One of our favorite places here in Tucson is Sabino Canyon, a three mile deep canyon that winds ever deeper into the Santa Catalina Mountains, following the occasionally roaring and usually trickling Sabino Creek.  It begins in the Coronado National Forest, just beyond the easternmost edge of the Tucson suburbs.  The road into the canyon, which passes over nine bridges as it climbs, was built by the Civilian Conservation Corp and Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.  The stone bridges that were built by hand have endured over all these years, even through damaging floods.

My wife's father, who attended the University of Arizona in the mid- to late- Thirties, used to tell us how he and friends used to drive up the road with their dates in the evenings, when the canyon was well beyond the outskirts of the city.  It has long since been closed to cars.  A tram carries visitors back and forth now, the driver pointing out various kinds of cacti and rock formations to visitors along the way, telling folklore about the valley.  We've heard it all of course, many different times, as we have been visiting Tucson well on 25 years now, so much so that we could fill in the blanks if asked, could recite the names of cacti he fails to mention --- the saguaro, ocotillo, palo verde, prickly pear, cholla, barrel cactus, cottonwood, and so on.  They are all so familiar and yet like distant relatives whose stories we love to hear every time we visit.

Today, at my daughter's wish, we are hiking the Phone Line Trail, which traverses the length of the canyon, only about two thousand feet (or forty stories) higher than the canyon floor.  From the last tram stop, #9, there is a moderately difficult half mile of switchbacks by which most of the elevation is gained, and then the rest of the trail is fairly level and easy to walk, provided, of course, that you watch for rattlesnakes and don't veer off trail (and off mountain).  Today the trail was filled with patches of purple and golden poppies, as the area has had relatively good rain recently.  Sabino Creek is flowing well, filled with rainwater and very cold snowmelt, even lapping over the tops of the bridges by a couple inches --- perfectly passable and yet bracing for wading.

It's a warm 86 today, and yet the breezes keep it from being too hot.  It's not possible to sum up the sweep of the landscape --- the deep and wide blue sky, the contrast with the browns of earth and canyon walls, the green lushness of the desert vegetation, and the splashes of wildflower color on canyon walls and farther up in cliff top meadows.  And then there are the sounds --- birds all around, the wind in our ears, and the crunch of the rocks on the path as we walk.  Down below, the tram passes about every half hour, like an earthworm inching up the road.

Sometimes we're quiet.  Sometimes we talk.  We remember other trips into the canyon, like the time I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake.  Both my children were strolled into the canyon before they could walk, my son as early as when he was six weeks old.  They have grown up coming here and likely will bring their own children here.  That is a pleasant thought.

I can't help but think Psalm 107 as I see the lushness of the desert: "He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water."  You often think of deserts as desolate, lifeless places, but it's not so.  This one is alive.  And it's life to us, to our family, a place of solitude, remembrance, and peace.  It's annual strangeness sharpens our senses, our awareness of Creation, and our appreciation of each other.

At the end of the trail, we switchback the half mile down to the creek, our knees feeling the stress by the end.  We find a shallow place to cross the river, which at its deepest is above our knees.  By the time we reach the other side, my feet are numb.  I sit on the rocks in the sun and rest and watch others attempt to cross.  I remember carrying my son across on my back years back, the water raging, losing one shoe to the current.  Today, I won't try it.