 New
Mexico's San Francisco River
The San Francisco River remains an outlaw kind of place--elusive, forgotten, forever on the frontier. The 'Olde English' cartographers, when they exhausted their charts of the known world, simply scrawled 'Heare There Be Dragons' to fill the empty space. This is what they meant. Born of snowmelt in the Mogollon rim country of Eastern Arizona, the San Francisco flees headlong into New Mexico for more than 90 miles, before whimsically stealing back across the line to ambush the Gila River in its reluctant odyssey to Pacific waters. The 'Frisco and its sometimes runnable tributary, the Blue, are not near any settlement of size. Straddling two states, the area is administered by two different National Forests. One side of the forest is sanctioned Wilderness. The other is designated 'Primitive'--the last such legislative compromise in the continental United States. All this makes it perfect for paddling. In 1536, Spain's Cabeza de Vaca and three broken companions limped out of this area to proclaim that untold riches lay just beyond the proverbial rainbow. His eight years of wandering, and many abandoned dead, enhanced the exotic fantasy. The veiled promise of the 'Seven Cities of Cibola' became fixed in people's imagination. Other expeditions, including that of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, staggered up and down the San Francisco River corridor to embrace an uncertain destiny. Slightly less than 300 years later, James Ohio Pattie, a fur trapper, was perhaps the next non-native to sojourn hereabouts. Pattie stalked beaver, playing hard at that game until the fur market crashed. Many of the region's contemporary landmarks--Angel's Roost, Hell Hole, Do Nothing Canyon--are owed to his legacy. Stockmen enjoyed a halcyon decade in the 1880s and built some sizeable herds. But rainfall in this region is a crapshoot, and the boom didn't last. Today, everyone is gone once again. Human habitation is limited to a few heartbreak ranches on the fringes of the wilderness. Along the river, the stone ruins and fanciful art of the archaic Mogollon people ignite curiosity, but confide no more to us than they did to the legions of Coronado. Paddlers taking to the San Francisco can't help but become absorbed in the region's history. But they also have to pay attention to the river. The current here is quick. Negotiating the many tortured bends and braids in the river channel is a full-time occupation. Rapids are frequent. The canyon walls seek to enmesh, enfold, obstruct; and then, the wildly dissected ramparts ebb unexpectedly, revealing grandly cobbled boulevards like the Mule Creek Box and the confluence with the Blue. It also is a place of contrast. The thirsty watershed can transform the San Francisco from a whispering trickle to a psychotic flood of 15,000 cfs in mere hours, sculpting creative routes, rearranging rocks and rapids. Twisted logjams of century-old cottonwoods that demand a careful portage, disappear in a heartbeat--only to be replaced by some future storm. Gila conglomerate rock, a volcanic stew, rubs shoulders with limestone and sandstone, with more resistant granite and basalt. The formula results in highly stylized 'hoodoo' spires. Everything is vertical, jutting, naked. Once-molten trysts are rudely exposed. The riparian belt at riverside is Upper Sonoran, consisting of willow, cottonwood, sycamore, box elder, ash and walnut. The highlands dash away, run up and through transition zones to alpine, with pockets of aspen, Engleman spruce and white fur. More than 200 avian species nest in or near the canyon. It is raptor heaven, with bald eagle, peregrine, osprey and the endangered Mexican Black Hawk. Desert Bighorn sheep are common. Exotic refugees, like the South American coatimundi, in all its prehensile-tailed glory, slipped the immigration crowd at the border, liked what it found and stayed. Bill Teague, a native-American storyteller from nearby Clifton, Ariz., even tells of jumping a full-grown jaguar once in the region. A three- to five-day run down the 60-mile, uninterrupted middle-reach of the San Francisco has hosted weddings, anniversaries and informal retreats of our tribe. These events are sometimes graced with the vibrant new-green of early spring, sometimes they are garnished with new snow. A favorite lay-over on a broad, grassy bench, is dominated by a single somber cliffdwelling. Holes that once contained supporting roof timbers, watch over camp with the vacant stare of a pair of empty eye sockets. Curious Bighorn approach warily. There's a huge, grandfather tree that serves as night-roost for a flock of resident turkeys. Sequentially, they catapult from the surrounding cliffs to flutter jarringly into the uppermost branches, with all the panache of a score of discarded sack-lunches. Tonight, at moonrise, I strain to hear the far away, yapping chorus of wiley coyote. The melodic competition is soon to have a new player, for this river ecosystem and the surrounding Apache and Gila National Forests are the chosen release site for U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Mexican wolf reintroduction. The ambitious project calls for an eventual density of 120 experimental animals dispersed over a 6,000-square-mile habitat. It seems the bureaucrats have gotten something right this time. That first low, protracted howling will be a watershed moment, synonymous with wilderness, enriching the San Francisco River basin for all of us who care to listen. It is the very reason that modern man goes back to the woods, builds a campfire and watches the night sky. San
Francisco Facts
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