I fell in love with the wild country early. My first trip to Palm Canyon (my dad for all his faults liked to go out into the back country on Sundays) was when I must have been about 12 and I immediately loved the area with its sheer cliffs and palms hidden in steep side canyons. These were immediately captivating. My last trip there was about 1967-68, when I went with two professors at Arizona Western College. Most of my photos are from the late 50s and early 60s and so are in black and white. Taken with a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera, if I remember right. See: en.wikipedia.org/… and www.tripsavvy.com/….
The Kofa and Castle Dome Mountains were two of my favorite places back in the 1950s and 60s. I made the climb to the palms in the main canyon at least three times. It was very rough country and a fall was certainly very dangerous. But I was young and much more able to get around the rocks then I would be now.
In the 1960s I was just getting interested in spiders and so I looked along the trail for what I could find. Under the rocks I found a very strange spider that looked like a cross between a wolf spider (family Lycosidae) and a running crab spider (family Philodromidae), but the eye arrangement was certainly not like the former’s. Several years later I was able to identify it as a Homalynichus in a family with only two species, the Homalychidae. This is a family so unknown that I could only turn up the reference www.biodiversitylibrary.org/…. I also found some neat Phidippus (family Salticidae) at the time, also under rocks. The area is known for Big Horned Sheep and certainly Mountain Lions, but the only other animal that I remember actually seeing was a very irate Black-tailed Rattlesnake that my friend Richard and I disturbed on the cold and windy day in 1960 as we climbed up a side canyon to see an individual palm with a distinct sheath of dead leaves. Years ago the Arizona palms were supposed to be a new species of Washingtonia, distinguished by being self-pruning. It still could be found in some write ups, but as Dick and I found, these were just California Fan Palms Washingtonia filifera, and the so called “self-pruning’ was caused by occasional fires, possibly started by lightning. The isolated palm in the side canyon had not experienced fire and so looked like a normal California Fan Palm. This was confirmed by others later, although we never reported it at the time.
The nearby Castle Dome Mountains also held interesting secrets, as in the rock formed Horse Tanks, a series of tinajas (water-holding rock depressions.) Water in deserts is a drawing card for wildlife. One of the more isolated tanks held the body of a mule deer that had fallen, probably drawn by the smell of moisture.
One of the very first photos that I ever took was of Castle Dome itself. This photo dates from the 1950s and may have been taken with my first camera, a Kodak Brownie that I bought with a little money and some boxtops from a cereal company!