Archive for the ‘Peloncillo Mountains’ Tag
“Old Desert Men” (San Simon, Arizona, 12-01-12) — Image by kenne
Sharing their knowledge
Looking in the direction
They expect to go.
Borrowing years of living
To guide them forward.
— kenne
Like this:
Like Loading...
Finding the Way Through Doubtful Pass– Image by kenne
“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me,
losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place,
where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking,
but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to
turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me,
which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know,
which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or
straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories,
my old story, as if it were the first time.”
― from The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Like this:
Like Loading...
Doubtful Pass In The Peloncillo Mountains — Image by kenne
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
— Susan Sontag
Like this:
Like Loading...
Peloncillo Mountains (Cochise County, Arizona) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Truth never dies. The ages come and go.
The mountains wear away, the stars retire.
Destruction lays earth’s mighty cities low;
And empires, states and dynasties expire;
But caught and handed onward by the wise,
Truth never dies.
— Anonymous
Near Doubtful Pass in the Peloncillo Mountains — Image by kenne
Like this:
Like Loading...
Doubtful Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains, Arizona — Image by kenne
The world is made of Circles
And we think in straight Lines
— Peter Senge
Like this:
Like Loading...
Computer Painting by kenne
You ask me what’s a coyote fence? A crooked line of cedar poles
Surrounding our adobe, our refuge from the road
Some nights we can see light of fires as Indians dance
And the eyes of God shine through the coyote fence.
— from “The Light Beyond the Coyote Fence” by Tom Russell
Like this:
Like Loading...
Peloncillo Mountains — Images by kenne
Like this:
Like Loading...
Western Window On the Past — Image by kenne
The wind moves unnoticed through the window
like the memory of forgotten times
punctuated by years of drought
where water no longer moves
atop the creek beds, and cattle no longer roam,
each not sustainable in the basin
below the Peloncillo Mountains
where desert bushes and cactus
have replaced the grasslands
near Doubtful Pass trail once used by
the Butterfield Overland Stagecoach Company.
— kenne
Like this:
Like Loading...
Doubtful Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains (December 2012) — Fisheye Art by kenne
Riding the stagecoach
Days of Geronimo past
Through Doubtful Canyon.
kenne
(We will be driving through the Peloncillo’s today, May 12, 2015, on our way from Ft. Stockton to Tucson.
First posted December 8, 2012)
Like this:
Like Loading...
Desert Fence Line — Image by kenne
We’d picked up all the fencing tools
And staples off the road.
An extra roll of “bob” wire
Was the last thing left to load.
I drew a sleeve across my face
To wipe away the dirt.
The young man who was helping me
Was tuckin’ in his shirt.
I turned around to him and said,
“This fence is finally done,
With five new strands of ‘bob’ wire
Shinin’ proudly in the sun.
— from The Fence That Me and Shorty Built, by Red Steagall
Like this:
Like Loading...
Cattle Corral in the San Simon Valley — Images by kenne
Note: This article came about as a result of a scheduled duck hunting trip that went a bust. For several years Tom and some of his hunting buddies have gone hunting in the San Simon Valley. The valley contains several small ponds, little known to most duck hunters. Again this year, they were planning to hunt the riparian area of the valley. Tom asked me if I would like to go duck hunting. I told him I hunt only with a camera — the hunt was on.
Two days before the scheduled hunt we got word that there were no ducks in the valley — there was no water. Tom and I discussed the situation and decided to make it a photo expedition.
This posting is about the disappearing water in the San Simon Valley, which serves as a “poster child” of the west. Yesterday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued “a call to action” a three-year study of the Colorado River and its ability to meet the future needs of city-dwellers, Native Americans, businesses, ranchers and farmers in the western states.
“There is no one solution that is going to meet the needs of this challenge,” Salazar said. “We need to reduce our demand through conservation. We also need to augment supply with practical measures.” — Arizona Daily Star. December 13, 2012
ECOCIDE ARIZONA STYLE
Tom Markey and Kenne G. Turner (November 2012)
During its four years of operation (1857-1861), the Butterfield Overland Mail gave its passengers views of the some of the West’s most luxurious grasslands when its stagecoaches emerged from the Peloncillo Mountains, now a 19,440-acre wilderness area designated by Congress in 1990 along the Arizona – New Mexico border, and those stagecoaches descended through West Doubtful Canyon into the San Simon Valley in what became Cochise County, Arizona.
However, the graves of scalpees, such as that of John James Giddings (1821-1861), who was heading back east, attest to the pass’s prolonged perils at the hands of Apaches led by Cochise and Geronimo.
But a far worse peril than the Apaches could ever have imagined was soon to be visited upon the region.
In the fall of 1882, Will C. Barnes, former Medal of Honor awardee in the battle at Fort Apache, Arizona Territory, wrote in “Herds In San Simon Valley – What Happen To The Promise Land of Arizona’s Oldtime Cattlemen?” of his personal experience in seeking a suitable location for raising a few cattle. He was advised by an old Army officer, having chased Apaches throughout the area, that the San Simon Valley might be a suitable location.
After spending ten days riding over the valley, Barnes decided he had found his “promised land.” The river, although an “intermittent affair,” provided for a riparian area as it quietly flowed through the lush grassland.
By 1885 or so those once lush grasslands (around Chaney Place … as one bearing point) in the San Simon Valley were already seriously overgrazed by an estimated 55,000 cattle and in danger of disastrous erosion and eventual desertification: an Arizona-style ecocide as the cow that ate the West and exhausted its fragile water sources was well on its way; see Lynn Jacobs’ classic, Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching (1991).
Dry Riparian Area In The San Simon Valley
The stunning classic account of this disaster is Marc Reisner‘s 1986 Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. A four-part television documentary based on a revised version of the book was produced by KTEH-TV, the PBS affiliate in San José, California, in 1996. The parts are entitled Mulholland’s Dream, An American Nile, The Mercy of Nature, and The Last Oasis.
Ecocide is, by the way, a term used to refer to any large-scale destruction of a natural environment by over-consumption of critical non-renewable resources. The word’s fatal significance is repeatedly illustrated by Jared Diamond in his vastly successful Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005, with a revised edition from 2011), which chronicles a series of major ecological disasters such as Easter Island.
The San Simon Subbasin, some 1,930 square miles north and south of Interstate 10 in southeastern Arizona that extends into New Mexico is well on its way to becoming another ecocide success, and this is particularly true of the closed drainage basin of San Simon Valley that is north of Interstate 10 between Orange Butte (5,250 feet) on its eastern edge and Javelina Peak (5,592 feet) to the northwest. The surrounding area is an ancient volcanic eruptive hot spot primarily composed of basaltic to rhyolitic rocks from some 16 to 30 million years ago. Its tectonic underpinnings are still unstable; the San Simon Basin regularly experiences earthquakes of significant magnitude about every 50 years or so. And surface water comes and goes with the rhythms of this geological instability. The earthquake of May 4th, 1887, had an estimated Richter magnitude of 7.2.
Cattle Watering Pond
The water resources of the region have always been marginal. In 1934 Will C. Barnes wrote after revisiting the valley: “Many of the old valuable grasses and forage plants were gone. The green meadows were replaced by wide expanses of drifting sand. Of running water, except during the summer rains when floods occurred, there was almost none.”
Today, the San Simon and Whitlock Cienega are both dry, as is nearby Parks Lake. Only a few artesian wells in the area are still flowing, and artesian pressure has been steadily decreasing: windmills had long had to assist the water to reach the surface, and even these have failed recently, and dry tanks are increasingly abandoned.
Any significant groundwater resources are limited to a network of aquifers, and in-depth investigations of the economic aspects of aquifer water quality are, remarkably, a relatively young field. Increases in salinity from irrigation re-charge and undesirable mineral content in irrigation water from ambient groundwater and aquifers have, however, already been indicated in the San Simon Valley. According to an Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ 2002) Baseline Study from 2004, groundwater in the lower or artesian aquifer rarely met health-based standards because of frequently elevated fluoride or arsenic concentrations. Then, too, groundwater in the upper aquifer often also did not meet health-based standards because of elevated fluoride or nitrate concentrations.
Dry Water Detention Area
The Bowie pistachio plantation contact is Jim Cook of the Pistachio Corporation of Arizona, Bowie (520-847-2554).
Sky Island Alliance (SIA) is currently conducting a statewide “Spring’s Inventory” and reports that fifty springs will have been inventoried by the end of 2013. SIA should be encouraged to conduct a follow-up of the ADEQ 2002 Baseline Study of the San Simon Basin and note the changes during the past decade.
The now dry detention dam lakes no matter how shallow they were (1-2 feet), in the San Simon Basin north of Bowie and San Simon were convenient stop-overs for numerous species of migratory ducks, but no more: no ducks were sighted in the area again this season, and one by one the ponds in the area have been going dry at a rapid rate over the past four years.
Dry Detention Dam Lake
To make the ecological situation of this threatened area even worse, in the Sierra Club’s Rincon Group Newsletter (July – September 2012), Russell Lowes reports that Southwestern Power Group (SWPG) wants to build a large natural gas plant (SunZia) north of the Chiricahua Mountains near Bowie, and this would certainly be a significant source of pollution, even as far west as Tucson. The start-up is now planned for 2015 after the local Board of Supervisors granted the developers a construction permit extension in November of 2009.
The agency that is controlling the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process for the projected Bowie natural gas plant is, as you might suspect, the perennial rancher’s friend who continues to support a no longer economically viable way of cowboy life at taxpayer expense across the West, namely the federal Bureau of Land Management.
According to some environmentalists (Cascabel Working Group, July 17th, 2011), SWPG has “intentionally hidden its intended use of SunZia (Southwest Transmission Project) for the Bowie plant and appears to have misrepresented the project as delivering primarily renewable energy to gain the support of governmental, environmental and public interests to expedite the project’s construction.”
Hydrographic declines (subsidence) in the Bowie area have been recorded since the 1980s as part of surveys of pre-consolidation stress on aquifer systems, but there do not seem to be more recent post-plantation reports from the area; see Water Resources Research for June 1981 which cites a local decline of more than 278 feet since 1952 in a well five miles east of Bowie.
There seems to be a lack of up to date water demand estimate studies for the area, and, if this is the case, it is probably masking a serious case of Arizona-style ecocide.
The promised land that Will C. Barnes wrote about years ago was in the making for centuries and cannot be restored in just a few years: “The present emergency offers a vast field for true conservation. But remember this, it will not be accomplished in a year or a dozen years. And most of all, to succeed, it will require conscientious cooperation by every stockman using these lands. In no other way will it be brought about,” wrote Barnes. He concluded that the valley was not an isolated or unusual area. “All over the West, similar areas are now going through the same destructive process of erosion.”
Images by kenne
Click here to see a slideshow of Kenne Turner’s San Simon Valley images.
Related articles
32.270209
-110.860703
Like this:
Like Loading...
Looking east from the Peloncillo Mountains over the Lordsburg Playa. — Image by kenne
The Lordsburg Playa is a large alkaline lake that contains deposits of calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, sulfate and chloride. It is considered a good example of a mineral soil flat wetland, which are barren, generally dry, flat, and undrained. The Sky Island Alliance classifies the area unworthy of any conservation effort except that an important aquatic arthropod assemblage survives there and flourishes when the playa holds water.
Surrounding the flats is a zone of vegetation in strongly alkaline soil that is not diverse but contains some rare plant species worthy of conservation efforts. The greatest threat to this community is grazing, since the vegetation that grows there can tap water resources throughout the year.
kenne
32.270209
-110.860705
Like this:
Like Loading...
Doubtful Canyon II — Image by kenne
32.270209
-110.860703
Like this:
Like Loading...
Doubtful Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains — Image by kenne
Riding the stagecoach
Days of Geronimo past
Through Doubtful canyon.
kenne
32.270209
-110.860703
Like this:
Like Loading...
An Old Bunkhouse Near An Abandoned San Simon Valley Livestock Corral — Images by kenne
In the late eighteen hundreds, the land west of the Peloncillo Mountains, known as the San Simon Valley, had many beautiful grassy meadows with mesquite, ironwood, palo verde and other desert trees. This area was very attractive to many west Texas ranchers and by 1895 an estimated 50,000 head of cattle were grazing in the San Simon Valley. However, under the old open range conditions the great herds were devastating the San Simon Valley. Today most of the valuable grasses and forage plants are gone, left behind are many deep trails first worn by cattle, later dug deep by storm waters, easily eroding the land no longer protected by fine stock grasses.
The destruction to the valley is not an isolated picture, but serves as a poster-child for similar areas in the west that are experiencing the same destructive process in much of the western U.S.
This weekend we will be spending additional time in the valley and the Peloncillo Mountains photographing more evidence of the southwest’s disappearing water.
kenne
Abandoned Livestock Corral In The San Simon Valley — Image by kenne
32.270209
-110.860703
Like this:
Like Loading...
Becoming is Superior to Being 
Note: This article came about as a result of a scheduled duck hunting trip that went a bust. For several years Tom and some of his hunting buddies have gone hunting in the San Simon Valley. The valley contains several small ponds, little known to most duck hunters. Again this year, they were planning to hunt the riparian area of the valley. Tom asked me if I would like to go duck hunting. I told him I hunt only with a camera — the hunt was on.
Two days before the scheduled hunt we got word that there were no ducks in the valley — there was no water. Tom and I discussed the situation and decided to make it a photo expedition.
This posting is about the disappearing water in the San Simon Valley, which serves as a “poster child” of the west. Yesterday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued “a call to action” a three-year study of the Colorado River and its ability to meet the future needs of city-dwellers, Native Americans, businesses, ranchers and farmers in the western states.
“There is no one solution that is going to meet the needs of this challenge,” Salazar said. “We need to reduce our demand through conservation. We also need to augment supply with practical measures.” — Arizona Daily Star. December 13, 2012
ECOCIDE ARIZONA STYLE
Tom Markey and Kenne G. Turner (November 2012)
However, the graves of scalpees, such as that of John James Giddings (1821-1861), who was heading back east, attest to the pass’s prolonged perils at the hands of Apaches led by Cochise and Geronimo.
But a far worse peril than the Apaches could ever have imagined was soon to be visited upon the region.
In the fall of 1882, Will C. Barnes, former Medal of Honor awardee in the battle at Fort Apache, Arizona Territory, wrote in “Herds In San Simon Valley – What Happen To The Promise Land of Arizona’s Oldtime Cattlemen?” of his personal experience in seeking a suitable location for raising a few cattle. He was advised by an old Army officer, having chased Apaches throughout the area, that the San Simon Valley might be a suitable location.
After spending ten days riding over the valley, Barnes decided he had found his “promised land.” The river, although an “intermittent affair,” provided for a riparian area as it quietly flowed through the lush grassland.
By 1885 or so those once lush grasslands (around Chaney Place … as one bearing point) in the San Simon Valley were already seriously overgrazed by an estimated 55,000 cattle and in danger of disastrous erosion and eventual desertification: an Arizona-style ecocide as the cow that ate the West and exhausted its fragile water sources was well on its way; see Lynn Jacobs’ classic, Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching (1991).
Dry Riparian Area In The San Simon Valley
The stunning classic account of this disaster is Marc Reisner‘s 1986 Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. A four-part television documentary based on a revised version of the book was produced by KTEH-TV, the PBS affiliate in San José, California, in 1996. The parts are entitled Mulholland’s Dream, An American Nile, The Mercy of Nature, and The Last Oasis.
Ecocide is, by the way, a term used to refer to any large-scale destruction of a natural environment by over-consumption of critical non-renewable resources. The word’s fatal significance is repeatedly illustrated by Jared Diamond in his vastly successful Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005, with a revised edition from 2011), which chronicles a series of major ecological disasters such as Easter Island.
The San Simon Subbasin, some 1,930 square miles north and south of Interstate 10 in southeastern Arizona that extends into New Mexico is well on its way to becoming another ecocide success, and this is particularly true of the closed drainage basin of San Simon Valley that is north of Interstate 10 between Orange Butte (5,250 feet) on its eastern edge and Javelina Peak (5,592 feet) to the northwest. The surrounding area is an ancient volcanic eruptive hot spot primarily composed of basaltic to rhyolitic rocks from some 16 to 30 million years ago. Its tectonic underpinnings are still unstable; the San Simon Basin regularly experiences earthquakes of significant magnitude about every 50 years or so. And surface water comes and goes with the rhythms of this geological instability. The earthquake of May 4th, 1887, had an estimated Richter magnitude of 7.2.
Cattle Watering Pond
The water resources of the region have always been marginal. In 1934 Will C. Barnes wrote after revisiting the valley: “Many of the old valuable grasses and forage plants were gone. The green meadows were replaced by wide expanses of drifting sand. Of running water, except during the summer rains when floods occurred, there was almost none.”
Today, the San Simon and Whitlock Cienega are both dry, as is nearby Parks Lake. Only a few artesian wells in the area are still flowing, and artesian pressure has been steadily decreasing: windmills had long had to assist the water to reach the surface, and even these have failed recently, and dry tanks are increasingly abandoned.
Any significant groundwater resources are limited to a network of aquifers, and in-depth investigations of the economic aspects of aquifer water quality are, remarkably, a relatively young field. Increases in salinity from irrigation re-charge and undesirable mineral content in irrigation water from ambient groundwater and aquifers have, however, already been indicated in the San Simon Valley. According to an Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ 2002) Baseline Study from 2004, groundwater in the lower or artesian aquifer rarely met health-based standards because of frequently elevated fluoride or arsenic concentrations. Then, too, groundwater in the upper aquifer often also did not meet health-based standards because of elevated fluoride or nitrate concentrations.
Dry Water Detention Area
The Bowie pistachio plantation contact is Jim Cook of the Pistachio Corporation of Arizona, Bowie (520-847-2554).
Sky Island Alliance (SIA) is currently conducting a statewide “Spring’s Inventory” and reports that fifty springs will have been inventoried by the end of 2013. SIA should be encouraged to conduct a follow-up of the ADEQ 2002 Baseline Study of the San Simon Basin and note the changes during the past decade.
The now dry detention dam lakes no matter how shallow they were (1-2 feet), in the San Simon Basin north of Bowie and San Simon were convenient stop-overs for numerous species of migratory ducks, but no more: no ducks were sighted in the area again this season, and one by one the ponds in the area have been going dry at a rapid rate over the past four years.
Dry Detention Dam Lake
To make the ecological situation of this threatened area even worse, in the Sierra Club’s Rincon Group Newsletter (July – September 2012), Russell Lowes reports that Southwestern Power Group (SWPG) wants to build a large natural gas plant (SunZia) north of the Chiricahua Mountains near Bowie, and this would certainly be a significant source of pollution, even as far west as Tucson. The start-up is now planned for 2015 after the local Board of Supervisors granted the developers a construction permit extension in November of 2009.
The agency that is controlling the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process for the projected Bowie natural gas plant is, as you might suspect, the perennial rancher’s friend who continues to support a no longer economically viable way of cowboy life at taxpayer expense across the West, namely the federal Bureau of Land Management.
According to some environmentalists (Cascabel Working Group, July 17th, 2011), SWPG has “intentionally hidden its intended use of SunZia (Southwest Transmission Project) for the Bowie plant and appears to have misrepresented the project as delivering primarily renewable energy to gain the support of governmental, environmental and public interests to expedite the project’s construction.”
Hydrographic declines (subsidence) in the Bowie area have been recorded since the 1980s as part of surveys of pre-consolidation stress on aquifer systems, but there do not seem to be more recent post-plantation reports from the area; see Water Resources Research for June 1981 which cites a local decline of more than 278 feet since 1952 in a well five miles east of Bowie.
There seems to be a lack of up to date water demand estimate studies for the area, and, if this is the case, it is probably masking a serious case of Arizona-style ecocide.
The promised land that Will C. Barnes wrote about years ago was in the making for centuries and cannot be restored in just a few years: “The present emergency offers a vast field for true conservation. But remember this, it will not be accomplished in a year or a dozen years. And most of all, to succeed, it will require conscientious cooperation by every stockman using these lands. In no other way will it be brought about,” wrote Barnes. He concluded that the valley was not an isolated or unusual area. “All over the West, similar areas are now going through the same destructive process of erosion.”
Click here to see a slideshow of Kenne Turner’s San Simon Valley images.
Related articles
-110.860703
Share this:
Like this: