Tumamoc Hill
by Jane St. Clair
Tumamoc Hill is a three-mile round-trip to the top and back. It’s where people go in Tucson for a nice easy hike, often with friends and family. It’s got a nice easy wide road, so there’s nothing hard to navigate like hikes with steep rocky cliffs with zillion-mile drop-offs or wide streaming creeks with quicksand. No sir, Tumamoc Hill’s nice and easy.
As a consequence, you see people of all ages and abilities there. The Hill gets over 1,000 hikers a day.
The best thing about Tumamoc Hill are the incredible views of the city. Once you’re at the top, you can see every little thing in Tucson. When you are up that high, it’s easy to pick out landmarks like certain downtown buildings and even radio towers on certain mountains in the distance.
People first lived on Tumamoc Hill fifteen hundred years ago, and they left us hundreds of interesting petroglyphs. When Europeans came to this spot, they used it as a look- out for Apache. The University of Arizona put their desert laboratory here in 1903, which has been operating ever since. Botanists and biologists study plants, reptiles and mammals of the desert on Tumamoc Hill, and their work has been ongoing for decades.
Highways look like swirly spaghetti from up here.
You usually just park your car along the side of the street and then start your trek up the hill from the bottom, where people are selling souvenirs and trinkets. If you want to go intellectual, you can download an app from the University of Arizona. Their lectures divide the hike into six parts with ten-minute talks for each section.
As you start to climb, one of the first things you’ll see is a altar to Our Luminous Mother made by a woman dying of cancer. Designed with a lot of blues and mirrors, the sanctuary is usually covered with milagros.
You walk up a wide paved path, easy-peasy hiking. Many people walk backwards so they don’t miss the views of the city and desert landscape. Some of these views are as breathtaking as the ones you’ll see at prime hiking spots in Tucson like the Saguaro National Monument and Sabino Canyon. About halfway up, you come to the U of A desert laboratory building made of stone.
Tumamoc Hill almost spirals to the top. If you begin to falter before you make it to the summit, keep going. The views up there are worth it, plus you get to see all the buildings where the scientists work.
For some reason unknown to humankind, Tumamoc means deadly lizard, however, they named it that anyway.
To find out all kinds of information about Tumamoc Hill, including how to download the University of Arizona app, go here.