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By Georgie Wood
(ggannwood@yahoo.com)
During the time when so many more people were hiking to the Aravaipa Canyon Primitive Area that had been established in January of 1969 by the Secretary of the Interior, and after we had sold our Wood Brothers Panorama Ranch in 1970 to the Nature Conservancy (TNC), a hiker to the creek, who had parked his car in our front lot, ran over one of our dogs, “Cloud”, an Australian Blue Heeler. Visiting us at that time was conservationist Ted Steele of Tucson who was an Arizona Director for the Defenders of Wildlife (DOW). When Ted Steele saw this happen, he was distressed enough to want to beat on the man with his cane, but he didn’t. Our poor Cloud had to be “put down”.
In 1971, several groups of hikers were caught in the canyon during a flood and had to wait it out in a cave at the mouth of Virgus Canyon. That cave is called “Apache Kid Cave” because it is supposed to be where the Apache Kid was born. The hikers shared what food they had, and some were packed out horseback by Cliff and his brother Fred Wood after the creek went down.
A California lady wrote us in May of 1971 that during her hike she had found it very disturbing to see the presence of cattle in the creek, the cattle “chips”, and the many fire rings left by campers. Also disturbing to her was the presence of a church group of about 30 people, counting the children and their advisors, and the children yelling and screaming. Her letter, a long one, was full of suggestions, probably because she happened to be a member of the Sierra Club.
It was in 1972, the year that Cliff’s and my son, Neal, turned 16 years old, when Cliff and Neal opened our front door when someone knocked on it. Standing outside was a man and woman who said that they couldn’t find the woman’s clothes that had been left on a rock by the side of the creek. She was dressed only in a bikini and a towel.
After TNC’s mortgage on the Panorama Ranch had been assumed by DOW in April of 1972, and when our son, Neal, was in his last year of high school in Kearny in 1974, he took a horseback ride up the creek with the DOW Preserve Ranger, Larry Coak, and a very attractive, blonde lady, Anne La Bastille, Ph.D., of the Office of International and Environmental Programs, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. After Anne arrived back in Washington, she wrote us a very nice letter and sent us a copy of what she had written about her trip to the Aravaipa, in which Neal was written as a young wrangler on that ride. I still don’t know if Neal was kidding or not when he told us that he had asked Anne if she wanted to go skinny dipping in the creek!
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