I sacrificed a recent crisp, sunny morning to a five-mile scramble around the new Sonoita Creek State Natural Area and I’ve got no regrets save not going farther, maybe packing in and spending a big-moon night wondering if the breeze-blown ocotillo was reaching for something it can never reach.

The preserve, just outside Patagonia Lake State Park in Santa Cruz County, has about 20 miles of trails on some 9,000 acres, so it’s easy to cobble together a representative loop to fit your mood. Like so much of Southern Arizona, the Natural Area, located in a transitional zone between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, has a deceptively varied ecosystem, with seven distinct vegetative communities dominated by semi-desert grass lands and riparian forests.

I started hiking across the scrubby plain, through a veritable ocotillo forest, on the Sonoita Creek Trail, which is well-marked with cairns (small rock piles). It quickly drops into the riparian zone, though Sonoita Creek is dry in many places at this time of year. Shady cottonwoods and bare white sycamores mix with mesquite and scrub oak, and birders will want to take the short Cottonwood Loop which circles an especially verdant stretch of the creek and provides probably the best chance to see some of the Mexican avian species that are known to haunt the area, including the elegant trogon. The turnoff for the short loop is well marked with a sign.

About a mile or so in you’ll see the huge stone remnants of the New Mexico and Arizona railroad that once ran along Sonoita Creek from Patagonia to Rio Rico. Here the creek is flowing, but it’s easy to cross by stepping on some well-placed stones. A cow skull perched atop a cairn marks the trail, and you can still hear the trains far across the plain to the southwest.

I passed the State Land boundary and ascended onto the Coal Mine Spring Trail, which rises onto the plain, dominated by ocotillo and mesquite. You can see the Santa Ritas and the white-dot observatory on top of Mount Hopkins far to the northeast. After crossing the plain, I turned south onto the Vista Trail and walked southwest along a fence for about a mile or so, then the trail drops back down into the riparian area where I picked up the Sonoita Creek Trail again and retraced my route back to the trailhead/parking lot.

It’s an easy loop-tour of the Natural Area’s major biomes, and it would be perfect for organized families with children 10 or older. A picnic lunch down by where the creek flows, on the sandy banks with plenty of round smooth rocks for skipping, seems like an ideal way to while away a temperate Southwestern winter Saturday.

Getting There:

Take I-19 South, exit at Grand Avenue, then catch Highway 82 to Patagonia. Ten miles on look for the entrance to Patagonia Lake State Park on the left. Drive four miles to the lake entrance and fee station. It costs $7 to get into the park. Once in, follow the signs to the office and visitor center, where a park employee will issue you a permit. Then drive back to the entrance and follow signs to the Sonoita Creek State Natural Area’s parking lot and trailheads. Make sure you pick up a map at the visitor center.

For more information about the Sonoita Creek State Natural Area call 520-287-2791

Originally published in the Sahuarita Sun

La Posada Hotel in Winslow brings back the golden age of Southwest travel

The railroad is mostly for huge metal crates anymore, and Route 66 across Northeastern Arizona is strewn with abandoned motorcourts and kitsch approximations of the Mother Road’s golden age.  Interstate 40’s nonstop mania does little to convince us that this region was once a deliberate stop for discerning tourists.

But then we arrived in Winslow, heretofore known to us for its brief appearance in an Eagle’s hit from the 1970s (a fact the town still celebrates, in lieu of much else), and pulled into the parking lot of the La Posada Hotel, the capstone to Mary Colter’s career as the preeminent architect and designer of the American Southwest.

Now owned by Winslow Mayor Allen Affeldt and his wife, the brilliant painter Tina Mion (whose strange, wondrous paintings fill the arched hallways of the hotel), the La Posada has been beautifully restored and is now a reminder of the days when traveling to Indian Country was a chic journey to the American outback taken by the rich and famous and anybody else who could afford it.

This was largely the result of the genius of Fred Harvey, the so-called “civilizer of the West.”  He and his “Harvey Girls” made a trip to the barren, undeveloped High Desert an experience quite beyond merely comfortable, offering fine dining and fresh, gourmet food prepared by European chefs on Sante Fe dining cars.  Later, using Colter’s talents, Harvey built some of the nation’s finest hotels in some of the nation’s most out-of-the-way small towns, so that passengers on the popular Los Angeles to Chicago line would be able to live well even when stopping in Needles, Calif. 

The crowning achievement of this partnership came in 1930 with the construction of the La Posada, The Resting Place, at Winslow, the headquarters of the Sante Fe Railroad and the gateway to Indian Country.  Howard Hughes, Sinatra, Einstein, Bob Hope and the Crown Prince of Japan all stayed in Colter’s masterpiece, along with many other luminaries of American and world culture, hopping off the train right outside the hotel and then taking automobile “detours” to the Hopi Mesas and Navajoland, and then returning to the comfort of the Spanish Hacienda-inspired hotel and supreme comfort in a land that knew little of that gift.

Eventually train travel fell off, and Route 66 gave way to the Interstate, and not long after that everything was the same, and the Interstate Territory became the province of chain hotels and those restroom machines that blow hot air on your hands.  The La Posada closed in the 1950s, and sat disused until a few years ago when Affeldt and Mion saved it. 

It was refreshing to get out of that chain-world and stay at a hotel for its own sake, not just because we needed a place to crash until we got driving again.  I was assigned the room named for Isabella Greenway, a hotelier herself and the first female representative to Congress from Arizona; my sister and mother, with my sister’s baby and toddler, occupied the room next door named for the great Lionel Barrymore, also a past guest. 

At first I was worried that a three-year-old boy wouldn’t be exactly welcome in such a well-appointed atmosphere, but, as the hotel’s brochure says “well-behaved children and pets are welcome;”  they had to make a slight exception to their policy for my nephew.  The little fan of Thomas the Train Engine had to be coaxed away from the sitting area set up just outside the hotel’s sprawling back garden, right beside the right of way.   Trains still pass often, and the engineer will wave back and blow his whistle if you wave to him first. 

The independently operated Turquoise Room just off La Posada’s main lobby serves “Fred Harvey inspired” meals like prime rib and steak, and a wild blend of gourmet dishes under the heading “Native American-inspired nouvelle cuisine.”  Interesting, creative, and delicious is what that means, I think.  I had the prime rib and chocolate soufflé with orange liquor and went to bed wishing I was traveling the territory on the old Sante Fe Chief instead of in my compact car.  A wanderer could get used to this kind of life.

The Details:

For all its beauty and Fred Harvey-like attention to detail, the La Posada is actually quite affordable.  Reservations are a must, and expect to spend as much at the Turquoise Room for dinner as you do on your room.   The La Posada is at 303 E. 2nd Street, Route 66, Winslow, Ariz.  Call 928-289-4366 for reservations, or check out www.laposada.org.

Originally published in the Sahuarita Sun

Above 6,000 feet or so the land is heavy with wet snow, melting and seeping and getting ready to run down to the basins and inspire wildflowers in a few months.

The state's few major dailies are full of news about would-be snow revelers being turned away from Snow Bowl in Flagstaff, which opened a few days ago after a series of winter storms hit the state around Christmas.  The parking lots around the sacred mountains that loom over Flag were full early in the day, much to the disappointment of thousands of snow-seekers who made the trip up from Phoenix and elsewhere.  One news story said that rangers were turning people away from wildcat sled runs in the Coconino National Forest (public land, mind you--as is the majority of the land in Arizona).  The rangers reportedly said there were "liability" issues involved, and directed people to a sanctioned snow-play area at the base of the San Francisco Peaks which, alas, was full to capacity by early in the day as well.  

Down here in Southern Arizona, we've had a week or so of intermittent rain storms that have kept things cool and gloomy on the desert since a few days before Christmas.  Rain in the basin usually means snow on the range, and so it was that a foot or more of the white stuff fell on the Santa Catalina Mountains above Tucson, causing the nation's southernmost ski run, Ski Valley on Mount Lemmon, to actually open to skiers and snowboarders.  

An Arizona Roamer correspondent made the trip up the Sky Island Highway to Mount Lemmon on Sunday, a warm winter day in the desert with a cloudless blue sky.  Everybody else in the Old Pueblo had the same idea, apparently.  Our correspondent reported that it took two long hours to make the bumper-to-bumper drive down the mountain, a drive that usually takes less than an hour.  There were thousands of Tucsonans and even Nogalians and probably even Sonorans up there on the mountain--"the most people that have ever been on Mt. Lemmon at one time," our correspondent guessed.

In the state's midlands, the mountains around Prescott are covered with snow, but Prescott itself is only soggy and slushed from the sun now.  When we were growing up there in the pinelands around Prescott, a few times every winter we would load up our sleighs and rise on skinny, icy roads up to Groom Creek or some other higher point in the Prescott National Forest; and we sled where we wanted to sled, and there was nobody around talking about the liability.  

Take a short, scenic drive north of Benson to the ranching country and you’ll find an unexpected destination for bibliophiles, or anyone interested in how a bookstore can thrive for more than 30 years in a relatively secluded ranch house.

Winifred Bundy opened the bookstore 33 years ago in a ranch house she has lived in for 52 years. She’s likely to come out and show you around in her stocking feet. Make sure to get the tour, as the stock (mostly new books, with an emphasis on Southwestern and Western themes) is organized according to a slightly individualistic code, and Winifred is a great source for recommendations.

She learned about the Southwest from the great Lawrence Clark Powell, one the West’s finest authors and a famous librarian (in circles in which a librarian can be famous). Bundy now publishes several one-of-kind editions of his work and sells tapes of conversations with Powell accompanied by music from Tucson band Calexico.

The best-written history of this territory has got be Powell’s short “Arizona: A History”, published on the bicentennial and reissued by the University of New Mexico Press in 1990. I highly recommend buying the slim “Southwest”, a special edition of three evocative and learned essays about the desert by Powell published by Singing Wind.

In 1997 Powell had this to say about Bundy and her shop (he was interviewed in the Tucson Weekly):

“Winifred Bundy. . . was a student of mine. When she finished school she wanted to start a bookstore. I said, ‘Where are you going to put it in town?’; and she said, ‘I'm not going to have it in town, I'll have it out at the ranch.’ I said, ‘You're crazy’; and she said, ‘I've always been.’ We got off to a flying start. She was a wonderful student--learned to write by writing. I don't believe in courses in writing. I don't believe in creative workshops. Winn was just a naturally bookish person. She started a shop, and it's lasted as one of the (few) surviving bookshops in our community. She was right. People come from all over the world now to find her.”

If you plan to buy any books—and it’s difficult, many find, to drive all the way out there and not purchase something, there’s simply too much great stuff that can’t be found elsewhere—take cash or a checkbook; Winifred said she “doesn’t mess with credit cards.” She encourages booklovers to bring lunch and have a picnic on the ranch, and don’t miss saying hello to the mule and beautiful white horse who share a pasture along the road leading to the shop. A well-stocked children’s reading room makes this a great family destination, especially when Winifred’s friendly dog comes out from the back room looking to play.

From Benson’s main drag, 4^th St., take Ocotillo Road north about three miles, then turn right on Singing Wind Road; if the gate is closed, open it. The bookstore is at 700 W. Singing Wind Road, 520/586-2425, and is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, including most holidays).

Originally published in the Sahuarita Sun