Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

VIII. Sierra Ancha

Sierra Ancha is the place in Arizona I value most, save the Canyon. Set above the Tonto Basin of the Sonoran Desert, the range rises to nearly 8000 feet. On all flanks, that rock castle fights a losing battle against the desert. The old CCC cabins my university leased were at 5000 feet, my favorite Arizona altitude for its ideal setting: in one hand you are offered the Ponderosa and, in the other, the Saguaro. A choice no other state offers.

Rough by any reasonable measure, the cabins provide a luxurious retreat whether one goes up the mountain or down into the desert. The cramped, less than shining shower stall, in the dimly lit bathroom, gives a rare level of pleasure at the end of a hard day. On more than one occasion, during the first blasts of hot water, I have heard a woman utter a sound made in only one other arrangement. In the 1930s, boys from Philadelphia built sound cabinetry and rock fireplaces. The cabins have electric heat, and fairly clean water, and a kitchen that usually works though lighting the propane jets present real and present danger. The wood and stone buildings are set next to Parker Creek, a big stream running most of the year. Choosing different ones for the fun of it, for the price of $5 to $10 per night, my wife and I would live for a week or two, host our friends, the children of our neighborhood, and, on one occasion, a black bear. In the shaking torchlight, a long black snout and the fearsome teeth of a monstrous beast appeared, 250 ursine pounds of power. He, or she, threw garbage cans around and then, hearing the loud attack of the braver of two dogs, leapt up and through a screen wrapped around that porch.

The Ancha are remote, far from towns of any size, and will provide safety for bears, for coatimundi, deer and, at the cabin altitude, a variety of snakes. One day I almost stepped on a thick bull snake, which did its passionate imitation of a rattler, ringing his "rattles" by a sound drawn through his throat, shaking his smooth tail and twisting around like a nasty diamondback. On the Parker escarpment, where the water cascades 400 feet into the Sonoran, my headlights once caught 30 highly mobile burrowing owls out for a courtship stroll. Standing on the road watching the sun set over Roosevelt Lake and the 4 Peaks 30 miles away, a lion screamed her hello 20 yards behind me.

At the top, on Aztec Peak, just one hiking day from the desert, Arizona Columbine bloom next to snow drifts. I visited the tower perched up there once. A summer ranger presided over the world, with Desert Solitaire on a metal desktop right where Edward once laid his books. She was scrunched up in her perfect, self-contained room, looking out over everything from New Mexico to Flagstaff, and, according to her, watching cougars denned in the rock cliffs near the tower.

Water is surprisingly available. Hunt Spring, where the pine and oak come together on the Cherry Creek side, flows into a fantastic canyon called Devil's Chasm. This deep, narrow crevice provokes inversion of climatic rules, and huge firs, never timbered, grew up 100 feet tall, 2/3 of a vertical mile and 2 horizontal miles from the Saguaro. Along our way down the chasm's rocky flow from Hunt's Spring, flowering faux tropical plants strew our pathway, and we stepped among the petals as well as huge mounds of bearshit. Truth must be told that the range suffers more than most from the pine beetle. In the 10 years we spent going to the CCC cabins, the Ponderosa stands fell prey to that killer with dismaying speed.

My university held a lease on the cabins for research purposes, from the days when biologists went and looked at plants rather than through atomic microscopes at DNA. We brought our dogs and trekked the trails, admiring that canine 60-foot descent through thick brush and fallen trees, reckless abandon, a skier on a steep grade, hitting every corner until the hound slashes across our path, with a brief, arrogant lift of the head to the ludicrously awkward bipeds.

In the winter, the snow comes to the cabin level at times, lovely showers of huge flakes, sticking to the great exotic trees planted by the CCC gangs nearly a century ago. If you go up, along the wooded Parker Trail after a snowstorm, you fight through drifts in the passes, struggling to reach the Workman Creek drainage and the final ascent to Aztec Peak. At the top of Parker you stumble across the scorched earth of the Coon Creek fire. Young men and women had made a stand right at this ridge and held the roaring inferno back. The trees on one side of their trench stood untouched; on the other side in the Coon drainage they were blackened or burned to death. The firefighters won in the same way men held lines in World War I, and now, in Ukraine. The trench remains, half dug, half piled up. In what remains of the Coon Creek forest one sees a replication of the no man's land between the WWI trenches, with every living thing blasted into an eternal hell. Given Arizona's sad record of firefighters' death, the comparison becomes too painful, bringing to mind Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire. How quickly the heroic act of fighting fire can become the ignoble event of becoming its fuel.