On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 16, 2022, my Bold Bison co-owner, Patrick, and I continued our day of desert adventure in the Rincon Mountain District on the east side of Saguaro National Park. We had already spent the morning in the Tucson Mountain District to the west and had had lunch in Tucson as we headed east to the Rincons. It was the final day of my week-and-a-day-long birthday trip to Tucson before heading home to Chicago the next day.
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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.
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Monday, November 14, 2022 was a transition day. Sean was set to fly home to Chicago in the morning. Then in the afternoon, Patrick would arrive and we would shift into Bold Bison work mode, shooting interviews and footage for a video project. For me, it felt like an instant revisit to Saguaro National Park. The initial exploration of the Park with Sean was complete. And now it was time for a second visit connected to work travel, except that there was a gap of only a couple hours, rather than months or years, between one and the other.
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Sunday afternoon, November 13, 2022, Sean and I continued our day in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Time was growing short as the sun traced its short November path across the wide-open sky. Our next stop was Senita Basin for our second hike of the day. But to get there, we had to drive down and along the border, wedged between Wilderness and a wall.
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Established in 1937 by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument protects over 330,000 acres of the Sonoran Desert. The southern edge of the Monument is the international border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Its eastern edge borders the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Bounded on the west and northwest by Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Monument is important to the Pacific Flyway of migrating birds. It is the northern extent of the range of species of cactus, the Senita Cactus, that grows nowhere else in the contiguous United States. The Monument is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Ninety-five percent of the Monument is federally designated Wilderness. It is fewer than fifty miles from the Gulf of California.
And it is beautiful.
On Sunday, November 13, 2022, it was where Sean and I were headed for the day.
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Our day in the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park—Friday, November 11, 2022—was coming to a close. We had greeted the sun that morning in the Saguaro forest, and we would say goodbye to the sun from the forest too. The next day would be my birthday, and we’d spend it exploring Tucson.
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On the afternoon of Friday, November 11, 2022, Sean and I continued our exploration of the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park with a hike up a portion of Tanque Verde Ridge Trail. It allowed us to quickly reach some great views of the entire northern reaches of the Santa Cruz Valley, which encompasses Tucson, and the mountains that encircle the city. The trail climbs for eleven miles up a southwest-northeast trending ridge into the heart of the Rincon Mountains high country. But on this afternoon, we only did the first one and a half miles, which was still a vertical rise of over seven hundred feet.
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Friday morning, November 11, 2022, Sean and I were up early. We planned to spend the day exploring the eastern side of Saguaro National Park, the Rincon Mountain District, beginning with a Ranger-led sunrise hike to greet the dawn in the Sonoran Desert. Later we would go on a hike up Tanque Verde Ridge, and then wander around in the Saguaro Forest.
But first, sunrise.
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On Thursday, November 10, 2022, Sean and I finished up our afternoon on the western side of Saguaro National Park by exploring some of the Tucson Mountain District’s northernmost areas, including sunset under Panther Peak (3,435 feet).
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I love the desert. I love all four of North America’s deserts with their unique characters and personalities. As we arrived in the Sonoran Desert, we eased our way in gently with a wonderful introduction to this diverse place’s plants and animals with a visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum before driving to the heart of Saguaro National Park’s Tucson Mountain District.
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Saguaro National Park protects almost 92,000 acres of the northern Sonoran Desert. Established as a National Monument by Herbert Hoover in the waning days of his disastrous presidency, it was upgraded to a National Park by Congress in 1994, part of a robust legacy of desert conservation during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Of the Park’s 92,000 acres, 71,000 are federally designated Wilderness.
The Park comprises two distinct units on the eastern and western edges of Tucson, Arizona. While both units contain the same general ingredients of desert grassland and variously vegetated transition zones climbing the slopes of mountain ranges, they have markedly different flavors. To the east, Rincon Mountain District contains a true Sky Island, a mountain range high enough and cool enough to cradle habitat remnants of ecosystems—trapped above warming valley floors as the Ice Age glaciers retreated—usually found much farther north. To the west, Tucson Mountain District, smaller and lower, feels more iconically like desert, with dramatic, virtually bare, mountains rising sharply from flats and valleys.
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Wednesday, October 30 we needed to say farewell to our campsite and get all of us, including Rick with his hurt knee, out of Havasu Canyon and up to Haulapai Hilltop ten miles away and some 2,000 feet up. Although our time in the Canyon was ending, our trip would not actually finish until Saturday. We still had some Americana time coming at a Route 66 roadside attraction, Hoover Dam, and Las Vegas on Halloween.
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Tuesday, October 29 was a quiet day. We mostly took it easy and rested or explored Havasu Canyon areas closer to the campground. We needed to marshal our strength for the big hike back out of the canyon the following day. And we were worried about Rick’s hurt knee. The slower day also afforded us the opportunity to check out the tiny village of Supai, where most Havasupai homes and services in the canyon are clustered.
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Monday, October 28 was the first of our two full days in Havasu Canyon. We had hiked in the morning of the previous day for our three nights of camping. Despite the big hike that day, we decided for another big hike this following day: hiking downstream to Beaver Falls and then on to attempt to reach the confluence of Havasu Creek and the Colorado River in the main trunk of the Grand Canyon. From the campground, the confluence is seven miles, so it would be a long, but doable fourteen mile out-and-back. We’d decided to do it this first day because then we’d have a full day to rest before the hike back out of the canyon on Wednesday.
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On the afternoon of Sunday, October 27, after our long hike into Havasu Canyon, we wandered from our campsite to have a look at Havasu Falls, the showpiece of the canyon, that in 1974 wasn’t even part of the Havasupai Reservation.
In the summer of 1974, during the darkest days of the Watergate crisis, a bill to enlarge Grand Canyon National Park wound its way through committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation sought to incorporate two National Monuments into the Park, smooth out some of the boundaries, and regulate air traffic above the Park. It also sought to finalize Native American land claims. The bill offered a chance for the Havasupai to reclaim the vast majority of the land taken from them in 1880.
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Sunday morning, October 27, we had to be up early for our ten-mile hike into one of the most scenic parts of the Grand Canyon. We wanted to get an early start both to avoid the midday desert heat in the inner canyon and to ensure we got a nice campsite for our subsequent three nights in Havasu Canyon.
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“Wait, did you quit your job to go to the Grand Canyon?”
I was on a tour bus somewhere in rural North Carolina. Next to me was Steve, the inspiring executive director of a conservation organization in northwestern Illinois. We were in North Carolina for the annual Land Conservation Conference. We’d been on a rainy field trip most of the day and now were on our way back to Raleigh. I had been telling Steve about our upcoming Grand Canyon trip, less than a week after the conference. In thinking through the timeline, Steve realized that I would not be in Chicago for my former employer’s very important event, which he was going to attend. It was the sort of function that a staff member would not dream of missing.
“I won’t necessarily say that I quit my job to go to the Grand Canyon, Steve,” I replied with a grin. “But if you want to spread that rumor, I won’t stop you.”
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In January 2019, Sean and I received a text from our friend, Rick, in Denver, who wanted to gauge our interest in trying to secure campground reservations in Havasu Canyon sometime that year. I replied almost instantly that we were interested.
Located south of the Colorado River and west of the National Park developments at the South Rim, Havasu Canyon is the largest tributary canyon into the Grand Canyon. It and the plateau lands that surround it are the home of the Havasupai Tribe, who take their name, “People of the Blue-Green Water” from the world-famous waters and waterfalls of Havasu Creek, which flows from a canyon spring to its confluence with the Colorado River. On the way, the creek tumbles over a series of waterfalls, which attract some 25,000 outsiders a year to the tiny reservation village of Supai, population roughly 600.
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Our ten days in California began with three nights in Los Angeles visiting Charlie and Kevin, who had just moved there from Chicago and were still settling into their apartment in Marina del Rey. Sean and I were excited to see them in their new life.
After our grand hike on Widforss Trail, instead of returning immediately to our campsite, we went to the Grand Canyon Lodge campus to hit the North Rim Visitor Center one last time. It was the late afternoon of Saturday, September 17, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to linger at Grand Canyon National Park the next morning waiting for the visitor center to open if we wanted to get back to Phoenix in time for our flight home.
The morning of Saturday, September 17 was clear and warmer than the previous morning. Our plan for the final full day of our Grand Staircase adventure was to hike the Widforss Trail, a ten-mile round trip through the forests of the Kaibab Plateau to Widforss Point. Widforss Point, which provides a panoramic view of the Grand Canyon, is the type of viewpoint that on the developed South Rim would be served by shuttle buses and a packed parking lot. But because it was on the far less developed and less visited North Rim, it was accessible only to hikers and backpackers.
By 4:30 in the afternoon on Friday, September 16, Sean and I were back in the general vicinity of Grand Canyon Lodge. The Visitor Center had not been open in the morning when we went to breakfast, so we stopped in and stamped our passports for Grand Canyon. We also noted the times of sunset and moonrise and the time of the ranger talk at the campground amphitheater, all of which we wanted to experience.
We had a busy evening ahead of us, so we headed back to camp to relax for a bit.
In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which, so far as I know, is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I was delighted to learn of the wisdom of the Santa Fe railroad people in deciding not to build their hotel on the brink of the canyon. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see. We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children’s children will get the benefit of it. If you deal with irrigation, apply it under circumstances that will make it of benefit, not to the speculator who hopes to get profit out of it for two or three years, but handle it so that it will be of use to the home-maker, to the man who comes to live here, and to have his children stay after him. Keep the forests in the same way. Preserve the forests by use; preserve them for the ranchman and the stockman, for the people of the Territory, for people of the region round about. Preserve them for that use, but use them so that they will not be squandered, that they will not be wasted, so that they will be of benefit to the Arizona of 1953 as well as the Arizona of 1903.
– President Theodore Roosevelt, from Speech at Grand Canyon Arizona, May 6, 1903
After taking in the views at Cape Royal, we drove a short way north on the Walhalla Plateau to Cliff Spring Trailhead for a hike before lunch on Friday, September 16. Cliff Spring Trail drops beneath the rim of the Walhalla Plateau into a steep canyon until it reaches a natural spring about half a mile from the trailhead. The trail continues for another half mile before it peters out. Theodore Roosevelt camped at Cliff Spring during a 1913 hunting trip to the North Rim.
Late morning on Friday, September 16, Sean and I climbed into the Jeep and departed North Rim Campground for the Walhalla Plateau, which juts some fourteen miles south into the canyon from the end of the Kaibab Plateau. That morning at breakfast, we had seen the primary view into the canyon from the busiest point on the North Rim (the equivalent of driving into Grand Canyon Village and having a look from the South Rim), but now we wanted to spend the day seeing other aspects of the Grand Canyon from its North Rim. In part because of the Walhalla Plateau, the views from the various vantage points on the North Rim are more varied than those on the South Rim. Our intention was to spend the greater part of the day on the Walhalla Plateau.
It was already 5:45pm (Utah time) on Thursday, September 15 by the time we drove away from Zion National Park en route to the final National Park in our descent of the Grand Staircase.
Grand Canyon National Park was the first National Park I’d visited, twenty-four years earlier when I was thirteen years old. Back before that trip with my aunt and uncle and cousins, I’d read everything I could about the canyon in my Catholic grade school’s small library. I had become enchanted with photos of black Kaibab Squirrels with their tufted ears and white tails. But the squirrels are only found on the North Rim, and on that long-ago trip we’d visited the South Rim. This would be my chance to see a Kaibab Squirrel.
On Friday, September 9, 2016 Sean and I began our trip down the Grand Staircase with an evening flight to Phoenix. More often than not, this was our modus operandi, to fly out after work, stay overnight near the airport, and begin the trip proper on the ground in the morning wherever we were. That Friday, I was more than ready to be gone. It had been a very long week at work, culminating in issues with a new vendor. (I’d ultimately be proven right in my assessment of their shoddy service.) But either way, it would be good to do some hiking in a place I’d wanted to visit since childhood.
In 2016, the Centennial Year of the National Park Service (although National Parks had existed for decades prior), Sean and I embarked on a mini-journey to calibrate our Park trips so that by the end of the year, we’d both have visited the same National Parks. That meant that we had to travel to Yosemite, Shenandoah, Dry Tortugas, and Grand Canyon. Along the way, we picked up other Parks near those four so that by the end of the year, we’d visited eight National Parks and thirteen National Park units.
After Yosemite and Channel Islands in May and Shenandoah in June (and Muir Woods, Golden Gate, and Point Reyes in August), we planned to visit the Grand Canyon in September. We knew that we’d want to pick up at least one more Park on a visit to the Grand Canyon. Very early in our planning, we considered a relatively short trip to the South Rim and Petrified Forest National Park, which is near the top of Sean’s list of Parks to visit. But we decided that an extended long weekend was giving both those Parks short shrift.
In August 2016, Sean’s firm sent him to Los Angeles and San Francisco for a week. On Sunday afternoon, August 7, we were treated to spectacular aerial views of southern Utah and northern Arizona. In particular, we were able to see Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Grand Canyon National Park, all from the comfortable cruising altitude of American Airlines Flight 2220 from Chicago O’Hare to LAX.
In the summer of 1992, a family trip took my aunt, uncle, two cousins and me to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We stayed in a canyon-view room in Thunderbird Lodge. Fanny packs strapped securely around our waists, we strolled the rim looking at the vistas. Drama was provided by an escaped convict who fled into the park causing the closure of a large section of the eastern part of the South Rim, as well as road blocks on the highways in and out of the park.
Thirteen years old, about to start high school in September, I was enthralled by everything.
I had been primed for the park. I’d read every book about the Grand Canyon in my Catholic elementary school’s library. Picture books about the canyon from the 1960s with vividly washed-out photographs of Ponderosa Pines and squirrels with funny little tufted ears, I’d read them all. In particular, I’d read Marguerite Henry’s 1953 historical novel about a semi-wild burro, Brighty of the Grand Canyon.
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