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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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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