Ajo and Organ Pipe

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Volcanic tufa of Ajo Mountains in Organ Pipe National Monument

I decided not to go the Mexican route to Organ Pipe, so I just got on I-8 and turned south at Gila Bend. This town has to be one of the most unattractive in the country. Out in the middle of the desert, it has nothing but motels and tourist services, next to the freeway. There is one attraction: the Sonic Motel and Grill. This queer establishment was built just after we launched our first satellite, and the whole place has a strange, space-age theme. Space-age, that is, as conceived in 1960. Tail-fins and sputniks and bouffant hairdos. Very strange. I stayed there once. It turns out each room has photos of rockets or missiles. And there is a big one outside on the lawn, right in front of the office. One of the last of that vanishing American breed, the Roadside Attraction.

The fifty-mile drive between Gila Bend and Ajo is very lovely, if desolate. There is absolutely nothing between the two towns except gorgeous scenery ~ desert and mountains. This time of year of this particular year is glorious. There has been so much rain that everything is blooming. I got a room in one of Ajo’s cruddy little motels, and some Chinese take-out at the only restaurant that was open (they didn’t serve tofu!), and went to bed early.

Ajo is a tiny town at the edge of the world. Phelps-Dodge still operates a mine there, which keeps the place going, I guess. There is a great old two-story adobe hotel “The Cornelia”, which is for sale for $2 mil., and a nice new plaza and spiffy RC Church, which looks like a miniature San Xavier (the great Mission south of Tucson).

Aside from the mine, there is nearby (30 miles) Organ Pipe National Monument. This is one of my favorite places. It is located just West of the Tohono O’Odham Reservation, which extends a hundred miles to the east, almost to Tucson. And west of Ajo and Organ Pipe is all military. Off limits. (I guess they run bus-tours now sometimes). The Luke Airforce Base and the Goldwater Missile Range (where they test the missiles). All the way to Yuma and the Colorado.

There is a border crossing, which has a motel, a general store, and a postoffice on the US side, a little town called Sonoita in Mexico. The Postal service calls the place “Lukeville”, but everybody else calls it Gringo Pass. Very remote. But the park is one of the best.. A highway runs North/South from Why?, AZ (I’m not making this up) to Gringo Pass, bisecting the Park, which has two long, one-way loop drives. The one to the west is now closed because of danger from coyotes (human smugglers). (A ranger was recently killed.) Meanwhile, they are building the “fence” right along the road that leads to Quitobaquito Springs. This is a real desert Oasis, with a little lake and lush vegetation ~ in the old days, the only natural water for a hundred miles in any direction.

The ranger said that they were thinking of running bus tours out there. I hope so. It’s way too bad to have it closed, because this section of the park includes the best stands of organ pipe cactus. (The Monument is the only place in the US where these plants grow wild.) It also contains the canyon that has elephant trees, which produce the aromatic gum (copal), which is a relative of frankincense. The motel lady in Ajo said that lots of undocumented Mexicans were coming to work on the “fence”! At $23/hour, it beats the shit out of wages at home, which as I learned in Puerto Vallarta were $.50/hour for unskilled labor. Another irony is that most of the structure is electronic ~ motion sensors ~ which we are assured can tell the difference between humans and deer and coyotes.

Fairy Duster

Brittle Bush
The other loop drive, to the east, winds up the side of the Ajo Mountains. I guess somebody thought they looked like garlic heads, because that’s what the word means. Well, they are kind of bulbous and whorly. They are volcanic, and the tufa rock they contain is quite spectacular. This year, they are covered with brilliant displays of brittlebush and Mexican poppies (yellow), lupine (lavender), desert asters (white), penstamen (red-violet), and more. From a distance, the mountainside looks gold, in some places.

I made a short video of the flowers around the visitor center. I think I have filled the commenary with disinformation: the "Mexican Poppies" are there (somewhere), but the brilliant yellow flowers on a bush are Brittlebush. And the "juvenile Palo Verde" is in fact an Acacia, I think. (They are more of a golden yellow than the Palo Verde, which isn't out yet.) This video

After another night in Ajo, I drove through the Reservation to Tucson. Almost the entire way, the road was flanked on both sides by ribbons of lupine, sometimes mixed with the yellow flowers. And from certain perspectives, the desert floor was carpeted as far as the eye could see. The famous “carpet of flowers.” In this case Mexican Poppies mixed with lupine .

Here is a video showing a magnificent stand of saguaros on the way up to the Ajo Mountains.