Oracle State Park by Jane St. Clair

Oracle State Park is one of those places that makes you wonder about other people’s lives, and what it was like to live somewhere else in some other time.

Oracle State Park was once someone’s home. Out in the middle of no where and in the middle of the Great Depression, four Midwesterners built themselves a fanciful blue house and took up cattle ranching on this land about twenty miles north of Tucson.

They bought 50,000 acres so barren that it still has only one saguaro.  Oracle State Park is all big piles of rocks and rolling grassland, but it has grand places where you can stand and see for miles and miles and miles. 

If you hike Oracle State Park in late winter, its wilderness has a bleached out quality.  Medium green is a bright color here and stands out among dusty hues of gold, grays, and beige.  You can hike for hours and hours and see for miles and miles but what you won’t see are other people.  It’s just you, land and sky –and the sky goes on forever.

After a while you start seeing details like the way the tall grass can look shiny and wet or the way an orange butterfly flutters on a sagebrush. The vistas are tremendous with snow-topped mountains above that belong now to the entire San Pedro river valley below. Animals live here – grasshoppers, mice, deer, snakes, lizards, mountain lions, jays and hawks– but usually they hide from hikers.

Oracle State Park once belonged to the Kannally family from Illinois.  One of their sons had tuberculosis. He came to Arizona in 1902 as a teenager to find a cure. As his health improved from the dry air and warm climate, Neil Kannally vowed to come back some day and make his home here. He and three other siblings purchased this land and built the dramatic Mediterranean style house on the property in 1929. None of them married, and they lived out here until the last one died in 1976. While they sold most of the property to Magna Copper Company, they also left 4,000 acres to the Defenders of Wildlife, which gave it to the state of Arizona for a park.

The Kannally house is very cool, with its 16-inch thick adobe walls and whimsical paintings of cowboys riding with fairy princesses. This house has no bedrooms – the family slept in various cottages on the land.  It must have been so quiet out there, and so dark at night under a black desert sky stippled with stars. 

This wilderness place makes us wonder about other people’s lives and what it was like to live somewhere.

To plan your visit to Oracle State Park, go here.