It is always a treat to start the Pontatoc Trail and see water flowing in the first wash – as you might expect farther up the Pontatoc Canyon Trail there was water at each crossing of Pontatoc Canyon. New-to-me on this hike was watching the moonrise over Pontatoc Ridge – I wonder if, or how many times, it has risen behind me on other hikes, but tired and staring down at the rocky trail in front of me I missed it…
With water flowing all over the range we hiked to Maiden Pools to see the water – rushing, as expected – but the sunset and night in the canyon were the highlights of the hike…
Moving away from the static of the rushing water in Sutherland Wash we can hear the slow, constant, distant, repeating gunshots – not close by, not a concern… not even inappropriate – but certainly an unwelcome intrusion as we try to carefully and respectfully contemplate the petroglyphs in the Sutherland Wash Rock Art District.
After visiting this area last year I spent some time reading about and looking for information – some of which is included in the post – this year my mind wanders to two books – John P. Wilson’s Islands in the Desert (an amazing history of the mountains of Southern Arizona) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (a fictional journey thru the borderlands of the mid 1800s based on the Glanton Gang). In both books the landscape is a stunningly beautiful – maybe even magical in Blood Meridian, but in both books there is also terrible and stunning violence – sacred and the profane, petroglyphs and gunfire…
January 2017 can’t quite rival January 2015 for weather in Pima Canyon – in 2015 snow fell low into Pima Canyon collecting on the tops of the Saguaros and making sections of the trail a snowy tunnel – but the weather this year has put a wonderful amount of water in motion and it was spectacular to see water covering and flowing down canyon from the first canyon crossing on the Pima Canyon Trail.
