I found the little desert gem of a spot I’ve affectionally named S&S (and have returned to more than once over the past few weeks) after climbing some 5,000 feet up a long, winding mountain road I’d picked out on a map. Phoenix in my rearview, I was lured by the elfin beckoning of remote dispersed BLM camping dotted with pines. The bear-warning signs did not deter me—the strong vinegary pepper smell wafting from the back notwithstanding. (PSA: Don’t return hot sauce with a broken lid to spice rack and drive along wind-waved, unmaintained “roads,” even if it is the last of the bottles you got in New Orleans, unless you want the back of your van to look like a crime scene. You’re welcome.) The snow and ice and road closed signs did give me a modicum of pause. It was the ranger’s, “You know it was 12 degrees this morning, right,” that did it, though.
Back toward the valley floor I descended. Stopping to take in the stark beauty along the way, I at once swelled with gratitude for federal protections for lands like these nearly 60,000 acres of the Pusch Ridge Wilderness and felt the stinging choke of grief and rage over recent loss. Sacrifices to the guardians of a greedy feudal system disguised in plain sight are many—2 million acres of desert in southern Utah, my home state; 10 million acres of sage-grouse habitat across the northwest; 1.3 million acres near Joshua Tree and Death Valley in my recent home, California; the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to name a few.
I am unendingly fortunate to be on my current journey. Its role in hope’s prevalence is not lost on me. Loving something vast and unfathomable is simpler in its presence. Belief in transformation is relatively easy to foster when the soul is bathed in moonlit coyote yips and morning visits from a marmalade-hooded desert cardinal and his mate. We are the land in our very composition and exist only thanks to its bounty. Let’s grow our combined hope by taking actions like these listed by Land Trust Alliance.
Back in lower elevations, I found a spot, parked just so (exit ability sans maneuvers for safety, full creosote bush near my cook spot for feng shui) and set out to explore my new living area.
Mount Bigelow and the intended road to my home for the week in early February upon my arrival in Tucson. Off to the right (and not pictured) is the Catalina Station, an astronomical observing facility that’s home to a 61-inch Kuiper Telescope.
The road to Mount Bigelow, a subpeak of Mount Lemmon, at 9,000+ feet the highest point in the Santa Catalina Mountains. Its home, the 1.78-acre Coronado National Forest, spreads across southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
Looking out on Pusch Ridge Wilderness, 56,933 acres that includes much of the Santa Catalina Mountains and was set aside for preservation in 1978 under the 1964 Wilderness Act.
First glance.
What have we here?
For me, universe? A symbol of mutual protection? A challenge?
Yes, please!
Yes, yes we are.
May hope prevail. May it grow. May the wildness in all our hearts crack us wide open so that our rage and sorrow and strength and grace can spill and seed the change we must see in the world.
It is our brush with the wild nature that drives us not to limit our conversations to humans, not to limit our most splendid movements to dance floors, nor our ears only to music made by human-made instruments, nor our eyes to “taught” beauty, nor our bodies to approved sensations, nor our minds to those things we all agree on already.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Women Who Run with the Wolves