(June 23, 2024)

We’re in Northern Arizona, near Lee’s Ferry below the Glen Canyon Dam. I texted the guide to find out whether we meet at 6:30 a.m., Mountain Daylight Savings Time (which is the time that my telephone says it is), or 6:30 a.m., Mountain Standard Time (which apparently is the actual time). She’s texted back to say that Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time, which is kind of true because the state doesn’t, but the Navajo Nation does, as do other tribal areas. Driving across nonconformist Arizona is weirdly disorienting, the GPS time jumps each time we cross a state or reservation border, and I have to check the internet to figure out what time it should be. The applicable time zone (and the time displayed in our GPS) seems to change at whim.

We would meet the guide at Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River, and on one side of the river, the non-Navajo side, it is 4:10. On the other side of the River, the Navajo side, it is 3:10. Or is it the other way around? My phone says it’s 3:10. My phone apparently agrees with the Navajo Nation, even though reality differs. I figure it’s one of those mystic things the Navajo picked up from the Hopi.

It’s the end of June, and it’s 102° at 3:10 (or 4:10, depending on where one stands), which is serendipitously the same time that the Yuma train is famously scheduled to arrive. It’s dry and sunny, which covers a lot of Arizona weather. I will only note that Willis Carrier invented central air conditioning in Houston. I’m not certain Arizona has invented shade.

The Colorado River below at Navajo Bridges.

Getting ready for this trip, I finally read Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. It’s a fun-filled romp by a romantic band of fictional 70s eco-terrorists who have gun battles, sabotage big machinery, destroy bridges, dislike almost everybody, have hot sex, and make plans to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. I had read Abbey’s Desert Solitaire many years ago and admired it, but reading The Monkey Wrench Gang I realize that today the eco-terrorists’ methods would like as not be used by Bundy’s protesting the BLM. Mr. Abbey’s means make me queasy, and worse seem unproductive.

Some History

Arizona gained statehood in 1912 as the 48th state. Until 1821, Arizona was Spanish, and then Mexican after the Mexican Revolution. It was ceded to the United States in 1848, after the Mexican-American War. What a successful real estate deal that was.

Besides The Monkey Wrench Gang, I started reading a terrific history of Arizona, Arizona, A History, by Thomas Sheridan. At least what I read of it was terrific. It was dense and long, over 500 pages, and I only managed about 200 pages before we left for Arizona. That was enough to get me through the Civil War and into the late 19th century, when railroads, cattle, mining, and cotton spurred Arizona development, at least a bit. Arizona didn’t really get spurred until the U.S. government stepped in with massive water projects. Water transfers let Arizona boom, hence the Monkey Wrencher’s plans to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

By the 17th century, long before the United States took over, the Colonial Spanish had started early missionary settlement in Arizona, but they (and then the Mexicans) never really did much until the late 18th Century. Then they bought off the Apache with food, other supplies, and guns. The Mexican Revolution brought chaos, and the Mexican government couldn’t continue the Spanish payoffs to the Apaches. The Apache again went to war.

Arizona was on the furthest fringe for Spain, and even with the Apache payoffs Spanish settlement was sparse and precarious. The Pre-Spanish native populations, on the other hand, were complex and well-established. The prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam developed complex civilizations, though they didn’t have much respect for state borders. The Mogollon and Hohokam developed water control systems for farming, and the Ancestral Pueblo, née Anasazi, built complexes throughout the Southwest, including Mesa Verde, Keet Seel, Canyon de Chelly, and Chaco Canyon. Meanwhile the Hohokam built ball courts similar to the courts of Mesoamerica, and the Mogollon created Mimbres pottery.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mogollan Mimbres pottery, 10th to 12th century and 850-1050, public domain.

The Hopi, Zuni, and O’odham are thought to be descendants of the prehistoric groups.

The Apache and Navajo came to Arizona and New Mexico from the Rockies as a single language group as late as the 1500s, but then split, with the Apache moving further south from Arizona to Texas. The Navajo/Apache language group, Athabaskan, stretches through Alaska and Western Canada, then makes a big jump to the American Southwest. They apparently didn’t like Washington or Idaho.

The Navajo are great incorporators, and took religious practices from the Hopi and Zuni, sheep from the Spanish, and weaving from the Pueblos. The Apache meanwhile waged brutal battles with the Spanish and Mexicans in both Arizona and northern Mexico. It’s estimated that about 5,000 Mexicans were killed by Apaches between 1820 and 1835, and then they continued to fight with the Americans. When they were finally subjugated, they were just lucky that our Indian policies were so peaceful, fair, and equitable. Just kidding.

The U.S. had 5,000 troops in the field in 1886 to accomplish the surrender of Geronimo and 30 other Apache warriors. The Apache and Navajo are now reunited as part of the Navajo Nation.

C.S. Fly, Apache warriors, Arizona Historical Society, 1886. Geronimo is on the far right.

Under U.S. control, Arizona was the Wild West. Kit Carson decimated the Navajo in Canyon de Chelly in a war of attrition and starvation. The U.S.-Apache Wars were nearly continuous for a half-century. Arizona mining boomtowns came and went, and the Earps, Doc Holliday, Cochise, Fort Apache, the OK Corral, Geronimo, Tombstone, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Hashknife, and the Range Wars are as much touchstones of our culture as Generals Grant or Eisenhower, or Lexington and Concord, or the passage of the 19th Amendment. They trigger a mental image that we immediately recognize.

And Arizona gave us mythology. The 3:10 arrived in Yuma not once but twice, and both times it was on time. The gunfight at the OK Corral continues to be fought on screen every few decades, with variations that explore either the Earps’ thugishness or their nobility. Before we left for Arizona, we watched John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach starring the young John Wayne in his first major role. Watching it now, it was like seeing Star Wars for the first time. I realized why every boy child for the next two generations–including me–would wear a cowboy hat and pack a six gun as he entered the frontier range of his neighborhood. It was all you could ask for imagination.

Climate

Arizona is dry and hot. Statewide average annual rainfall in Arizona is 12.26 inches. In Yuma, bordering California and Mexico, average annual rainfall is a whopping 3 inches. Summer in the southern desert can average highs of 115°. We traveled in the High Desert, at the higher elevations of far north Arizona, but it’s still hot, still dry, just not as hot or as dry as the south.

Population

It seems like everything in Arizona is south, and then a bit further south, and then crammed right up to the border with Mexico. Ain’t true. Physically about two-thirds of the state is north of Phoenix. Still, it is true that most of the population is crammed around Phoenix and Tucson in the south. There are towns north of Phoenix–Prescott (47,603), Winslow (9,005), Sedona (9,790), Flagstaff (75,907)–but the further north you go the fewer people there are. The population of Page, the northern town of any size closest to Lee’s Ferry, is 7,440.

By population, Arizona is the 14th largest state, with a total population of 7,151,502. Almost 70% of that population, 4,845,832, is in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. Another 1,057,597 is in the Tucson Metro Area, southeast of Phoenix. Phoenix is the nation’s fifth largest city by population, trailing Houston (2,314,157), but leading Philadelphia (1,550,542), but it also represents the bulk of Arizona’s population.

Arizona map of population density, from Wikimedia Commons.

In 1860, Arizona’s non-native population was 6,482. By 1910, two years before statehood, the total population was only 204,354. As late as 1950 the population was still less than 1 million. Since 1950 Arizona has boomed. It’s a relatively diverse state, though most of the population is either Anglo or Latino. Anglos are 53.4% of the population, Latinos 30.7%.

Native Americans are about 3.7% of the population, giving it the third largest indigenous population by state–California and Oklahoma are numbers one and two. After English, the most common languages spoken in Arizona homes are Spanish, Navajo, and Apache.

Geography and Fish

There are three geographic regions in Arizona. The Basin and Range region covers most of Southern Arizona, and also most of Nevada, Western Utah, and parts of mainland Mexico west of the Sierra Madres. It’s the corduroy geography of interspersed flat basins or valleys and narrow mountain chains that John McPhee describes in Basin and Range. We didn’t make it to the Arizona Basin and Range.

The Colorado Plateau where we spent our time is named for the Colorado River, the “Colored Reddish” River, and the Colorado River cutting through the Colorado Plateau formed the Grand Canyon. It is the nation’s 5th largest river, and famously it is used up for urban water supply and agricultural irrigation by the time it reaches the Gulf of California. The Plateau is high country with a mean 6,352′ elevation, centered on the Four Corners Region. The Plateau is drained by the Colorado River, the San Juan, and the Green.

Map of the Colorado Plateau, from Wikimedia Commons.

This trip I would fish the Colorado River, the San Juan, and the Green, the San Juan in New Mexico with my great niece, and the Colorado in Arizona and the Green in Utah with Kris.

The Mogollon Rim is the third major Arizona geographic region, and is the transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range. There is an escarpment, and in places it rises as high as 8,000 feet from a basin to the Plateau . We didn’t make it as far south as the Mogollon Rim either.

There are two major rivers in Arizona, the Colorado and the Gila (which is a tributary to the Colorado). There are two native trout, the Apache trout and the Gila trout, both native to waters located along the New Mexico border. The Apache is endangered (though it is proposed for delisting), and the Gila threatened. Their restoration is part of the wider movement to restore native trout. Restoration a good thing, though it means the removal of transplanted rainbows and browns, and they’re awfully fun to catch.

In the Colorado River in Glen Canyon we would be fishing for rainbow trout, which survive and reproduce because of the cold water releases from the Glen Canyon Dam. There appear to be no current stocking programs. Fortunately for our fishing we got there before the Monkey Wrenchers blew up the dam.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Apache Trout.

Politics

Since World War II, Arizona politics has been pretty consistently inconsistent, with 10 Democratic governors and 8 Republicans. For President, the only Democrats who have carried Arizona were Harry Truman in 1948, Bill Clinton in 1996, and Joe Biden in 2020. The current governor, Katie Hobbs, is a Democrat. U.S. Senator Mark Kelly is a Democrat, and U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema is nothing at all, other perhaps than a nutcase. The Congressional delegation is currently six Republicans and three Democrats.

There is a slight–two vote–Republican majority in both houses of the Arizona legislature: two votes in the senate, two votes in the house. Overall Arizona is considered to lean Republican.

Joe Biden carried Arizona in the 2020 election by about 10,000 votes, and Arizona is an exception to most states in that the Democrats carried several areas that are largely rural, particularly in the tribal areas of the far northeast. in 2016, Donald Trump carried Arizona by about 90,000 votes, including Phoenix’s Maricopa County which then flipped in 2020. Total turnout in 2020 increased by more than 700,000 votes, with both Trump and Biden benefitting from the increased turnout. Biden benefited a wee bit more.

2020 Election Results in Arizona by County, Wikipedia, by AverytheComrade.

Where We’re Going

This is an ambitious trip. By trip’s end I will have fished the three major drainages on the Colorado Plateau: the San Juan in New Mexico, the Colorado in Arizona, and the Green in Utah. That’s also the three major Southwestern tailwaters–rivers that exist as destination trout fisheries because of the cold water flowing through dams from deep lakes. By the end of the trip we will have driven about 1500 miles and floated about 25 miles of river.

We’ve already caught our New Mexico fish, and Kris didn’t fish the San Juan. She’s fished it before, and I took my 16 year-old grand-niece fly fishing for the first time. I booked the guide, James Brown, “JB”, through Duranglers in Durango, but he also runs his own guide service. He couldn’t have been a better choice to guide Eva. Before we went I was going to try to teach Eva how to cast, and after nearly an hour got as far as showing her how to hold the rod. I didn’t get as far as showing her how to hold the line with her left hand. JB had her throwing flies in about 30 minutes.

Because JB thought Eva would catch fish all day, we fished the lower heavily stocked catch-and-take section of the river instead of the flies-only trophy water. Quantity trumped all, and we mostly had the lower half to ourselves. She landed a bunch of fish, missed a bunch of fish, and may or may not have taken a nap. Half the time I think JB was as excited as she was, which made the day fun for all of us. Believe it or not he and I talked a lot about fishing. I caught a bunch of trout, both wild browns and stocked rainbows, and I’m not going to complain about catching a bunch of trout, wild or stocked. I’m not proud, and I can use the practice.