Life along the Verde River

I always dreamed that the first time I explored the Verde River would be via kayak, perhaps on a Sierra Club outing where bald eagles soared overhead and red and yellow birds filled the tree canopies. However July's abundance of monsoon rain reminded me that extremely high conditions along the waterway are dangerous, so I wasn't at all disappointed to explore the river from its safe and muddy banks. And it was about time: after driving over the Verde on many bridges hundreds of times during the past thirty-three years, I'd finally be stopping to really experience a small section of it.

I started at Tuzigoot National Monument, the site of the partially reconstructed ruins of an ancient pueblo. First occupied almost a thousand years ago, the dense adobe complex of one hundred and ten rooms sits on a hilltop that's an easy walk to the Verde River. The apartments were the center of a village where the Sinagua population could farm, hunt, and forage near a perennial river. By the time the Spanish explored the area in the seventeenth century, the site was long-abandoned, its citizens probably having joined other pueblo natives like the Hopi to the north or migrating tribes like the Yavapai to the south. What the ex-residents left behind is an archaeologist's dream of discoveries, including the bones of a scarlet macaw, a bird probably obtained from central Mexico through an extensive trade network.

At almost 3,400 feet in elevation, the Central Arizona landscape surrounding Tuzigoot is quite arid compared to the lush environment along the river. On a short walk to a viewing platform over the Tavasci Marsh - a wetland in an oxbow of the Verde - I encountered a variety of desert flora and fauna. Amid cacti and creosote bushes, I discovered a black-throated sparrow, a bird just as happy to call the much lower and drier deserts around Phoenix home. A multitude of lizards scampered across the path - not uncommon anywhere I explored that morning - including a greater earless lizard, a first identification for me. Unfortunately, someone would need a powerful set of binoculars to see the beavers and red-ringed blackbirds that reside in the distant marsh.

However earlier, crossing the Verde River just before reaching the monument's parking lot, a male blue grosbeak singing from a tree reminded me that it's currently summer breeding season for many migratory birds. In fact, Dead Horse Ranch State Park, sprawling to the south just below a tight bend in the river, is the better preserve to find these visitors. Countless native Fremont cottonwoods line the river's shores there and give a variety of wildlife - not just birds - plenty of green habitat.

Staying close to the river in Dead Horse, I hiked the short Canopy Trail, along with sections of the Forest Loop and the Verde River Greenway. I also visited the West Lagoon, one of three small lakes that are filled by working irrigation ditches that remain from the agricultural history of the property. The prevalence of water sustains a thriving population of dragonflies too numerous to even try to count as they skim shorelines rimmed with cattails.

In the woods, I quickly spotted a black-throated gray warbler, most likely an immature or a female. Nearby, ash-throated flycatchers whistled from the treetops. I heard the short, chortled calls of tanagers, and eventually spotted a female summer in the low trees of the parking lot. After hearing its peeps and cackles in one grove of trees, I finally identified a ladder-backed woodpecker at another location. While I missed several shots of male blue grosbeaks, I finally captured one of a female or immature male, dusty rose in color. At the lagoon, a male northern cardinals trilled his songs from a thicket of dense reeds. And a fearless great blue heron allowed me to photograph it from a remarkably close distance.

It's impossible to picture life in Central Arizona without the Verde River, a touchstone that helps measure the health of the entire area's environment. Extending 170 miles from its origin south of the Grand Canyon, the watershed eventually fills two of Phoenix's reservoirs, Horseshoe and Bartlett, before joining the Salt River. Its tributaries include Sycamore Creek, Oak Creek, and Fossil Creek, all riparian ecosystems altered but not unrecognizable from their natural state. The river system hangs on as a critical lifeline for both man and beast, and for an endless variety of flora and fauna, as it has for millennia.