Southern Arizona

When no one was calling 911 at three in the morning in Key West and my eyelids were drooping I would open Google maps and wander the planet. What, I would ask myself, goes on here?

Not much, it turns out, which may be good or bad depending on your personality and your mood at the moment. It may happen that one day I shall return to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument but at the moment that looks like long odds. 

After three nights on public land dispersed camping near Ajo I wanted to see what was what in a monument dedicated in 1937 to organ pipe cactus and it’s preservation. 

Organ Pipe looks rather similar to Saguaro, the cactus of popular imagination but instead of a distinctive central stem with arms branching off it has a whole bunch of stems growing out of a central spot. At least that is the non-botanist explanation. 

It therefore seems reasonable to argue that Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument taught me this one thing. However it’s a thirty mile drive through what is essentially one more stretch of Sonoran Desert. 

Here it is, free access with no fee charged to drive through. 

This would be a saguaro (sag-hew-aro) cactus I think: 

There are a couple of rest areas with trash cans (bring your own toilet to the Monument) and there is a visitor center. The campground is the “fee area” with full facilities and gets high marks from visitors. You can pay to see the night sky and hike the trails. Or you can disperse camp for free on BLM land south of Ajo. 

The fly in the ointment is Lukeville at the southern end of the highway. This is the end of the road if you aren’t going to Mexico. There is a gas station advertising only regular gas ($4:00) when we paused there and there is a diner and that’s it. Your only option is to turn around and drive back which is what we did as we weren’t ready yet to cross to Sayulita an unmemorable town we drove through last summer. The motel looked very dead. 

65 miles south of here is the city of Puerto Peñasco known to Arizonans as Rocky Point, a beach resort of 65,000 residents that has made its fortune catering to land locked Arizonans. You only need a tourist card at the border and your vehicle needs no permits to enter Mexico here so this road sees tons of beach goers bound for the high rises and chain bars of Rocky Point. 

The border is open 6am to 8pm so you need to time your drive to avoid disappointment. We saw lots of cars heading north on Martin Luther King day, the end of a long weekend. 

We drove back to the dot called Why, a gas station, a casino and some trailers and turned toward Tucson, 90 minutes away through the Tohono O’Odham Indian reservation. 

Apparently Why started out as Y naked for the y-junction of the two highways, one to Tucson and the other to Ajo but the state highway department required town names to have three letters…with 65 inhabitants Why is more of a wide spot in the road than a village of note for anything other than its name. The iconoclasts and misanthropes and loners who need wide spaces and emptiness are lucky to have these places to retreat to. 

We stopped to make tea and coffee and walk Rusty somewhere in the reservation, near Indian Reservation Road 15. 

I got a hankering for the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations of south Florida as we drove through the damp overcast desert. I missed the greenery and the wildlife and the feeling of home I get in South Florida. 

The casinos of South Florida have brought the Indians wealth and space in a crowded peninsula. Here there is no built in tourist market or population seeking escape in the sage way for these Indians. 

The scenery was spectacular and luckily Kitt Peak was closed as I wasn’t much in the mood to stop. 

It was dark and gray and chilly and the numerous Border Patrol checkpoints were all closed. 

Tucson with its dreadful potholes torn up streets and aggressive traffic beckoned to us. The bright lights and esoteric joys of Trader Joe’s and Costco and preparations for a Mexico were next on the list. 

That’s another small corner of this vast country checked off the list. Glad I took the time to see it. It’s always better to go there than to just see a street view.