Sabino Canyon | Prairie Haven

Sabino Canyon is in the Santa Catalina Mountains, at the northeastern edge of the city of Tucson. There’s a road up the canyon with bridges across the creek that was built during the 1930s. The road is closed to normal traffic, but it’s used by sightseeing trams that carry visitors up and down the canyon.

During the summer of 2006 some big rainstorms in the mountains sent huge amounts of water down Sabino Creek. The massive amounts of water destroyed parts of the road, and washed rocks and trees from the hillsides onto the pavement.

Here’s a link to the Forest Service story about the flood.

We hadn’t been to Sabino Canyon for several years, so we were interested to see the destruction that the floods had caused. We took the tram as far as it would go – about half way up the road – and walked up the rest of the way.

Views on the way up the canyon

This is the top of the road now. There used to be a big turn-around area for the trams but parts of the road have washed away, and much of the rest is covered with boulders.

Boulders on the road

The forest service hopes to have the top of the road open by the end of this summer.

There are trees along the creek that were bent or broken from the floods.

Otherwise the creek and the hills around it don’t look any different – the flood was hard on the man-made structures, not the natural ones.

There were lots of wildflowers along the road.

Parry’s Penstemon (Penstemon parryi)

Closeup of Parry’s Penstemon

Rose Bladderpod (Lesquerella purpurea)

Closeup of Rose Bladderpod

Fairy Duster (Calliandra eriophylla )

The road crosses and criscrosses the creek, and often the water runs over the road as well as under it.

We had to take off our shoes and wade across. The water isn’t very deep, but it’s from snow melt so it’s very cold.

We walked up past the end of the road, and saw parts of the canyon that we’d never seen before. This is a view down the canyon.

And some of the flowers we saw high up in the canyon.

Desert Hyacinth (Dichelostemma capitatum)

California Poppies ( Eschscholzia californica ssp. mexicana) – they were closed because of the cloudy, wet weather.

Silverleaf Bahia (Bahia absinthifolia)

The air got colder as we walked higher, and eventually we walked into a very wet snowstorm. After getting pretty wet, we decided to head back down to warmer, sunnier places.

Mountains with snowstorm