Hiking through history in search of an unmarked peak in the rugged mountains of Southern Arizona.
I get a text from my friend, Lisa. She writes, “There’s a neat looking route in this old guidebook. Want to see if we can follow it?”
“Sounds fun,” I text back.
Lisa tells me the book is the Hiking Guide to the Santa Rita Mountains by Bob and Dotty Martin. Our destination, Peak 6,820, overlooks a canyon called Temporal Gulch.[1] I wonder if the Martins’ guide can direct us there in 2018, over 30 years since they published their book.[2] Has fire consumed the foliage? Have people redirected the trail?
Of course, I agree to go.
The name, Temporal Gulch, intrigues me. I wrote my dissertation on Puritan sermons and recall how colonial New England ministers used “temporal” as an antonym to “eternal,” exhorting the faithful to look beyond the temporal world to eternal life. My Puritan associations imbue Temporal Gulch with a symbolic aura, a place in and of this physical world.
I mention this Puritanical connotation for “temporal” to Lisa. In her quizzical fashion, she asks, “Then why do they call part of your brain the temporal lobe?” I Google it, learn that temporal refers to the lobes’ proximity to the temples.
Obviously neither Puritans nor neurophysiologists designated the canyon in the Santa Ritas as Temporal Gulch, but, even after hours of research, I never learn the name’s origin. In Spanish, un temporal is a storm. Perhaps a flash flood in the canyon made an impression on someone. Or maybe the true name origin was temporal and now forgotten.
Puritans considered time as a cycle; I, their descendent, conceptualize time as a line. Though our ways of describing time vary, time remains a means of sensing the world, a perception of changes in our environments and within ourselves. I find myself wondering about various spans and spaces, trying to contrast human and geologic history. For a human, observing time means noting changes from one moment to the next and from one generation to the following. We can only sense time in perceptible increments and no one innately feels transitions from one epoch to another. Scientists must read those changes from stories left in sediment.[3]
On the morning of our first attempt to find “Bob and Dotty Peak,” Lisa and I park with the birdwatchers at Madera Canyon and ascend on the Old Baldy trail. We trek over pine roots all morning, gaining altitude, chatting about books and friends. My perception of time emerges from a concert of my senses while footfalls become increments. Wind rises and tapers as we ascend, as do the competing smells of pine and oak. Variations in heat, the angles of shadows, the dryness in my mouth, and the emptiness of my stomach—thus my body measures time.
At one point, we talk about loved ones sick or recently passed. Viewed through the dead and living branches on the mountainside, the green veins of waterways ripple from the foothills into the desert.
In their author photos, gray-haired Bob and Dotty sit on a mountaintop in horn-rimmed glasses and plaid shirts. Imagining them scrambling up a canyonside through manzanita brings me great pleasure, and so I want to know more about them.
According to the Hiking Guide, Bob was born in 1920. A search reveals that he passed away in 2008. The County Highpointers Association has memorialized him, recounting his Navy service during World War II, his Master’s in Statistics, and work in the oil industry.[4] Bob met Dotty when they both played flute in the Purdue University orchestra. The pair added three children to their family and their marriage persisted for 65 years.
I also search for Dotty. Even with her maiden name and birth year, I don’t find any mention of her other than in Bob’s obituary. I turn to genealogical records expecting to learn that Dotty passed away, but instead find that Dotty is still alive and over 100 years old.[5]
Lisa and I were children when the Martins wrote the Hiking Guide, starting our lives while Bob and Dotty were winding down, a temporal gulf between us.
Human generations represent recent, fleeting moments in the mountains’ history, but, to our perception, much changes from one generation to the next.
We eat lunch, squatting on logs at a windy gap called Josephine Saddle.[6] Several trails coalesce here. We can see north and south, cradled between peaks. Scrub jays await our crumbs as we look over Bob and Dotty’s directions.
I glance at a sign that commemorates three Boy Scouts who perished in the 1950s while ascending Mt. Wrightson.[7]
“What parents would let kids do that?” I ask Lisa.
“Hmm,” she considers, then notes, “They were around my students’ ages.”
I assume that the Scouts’ parents loved them as much as parents love their children today even if their generation accepted dangers parenthood no longer permits.
Chewing my energy bar, it dawns on me how the temporality of childhood defines a generation. Parents contrast what their children experience with what they experienced as children and update their approaches to parenthood accordingly. Thus, the canyons between generations widen in some places, narrow in others.
Countless travelers have paused at Josephine Saddle before venturing further into the backcountry. Human generations represent recent, fleeting moments in the mountains’ history, but, to our perception, much changes from one generation to the next. I recall that the Tohono O’odham name for the Santa Ritas is Ce:wi Duag and that Mt. Wrightson and Mt. Hopkins bear the names of settlers killed here by Apache men. Abandoned mines appear as Xs on Bob and Dotty’s maps, and, of course, the memorial sign reminds me of the ill-fated Scouts.[8]
Today, my friend closes a book written by people a generation ago, returns it to her pack. We stretch, heels on logs and heads bent kneeward, then extend our arms above our heads to loosen our backs. Maybe Bob and Dotty rested here and performed the same actions. We shoulder our loads for more walking.
Heading down the Temporal Trail, we pass McBeth Spring, a landmark near where the Scouts were found. It is a cement box holding some water. Oaks and evergreens grip the slopes above and below us. Beyond their framing, the Santa Ritas’ foothills flatten into Patagonia’s plains.
After a few miles, the trail evens out onto a canyon floor, confirming the Hiking Guide’s description: “After the level stretch, the trail descends into the head of Temporal Gulch.” Cottonwoods and sycamores gather over a flowing stream. Water gurgles around rocks, swirling in foamy jetties. The dry air moistens, intensifying the smell of wet leaves, the body odor of a living canyon. We’ve entered Temporal Gulch.
The Hiking Guide instructs us to “descend the trail in Temporal Gulch past Wildcat Mine, which has a large tailings pile on the right.” Once we identify that tailing pile, we should walk a quarter mile and then “leave the trail on the right and pick a way south through the timber to the ridge crest.”
Looking for mining detritus reminds me of the current Rosemont Mine slated to destroy most of the southeastern portion of the Santa Rita range. With the butterflies and squirrels escorting us down the trail, it’s hard to imagine so many millennia of life being wiped out so quickly. It violates how I understand mountains in time. Lisa is talking about her students, but remembering the impending mine raises my heart rate, conjures helplessness and fury. I breathe deeply through my nose, return my awareness to listening to my friend.[9]
Lisa and I abjure GPS and rely only on Bob and Dotty, as that’s the nature of our experiment. We wander for longer than a quarter mile.
“I didn’t see a tailings pile,” I tell Lisa.
“Me either,” she agrees. “I was really looking, too.”
Time has obscured the landmark. Hanging our heads over the Martins’ map, we conclude that we’ve traveled too far.
A jet roars overhead and the breeze carries memories of juniper and scrub oak.
“It looks like we could reach the peak by doing Bob and Dotty’s route in reverse,” I observe. “Their ridge walk was about a mile and we’ve gone almost that far beyond where Wildcat Mine should have been.”
“I think that’s the peak,” Lisa points to a wooded prominence high to our right.
“I do, too,” I say. “May as well give it a shot.”
I spot a sweatshirt and backpack tossed over a juniper bush. It’s not an REI-style backpack; it’s a school bookbag. We soon pass shoes, socks, and jackets hung like deconstructed scarecrows in the shrubbery. A children’s book with a pink cover and a title in Spanish lays among the leaves.[10]
Temporal Gulch would be a stealthy path for migrants avoiding paved roads, but often they aren’t equipped for backcountry travel. Many migrants pack for moving homes, bringing gifts to their children here in the United States. It makes sense they would dispose of weight at this point in their journey. They’d be exhausted.
Seeing people’s everyday items strewn about the foliage unnerves me, sabotaging our effort to find the peak.
Sometimes, I feel my hope for the wilderness depleting like the desert water table, so I’m grateful for friends like Lisa who can’t accept defeat.
Despite a few attempts, we can’t choose a route to the ridgeline. Trees grow close to the trail and the canyon walls rise steeply. We struggle to get an eye on Peak 6,820. Eventually, I follow Lisa back toward the elusive tailing pile. The sun passes beyond the midpoint in the sky and we have eight or nine miles back to the parking lot, so when we don’t find the pile, we keep walking out while there’s daylight. Time limits our exploration.
The parking lot is eerily empty when we reach the car several hours later. Normally, other hikers and picnickers would be enjoying the afternoon, but not one person or car remains.
On our way out, we encounter a signed barricade explaining our solitude. The mountains aren’t closed because of inclement weather or a marauding bear, but because of a government shutdown. Thousands of miles away, politicians can’t agree on a budget and somehow that’s supposed to “close” the mountains.[11]
Sometimes, I feel my hope for the wilderness depleting like the desert water table, so I’m grateful for friends like Lisa who can’t accept defeat. A few weekends after our first trip, we return to Temporal Gulch, this time armed with modern topo maps and GPS.
As we ramble down the canyon, Lisa notices a large mound with tall pines and oaks sprouting all over. Nothing about the groundcover indicates that the mound would be a tailing pile, but the anomalous shape catches Lisa’s attention.
“That’s got to be it,” she insists. The topo maps show this would be a logical spot relative to the Wildcat Mine. With the heels of our boots, we dig into the topsoil and, sure enough, a foot below the surface, jagged rocks indicate that the deposit is unnatural. This is the tailing pile.
Our experiment with the Hiking Guide reveals that the landscape has changed significantly since Bob and Dotty’s time. In 30 years, forest growth covered the main navigational landmark. The trees protruding from the tailings pile are no saplings. They reach into the canopy with all the others around them.
Once we discover the pile, we hike to the ridge. When we reach the top, we fight through thick undergrowth, our route rising and falling as the ridgeline slithers southward. We pass fire rings, some new, some old, all littered with Spanish-label canned goods.
After a mile of wounds and scrapes, we emerge onto a rocky high point ringed with red-barked manzanita. We’ve made it to Bob and Dotty Peak. We settle onto boulders with panoramic views of the southern Santa Ritas, green trees fading to craggy mountaintop. We relax and enjoy our trail mix.
Lisa and I are still younger than Bob and Dotty had been when they recorded the route to this spot. We’ve followed more than just their path through the mountains. We’ve followed their path through time.
A silhouette passes against the sky. Its huge pterodactyl shadow darkens us for a blink’s breadth.
“The wings aren’t straight like a vulture,” Lisa shades her eyes with her palm. “Or like a hawk.”
Indeed, the wings form an inverted W.
“It’s got to be a golden eagle,” I deduce.
The eagle soars by us, its eyes scanning across the time and space of Temporal Gulch. Our eyes track the bird along the far ridge until it slips beyond view. I exist only in that moment, a peak on a ridgeline between the past and the future. The history of Temporal Gulch condenses to me, my friend, and an eagle surrounded by mountains, trees, sky, and horizon. After a few minutes, we pack up, follow Bob and Dotty’s route back to the trail, and continue our walk into the future.
End Notes
[1] Martin, Bob and Dotty. Hiking Guide to the Santa Rita Mountains. Pruett Publishing. 1986.
The book will be referred to as “the hiking guide” throughout this essay.
[2] The Martins provide this data about the hike:
Peak 6,820 via Temporal Gulch
General description: A long approach hike on a good trail, followed by a strenuous climb and bushwhack to a remote summit.
Hiking distance: 14 miles
Starting elevation: 5,420 feet
High point: 7,100 feet
Elevation gain: 4,000 feet
[3] The Santa Ritas formed in two main phases, the Piman and the Helvetian. Faults folded plates of rocks and igneous intrusions forced magma through the surface. Both phases lasted millions of years during the Laramide Orogeny, the period from 90 to 53 million years ago that also gave rise to the Rocky Mountains. The mountains as a landscape feature are much younger than the sediment that comprise them, some of which dates to the Precambrian Period, 538.8 million years ago. (Drewes, Harald. Structural Geology of the Santa Rita Mountains, Southeast of Tucson, Arizona.)
[4] The obituary states that Bob climbed “Colorado’s highest peaks, then the ones over 13,000 feet, then the ones over 12,000 feet, until he had climbed the 1500 highest ones. He also climbed peaks in other states, especially Arizona, and pursued county high points across the U.S. He wrote five hiking books, a couple of them co-authored with Dotty.” (“In Memory of the Unstoppable Bob Martin.” County Highpointers Association. 2008. cohp.org.)
[5] I used ancestry.com and public records. Apologies if Dotty has passed.
[6] A 19th-century surveyor named Josephine Saddle and a nearby peak after Josephine Pennington, a wealthy settler’s daughter who only lived in the area briefly. It’s not known why the surveyor named these places after Josephine, but, of course, it’s speculated that he was enamored with her.
[7] The leader of the trip, Eagle Scout Mike Early, planned the hike up Wrightson to celebrate his 16th birthday. It was November 15, 1958. Lou Burgess was also 16, but Michael Le Noue was 13, Ralph Coltrin, Jr. and David Greenburg were 12, and Ronny Sepulveda was only 11. Like Mike, David was celebrating his birthday that weekend.
One might propose that kids were more mature in the 1950s, but there’s no evidence for that in this story. The expedition left camp at 1:15 p.m., far too late for an 11-year-old to hike six miles one way and gain over 4,200 feet of elevation. Young Ronny developed blisters by Josephine Saddle and so Ralph was assigned to wait with him while the others continued on. By 4:45, the weather turned stormy and the four remaining boys still faced a long, steep climb to the top. Lou tried to convince the other three to turn back, but they wouldn’t listen, so he descended to Ronny and Ralph alone.
After waiting for hours, Lou, Ronny, and Ralph trudged back to camp and endured a horrific night huddled under a picnic table when their tents collapsed in a heavy snowstorm. Mike, Michael, and David never returned.
Over the following weeks, 750 searchers combed the Santa Ritas until volunteers from Fort Huachuca found the boys’ bodies downslope from the Temporal Gulch Trail when the snow melted. Michael’s father, Bruce Le Noue, camped out at Josephine Saddle for all 18 freezing days of the effort.
[8] The Tohono O’odham name for the Santa Ritas is Ce:wi Duag, or “Long Mountain.” An information pamphlet compiled by the Arizona Trail Association, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Coronado National Forest explains that “the Tohono O’odham are the ancestral stewards of this land. Ce:wi Duag is vital to ceremonies, stories, and songs, and is home to ancestral villages, sacred sites, and critical natural resources. The land you are visiting is a foundational component of Tohono O’odham culture and himdag, a word that means ‘way of life.’”
Without regard for Ce:wi Duag, the Spanish renamed the range after the Italian saint, Rita. From a distance, a swath of white sediment cuts across the mountains and it allegedly reminded the Spanish of the scar on Saint Rita’s face.
In the 1600s, Jesuit missionaries colonized the Tohono O’odham’s land and forced them to transport logs from the Santa Ritas to build the Tumacacori Mission near present day Tubac, many miles away. An O’odham uprising against the Jesuits in 1751 failed to expel the Spanish intruders from the land.
Apache people weren’t any more successful at driving out Americans than the Tohono O’odham had been at expelling the priests. During the Battle of Fort Buchanan in 1865, warriors shot settlers William Wrightson and Gilbert W. Hopkins in the mountains the Apache call Dził enzho, or “Beautiful Mountains.” The Apache men may have killed the settlers, but the two highest peaks in the Santa Ritas are now named Mt. Wrightson and Mt. Hopkins, imposing those particular colonists on the mountains long after their generation passed.
Today, birdwatchers flock to the Santa Ritas like salmon fishers to an Alaskan stream. They line the roadsides equipped with spotting scopes, prying the forest for the elegant trogon.
[9] Despite rich ecological diversity, proximity to large populations, and use by local people, international mining conglomerates have been trying to force an open pit mine into the Santa Ritas for decades. They offer the usual “jobs and taxes” nonsense that only politicians and investors accept as payment for our collective risks and losses. They also promise to perform acts of attrition to compensate for gutting the mountains and contaminating a fragile water table, promises that have proven to be lies with every other mine they dig. The current liars drooling over Santa Rita copper are Canadian mining corporation, Hudbay Minerals.
People have been mining the Santa Ritas long before Hudbay came along. The 1880 census recorded the “inhabitants in Temporal Gulch, Santa Rita Mts., in the County of Pima, Territory of Arizona” and noted six men living in the canyon. The census records these men as Amos Johnson (50), Theodore E. Williams (52), Marshall B. Barnhart (34), John Moore (22), William H. Smith (50), and John Brosee (50). Two of the men came from New York, one from Ohio, and one from Missouri. Brosee listed Prussia as his place of birth and Williams was from Saxony. With dynamite, pickaxes, and donkeys, these men traced veins of ore through shafts such as the Wildcat Mine in Temporal Gulch.
What Hudbay proposes to create an is open pit mine east of Temporal Gulch. Unlike a 19th-century mineshaft, open pit mines remove all the rock and other material to create a gaping chasm in the earth. The desired metals and minerals are leached from the extracted rock in huge artificial ponds filled with toxic chemicals. Removing entire mountainsides violates human expectations for mountains, which are supposed to be permanent, at least relative to our lifespans. The destruction feels unnatural and deeply wrong.
The Rosemont Mine threatens many endangered species including fish in Cienega Creek, the Mexican garter snake, yellow-billed cuckoo, and even jaguars and ocelots. Aside from the endangered animals, countless other creatures will lose their homes and lives. The devastation to plant life will be equally tragic.
The City of Tucson and Pima County oppose the mine, largely because of how moronic it is to contaminate our fragile desert water supply. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are drying up, yet federal and state governments think it’s reasonable to give our limited water away to a foreign-owned mining company. It’s a glaring example of how international monetary interests overrule local communities. (Abbot, David, “Rosemont Mine Project in southern Arizona faces pushback over water storage, “AZ Mirror. Feb. 17, 2022.)
The Center for Biological Diversity explains that the mine “was proposed to be sited in the Rosemont valley, planned to be a mile wide, a mile-and-a-half long and more than 3,000 feet deep. Billions of tons of toxic waste excavated from the pit would be piled 600 to 800 feet high on thousands of acres of public lands surrounding the privately owned copper deposit, fouling the air and water and permanently damaging and destroying thousands of acres of habitat that supports a rich diversity of wildlife.” (“Stopping the Rosemont Copper Mine, Center for Biological Diversity.” biologicaldiversity.org)
In 2009, the Tohono O’odham Nation passed a resolution titled “Opposing the Proposed Rosemont Copper Project.” The resolution states that “the proposed location of the Rosemont Copper Project is on the Nation’s ancestral lands and would significantly impact, destroy, or alter cultural and archeological sites containing numerous Archaic, Hohokam, and O’odham funerary objects, sacred objects, and other archeological and cultural items, as well as permanently alter the Cultural and Natural Landscapes of the area.” (“Resolution of the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council (Opposing the Proposed Rosemont Copper Project).” 2009. scenicsantaritas.org)
Ignoring opposition from local people and governments, as well as court rulings in favor of environmental groups like Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, Hudbay’s bulldozers are currently grading land. They are clogging local waterways with debris and annihilating indigenous history. Nothing can overcome their greed and implicit threat of violence toward those who would impede the devastation.
[10] The Humane Borders website includes a map that uses GIS data to identify each location where a body has been discovered. The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office provides much of the information. Humane Borders states that, “since 2001, over 3,000 undocumented migrants have died within the Pima County OME jurisdiction.” Using their map, I discover that in April 2010, Bernaldino Perez Salas, who was 32 at the time, died near Temporal Gulch. His cause of death was recorded as “Heart Disease.” West of Temporal Gulch, not far from Mt. Wrightson, 23-year-old Silberio Rosales Hernandez succumbed to “exposure to the elements” in 2021. Many other red dots mark the southern Santa Ritas, including unidentified skeletal remains of a woman found near the Patagonia roadside rest stop in November 2021.
[11] With so little effective climate leadership, I find myself questioning what will be left of the Santa Rita Mountains for future generations. In 2017, the Sawmill Fire burned 46,991 acres and the rate of such wildfires increases every year. Rivers, lakes, forests, glaciers, shorelines, and mountains—all the landscapes that are supposed to appear permanent to human time-sense—are drying, flooding, burning, melting. They are changing at an observable pace. And, then, of course, there is the Rosemont Mine…
