To Sail the Arizona Sea

Once during a weekend getaway as a child, I took notice of the changing flora around me. While heading to the Sonora Desert Museum and Old Tucson, I paid special attention to all of the differences between the saguaro studded desert floor of the "Valley of the Sun" where I am from, (a.k.a. Phoenix and nearby settlements), and the constantly differing recently encountered landscape biota. The green candle shaped ":desert trees" were soon accompanied by large Yucca plants and rather large fields of grass.

It was if I had been almost instantly transported to some other strange world. The mountains nearby transformed from merely hills near where I live, to those dwarfing the medium sized Superstition Range nearer my house. Even the mountain boasting lofty "Four Peaks" was no match for the prominence of these beasts! Passing around the side of one of these giants, we we were soon in the city that was sought out.

Throughout our stay I, my brother and sister, and our parents spent over half the day at the desert museum, then we shifted our attention to the famous western filming location, Old Tucson. Regrettably most of the buildings on those grounds have since burned down is a furious fire. The attraction has been rebuilt, however.

After leaving both places and heading home, which was about half an hour prior to the sun setting, again those hues of gold, green, and the distant blue of the mountainside presented themselves with unrelenting grandeur! Another thing that stood out, was that unlike many of the mountainsides near my home, these were not fully carpeted with trees on the upper slopes, but gigantic rocky exposures dominated a good percentage of the surface area. This gives these ranges kind of a mottled appearance. I love the way they look!

From observing the various vegetation derived landscape surfaces, it was easy to see in action what I had read about, and had seen in a much more limited quantity in the Matazal range, or almost undetectable slowly varying phases of slow gradual ascents from my residence to Mogollon Rim upper levels. These were drastic, no nonsense steps into higher altitudes. How much could these different biological communities be? Clues pointed to the answer being that they were quite large, as the banded transition zones were very visually pronounced.

A few days later, when gazing into the depths of a few maps and my parent's Arizona atlas, I studies the elevation changes in not only the Santa Catalina Mountains, the ones which had caught my attention while on the prior visit south, but to many other characteristically similar nearby ranges. It was apparent that a dozen, then afterword perhaps twice that many, were present in this region. The Pinalenos fascinated me the most, as that steep mass of mountain represented the greatest vertical relief in all of Arizona!

Mount Graham, which is the highest named peak of the range, rises over 6,3000 feet, (1900 M) above it's base, however on the other side of the mountain,the town of Safford, just ten miles away, lies almost eight thousand feet (twenty four hundred meters), below the mighty summit! Much of the ridge crest is within a one thousand feet, (300 M), of the highest peak,, making the silhouette all the more impressive, and the hiking a lot more enjoyable. Although the tallest, (prominence), and possessing the highest summit, (elevation), these mountains are far from being the only spectacular wonder scattered about this section of the North American landmass.

Others with names such as the Santa Teresa, Chiricachua, Santa Rita, Huachuca, Rincon, and Galiuro, just to name a few, were introduced to me. A few I had heard of before, but had not noted their significance, or understood their closely interrelated proximity. Apparently these masses of the Earth followed a dispersion pattern tapering from the glorious Sierra Madres of Mexico, as if in an almost vain effort to reach out and provide a bridge to the next massive geographical feature along their path into Arizona, the Colorado Plateau. This is why some of the mid to northern of these mountain ranges exhibit biota indicative of both the Rock Mountains and more southerly oriented ranges of Mexico.

The confluence of geographical features allows for this irregular geology, giving rise to not only variances in latitude specific species, but to those which greatly differ from one elevation to the next! These distinct miniature biomes exist only on certain heights of the mountains. Roughly on the same elevation plains one other, life zones exist on each of the mountain masses which make up what is commonly, or often uncommonly referred to as Arizona's "Sky Islands".

The flora and fauna develop in tandem, however isolated by great distances and seas of baking desert floors below. This sea of aridity surrounds these communities dynamically thriving in parallel, prohibiting any cross-range travelers, save for a few birds and drifting spores. These conditions could as well describe an ocean bound archipelago like the Galapagos for example, for the similarities are astounding. Oh, if Charles Darwin had only spent his life in Arizona! I believe he would have come to the same conclusions that he had on those shoreline harboring worlds off the South American coast.

Maybe in the very near future I will be making no plans to sail the oceans or walk on some distant untraveled hidden island chain, but with a little free time and a manageable amount of gas money, then a visit to some of the members of the Madrean Archipelago, another name given to the biologically distinct sky-reaching mountains which I have been describing, would not be out of range. I shall don my life preserver and climb into my boat, er truck, to sail the seas of the little known islands of southeastern Arizona!