Moon Mountain Vista

Taking a peek back: Colorful historical facts

Apr 27, 2005

The name game

The 1868 General Land Office map identified what are now the Phoenix Mountains simply as "Barren Mountains Unfit for Cultivation." The name Squaw Peak first shows up 35 years later on a General Land Office map from a 1902-03 survey.

Phoenix's first city engineer, Dr. Omar A. Turney, was a surveyor on that expedition and claimed to name it.

It "seemed hardly large enough for a full-sized buck mountain," Turney wrote in 1929, "so (I) named it Squaw Peak."

Turney's decision did not sit well with all Phoenicians. In the 1950s, historian James Barney claimed that early prospectors and cowboys had referred to it not just with the word "Squaw" but also with the female body part some thought it resembled - though respectable folks called it "Phoenix Peak." Barney quoted letters from old-timers who said that the real "Squaw Peak" was a rock formation on the north side of Camelback Mountain.

In 1993, Phoenix City Councilman Calvin C. Goode suggested that the name "Squaw" might be offensive to Native Americans and proposed a change, although his proposal never got out of council chambers. And subsequent efforts to change the name to "Iron Mountain" in 1998 and back to "Phoenix Peak" in 1999 also failed.

Last month, the peak's name was finally changed to honor Pfc. Lori Piestewa of Tuba City, who recently died in combat in Iraq.

Escape route

In December 1944, during World War II, 25 German soldiers escaped from a POW camp set up in Papago Park. Some of the escapees intended to float a boat down the Salt River, which they had seen only on maps. They were sorely disappointed when they discovered that the river was dry. All the prisoners were quickly captured, except for their leader, a U-boat captain, who hid for a month in a cave on Squaw Peak before he was recaptured.

Think pink

Arizona Biltmore's builder, Arthur Chase McArthur, poured a hot-pink concrete sidewalk that ran two miles from the resort to a reservoir on one of the hillsides just south of the peak. Longtime Phoenician Ted Stratton, 52, remembers climbing the fence to the reservoir as a teenager to "make out on the pink sidewalk. It was great because there were palm trees," he says, "and the light would glow off the mountains."

Portions of it still exist, safely guarded behind the gates of an exclusive community, although the reservoir was filled in years ago to make way for development.

Road wars

The 1971 land use plan for the mountain preserve proposed equestrian centers and ampitheaters, nature and outdoor-skills centers north and south of the mountain and on both sides of Dreamy Draw. It also suggested a paved, two-lane, scenic road from Moon Mountian to Tatum Boulevard, following an alignment similar to the current Trail 100. None of those "improvements" was ever made - though that was not the last attempt to ram a road through the preserve. In 1992, local developers proposed a road through the mountains just east of Piestewa Peak to route traffic away from Tatum and to open the preserve to those who didn't have the inclination or the energy to walk in on foot. As if there weren't enough of those already.

Lighting the way

In 1976, a Phoenix nurse named Kay Alderton got permission to set up luminarias on the summit trail. The parks department delivered a ton of sand to the parking lot in November of that year, and Alderton shoveled it into 40-pound sacks, which she packed up the trail and hid. Then, the weekend before Christmas, she and a friend brought 780 paper bags and candles and started setting them up. Hikers asked what they were doing and volunteered to help.

"And before I knew it, we were done, and the club members were coming up to light them," Alderton says. "I thought if it brings that kind of spontaneity out of people, I'll do it again."

She did, 15 times, and it grew larger every year. Parking lots were so jammed that the city started busing in viewers, as many as 15,000 one year.

"It got out of control," Alderton says. People were falling and getting injured in the dark. Vendors were hawking their wares on the trail. And when she found puddles of blood during her day-after cleanup, she decided to pull the plug.

"The trail can't take that kind of use," she says.


Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic
May. 17, 2003 12:00 AM
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