3:16 California botanist here. I traveled through the Madrean chaparral for the first time while collecting for my PhD, and I knew ahead of time that there was this "interior chaparral" out there, but boy howdy I wasn't really prepared for how chaparraly it actually is. I about lost it when I ran into a sugar bush, _Rhus ovata_ ... It is so weird to drive through hours and hours of desert and then run into a plant that is so emblematic of coastal California. Mind blown.
I'm from S CA and totally love the chaparral there. Been in Tucson for 40 years. Some fabulous chaparral in the Catalinas and Santa Ritas here, if you ever get the chance.
Thank you for your video. 74 year old Tucson native here and we love our Sky Islands. They make summers liveable. My great grandfather and great uncles worked the Lavender Pit in Bisbee, grandmother went to school in Bisbee in early 1920s. Have traveled world wide, and lived in many other beautiful locations around the world, but Arizona lives in your soul and we always come home.
One of the best sky islands in Southeast Arizona is Mt. Graham, literally you go from 2,000ft. to 11000 ft in 20 miles. There's a paved road that goes all the way to the top. At the top you feel like you're standing on a commercial airliner in flight. You can see all the mountains this guy describes from the top of Mt Graham.
I live near the santa catalinas which are a sky island. For those who dont know if you start at the bottom of the mountain and travel to the top,its like driving from mexico to canada with regards to climate and fauna.
I had the privilege of hiking across many parts of two hemispheres for my geology education...I'm now in Tucson and hike the sky islands every weekend. This is the finest hiking and birdwatching I've ever experienced
Dude... I live in a cave on the Colorado River every winter just South of Erinsburg. What no one ever talks about is all the evidence of ancient flooding their. The debris piles are hundreds of feet tall, full of petrified wood, dinosaur bones and fossilized coral everywhere. Pretty Cool stuff, thanks for the video
I love this, thank you for such an expansive exploration of the geography of AZ; I live here and am obsessed with the strangeness of the landscape and the weather it creates.
I really enjoyed your video. Thank you for sharing your pictures and information. Am subscribing and sharing with my elderly father, he can't get out and around anymore but videos like this interest him and give a lot of visual, I think he will enjoy them.
Definitely check it out! Mount Lemmon, Mount Wrightson, Miller Peak, Bisbee, Chiricahua National Monument, Portal, and Cochise are all areas I recommend!
White Mountain Apache Tribal member here just chillin on the rez in Whiteriver AZ enjoying a vid on my local area, is good to see my home land on youtube, a lot of places in the images iv drove through or walked through just recently if not day before or after posting this comment, thank you for showing our great state of arizona and its natural beauty!
The sky islands are the absolute gem of Arizona. The most bio diversity in all of North America. Treasure troves of ecology. Great job once again on this one, brother. You’re doing the Lord’s work. 🌵🏜️🌲🌎
@@thenaturalexperience2140 I live in Prescott ,grew up here amazing place to be. I can’t wait to check out more of your videos. I am getting ready to do quartzite and tortilla flats. Kind of a little east west travel lol one place I haven’t done anything in my own backyard is granite mountain, I don’t know why, but have you got any videos on it?
sadly no, but I have hiked there! Beautiful place; the reservoir at the bottom contrasts well with the bold beige rocks that are littered all around the mountain. I highly recommend hiking to the trails end, sadly it doesn't take you all the way to the top but you see quite a bit! If you're going to quartzite; check out my King of Arizona video, it shows off a cool wilderness area nearby to there 👍🏻
I’ve only been to mount lemmon but it was gorgeous and so interesting to see the change in biomes as you go up the mountain. Arizona is a beautiful place
Summerhaven up at the top of mount lemmon is such an enjoyable little community; but I highly recommend you check out some of the other mountains when you get the chance; they all have a little something different to offer 🙌🏻
I also found a huge native American agricultural site just off the Colorado River with thousands of morter and pestiles. Every overhang had ancient bee hives under them. A local farmer said his grandfather reused an old canal he found for his fields. What was interesting was after finding thousands of agricultural tools, I didn't find one arrow head. I assume they were nomadic farmers.
What an amazing find; i'd ask you to disclose the location but it's best kept a close secret! A good chunk of native cultures weren't hunters and largely relied on the land for their resources, the colorado river area along the arizona cali border had many Yumen speaking tribes who farmed along its banked since it stayed above freezing in the area essentially year round! Thanks again for sharing!
@@got2kittys interesting, I didn't know that but the hives were very old and I've never seen a bee in that area before, I wonder where they went? Seems like prime area for them
Lots of good information, a lot of which was new to me! Living in Tucson we spend so much time visiting that SE part of the state, the variety in landscape always amazes me. It's our happy place, we can't get enough of it!
A top memory for me is my visit to the Chiricahuas. The first views of Cave Creek Canyon are as dramatic as any landscape anywhere. Then you loop around to the other side and get the National Monument hoodoos. Both things not able to be captured in pictures, but thanks for your great piece!
Amazing! I'm born and raised here in Arizona and I've never explored much of southern Arizona. We really have such an immensely enormous state with so many beautiful places
I live in Tucson and I love to go to our so-called "Sky Island" (it says so on all the signs) Mt. Lemmon as often as possible. In the winter at the top (near a town called Summerhaven), they even have ski slopes equipped with ski lifts and everything! The difference as you go up really is stunning, you really feel like you're gradually being transported to a different ecosystem than the desert we're all used to living in. Evergreens, lush cabbage-like plats, lakes with fish, streams, and the most stunning views of the Sonoran desert gradually fading into this foreign landscape. And the sunsets... I don't think I will ever get used to how obscenely beautiful the sunsets are out here, especially with a view like that. The sounds at night on the mountain are so otherworldly, so clearly different than the desert life, but also so clearly still influenced by the low rainfall and generally harsher climate. It's a remarkable place that I will always hold dear in my heart.
I've been to a good few regions of the US, every morning I have the Sawtooths in all their majesty to look at, but there's something about my home in the desert that keeps me coming back. I climbed Mt lemmon base to peak during springtime and it is.still my favorite hike. The amount you see in about 20 Miles is actually insane.
My passion for many years was off-trail hiking in the Catalinas. I consider one of the best parts of my life. Getting a little too old now for the big hikes anymore.
Wow, this is shockingly similar to Madrid! The chaparral and oak grassland/woodland is what we have surrounding the city and as you go up into the mountains it’s very similar pine forest to the photos shown here. Awesome video, hope to visit Arizona someday.
Really enjoyed watching this video. Have always found this part of the US fascinating. Plan on doing some backroads exploring in the next year. Thanks for the heads-up on the Chiricahua National Mon. what a spectacular looking place. Thanks for sharing.
Cool , i moved from Tucson to Rio Rico just the other side of the mountain from there, big house around 4000 feet love it, moved here when the virus broke out.👍💯
I never realized how beautiful the diversity of wildfire was in Tucson until I was older. Now I’ve come to appreciate the desert and AZ. Awesome video man!
Being in the areas shown in this video, you get a sense that it is not about "you" and the human condition of self just goes away. Been around all of these locations, when my health was better I was able to enjoy them first hand.
This is my 1st time exploring the Arizona Dessert Areas and I've been to Bisbee and Sierra Vista and surrounds/ Your video and narration here is excellent. I'll be back in the fall.
Wow ive been to so many different places in this state & thought i had seen it all. But you covered several in one video that ive never been to. Awesome job. I try to tell ppl about the sky islands whenever i hear someone talking disparagingly about a
Nice video. Well done! I live just a few miles from Saguaro NF East. I drive the loop often and hike as health permits. I also enjoy the Parker Canyon Lake area as well.
Crown King is a sky island. Obviously not part of the group discussed here but a sky island none the less. At the base is pretty dry desert and its almost shocking the first time you reach the top.
I've been up to Crown King! The little diner next to the general store up there has surprisingly good wings! Another great sky island in Arizona is Hualapai near Kingman; definitely worth the trip if you get the chance (:
11:06 Another good example of this is Navajo Mountain, in Navajo Nation. Not easy to get to, but the thing is just one giant hunk of mountain all by itself. Really makes it clear the effect that the topography has on the vegetation/ecology.
This would have been a perfect video to show my father, he was sure that all of Arizona was low desert scrub and that there was no biodiversity here. When I was little, he taught me all the scientific names for all the trees in NW MT, where I was born & raised. He would have been surprised to hear that we have Doug Fir. I tried to tell him about the Sky Islands, but he never saw them before he passed. He'd spent 26 years working for the USFS, and wrote a lot of contracts for thinning and clearcutting sections of forest before environmental groups started suing every proposed contract. 😢 He knew and loved the forests more than he liked most people.
thanks so much for sharing, I relate a lot to this, so many folks think AZ is just scrubs and cactus and I am hoping videos like this will change peoples opinions on that
how do you only have 500 subs?! and 43k in views? i was just driving through a canyon from the 83 to green valley looking for gold mines lol, i loved this video!
Hearing about the tribes that occupied these places and eventually removed from them is sad when you realize that nobody else really lives there today. Why tf did anyone ever need to bother them???
western expansion is a hard topic to cover; a lot of it doesn't make sense, in some cases they took the land just because they could... very sad indeed
There are places in the high desert where there is sand as fine as anywhere in the world. Sea shells all the way up near flagstaff. You can see the stages and watermarks way up in the mountains.
Yeah... sadly that is just one of several tragic events that happened to native peoples in the region. History is always fun to learn about but some parts of it are just straight up sad ):
So important to witness and remember. I did not previously know about this one, but it reminded me of the Grattan massacre: stolen cow, peacefully camped Native Am's wave white flag, oh well.... Sand Creek was also predominantly women and children. We need to be aware that non-combatants are fair game if your brain is full of racist hate, or religious hate.
Fantastic channel and narration. Look up JonLevi he does videos about old world architecture and in depth analysis of it. You sound so calming like him it's great man keep it up.
Thanks for the video. Is there a variety of oak called Madrean? at 3:15 you mention all the other oaks and Madrean Oak. Can't find that variety on a search, please help with this identification. Thanks !
I was using it as a general term to refer to the huge number of evergreen oak in the woodlands; some of these mountains contain around 1/4 of the entire worlds species of Oak trees!
Mount Lemmon above Tucson was my first introduction to this topic. The ecology from bottom to top in elevation was pretty cool. My brother lives there, I do not 😉.
Very helpful video… Do you know what regions in Arizona would be considered part of the mixed conifer area you mentioned? For example, are there any cities nearby any mixed conifer areas? I ask because I am looking for land and I thought it very interesting you described the mixed conifer areas as having the most rain water. Thank you
Yes! So the only city I know of that is super close to the mixed conifer zone in Arizona is Flagstaff! It's 7,000ft above sea level and gets nearly 100 inches of snow annually. If you're looking for a place in Southern AZ; try Summerhaven it's a small community located in the sky island mountains outside of Tucson. 👍🏻
Tucson less than an hour away from mixed conifer in the Catalina Mtns. Mt Wrightson to the south is close to Sonoita & Green Valley; north of Phoenix is Prescott. and its mountains. In fact, all over AZ there are dynamic cities and towns near forest, every area of the state, with skiing in at least three mountain ranges. Many of the images in this video are near Tucson.
it does widely vary, sometimes you will see entire juniper forests below 4,000; the scale I used was a general ecology scale for the region. Thanks for sharing
I love the white mountains; pinetop is such a nice little down, and all the little reservoirs in the region (like big lake) are such peaceful places to be
That massacre is godawful to hear about. Sounds almost as barbaric as the Sand Creek episode. The sky islands are indeed amazing--like so much of the Colorado Plateau and adjacent regions. America is so endowed--if we conserve it.
the actions against Native peoples in America's past and even in some regard today; is extremely frustrating and sad, i'm hoping to shed some light on that. I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
I've gotten about 400 in the past 11 days! it's been wild and i'm absolutely grateful. I checked out your channel; some absolutely wicked hikes! I'm jealous of your summit of Baboquivari!
'Native Hope' is the source I used; if you watch the video I reference the apache right before I mention geronimo and state that he was "one of their warrior leaders"
my friend; the graph I showed was a simple generalized breakdown of ecology of the Sky Islands; im sure it differs; and I personally have seen the elevation numbers vary. But stats are stats, and from experience I can say the diagram is pretty close to truth 🙏🏻
