Wednesday, November 16, 2022 was a Bold Bison day of adventure in the desert. Patrick and I had the day mostly to ourselves after the successful video shoots the previous day. We had captured basically all of the footage we’d need for the project, so anything we got today would be gravy. We had built this day into the trip as a safeguard, and honestly as an adventure day. It was my final full day in Tucson after being there for a week already, and I was looking forward to checking out a few things in Saguaro National Park that I hadn’t seen yet. Our plan was to catch the sunrise (again) in the Tucson Mountain District and then sunset in the Rincon Mountain District.
Despite being a little slower than we’d been the day before, we were at Cam-Boh Trailhead by 7am. I had already been to this trailhead twice—once with Sean and once with Patrick—both times at sunset. I looked forward to seeing the scenery under morning light.
And this time we were actually going on a hike: a 4.2-mile loop that connected Rattlesnake Trail with Panther Peak Wash Trail and then Cam-Boh Trail.
We set out headed north on Rattlesnake Wash Trail, toward the now-familiar profile of Panther Peak.
We spotted a hot air balloon off in the distance.
And another cresting the ridge ahead.
And then a third hot air balloon. I sent some balloon photos to Sean, who was displeased. Although he generally likes balloons, he does not abide by hot air balloons and will never ride in one.
Back on earth, the trail was hard-packed dirt, fairly easy to follow.
After 1.1 miles, we reached Panther Peak Wash and turned right (southeast). The trail wasn’t an actual trail. The trail was the wash. Now we we off hard-packed dirt and walking in sand.
As we hiked along in the soft sand, we swapped stories of our respective Catholic upbringings.
This Saguaro looks like an inflatable tube man announcing a sale at a used car dealership.
Patrick spotted a snake skin in the wash. From the patterns, I’m pretty sure it was shed by a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.
After maybe three-quarters of a mile, the trail left the wash. Now we were on a dirt path again.
After crossing Picture Rocks Road, we came to the junction with Cam-Boh Trail, 1.6 miles after we’d turned off of Rattlesnake Trail. Again we turned right, and now we were headed west, back toward the trailhead.
We reached the trailhead just after 9am. It was a nice, two-hour hike in the warming sunshine. We did not see any Javelinas, though not for lack of trying.
After a quick pitstop at the Visitor Center, we made the loop on Bajada Drive, stopping at the picnic area for a few more photos.
But really our goal was Signal Hill, where we walked the short distance to the top to see dozens of Hohokam Petroglyphs.
For one thousand years, from roughly 450 to 1450CE, the Hohokam people lived in south central Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert south of the Colorado Plateau. Their civilization was centered in what is now Phoenix. In fact Phoenix is located where it is because the early Anglo settlers entering the Phoenix basin encountered the massive canal system left by the Hohokam and built their own canals over them to channel water from the Salt and Gila Rivers to the town, just as the Hohokam had done.
Patrick was mightily impressed.
The fragments of buff to brown pottery with red painted designs that litter the low-lying basin floors of southern Arizona are the most distinctive and abundant material remains of former Hohokam residents. Ingenious farmers who deployed an assortment of agricultural strategies to grow crops in arid terrain, they ultimately engineered irrigation networks surpassed in length and size only by the canals of Andean empires. In addition to creating unique artifact styles, the Hohokam set themselves apart from the ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and other archeological cultures of the Southwest by the forms of the public buildings in their largest villages. These ball courts and platform mounds reflect the characteristic beliefs and community rituals of the Hohokam.
– Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish, The Hohokam Millennium
The presence of ball courts in Hohokam villages and the style of other artifacts suggests a much closer connection to ancient Mesoamerica than other cultures of what is now the southwestern United States.
Although far longer lasting and stable than Chacoan culture to the northeast, Hohokam civilization also vanished before the arrival of the Spanish, who first entered the Phoenix basin some two centuries later.
The oral traditions of the O’odham peoples connect them to the Hohokam, whom they call the Huhugam O’odham or “Finished People-Like-Us.” (“Hohokam” is derived from “Huhugam.”) O’odham oral tradition speaks of the living O’odham conquering the “finished” O’odham.
Hohokam culture gradually evolved from non-hierarchical to hierarchical before its collapse, which echoes what happened at Chaco, only on a longer time table. Both cultures, in connection with their living descendants, trace an arc of increasing hierarchy followed by a rejection of such highly stratified society and the concentration of resources needed to sustain it.
What is relatively new in the understanding of the “collapse” of hierarchical civilizations of the ancient Southwet is that, even if mitigated by a natural disaster—drought for Chaco, possibly catastrophic flooding for Hohokam—the transition from hierarchy to egalitarianism—and from city with centrally amassed resources to villages of dispersed resources better attuned to the carrying capacity of the available natural resources—the process involved the agency of the people. And the descendants of the people who made this choice are still with us.
Recent research and synthesis from examples across the globe—particularly including the Americas—are showing that the long understood concept of linear human social development is wrong. That linear concept places advanced cities as the pinnacle of societal development, the final state of the evolutionary process, but it’s now becoming clear that over and over again across the planet cities collapsed because of resource overuse or a rejection of amassed power and wealth. Again and again, societies acted with agency to disperse and evolve from bloated city to leaner societal structures that sat lighter on the land. What had been seen as a disastrous end is now being reinterpreted as an evolution to a more sustainable state. (See David Graeber and David Wengrow’s stunning The Dawn of Everything for more on this.)
It’s certainly a concept that Phoenix could learn from.
Patrick was also shocked that we were alone on signal hill. “We’re next to a major city, and there’s no one here,” he remarked.
It was a Wednesday rather than a weekend, but his point was well taken.
It was a quarter to eleven. So we stopped by the western side’s Visitor Center one last time for a couple final books before heading back into central Tucson.
After shooting a bit more b-roll of some of the murals around town, we headed to 4th Street for lunch. When we saw a place called Bison Witches, we couldn’t not go in for a sandwich.
Further Reading