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

Canceling Christmas

At my house, Christmas has been cancelled.

That's not to say that I won't be giving gifts or listening to pop songs with a holiday bent or drinking store-bought eggnog with cheap brandy by the bucketful. Admittedly, I don't have the financial resources this year to show more than the required bare-minimum, nuclear-family generosity, but I suspect I'm not alone in this. My beef with the holiday goes deeper. It's about being weary to distraction of the drive.

Perhaps the only thing we Arizonans know how to build is the overwrought single-family home. Everything else—roads and such—must take care of themselves, preferably by way of a generation or two of fanatical tax cuts and misguided government spending. By this I mean that it is impossible to travel, these days, by car from the south of the state to its central pinelands in less than four or five hours, and that's if you're lucky. One brief fender-bender anywhere on I-10 or I-17 means you're stuck in place, your foot slipping sleepily from the clutch to the break to the gas as you inch forward through the disappearing desert, passing stucco and red-tile-roofs and big boxes at a snail's pace.

It's not that they didn't warn us that this would happen. When I was a kid growing up in Prescott in the 1980s, they were always talking about the coming megalopolis—that urban mass of homes and strip malls that would inevitably close-in around us from Prescott to the border. As a kind of consolation for the blithe, and presumably unstoppable, destruction of a fragile landscape that exists nowhere else in the world, they said we'd surely get mass transit to take the pressure off, even a bullet train from Tucson to Phoenix and beyond. I'm not proud of this, but I always felt confident that by the far off date of 2000-something, surely this fantasy train would be a reality. But then I also thought I just had a high forehead, and that my hairline would eventually cease its heedless receding.

After returning home last week from a typically surreal and frustrating drive to Sun City to visit my girlfriend's parents, I declared a no-drive policy to be in effect at least until the new year. I don't like the person I become on the road. I would much rather sit back on a train, read a book, sip some coffee, and relax. Instead, I am forced to enter a slipstream battle of will and horsepower that can only end in frustration, boredom, or death.

That means we won't be seeing my nieces and nephews this year, and everybody knows that Christmas without kids is just a day off. At least I can start drinking early.

So I was thinking about all this when I attended last week a forum at the Tucson Convention Center called "Crafting Tomorrow's Built Environment: A Community Conversation on Regional Land Use." The mayors of all the region's towns were there, including Sahuarita's Lynne Skelton, as were the Pima County Supervisors, Tucson City Council members, and everybody else who has a say in land use policy in Southern Arizona—there were even a few big-wigs from Phoenix who showed up.

The room was a sea of dark suits, red ties, sweater vests, power-skirts, and high heels. The air smelled like PowerPoint and bad coffee. While the officials spoke, everybody fiddled with their Blackberries.

Grady Gammage, Jr., son of the famous ASU president whose name graces one of Frank Lloyd Wright's more cupcake-like structures and a fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, gave a brief presentation about the so-called "Sun Corridor."

This, as you may have heard over the last year or so, is a re-branding of that old inevitable megalopolis, only now that it's called the "sun corridor" it's not so scary, I guess.

"Over the next 20 years," a handout on the corridor says, "Phoenix and Tucson will become one of the country's ten 'mega-regions,' home to more than 10 million people."

Gammage told the forum that the sun corridor will run from Chino Valley, outside Prescott, to Sierra Vista. He also made it clear that this is something that we can't avoid, so we'd better start planning for it now. My question is, why haven't we been doing so all this time? They've been talking about this supposedly coming reality for more than 30 years.

And what's the top priority for the "Sun Corridor"?

"An integrated, modern rail system in the Sun Corridor will mitigate traffic and congestion woes in the rapidly growing region. Furthermore, future development focused around commuter rail service would preserve more of the Sonoran Desert, reduce the area's contribution to global warming, and protect air quality."

It just sounds so wonderful, so progressive, so smart.

Forgive me if I'm skeptical. I've learned one or two things since the 80s.

The subsequent 10-minute speeches from the mayors and other dignitaries were less than helpful if one was looking for honest, deep talk about the future of this state. As an example of the extreme disconnection that exists between the people and their leaders here in Arizona, consider the results of a instant poll taken during the conference. When asked to vote on what single thing they thought was most important to the future of Tucson and Southern Arizona, the people said high-paying jobs. When Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup got up to speak, he said that there'd been a different consensus at the table where all the mayors were sitting. They all said water. Do they know something we don't?

Perhaps the most honest statements came from Andy Gunning, who works for the Pima Association of Governments.

In a presentation titled "The Shape of the Region Today," he admitted that something like one-third of the residents of the Tucson area have been here less than five years; that the low-paying service sector is the state's dominant economic model and will remain so for the foreseeable future; that there has been no real increase in average earnings in Arizona in the last 39 years (pretty much my entire lifetime); that we only have enough water in the Tucson basin until 2030, and that's only if the ongoing drought and climate change don't get us first; that after Pima County reaches 2 million residents, which should be accomplished some time in 2040 or thereabouts, we can't really sustain things beyond that; and that "we are going to see a lot of congestion in the future,"

He did end on a positive note though.  At least, he said, "we are catching up with decades of neglect."

Merry fricken Christmas.

On December 8 and 9, Petrified Forest National Park east of Flagstaff, on the high bunchgrass plains of northern Arizona, will celebrate its 102^nd birthday.  

This strange sweep of muted pastel dirt-humps, littered with swirling-color petrified wood, became a national monument 102 years ago on December 8, 1906, and was promoted to a national park on December 9, 1962.   The monument suffered from nearly too much love and interest when it was a natural and favorite stop for roadtrippers along Route 66.  The land was nearly picked clean of its signature remains, the ancient left-overs of the primordial swamps that once held sway in what some Arizonans call the “dinosaur belt” in the northeastern corner of the state.  When you visit the park today—a must on any itinerary—the warnings are strict and many about not taking any of the petrified wood, but you can buy it at dilapidated tourists traps on the park’s boundaries. 

According to the Park Service, a Holiday Open House is scheduled for December 8 and will include hot drinks, cookies, and “holiday cheer” at the Painted Desert Inn National Historic Landmark from 10 am to 4 pm.  The inn, which was redesigned by architect Mary Jane Colter in the late 1940s for the Fred Harvey Company, has several wall murals painted by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie that are definitely worth seeing.

Petrified Forest National park is awash with a kind of commercial nostalgia for the golden age of the Fred Harvey Company and high-style southwest tourism.  To really do it right, stay overnight at Winslow’s La Posada , a short drive west on Interstate 40 from the park.  Also designed by Colter for Fred Harvey, La Posada has in recent years been totally refurbished and is a romantic and enchanting place to be.