The Sky Islands

The Sky Islands sit at a great biological crossroads. Here the Rocky Mountains reach down from the north and the Sierra Madre of Mexico reaches up from the south, while the Sonoran Desert to the west meets the Chihuahuan Desert to the east. Plants and animals from all four of those worlds overlap in these mountains, which is why a birder can find both a northern species and a tropical one on the same slope. Scientists count the region among the most biologically diverse in North America.

Each mountain range is its own separate refuge. When the climate warmed after the last ice age, cool-weather forests survived only by retreating up the mountains, where the air stayed cold enough, and the desert closed in around their feet. The creatures stranded on each peak have been evolving in isolation ever since, which is how these small ranges came to hold species and even subspecies found on one mountain and no other.

The most vivid way to feel the Sky Islands is to drive or hike from bottom to top. You start among saguaro cactus and creosote in the Sonoran Desert, climb into rolling grassland, then into oak woodland dotted with the region's distinctive evergreen oaks. Higher still the oaks give way to tall ponderosa pine, and near the summits of the highest ranges you reach cool forests of Douglas fir, spruce, and quaking aspen that would look at home in the northern Rockies.

Naturalists describe this as passing through a stack of life zones, and the rule of thumb is that climbing a thousand feet in these mountains is roughly like traveling hundreds of miles north. On the tallest ranges, a summer visitor can leave a hundred-degree desert in the morning and be walking in cool pine shade with a jacket on by midday, which is exactly why generations of Tucson and southern Arizona families have escaped up into these mountains through the hot months.

People have lived among and looked to these mountains for thousands of years. The Tohono O'odham and their ancestors have long known this desert and its ranges, and the Apache made the rugged high country of ranges like the Chiricahua and the Dragoons their strongholds through the hard years of the nineteenth century. The leaders Cochise and Geronimo are bound to this landscape, and Apache people remain part of Arizona today.

The Spanish left their mark as well, and the whole national forest that protects much of this high country carries the name Coronado, for the sixteenth-century expedition that passed through this borderland in search of legendary cities of gold. Later came miners, ranchers, and the outposts of the frontier army, but the mountains themselves have always dwarfed the human story played out at their feet.

The Sky Islands are famous among birders, who travel from around the world to canyons like Ramsey and Madera in hopes of tropical species that reach the United States almost nowhere else, including a remarkable variety of hummingbirds and, in a few canyons, the flame-colored elegant trogon. The forests and grasslands also hold black bear, mountain lion, white-tailed and mule deer, coatis, and a returning population of the region's native wildlife.

Each season shows the mountains differently. Spring and early summer are dry and warming, with wildflowers moving up the slopes. The summer monsoon brings dramatic afternoon storms and a burst of green. Fall lights the aspens and canyon maples gold and red at elevation, and draws migrating birds through the canyons. Winter dusts the high peaks with snow while the desert below stays mild, so on a clear day you can look up from warm sunshine at a white mountain crown.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.