It is March 1993, and all Arizona is whining about the weather. We have endured weeks of dark, rainy skies, slick roads, and soggy fairways. The Pacific winter storm express has jumped its track, and Seattle's winter has pulled into our station instead.
Phil Norton, my trail companion, and I have come to a place where we will hear no complaints. We can hardly even hear each other speak - but no matter; the setting makes talk too cheap to matter. We are in Ventana Canyon, 1,100 feet above Tucson in the Santa Catalina Mountains. The entire canyon carries the din of water slamming on gneiss and granite - rivulets becoming creeks, whitewater corkscrewing over rocks, waterfalls blurting over surprise escarpments. The Catalinas are masquerading as the Cascades.
Hiking in these conditions challenges us. Eight times we've had to surge through water almost up to our hips as we work our way up Ventana Creek, normally a maze of dry boulders snoozing in the sun. Finally Phil and I pick our way off trail - with care - and find a ledge where we can sit and watch the action.
From this aerie we can see, and hear, three waterfalls converging from different directions and crashing into a pool 50 feet below. Phil finds a word to describe the moment, and it comes to him in Spanish: Encantamiento. Enchantment. I focus on the splashing counterpoint, the baroque trio sonata of three liquid instruments, with each its own distinct voice and melody, and think of an orchestral suite Handel composed for a river boat party almost three centuries ago: Water Music.
Encountering water in any form in an arid land should delight us. And Arizonans certainly love water as long as it doesn't arrive inconveniently, aborting a golf date or flooding a family room. We have invented our own water spectacles, from 266-square-mile Lake Powell to the 560-foot-high geyser in Fountain Hills. We have been so enthused about water that, in 1987, the Arizona Legislature, finally worried about plunging water tables, banned developers from filling any more ornamental lakes with precious groundwater.
But water's most enchanting appearances in Arizona have always been Nature's own. They are evanescent, changing and disappearing with the seasons, and usually modest in scale. They come in the form of little creeks, seasonal waterfalls, and tinajas - a Spanish word that means, essentially, water holes in the rocks.
Water makes music here wherever it appears; it opens up whole new dimensions in Nature. Stare at the reflections of red rock and sky in Sedona's Seven Sacred Pools, and you will begin to understand why someone had thought to term them "sacred:" They celebrate and weave together water and light, two of the essentials of all life. Ephemeral waterfalls, thin as rice noodles, tumble off near vertical cliffs in Oak Creek Canyon whenever the snow melts. Tiny streams meander down through the canyons and foothills of the Hohokam and then the Pimas, for nearly 2,000 years. As recently as 1880, the Santa Cruz River rippled year round through Tucson as did the Salt River through Phoenix. Now, canals, dams, irrigation systems, and the straws of some 4 million urban Arizonans have sucked the rivers dry. The tradeoff is, well, the existence of urban Arizona.....
