EDITOR'S LETTER

We drove more than a thousand miles to get to Yellowstone. It was a long drive from my boyhood home in rural Wisconsin, and it seemed even longer because I was riding in the camper with my brother. As a collection of words, “riding in the camper” might sound especially comfortable, like a first-class flight to Singapore. But it wasn't all it seems.

Although we had our own beds and plenty of legroom, we couldn't see anything from back there. The small side windows were only slivers of light, and looking through them was like looking through a mail slot in a castle door. There was a bigger window on the back of the camper, but seeing Minnesota and South Dakota in reverse is like playing a Beatles record backward. It's interesting for a few minutes, but it's not the same as hearing it the way George Martin intended. So, we just sat there, like table lamps in the back of a U-Haul.

The drive was long, but there was no other way. There weren't any national parks or national monuments in Wisconsin. We had a national seashore, up on the big lake they call Gitche Gumee, but it wasn't one of the marquee parks, or something you'd see on the cover of National Geographic. It took determination to get to Yellowstone, no matter where you were sitting. We made it, though, and driving through the entrance gate was like driving into the dreams of Henry David Thoreau. It was enchanting and beautiful.

Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic Spring were part of it, but so were the park rangers and their flat hats and the rustic architecture and the wildlife and the gift shops and the scenic overlooks and the unspoiled nature of things. Wallace Stegner was right: National parks are the best idea we ever had. I was hooked. And even then, at the age of 8 or 9, I knew it was important to protect places like Yellowstone. By the time I got to Chiricahua National Monument, two decades later, I was even more convinced.

The first time Arizona Highways did a story about the monument was in September 1925, a year and a half after it was created. The story gives a glowing review. “Someone in the not far distant past execrated Arizona as 'the land that God forgot,” A.H. Gardner wrote. “What a gross calumny! What perverted appraisal of a land infinite in a vast variety of natural phenom-ena,” People like to compare the hoodoos in Chiricahua to those in Bryce Canyon. Like Donny and Marie, there's a definite resemblance. The hoodoos have similar names, too. But the names in Chiricahua are more interesting. In 1925, Mr. Gardner singled out a few.

“The formations,” he wrote, “owing to their semblance to animate objects, have been given names. For instance, there is Andy Gump, the Face, the Lizard, Judge Rumhauser, the Old Hen, the Shoe, the Totem Pole, Thor's Hammer, the Water Jug, Sweet Potato, Punch and Judy, Old Lady Sniff-Sniff, the Sheep, the Three Brothers, the Camel, and hundreds of other rock formations representing almost anything of which one can think.” Old Lady Sniff-Sniff, Andy Gump, Judge Rumhauser ... I've been to Chiricahua at least 20 times, and I've seen thousands of captioned photographs from the park, but I wasn't familiar with any of those names. I was curious, so I asked Suzanne Moody, a longtime park ranger at the monument. “That must be from an old source,” she said, “because most of the named formations, as listed, are no longer recognized. Is it from the Arizona WPA Guide?” “No,” I said. “It's from Arizona Highways — 99 years ago.” Turns out, only Punch and Judy, Thor's Hammer and the Camel still exist. The Sheep would be around, too, Suzanne said, but its “legs” broke off in the 1950s or 1960s, so it's gone. Most of the hoodoos you see today were named by crew members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, during their occupation of the park in the 1930s. Our story was written before that, so Old Lady Sniff-Sniff, Andy Gump and Judge Rumhauser came from somewhere else.

I figured the judge might have been a lawman from Tombstone. He wasn't. He wasn't even real. Judge Alexander Rumhauser was the protagonist in a comic strip called Judge Rummy. The artist was T.A. Dorgan, who created several popular cartoons for newspapers in the Hearst empire. He also ended up in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. In spite of those triumphs, his most enduring legacy is that he coined several American slang expressions, including “dumbbell,” “the cat's meow” and “for crying out loud.” Andy Gump was a character in a comic strip, too, a self-important man who was bald and toothless. And beloved. The Gumps was one of the most popular comic strips in the country in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of those strips are in the Library of Congress. I read a few. They stand the test of time. But not Old Lady Sniff-Sniff. I couldn't find anything about her — it seems she left the world without a trace. Maybe one of you knows something. If you do, please let me know.

Meanwhile, I'll be headed back to the monument later this month, to do some hiking with one of our photographers. It's one of my favorite places in Arizona. And one of my favorite parks in the country. I'd drive a thousand miles to get there. Even in the back of a camper. Happy 100th, Chiricahua National Monument.