I had only viewed the unmistakable rock tower of Baboquivari from the north and west, usually on a weekend lark down to Rocky Point or the Pinacate on Highway 86, but last labor day, I had the pleasure of approaching the 7,734 foot high peak from its eastern slope. I was the guest of Dr. Richard Conway, a retired geologist who now heads up the Friends of Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, and he promised to lead me up the trail into Brown Canyon, just below the most sacred place for the Tohono O’odham tribe: Baboquivari, the center of the O’odham universe.

I met Richard at 7:30 in the morning in the free-spirited little town of Arivaca, which has the feel of a Bisbee or Jerome without as much mining history or as many curio shops. The town has the laid-back feeling that author Tom Miller describes (referring to Bisbee) as a place with a lot of people with NVMS (no visible means of support); after all, this is a town at the end of a winding road that crosses many washes that become unbreachable after any major rain event--something guaranteed to  happen around 20 times a summer--so I think it is safe to say that the Blackberry addicted among us would not be attracted to living in such a remote place. As Richard explained, “to live here, you don’t want to keep a real tight schedule in the summer.” After parking in front of a store dedicated to tie-dye in all of its various forms, I jumped into Richard’s Toyota Tundra and we took off in the direction of Brown Canyon, which sidles right up to Baboquivari.  High grass land that deer and antelope frequent is the norm here, as opposed to the western side of the mountain range where the mighty saguaro cactus and other classic Sonoran desert flora dominates.

As we bounced up the rutted four-wheel-drive road into the canyon, Richard pointed out the dikes on the mountain, undulating rock fins that look like nature’s version of the great wall of China. Since it had been a wet summer monsoon season, the creek was running and we stopped to look at checkerspot butterflies ganging up on seep willow flowers. After parking at the Brown Canyon Education Center, we began hiking up the canyon in earnest. We followed the creek, knee high in sideoats grama and rampant with blue canyon morning glory. The morning glory was so thick that

it climbed over everything and in short order, we were dragging green mop-like tendrils from our shoes as we shuffled along. We stopped at a series of picturesque rock pools, deep enough to hold water year around, but whose banks were dry enough for prickly pear to grow along them. The water was absolutely crystal clear and the creek bed carved out a superb view of Baboquivari. Lately, I’ve been moved by water in Arizona. Not literally--I avoided a swim here--but because our surface water is disappearing (90 percent of our rivers and streams have vanished in the last 100 years). This little series of stone pools reminded me of a small pristine version of Sedona’s Sliding Rock without the hoards of tourists. After nearly a decade of drought in the state, seeing our most precious resource so lavishly displayed warmed

my heart.

We passed the fork to Jaguar Canyon and kept going to a grove of Emory and Mexican Blue Oaks. Jaguars have been photographed in this canyon and in the education center, they have a full-sized taxidermist-prepared specimen on display, one that Richard seemed a little embarrassed by when he saw me looking at it. While he was in the other room, I examined the jaguar closely and I was most impressed by his broad and seemingly bony head. His head reminded me of an outsized blacksmith’s anvil. I imagined having a mano-a-paw confrontation with an animal this size and I couldn’t conceive of a human tangling with this solid mass of muscle and sinew and coming out on top. I had read about a mountain biker who fought off mountain lion by pounding its head with a rock; from the looks of this stuffed jaguar’s head, that solution to an attack seemed futile. 

The flora of Brown Canyon was excellent. It was strange to see Ocotillos and a few Saguaros growing right above Arizona sycamores in this place where desert, water, and oaks converge. I saw Palmer’s agave, desert spoon,  globe amaranth, snakeweed, western spiderwort, as well as soap tree yuccas adorned with strands of morning glory. I found scarlet creeper twinning up an old livestock fence and an Arizona rainbow cactus right beside the trail. As great as the flora was, it was rivaled by the butterflies. Pipevine swallowtails and sulfurs swarmed at every water crossing. Seeing them in these numbers was a distinct an unexpected treat beneath the sacred mountain.

As we descended the verdant trail, Baboquivari’s rocky edifice at our backs, Richard remarked that these mountains are the western most of the sky islands (high mountain ranges that dot the desert in Southeast Arizona and Mexico)--the last outpost of high country. This was a fact I had not considered. I thought about the lower hotter deserts stretching out westward across the Devil’s Highway to the Colorado River, and beyond, toward San Diego and I felt privileged indeed, to stand in this last high oasis above the desert world. I have to say that as much as I’ve avoided being one of those white guys who subscribes to Native American spiritual practices--a Tohono Honky if you will-- for a few hours, I adopted the O’odham belief wholesale: Baboquivari was the center of my universe.