Cottonwood Tank is located on the west side of the Pusch Ridge Wilderness south of Catalina State Park. It appears that Arizona Game and Fish did maintenance work in 2017 and the tank is currently holding quite a bit of water.
Sadly, also apparently in 2017, a substantial amount of the tank is covered in graffiti.
Dead Horse Canyon – Frog Mountain Blues – p. 61:
Buster looks at the mountains and shifts to teaching the old geography, one that has slightly different notes from the modern hiking maps. The first gouge to the west he calls Alamo Canyon because there used to be a big cottonwood up there. Then comes Cement Tank because they put a trough in there. After that is Dead Horse for a dead horse found one day. Then Montrose on whose upper reaches Buster Spring bubbles away. And over the ridge from that is Romero for the old ranching family that came into the county in the nineteenth century. When Buster arrived in the 1920s they were still here, still ranching. And they became his neighbors.
Dead Horse Canyon is in the Santa Catalina Bighorn Sheep Management Area – lacking an official trail travel into this area is prohibited from January until May, but the summer heat means that it will be next winter before a pleasant visit is possible.
Bighorns have been documented in Dead Horse Canyon for many years – according to And Then There were None 8% of the Bighorn Observations made from 1936 to 1978 were in Dead Horse Canyon (p.88) and the photo shown below (of bighorn in Dead Horse Canyon) is described as “the largest number of sheep ever photographed as a group in the Santa Catalinas”. In 1972 bighorn permits were issued to 5 hunters, 2 kills were made – one at the head of Dead Horse Canyon (the last permits issued were in 1992).
Coronado National Forest Fee Proposal – Coronado National Forest: News articles about and the press release for the Fee (Increase) Proposal were from a post here in November – the link leads to the official page for the project and is a good starting spot if you are interested in submitting a comment about the proposal (comments due by May 1, 2018). I think that the list of ‘New Fee Sites’ is worth reading thru and considering – included from the Santa Catalina Mountains are the Bigelow Trailhead, Butterfly Trailhead and Windy Point Vista Day Use Area.
Improvements at Marshall Gulch Picnic Area and Trailhead – Coronado National Forest: If this topic, or the illustration below, seem familiar it is because the first comments on this plan were taken in 2010… The long running process to redesign the Marshall Gulch Trailhead appears to be in the final stages and on 10/27/2017 the Draft Environmental Assessment was published. If this plan goes forward it will not increase the number of parking spaces available but will attempt to restore the convergence of Marshall Gulch and Sabino Creek and make the area easier to navigate on busy days. An interesting note on visitation from the EA:
On average, the site receives over 65,000 cars each summer (May through September), which includes those just driving through and others who stop to use the facilities (Forest Service, unpublished data, 2010). Assuming that there are an average of 2.5 visitors per car, estimated use is 162,500 visitors. This does not include walkin use from Summerhaven and walk-in use during the winter when the gate is closed.
The Coronado National Forest is now taking applications to operate the Sabino Canyon Shuttle System. The Sabino Canyon Shuttle Prospectus page has the relevant documents – the documents contain quite a few details about the shuttle system including limits on and requirements for the number of trips the shuttle makes, required operating hours and details about the costs/revenue involved – among the details was this statement about visitation to Sabino Canyon:
Visitation by private vehicle totals approximately 520,000 people annually; it is estimated that the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area receives more than one million visitors per year (Feasibility Study, 2010). Actual visitation to the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area is difficult to quantify, as the public may visit at any time of day and may to arrive on foot, on horseback, or by bicycle, as well as by private vehicle.
Potential shuttle service operators tour Sabino Canyon – KVOA.com, Forest, Arizona Tour Company Says Feds Arbitrarily Disqualified Its Canyon Trams – Courthouse News Service.
Gates are closed on a number of roads for the winter – foot traffic is still allowed. Seasonal road closures on Mt. Lemmon – Coronado National Forest, Seasonal road closures on Mt. Lemmon – Tucson News Now
A bear – reported to be “very old, malnourished and ill” – was euthanized in northeast Tucson in December – ‘Malnourished and ill’ bear euthanized on northeast side – Tucson News Now, AZ Game and Fish report bear sightings in Bear Canyon, Tanque Verde Area – Tucson News Now, Bear Euthanized Near Sabino Canyon – Arizona Public Media, Bear spotted several times in foothills this week – KGUN9
Meet the Black Friday resisters – KGUN9: This article made me laugh a little – I assumed it would be about a serious protest but instead was about people getting outside and avoiding the Black Friday deal-shopping crowds! Of course, I highly recommend joining the movement…
The history behind the name of Arizona’s Mount Lemmon – The Arizona Republic: An article about Sara Lemmon and the name Mount Lemmon.
Sunburst Petroglyph Vandalized in the Tohono O’odham Haki:dag – Intercontinental Cry: In early 2016 a sunburst petroglyph in Catalina State Park was vandalized – this article details some of the efforts to preserve the petroglyph.
Popular Sabino Creek is bone-dry after months with no rain – Arizona Daily Star: Sabino Canyon is on a dry streak as we head into 2018, no surprise given the weather… The USGS makes data from Sabino Canyon available online and there is discharge data available back to late 1987. The graph below show data from 1988 to the end of 2017, this presentation is far from perfect – high spikes are cut off, some very low numbers are essentially hidden and this is just the raw data with no filtering for data quality – but it is still interesting to quickly scan thru:
Endangered Gila Topminnow Returns to Santa Cruz – Arizona Public Media: One explanation offered for the prescence of the Topminnow in the Santa Cruz is that “they may have reached the Santa Cruz from Sabino Canyon via the Rillito River”.
One way to celebrate the New Year: Take a hike – Arizona Daily Star: Again this year the Arizona State Parks promoted getting outside and taking a hike on New Years by offering guided hikes in parks around the state.
Suntran Sabino Canyon Sun Shuttle – Sun Tran: For the brief period of 12/26 to 1/1 there was shuttle service from Udall Park to Sabino Canyon – even with overflow parking available it can occasionally still be a challenge to find parking in Sabino Canyon and this service is a nice detail.
ASTEROID LATEST: NASA monitoring ‘unseen’ asteroid 2017 YZ4 set to skim Earth – Express.co.uk: An asteroid first observed from the Mount Lemmon Survey Observatory in the Santa Catalina Mountains!
Contador and Polartec-Kometa tackle Mt. Lemmon – Cyclingnews.com: A short article about the Polartec-Kometa Continental team and Alberto Contador riding up the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Weather! Even by Tucson standards this winter has been quite warm – we did get one winter storm that generated snow on the mountain…
Hikes and Events:
Rescues/Accidents/Incidents including information from SARCI’s SARNews:
In the modest distance between Redington Road and Buehman Canyon the SunZia transmission line project will add ten 135 foot tall steel lattice towers, two tension pads and 5 new access roads – only a fraction of the additions the project will make to the San Pedro River Valley. It appears that the only remaining barrier in Arizona to SunZia’s plan is a single lawsuit.
The San Pedro River Valley east of the Santa Catalina Mountains is far from pristine wilderness – farms, ranches, homes, utility lines, cattle, a gas pipeline and dirt roads cutting thru the desert… But that list obscures the truth that this area is something special, a part of Arizona that should be preserved as a welcome and important contrast to (and relief from) the dense development on the south and west side of the mountain. Giant steel towers looming over the valley and power lines imprisoning the sky don’t belong here.
I walk north and imagine the towers and lines – the subtle rolling hills won’t give them any place to hide, every time I look up I can see where they will create new shapes on skyline blocking the open sky – and every time I look down the variety of rocks and plants is amazing.
The terrain is steeper near Buehman Canyon and there is still fall color in the bottom of the canyon – beautiful to see this late in the season. The SunZia line will cross high above the canyon.
On a hillside east of the line the sunset comes into view – I wonder if this shot will be interrupted by towers and lines in the future…
Some SunZia reading material:
Thanksgiving – I am standing in the spot marked as Cargodera Spring – a tree hangs over the canyon, there are deer tracks in the sand and a hazy white stain reveals where a bird perched above the canyon floor – we have already worked up and down canyon from this spot, there are water stains everywhere, but nowhere surface water or signs of Cargodera Spring.
It is really no surprise that we don’t find the spring – topo maps are always best considered beautiful works of historical fiction, often correct, current, and recognizable enough that it is easy to forget that they are frozen in time while the details of the real world constantly change – any blue marking on a map of the Santa Catalina Mountains is suspicious at best…
We watch a single Coati work up canyon standing still until his tall tail disappears – after one last glance for the spring we hike back to the Sutherland Trail and enjoy the sunset on the way out.
