William Carr and Arthur Pack opened the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum on Labor Day 1952, twelve miles west of Tucson, and the name they chose was either modest or sly — because what they built wasn't a museum in any conventional sense. Ninety-eight acres of bajada and rock, two miles of trail, 230 animal species and 1,200 plant varieties, all of them native to the Sonoran Desert that begins exactly where the parking lot ends. The animals live in enclosures designed to resemble the desert because they came from it. The plants outside the gates are the same ones labeled on the path inside. Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch and paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews sat on the early board, lending weight to something that could have been roadside novelty. Instead it became the argument — made at walking pace, under open sky — for why this particular desert, and everything living in it, is worth protecting.
