We took our Safford AZ wildflower excursion on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday morning, we stopped into our local bookstore – I needed something to read – and Dennis (O’Keefe of O’Keefe’s Bookshop) suggested that we go over NM Rt 78 rather than mindlessly following I10; he was at lengths to describe the views we would enjoy crossing the mountains there. So we headed up past Cliff, admiring our own snow-capped Mogollons and nearer-by, fields full of small yellow flowers – our wildflower immersion began earlier than we expected! Above Buckhorn, we turned our back on the Mogollons and headed west to Mule Creek, NM, and up into the Gila National Forest, which became the Apache National Forest as we crossed into Arizona. I was fascinated by the way the microhabitats changed so quickly and so completely: Drive through rolling grassland, hit Mule Creek and through two washes, round a bend and into ponderosa pine. Go up the side of the mountain through healthy pine forest, over a small ridge and instantly leave pines behind and enter piñon/juniper forest. Another curve and a bump and back into the pines. And finally, crest the mountain range, cross the state line and drop into prickly pear, ocotillo and scrub bushes. We stopped, breathless, at the overlook. Gazing into Arizona from that elevation, we could see across a valley to hills jeweled with gold coins and necklaces, and crowned by another snow-capped peak. The mountain on which we were perched dropped past cathedral spires of stone, with foundations of smoothed rock outcroppings. I reached for my camera to take some pictures and…Oh no…No memory card! I thought I’d remembered everything: dog food, dog bowl, water bottles, snacks and the little insulated lunch bag, binocs and bird book, battery charger for camera batteries, 2 pairs of shoes and 5 layers of clothes (not changes, layers). But I forgot to make sure the memory card was in the dang camera!
We wound our way down the side of the mountain, thrilling but not enough to panic my fear of heights, and into the valley. And here, they began. Blankets of flowers. Mexican gold poppies, desert marigolds, desert chicory, globe mallow and a half-dozen other flowers whose names I don’t yet know. The hillsides looked as though Monet had wandered the landscape with a leaky paint bucket and a runny brush. The gold ran in streaks down some hills and puddled in the crevices. In places, Monet had brushed gold across a slope and the poppy-paint sagged downhill in ripples. And his paint pot leaked drips, drops and splashes of color. Monet loved to paint the light—on these hills and fields, he infused rainbow colors with glowing sunlight. Some fields and hills and crevices were dense with gold while some were lightly brushed. He hazed fields of poppies with purple penstemmons and dotted them with white. In some areas, tall spikes of red-purple, red or orange stood over the shorter, massed poppies, asters and marigolds.
All this and no camera….
We drove on into Safford, located our hotel and checked in, then went to find the WalMart. Conveniently, we had not gotten around to getting N his Christmas present—a small digital camera. So we shopped, successfully, for his and found an inexpensive memory card for mine. Now, we were both ready.
On Sunday, we were back in Monet’s footsteps. We drove the triangle of Safford to Duncan, crossing the Gila River, and back to Three-Way. We detoured to the area where we had found such a profusion of flowers on Saturday afternoon, now that we had cameras. Continued up to Clifton to a little café called PJs, then back down and east to NM again. Climbing the mountain range which we had descended the day before afforded a different view of the mountains, the hills and their flowers. We stopped again at the top, but the day was hazier. The jeweled hills that stood out on Saturday were now fuzzed into blandness and the snow capped mountain forming the western boundary of the valley disappeared into the haze. So glad we had gone that way the day before. I still took a number of shots, but on inspection, the light was so bright that the images were washed out. Next time. Driving back Rt 78, we crossed the line into NM and from the Apache to the Gila National Forest, and dropped down into view of the Mogollons again and ran for home alongside the Gila River.
General notes from the weekend:
1. Sightseers can be foolish wherever they are. I watched a man driving erratically down a long grade sided by a steep downhill slope protected by a flimsy guard rail. When he got close enough, I could see he had a video camera aimed at the golden hillside. He came too near hurtling right over the rail, down the slope and into that same hillside, a lousy ending for his home movie.
2. Dogs are not always conducive to peaceful poppy-peeping. Nutmeg got bored sitting by her back window and tried – several times – to climb up into my lap. Guess who was driving? I was more than a little worried about hurtling down a slope myself, especially on one of those 15mph switchbacks on the mountain side. And if she wasn’t trying to climb in the front with us, she was barking at the unseen, unheard and very possibly un-embodied. I’m going to WalMart before our next trip to locate a doggy seat belt. At least that will keep me on the road, even if deafened.
3. We crossed the Gila River several times in two states. The river has its headwaters in the mountains of the Gila National Forest; I’m not sure of the name of the range at its source. It flows free through New Mexico, heading north through its valley and curls around between one range and the next to come south again on the Arizona side. If you trace the river across the map, it turns north again to Phoenix, and then angles down to a juncture in Yuma with the formerly-great Colorado. Once our free-flowing Gila runs into Arizona, it is dammed and siphoned and channeled into a formerly-great condition as well. At the point where the Colorado and the Gila join, neither is much more than a muddy trickle. But that’s a blog for another time.
4. Did you know: Arizona does not follow the change to daylight savings time. So in the winter months, NM and AZ are on the same clock. However, 2/3 of the year, when you cross the state line, you lose (or gain, heading east) an hour. Like the state lines themselves, time is arbitrary and convenient, having little bearing in the short view on reality.
5. And finally, what was I reading? Thanks to Dennis’ recommendation, I picked up an account of Geronimo, called Meet Me on the Mountain. Fascinating; told from the perspective of Apache oral history. There is always another story and another view – and another truth.
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