EDITOR'S LETTER

Emily Dickinson wrote poems about summer. She wrote many poems about summer. Shakespeare wrote about summer, too. And so did William Blake and Carl Sandburg and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Summer inspires expression and lyricism. It's where the lazy days can be found. And it's a respite, of sorts. From long winters and tax returns and too much homework. Summer, in so many ways, is the season we all count down to. It's the time of year when we load up the station wagon and hit the road. Usually to someplace cool and detached.

In New York, the road trip is to the Hamptons. In Boston, the Berkshires. For those of us who live in the Sonoran Desert, it's a scenic drive to the White Mountains. It's where we go to chill out, wind down and decompress. It's not the only place in Arizona, but when it comes to that therapeutic combination of lakes, rivers, mountains, meadows and trees, there's no place better than the White Mountains. We've been preaching that since our second issue.

"The White Mountains are now open and accessible to the public," Editor Vincent J. Keating wrote in May 1925. "The Rice-Springerville highway is in such condition that a trip by automobile through the heart of the mountains may be made without the least difficulty. All who visit this section this summer will be delighted with the beauties of the mountains, the magnificent forests, the enticing trout streams and the invigorating air."

That was the beginning, but hardly the end. We've published hundreds of stories about the White Mountains in the decades since, including a beautiful piece in our July 1945 issue titled White Mountain Country . It was written by Joyce Rockwood Muench, who was the wife of longtime contributor Josef Muench and the mother of world-renowned photographer David Muench. Although the men made "Muench" a household name in this magazine, Mrs. Muench was every bit as talented. They used f-stops and long exposures. She used vowels and consonants.

"Hills roll up in a never ending succession," she wrote, "as full of motion as the ocean itself. But these waves are carpeted with the green of leaves and ferns and trees. Trees and trees and more trees. Big old alligator-barked junipers that may remember Coronado, and lithe aspens with their graceful, everlasting dance, aspens that follow where a fire has been, springing up to cover the naked wounds of the earth and make her forget the loss of her darker children, the pines and firs.

It's been more than seven decades since she wrote those lovely words, but the allure of the White Mountains — a place where "the world is hushed and beauty lies in every hollow and on every hill" — remains the same. And so do the points of interest she described: fishermen fishing on Big Lake, pastoral scenes along the Coronado Trail, the trickling water of the Little Colorado River. In fact, if we didn't point out the original date at the top of the story, you might think we'd found a present-day Emily Dickinson to write an epic poem about the sublime nature of summer in the White Mountains. Instead, we rummaged through our archives and found a classic. And when we wanted more, we called Jo Baeza.

If you're a longtime reader of Arizona Highways, you know Jo Baeza. She's been writing for us since she threw "some warm clothes" and her "cow dog" into a Ford Galaxie and moved to the White Mountains. She was looking for "a simple life among good people in a beautiful place." And she found it at a cabin on Hawley Lake. "I could look out the window in the morning and see a herd of 30 or more elk grazing in the meadow below," she writes in At Home in the Woods. "Ospreys circled the lake, a wintering bald eagle perched on a snag, coyotes sang their night song, my dog was drunk on wild scents, and I was all alone with the sound of silence."

In her newest essay, she writes about the allure of the White Mountains. Why she moved there. Why she stayed. Why it's cool and detached. It's a wonderful collection of words that makes her the longest-tenured writer in the history of this magazine. Thank you, Jo. For all of the characters and settings and plots over the years. We're grateful. And indebted.

Like Jo Baeza and Joyce Rockwood Muench, Kelly Vaughn writes about the White Mountains, too. Her theme this month is Escudilla Mountain, a place that helped inspire Aldo Leopold's theories on conservation. Grizzly bears, Mexican wolves, endless groves of quaking aspens... it was an ecological wonderland. Today, though, it's not the same. In the aftermath of the Wallow Fire, not even Emily Dickinson could bring the scorched earth of the mountain back to life. Kelly, however, through her own powerful words, tempts us with hope.

"A year after the fire, maybe longer," she writes in Like a Mountain, "I drove one of the scenic roads that cut across Escudilla. It was late summer or early fall, and although there was so much char from the burn, thin tufts of grass sprung from the earth like hope."

Hope. Right now, that's all we have. But someday, maybe, our grandchildren's children will get to rediscover Escudilla. Maybe. Meantime, there are many other ways to chill out, wind down and decompress in the White Mountains. All you need is a good station wagon.