Sabino Canyon Recreation Area

The canyon walls rose 12 million years ago. The creek has been running since before the Hohokam dug their first irrigation ditches in the Santa Cruz valley — some of the earliest canals in North America, a thousand years before Christ. Sabino Canyon is what happens when a desert city keeps one place wild.

The road into the canyon goes 4.5 miles and stops. During the Depression, the WPA and ERA built Sabino Dam and nine stone bridges over the creek, trying to push a road all the way to the top of Mount Lemmon. The terrain at the canyon's end made that impossible. The bridges stayed. In 1978, private cars were banned — the Forest Service wanted the canyon walked, not driven. The shuttle that replaced them now runs on batteries, open to the air, narrated, stopping nine times on the hour round trip.

Thirty miles of trails leave from those stops. Sabino Creek flows almost year-round — snowmelt in winter, monsoon in summer. Riparian corridors snake between saguaros and rock cliffs. Deer, javelina, rattlesnakes. Bobcats if you're patient. Mountain lions if you're unlucky. The creek crosses the road in several places; when the monsoon hits hard, it washes out bridges. A 2006 thunderstorm took out the Rattlesnake Creek crossing and scattered debris across the upper road. The tram stopped running above mile marker 1 until the repairs finished.

The visitor center at 5700 N. Sabino Canyon Road sells maps and answers questions. Friends of Sabino Canyon, founded in 1993, has raised nearly half a million dollars to keep the trails maintained and the Depression-era stonework standing. Over a million people a year come here. Most of them are locals — Tucson treats Sabino like a second home, the place you go when 100 degrees feels like too much pavement and not enough water.