a couple from St. Louis that tells me I’d not make a cheerful, helpful ranger.

“We’re here just for tonight at the Grand Canyon and we’re hitting Zion National Park tomorrow,” the woman says. “Can we see Zion in two hours?”

“You’re kidding. Stay two days, at least.”

“We can’t. We have reservations in Vegas tomorrow night.”

“Forget ‘em. Life’s short. Spend your time here and at Zion.”

“Oh, no—we’d lose our deposit!”

 

Morning dawns with perfect hiking weather, at least at the North Rim’s 8,000 feet. As we start down the North Kaibab Trail my jacket is stashed, my pack is slimmed to a minimalist 25 pounds. We’re not schlepping tents since there’s no rain forecast. A helpful ranger suggested this and guaranteed we’ll thank him for the absent avoirdupois during our 5,000-foot grind up the South Rim. (Note: Thank you!)

 

Before North Kaibab, we’d encountered exactly one other hiker in four days on the Arizona Trail. Now we’re three molecules in a river of humanity—the Park Service estimates 50,000 people walk or run rim-to-rim annually. Despite signs warning how tough it is, many try it without camping overnight. I ask one of the speedsters why. “Why climb Mt. Everest?” he replies, his expression adding, what a lame question. I know there’s more to the answer. Natural spectacles such as the Grand Canyon or Everest trigger a powerful lust in the human heart to cut them down to size, negotiate them on our terms. Young bodies, crazed with hormones and blessed with muscle tone, race across the canyon. When older and wiser, we design dams to plug the Colorado and make lakes in the desert. Either way, we learn much about our own abilities but little about the land.

 

We slither into our sleeping bags at Cottonwood Camp after 10 miles and one of those dismal pour-boiling-water-in-the-pouch “lasagna” dinners. It’s only 8 p.m., so I just lie awake and stare at the sky. A gibbous moon rises, bright and brittle as a light in a cell that the guard won’t turn off. The canyon’s serrated walls, faintly lit against the sky, are propped around us like sepia photographs of ruined battlements. The serenity is complete and perfect; I feel more secure than I would in my bed back in quake-happy Seattle.

 

At 10 p.m. a terrific wind blows out of nowhere, threatening to crack cottonwood branches 75 feet directly over my head. It’s the canyon “breathing,” exchanging warm air on its floor with cold on the Kaibab. It howls till midnight, then quits as abruptly as it started. That security was an illusion, an interlude. The canyon is a living entity, always changing, sometimes cataclysmically—floods, rockfalls, storms. Naturalist Craig Childs wrote perfectly: “The word ‘canyon’ is as close to a verb as any landform can be.”

 

Our ascent up the South Rim’s Bright Angel Trail is as tough as advertised, but the physical effort teaches me more about the canyon. Standing on the rim and staring into and across it, a “concept of sublimity” doesn’t fully jell, because its scale and architecture lie outside human experience. Hiking the canyon gives it an opportunity to rough you up, so you begin to know it—personally and respectfully.

 

I call home from the South Rim to report our accomplishment. Patty, my wife,  says she had just talked to a friend who’d thought I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. When she corrected him, he sounded disappointed.

 

“Arizona,” he said. “That’s mostly flat, isn’t it?”

 

he Arizona Trail traverses just one urban area, the piney metropolis of Flagstaff, which provides us with a nutritious refueling stop encompassing the four basic food groups: hamburgers, tacos, hot dogs and pizza. A few miles south of the city, the trail resumes teaching us lessons. 

I’ve planned a two-day, 21-mile hike from Walnut Canyon National Monument to the north end of dry Mormon Lake. Joining me is a long-time friend from Tucson, Ed Stiles. Ed lives and breathes hiking; he fabricates his own ultralight tents and backpacks, and he’s legendary in Tucson for snipping the paper flags off tea bags to save weight.

 

We shuttle one car to Mormon Lake, then drive back via Lake Mary Road, stopping to hide two gallons of water under a juniper. When we reach the trailhead at Walnut Canyon, a sign blandly informs us that we’ll have 15 miles to hike to our cache.

“Fifteen miles is beyond my range,” Ed declares.

“I eyeballed it on the map,” I say. “It looks like only nine or ten.”

“You eyeballed it?”

 

We spread the map on the ground and measure the route with a string: 15 miles.

<

So we wheel back to Mormon Lake to retrieve Ed’s car, re-park it where our water cache had been, then get lost in a labyrinth of back roads trying to cache water at an eight-mile stop. We burst out, inadvertently, back at the Walnut Canyon trailhead. It’s noon, a bit past our intended 8 a.m. departure.    

Lacking words fully appropriate to the occasion, I tell Ed, “I’m sorry.”

He’s beyond gracious. “This is how my backpacking trips usually begin—half a day after they’re supposed to. There’s always something. The basic fact about backpacking is that you can’t control a lot—the weather, the environment, forest regulations, what the trails may throw at you.” He doesn’t underscore the obvious: that I could have averted this ridiculous morning by measuring the trail.

 

We end up carrying two gallons of water apiece. The trek finally turns into fun near the end of the first day, after we’ve cycled five or six pounds of the water through our systems. On the second day, emerging from the mouth of Walnut Canyon, we discover a lovely pink and black escarpment of Coconino sandstone, furrowed and wind-sculpted in rhythmic waves. It’s not quite a spectacle to rival the Grand Canyon, but discovering it is like knowing a secret place.

We’re collecting a horde of them.

 

ot every mile of the Arizona Trail bristles with secret wonders. Some miles just bristle.

Snead, the trail steward, meets me in Superior and we rumble into the Pinal County outback for an introduction to some little-known segments.

 

Whitford Canyon, a few miles north of Superior, deserves to be better known. Without fanfare, the trail descends into a broad but shallow Sonoran Desert canyon that encloses a different, self-contained biological world at every turn. We walk through a saguaro forest, a cholla forest, a mesquite forest, a cottonwood forest, and finally a forest of sunflowers. Entirely absent is the puckered, parsimonious landscape sometimes associated with the word desert.

 

Snead examines a ruined cairn. “We used to think cows brushed against them and knocked them over. Now we know it’s bears. Ants and other insects will get under the rocks and the bears will tear up the cairns to get them.” A desert that supports  bears!

 

The next morning Snead deposits Randy and me at Tiger Mine Road near Oracle with a promise to pick us up six miles north where the trail crosses Tucson Wash. I wonder why he’s not hiking with us. It’s soon obvious. The trail undulates like a sine wave, rolling pointlessly into arroyos and over hills, offering few scenic dividends for the effort. It’s a segment only a desert rat could love.

 

Take that literally. Under a sprawling mesquite, Randy and I notice a scattering of spiky cholla stems surrounding a hole. We’re mystified: it’s impossible that they scooted there on their own. Later, a wildlife biologist explains it to me: a packrat arranged them to protect its den from marauding coyotes and bobcats. A barbed-wire fence, engineered by a rodent.

 

This is the argument for shunning a wheeled cage and instead plodding across the world at two miles per hour, remaining receptive to nature’s small miracles even—no, especially—where you least expect them.

 

 

hree weeks into the expedition, one of the surprises has been how few humans we’ve seen. Except for the Grand Canyon, and our occasional forays into civilization for showers and fine food, we’ve encountered maybe two dozen people on foot or bicycle saddle. Most of those were in the Superstitions, a convenient weekend escape for urban refugees from Phoenix. We’ve seen almost no trailside litter and have sometimes plodded for miles at a time without any sign of human impact on the land—except for those welcome markers assuring us we’re still on the Arizona Trail.

 

Lonesome miles like those reinforce, erroneously, the overriding myth of the American West that endures even today: that this land is so vast and its resources so prodigious that neither can ever be exhausted.

 

In a lovely, seemingly pristine valley on the Kaibab Plateau, Howard and I were enjoying lunch when a hunter puttered by on an ATV, a rifle slung over his arm. He circled an evergreen copse at a lawn-mowing pace for 10 minutes, counting on the machine’s rasp to flush a deer or elk. None appeared, but his motorized hunting, the ability to pursue prey through their own habitat at speeds faster than they can run, struck me as a metaphor for how technology has overtaken the West’s capacity to resist us.

 

Human effort, multiplied many times by machines, is gobbling the land at a voracious pace. In 1995 the Arizona Republic calculated that metro Phoenix was expanding into the desert at the rate of an acre an hour, a pace that has not since slackened. I calculate that at this rate it would take Phoenix 8,328 years to engulf the state, but the big number is small comfort. We persist in believing that there’s enough land for everybody and every kind of use. We blindly follow our biological disposition, multiplying our numbers and claiming more and more of the planet’s habitat, while denying our most amazing and precious gift: we are the one animal on the planet with the capacity to reason, to predict its own future, and alter it if we choose.

 

The Arizona Trail boldly attacks the north flank of the Santa Catalina Mountains, Tucson’s signature range, arcing up Oracle Ridge and over the summit of 9,157-foot Mt. Lemmon. We’d hoped to hike this entire segment—it’s Randy’s and my hometown hill, and a sentimental favorite—but the disastrous 2003 Aspen Fire has closed chunks of it. Still, we can hike several miles through a burn zone on Oracle Ridge, which proves to be disturbingly enchanting.

The coal-black skeletons of white oak and emory oak trees jut into the sky like upturned spider legs, eerily sinister but also lovely in stark contrast to a sapphire sky and the colorful new growth sprouting around them. Larry Snead tells me he likewise found it strangely beautiful the first time he hiked through here after the fire. “Here was all this devastation, and I thought it was pretty. I felt guilty,” he confesses.

 

Dean Prichard, a retired journalist, has lived here in the historic Buffalo Bill Cody ranch house for 30 years beside what is now the Arizona Trail. I ask him about his feelings when he rides his horse through the burn. “It’s not my land, but I’ve always felt like I was a part of it,” he says. “I feel a bit lost, a bit betrayed.”

 

Betrayed by whom? Fire is a natural and essential part of nature’s forestry, but our urban encroachment and misguided forest management has multiplied its ravages. The Aspen fire torched 84,000 acres, a number that means something only after I convert it to square miles: 131, an area four-fifths the size of incorporated Tucson. Most of the devastation near Prichard’s place was caused by backfires set to protect human habitat on the mountain.

 

Oracle Ridge, in fact, is the most instructive place on the Arizona Trail to see how substantially our species has transformed the landscape. Looking down from the  rocky aerie we see: an open-pit mine, a smelter, dirt roads (and this hiking trail) scraped into the foothills, a red tide of suburban tile roofs, the diamondlike dome of Biosphere II, and everywhere around us the blackened forest.

 

How do we preserve authentic wilderness at the back door of a city of nearly a million people? How do we convince a furiously growing population that it’s worth doing, that it must be done if civilization is to have any collective memory of the earth’s natural beauty and nature’s endangered balance?

 

e had planned to backpack 21 miles across the Huachuca Mountains to trail’s end at the Mexican border, but Steve Saway, the Arizona Trail Association’s volunteer steward for the southernmost segment, advises against it. “There’s a lot of illegal (alien) traffic up there,” he tells me on the phone. “And bears are being attracted by the smugglers’ trash. They’re losing their fear of humans.”

 

After nearly a month on the trail, I’m losing my fear of bears—mainly because I haven’t encountered one. I don’t want to test my luck, so we change plans again and day-hike into the Huachucas. To prove our manhood, we decide to tack on the half-mile spur to 9,466-foot Miller Peak, highest point in the Huachucas and the apogee of our expedition.

 

We climb—Randy, my brother-in-law Chris Ball and me—and my thoughts become a tangle of contradictions. I’m buoyed and even cocky over my by-now exhilarating physical condition; I easily outpace Chris, who’s 12 years younger and endowed with more natural muscle than me. But when we round a bend and actually see Miller Peak, a craggy, defiant fist slugging into the sky, my confidence drains out. It triggers my latent acrophobia, and I mentally review a parade of excuses I could use to back out of an assault on the peak. I recall a satisfying conclusion I reached weeks ago: when hiking isn’t fun, why continue?

 

I feel other contradictions. The landscape is ineffably beautiful and impossibly dramatic, maybe the best of the trek. The trail is a catwalk with the mountain falling away beneath it in a colossal swoop down to the San Pedro Valley. At one point granite stacks surround us like giant abstract chessmen; then we pass through a forest of pygmy aspen barely 10 feet high. At the same time, there’s a dismaying scatter of trailside trash, just as Saway had said: cans, bottles, wrappers, tattered curtains and blankets apparently used for bedding, even castoff sweatshirts and jackets.

 

No, saddening rather than dismaying. I can read the story in the litter. They’ve slipped across the border on a warm day. It’s a relentless 3,000-foot climb into the Huachucas. They chug most of their water, discard the heavy clothes—and suddenly it’s night at 9,000 feet. The story is no less important than the natural history along the Arizona Trail. Human culture, including our politics and economics, is a part of the global biosphere—arguably the most profound part, because how we proceed with civilization may determine the fate of every other living species on the planet.

 

My personal fears dissolve in these larger concerns, and we stumble onto the summit. We indulge in a round of loud and rowdy self-congratulations, devils dancing on a pinhead. We try to call our wives to brag, but the cell phones won’t work at this elevation: the mountain resists at least this one glimmer of technology. If I could reach Patty, and find a place away from the other guys, I would tell her this:

 

I’ve done the Arizona Trail. Not even half of it by actual mileage, but enough to know that I could go the distance, if I were inclined to. I still have fears—I nearly chickened out this morning—but they don’t command quite the authority they used to. I called their bluff, and they backed away, a little afraid now of me.

 

I thought at this expedition’s outset that the most profound quality of this land we call Arizona is its power to resist us—our big plans, our development schemes, our environmental depredations. After a month plodding over the landscape I realize it hardly has any physical capacity to resist at all. The extremes of climate, the fierce angularity, the aridity, hardly matter anymore: we could bridge the Grand Canyon and build a subdivision in the Superstitions if we chose to; we are that powerful.

But maybe the most powerful thing we’ve built here in the last century is one of the least intrusive: this rambling, 30-inch-wide dirt path called the Arizona Trail—because it can teach us what else not to build. When we expose ourselves to raw wilderness, let it speak, allow it to reawaken an awareness of the wonderful within our spirits, we come to respect its true value.  It doesn’t resist us, it changes us.