There is a certain mountain in southern Arizona, just out of view of Tucson, that overlooks the San Pedro River, the largest of the eastern tributaries of the Gila River, which in turn flows from the last of the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico until it meets the Colorado River some six hundred miles to the west, not far above the Gulf of California. If you climb the face of that mountain, a laborious but not impossible scramble though thickets of piñon, mountain mahogany, and agaves of various kinds, you will reach a saddle that brings another view, this one of the back range of the Santa Rita Mountains, at their heart a cone-shaped peak that is unmistakably a long-dormant though perhaps not extinct volcano. In the right season—in the pounding male rains, as the Diné people say, of summer or the gently descending female rains of winter—you will see water flowing down the faces of all these peaks, slow or fast, gathered in rock pools, spilling down the boulder-lined washes into subtributary and tributary, following that ancient path to the distant ocean.
Above that saddle, sheltered by an overhang ringed by catclaw acacia and Spanish bayonet, is a portal—literally, into another world. For within the mountain is a cave complex that has not yet been fully mapped, its most active explorer having died far too young, his contemporaries now for the most part too old to relive the daring days that led them to find the place by tracking the motions of birds and bats along a wall of crumbling limestone. Not far within the cave, still illuminated by dim sunlight, is an astonishing sight: a wall of rock wetted by a laminar flow, a sheet of water that has slowly filled a bowl-shaped rock pool, which in turn spills over, drop by drop, to feed several springs that issue forth in the narrow canyons far below—water that, yes, will one day flow all the way to the Pacific.
Water, mountains. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
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