Top picture: Rock Profile of Cochise's Face
Middle Picture: Organ Pipe Rock Formation
Bottom Picture: Distant Mountains were once the Apache Stronghold
Our visit to the Chiricahua National Monument left us dazzled; first by the rock formations and the richness of the environment and then by the history of the area.
Okay, the teacher in me is not entirely retired! So humor me, already!
The Chiricahua National monument is the intersection of two deserts and two "sky island" mountain ranges, creating a biological diversity rarely found anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. In plain language, that means that there is an incredible variety of plants and animals concentrated in a small area.
27 million years ago, the Turkey Creek volcano erupted, with a magnitude that dwarfed the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption by 1,000 times. Super-heated ash particles spewed into the air and melted together, forming layers of rhyolite rock. Cooling and uplifting created joints and cracks in the rock. Wind, rain, freezing and thawing have broken down the softer rock and have created "the land of standing-up rocks", formations from the remaining harder rock that are dazzling. The pictures tell the story best.
The Chokonen band of the Chiricahua Apache Nation made their home in these mountains for many hundreds of years, hunting large game and gathering edible plants. After the Mexican independence in 1821, the Apache warriors, lead by Cochise and Geronimo, fought the encroachment of the white settlers. Despite their efforts, these indigenous people were forced onto reservations in Oklahoma and New Mexico.
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