Destination Wickenburg: Hassayampa River Preserve
by Julie Anne Phillipps
Saturday morning, 10:00 am, and after spending most of my $43.78 paycheck fueling my car I head for Wickenburg. My mission; write a travel story with a pivotal emotional experience. Personally, I firmly believe that driving constitutes an emotional experience since my fifteen-year-old 528E needs a new rear axle. For the first twenty miles I fear the new relationship my horoscope promised is with a tow truck, but shortly out of Surprise the desert expands forcing me to forget the shimmying beneath my seat and focus on my travel assignment.
Shadowy blue mountains rise in the incalculable distance blowing away the last vestiges of city life claustrophobia, the vast emptiness dwarfing the immutable sense of urgency endemic to modern life. The yellow, green, and russet landscape a rustic palette of colors along ribbons of highways’ etched with foliage.....
What does foliage do? Dang, the car’s shimmying like an epileptic whore; man! why do I have to keep up with the 65 mph speed limit? I should write the governor demanding a junker lane on all major highways. Where is the wisdom in driving out of town with less than twelve dollars, should I have just read “Arizona Highways” and faked the trip? Hassayampa? Is this a town?
Barely visible behind a speed limit posting, a simple green sign reads, “Hassayampa River Preserve.”
Slamming on the brakes, I swerve left crossing in front of oncoming traffic then barrel down a poorly graded gravel lane barely wide enough for one vehicle. In my desperation for something to write, I forgot my deteriorating rear axle until the car gasps over the affront of the last gravel hurdle. Pulling into the parking lot, I am immediately irked by a billboard size sign that lists park rules.
beneath the overshadowing Cottonwoods, an old building, surrounded by a desert garden wreathed in butterflies, beckons visitors to enter.
Oh Geez!, the Nature Conservancy owns the site! Now I am out a $5 donation. Now I will need to drum up expert information on every riparian habitat in Arizona and the entire history of the Nature Conservancy in addition to an intensely leafy detail of this preserve! Oh well, I will use the flyers and pamphlets to flesh out the travel story.
Hassayampa River Preserve operates under the guidance of the Nature Conservancy’s Arizona Chapter, an international nonprofit membership organization committed to the global preservation of natural diversity. The Conservancy’s mission includes identifying and preserving the world’s finest remaining examples of plants, animals, and natural habitats by protecting the needed environment both land and water. The Arizona Nature Conservancy purchased the Frederick Brill Ranch in 1987, to save this natural riparian habitat. The Hassayampa River Preserve, located on Highway 60 three miles southeast of Wickenburg, protects and restores Arizona’s imperiled riparian areas. The Preserve operates with the help of donations and volunteers to preserve the cottonwood-willow forests and the rich assortment of wild life native to Arizona that depend on the few riparian habitats left in Arizona areas to survive.
The Frederick Brill Ranch built in 1860, houses the preserve’s visitor center, rugged frontier personality testifies to its extraordinary history as a ranch and stagecoach stop. No longer a stop over in our country’s westward migration, the Hassayampa Preserve is the destination of bird-watchers from around the country. Enthusiasts identified and sighted 229 bird species at the preserve in addition to the seventy-nine nesting species that call “Hassayampa” home. In the visitor center, I meet Lorraine, a friendly volunteer and avid birdwatcher.
Moreover, she is an extraordinarily useful woman! We quickly become friends, and she happily points out an “aggressive Rufous hummingbird” she has watched all day. All right, I had a two-week bird-watching class in high school that I survived by learning how to hide a single hitter in my pants cuff, so I am a little slow at distinguishing the Rufous from the eight hummingbirds that hang around the birdfeeder. Fortunately, the little bugger bombs another bird at the feeder. But, enough of the primal woodland war experience, its time to hit the trails where my pivotal experience waits.
Beaver-tail and Engelman prickly pears, fend off hackberry bushes, as brittlebush, claret cup and fender hedgehog seek the spindly shade of cholla in the preserve’s surrounding gardens. Dozens of dazzling yellow and orange butterflies swoop through the tall spiny chollas, fighting with the cherry red and Mexican bush sage for brilliancy. Cottonwoods towering beside desert fan palms wreathed in desert marigolds. An aromatic scent wafts by my nose announcing the ‘Mesquite Meander’ trail.
I should have worn boots; these damn lizards' are thicker than atheists at a libertarian party fund-raiser. What is that noise? There is nothing in these pamphlets about mountain lions or other criminal mammals. Oh Jeez, look at that thing! Hmm, I wonder how much snake venom antidote costs?
Lizards’ race along the trail as the more shadowy wildlife slithers through the thick ground cover beside the sandy trail. Approaching the woods, the trail darkens under overhanging
Ouch!
mesquite branches, and twisting around the cottonwood-willows the trail settles into a quiet walk along a dry bank. Off in the distance, tall grass-green reeds bend in the moist breeze promising water to thirsty trail walkers.
Damn, I forgot my water in the car and the smell of it down here is unbelievable! Maybe I should go back to the car. I better not leave now since it’s already late afternoon, maybe I can fall into a water fountain up ahead somewhere or if it is not too nasty, I can drink from the stream.
Pursuing the tantalizing scent of water along the River Ramble trail as a parade of red ants' march by in flaming red armor under a watchful troop of grasshoppers lurking beside the path. The river lazily drifts by a mere summer’s trickle of water running through rich green foliage redolent in the moist breeze.
Oomph!
Starlings swoop and circle in the deep bruised cleft where the river will again accept the mountain’s springtime water offerings. After a lazy interval of stargazing, the friendly volunteer staff emerges from the Hassayampa River Preserve’s unspoiled trails to assist me to the nearest aid station.