Hi, all! I’m Becca Thompson, the new field coordinator for Sky Island Alliance. You’ll see me helping Sarah and Bryon with fieldwork and volunteer support. I wanted to introduce myself by sharing
It’s a perfect afternoon in early spring when my friend and I decide to drive the winding road up to Montezuma Pass. Forty minutes until sunset. We take the miles slowly, every hairpin turn and switchback giving us a new view of the mountains. I almost ask to stop the car so we can admire the lichens glowing on the cliffs.
At the pass, it’s cold. Sometimes it snows in April, and there’s a light layer of it in the grass around the parking lot. Twenty minutes until sunset now. I chase my friend’s kid around with snowballs and toss a few at the dog for good measure. Within minutes we’re laughing so hard that it’s difficult to run.
It’s spectacular tonight. Looking west you can see as far as the Baboquivaris. As you trace back to the Huachucas, you see the Tumacacoris, San Cayetanos, Santa Ritas, Patagonias, and Canelo Hills. Below in the San Rafael Valley, ripples of mesquite and oak rise into low slopes with juniper, and there’s the ghost of an old homestead with bigger trees not too far from the pass. A few cattle tanks dot the lowlands to the south of here, followed by more beautiful valley and endless mountains in Mexico. Storm clouds and sunlight interplay across the sky.
The rocks, the rocks, the rocks. We look northeast, where the cliff faces are catching the last rays of light on the south end of the Huachucas. Pink, amber, sienna, gray, and olive braid together, different every minute. There are no words for the colors above us — we have not yet named so many shades of blue. I can’t capture how beautiful it is with a camera. I’ve tried. You’ll just have to go there when sunset is drenching every part of the landscape and take it all in yourself.
On the east side of the pass, you can see the wall — a tight slash stretching all the way to New Mexico. I turn my eyes back west.
As I write this, you can still go up to Montezuma Pass, stare toward the southwest, and not know where the border is. There is a fence — a small vehicle barrier — but it’s invisible from this far away. The easiest way for me to find it is to look for headlights from Border Patrol as they drive the easement, or to spot the chokes of dust swirling into the air from people driving the border road too fast. They’re passenger trucks now, but heavy equipment and larger construction trucks are slated to come soon. It’s quiet at this spot tonight, but it seems likely that noise from wall construction will rip through the air and reach us all the way up here, maybe within months. It’s constantly on my mind.
Like so many people, I love this place. Some people who love this place think it would be best served with a giant steel and concrete wall. I have seen no poll results from the animals, plants, and networks of bacteria and fungi under the soil, or from the washes and mountains themselves about whether they want a border wall, or what they think the border wall would do. But I think all the time about how it will affect them.
I try to take comfort in the impermanence of everything. The sunset, the deer, the snow, the wall. The Paleozoic volcanoes that produced parts of these mountains, the Cretaceous earthquakes that produced other parts. It all came to an end. Border barriers have been built throughout human history, and most of them fall down quickly.
The sun is tucking behind the mountains now. Red wine and gold hues spill out and twilight sets in. We get our supper — venison curry made with a buck my friends hunted in the Dragoons — and we begin to eat. Wet with snow, full of hot food, looking at the San Rafael Valley opening beneath us under an endless sky, we all feel so lucky.
I wanted to work at SIA because of evenings like this, and because I believe in people working together across borders, cultures, and mountain ranges to preserve the places we call home. This month, we’re asking interested people to get out to the San Rafael Valley and survey springs close to the border before construction begins on the wall. If you go out spring seeking and have some extra time, I certainly recommend driving up Montezuma Canyon Road for sunset at Montezuma Pass.
Looking forward to meeting all of you soon — Becca Thompson