Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Organ Pipe

 Five miles north of Lukeville, on the border with Mexico, is the visitor center and administrative center of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It is a great place to visit and there are lots of great books pertaining to the Sonoran Desert. There is also a short film called "Where Edges Meet" that is about this area.
  Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument covers 330,688 acres. So it is a large park. The park was officially declared a national monument in 1937. The town of Lukeville already existed before then and this is why the townsite is not actually in the park even though maps make it appear that it is. The State of Arizona already owned this land before then and donated it to the federal government during Prohibition to try to stem the tide of illegal liquor being brought in from Mexico. 
  About one mile southwest of the Visitors Center, on a narrow park road, is the Twin Peaks Campground. It has 208 campsites.  I have camped here twice in the past. From my campsite those two nights, I was able to see the lights of Sonoyta, Mexico, in the state of Sonora, plus two other small towns in Mexico. Sonoyta has about 12,000 people and is located directly across the border wall from Lukeville. There is one other formal campground in the park and that is Alamo Canyon, at the end of Alamo Canyon Road. That campground only has only four sites and the road leading to it is a dirt road. It is primitive camping only and there is a maximum of 20 people that can be in the campground at any one time.
  In the winter months, when the weather is pleasant, there are some great ranger programs that take place in the amphitheater at the Twin Peaks Campground and I attended quite a few of those ranger programs during the 18 years that I lived in Arizona.

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