State land access closed in 36b

[vegasjeep]

Vehicle access into Brown Canyon for hunters has been closed for at least 35 years that I know of, long before the USFWS acquired it for its refuge. That canyon was one of the places I wrote about in a series of articles I did for the Tucson Citizen way back in the early 1980s. Before that, a hunter had sued the State Land Department director for malfeasance for not prosecuting a landowner who had locked the gate at the canyon's entrance. The hunter lost the lawsuit. A few years after that when the landowner sold his holdings, wildlife artist Ray Harm bought the big house in the canyon and continued to keep hunters out. After the feds bought everything in the canyon, the refuge manager tried to close the entire canyon to hunting, including some state land. Here's what the USFWS website says now:

 

Hunting

Hunting is permitted on approximately 90% of the Refuge. In addition to all Arizona State Hunting Regulations, there are several Refuge-specific regulations that are in effect and must be followed. Please refer to the Refuge Hunt Brochure for a hunt map and listing of current regulations specific to Buenos Aires National wildlife Refuge. State regulations pertaining to hunting can be found at the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s website:

http://www.gf.state.az.us/

 

Access

Hunting is not permitted in high public use areas and near residences. These NO HUNT ZONES are posted on the ground and are identified in the Refuge Hunt Brochure. Brochures are available at Refuge Visitor Centers and brochure boxes posted throughout the Refuge. Motorized vehicles are restricted to roadways. Access may be limited by weather conditions. Refuge land in Brown Canyon is closed to hunting. Hunter access to state land in Brown Canyon is limited. All hunters must sign in and out and must follow designated routes of travel.

 

Bill Quimby

 

I know you know the area really well but the area im talking about was private land owned by the lopez's at one time and is now leased by the cattleman farmer Chilton. Its the old Hanus (sp?) pond. Im guessing you might be talking about Don locking it? Same property?

Chilton gave us permission to hunt on HIS leased land and the game warden said he does not care. Im not so sure that is over stepping his boundry though

 

[RoughCut]

Unless I'm missing something, there's nothing new here. Vehicle access into Brown Canyon for hunters has been closed for at least 35 years that I know of, and that means long before the USFWS acquired it for its refuge.

 

That canyon was one of the places I wrote about in a series of articles about the increased loss of access to public lands that I did for the Tucson Citizen way back in the early 1980s. Before that, a hunter had sued the State Land Department director for malfeasance for not prosecuting a landowner who had locked the gate at the canyon's entrance. The hunter lost the lawsuit. The landowner disliked hunting so much, he began setting off dynamite charges during the hunting season, hoping to scare deer away from hunters. (The deer I watched when I hunted there paid no attention to the noise.)

 

When that landowner sold his holdings, wildlife artist Ray Harm bought them and continued to keep hunters out. After the feds acquired everything in the canyon, the refuge manager moved to close all of Brown Canyon to hunting, but couldn't close the state land. Here's what the USFWS website says now:

 

Hunting

Hunting is permitted on approximately 90% of the Refuge. In addition to all Arizona State Hunting Regulations, there are several Refuge-specific regulations that are in effect and must be followed. Please refer to the Refuge Hunt Brochure for a hunt map and listing of current regulations specific to Buenos Aires National wildlife Refuge. State regulations pertaining to hunting can be found at the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s website:

http://www.gf.state.az.us/

 

Access

Hunting is not permitted in high public use areas and near residences. These NO HUNT ZONES are posted on the ground and are identified in the Refuge Hunt Brochure. Brochures are available at Refuge Visitor Centers and brochure boxes posted throughout the Refuge. Motorized vehicles are restricted to roadways. Access may be limited by weather conditions. Refuge land in Brown Canyon is closed to hunting. Hunter access to state land in Brown Canyon is limited. All hunters must sign in and out and must follow designated routes of travel.

 

Bill Quimby

 

 

Mr. Quimby

 

Thanks for the great info and I apologize if there are threads on this Brown Canyon topic already. If you know the link I would love to check it out. Are the boundries of this refuge marked with fence line or signage? All I know is I was at the Brown Canyon Kiosk and talk about a neglected weather ridden booger it was. The little handout brochures were faded and wrinkled from being rained on and in the sun for so long I couldn't even read them. Is there a better place to get information on where exactly I can and can't set foot? Not lookign to hunt in the area, just around it and don't want to cause a raucous. I'm all about being a ethical and legal hunting but it sure seems fishy in this area, or so it seems.

 

As always, thanks for your input and knowledge.

[billrquimby]

Rough Cut:

I don't remember any discussion of Brown Canyon on coueswhitetail.com, but the USFWS website where I got that information is:

 

http://www.fws.gov/southwest/refuges/arizona/buenosaires/

 

Vegasjeep:

We used to hunt Brown, Thomas and Sabino canyons (the one in the Baboquivaris and not the Catalinas) a lot of whitetails and javelinas, but it's been at least 20 years since I was down there. I remember a windmill just inside the canyon, but no ponds. Unfortunately, I also don't remember a Chilton, Hanus or Lopez owning land in the canyon itself. There were some small properties outside, but we typically drove to the locked gate just past the windmill, parked, and climbed to hunt deer and pigs. I also did a lot of lion hunting from horseback on the ridges above the three canyons and up to the peak, but we almost always rode in from the dude ranch in Sabino Canyon. There always were a lot of deer and lions there, and I assume little has changed.

 

The following is from my book, Sixty Years A Hunter. It tells about one of my hunts that went wrong above Brown Canyon:

 

... Hunting only on weekends I then spent a total of fifty-seven days over three years -- nearly two months of my life -- following hounds on horseback with three different houndsmen before I finally took my lion. I began by hooking up with a man named Gene Clayburn. He was not a professional guide, but he liked to run his hounds and wanted company. He and I shared expenses and followed his dogs all over the Chiricahua, Sierra Ancha, Baboquivari, Catalina, and Santa Rita mountains and chased a lot of lesser game. We even chased a few lions but I never had an opportunity to take one with him.

 

Gene liked to hunt a place he called “The Lions' Kitchen” on the ridge between Brown and Thomas canyons in the Baboquivari Mountains twenty miles north of the Mexican border southwest of Tucson. He called it that because we sometimes found Coues deer that had been killed, partially eaten, and covered with dirt and brush by lions there. It’s still one of the better places in southern Arizona to find a mountain lion.

 

Gene had a buckskin gelding he called “Sam” that I became attached to the first time I rode it in the mountains. It was an old, gentle, sure-footed animal, and it didn’t panic in brush or rocks as some horses do. I felt safe on that horse so I bought it from him. I enjoyed riding Sam and hunting with Gene even though we never caught a lion. We spent some interesting days together, dragging our mounts through brush and across shale slopes, and up hill and down dale because neither of us knew where to find the horse trails that cattlemen have made in every mountain range in our part of the country.

 

We also spent a miserable night trapped on a cold, wind-blown ridge. It was the last day of 1970 and a rancher had called Gene to say a lion had killed one of his calves the previous day and probably returned to the kill site that night, so the trail should still be hot. It was our opportunity to break my lion jinx so we loaded our horses and his dogs and went hunting. Jean and I had been invited to a New Year’s Eve party that evening, and I told her I’d join her at the party if I got home late.

 

What was intended to be a half-day hunt was a disaster. The lion’s scent took Gene and I, along with a friend named Richard Kane, up Brown Canyon, across Lions' Kitchen, and then along the ridge above Thomas Canyon all the way to the base of Baboquivari Peak. We’d reached the point we’d decided we should turn around and follow our trail back if the dogs didn’t bump the lion in the next half hour. We’d ridden the same trails on previous hunts and it had never taken us more than four or five hours to make the loop.

 

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way this time. Richard’s horse was a handsome and expensive black quarterhorse that had little experience with rocks and rough mountains. It panicked as the three of us were leading our mounts across an especially nasty shale-covered slope. It jerked the reins out of Richard’s hand and tried to bolt uphill but it was too steep and when the horse began sliding on the shale it reared up and rolled backward down the slope. In the excitement Sam and Gene’s horse broke away from us, too, but they made it to the top of the ridge. We could only watch in horror as Richard’s horse rolled end over end downhill for two hundred yards, falling off a couple of ledges along the way. We could hear a hollow “thunk” every time the horse’s head bounced off a rock.

 

The three of us slid down to it, picking up Richard’s camera, food, rifle, and an assortment of items from his saddle bags that were scattered across the hillside. The horse was unconscious and wrapped around a tree above another ledge when we reached it. The saddle tree was broken and Richard could lift up a bloody triangular flap of skin about the size of a folded napkin on the horse’s rump. When we got to the animal, it woke up, lifted its head, then slammed it on the ground, knocking itself out again. I was sure we would have to shoot that horse where it had landed. There was no way we could get it up where it was. Gene took one look at the situation and said, “One more fall won’t hurt it.”

 

Gene had broken his left arm a few weeks earlier and it still was in a cast, so he had Richard tie his horse’s neck with a long rope to the tree then the three of us sat down and pulled on the horse’s rear legs while using our feet to shove the front part of that horse off the ledge. After it hit the end of the rope and fought to stand up, we released the rope and the horse found its footing and stood there, shaking. Richard then packed all his gear on the horse and led it off the mountain while Gene and I went looking for our mounts.

 

I found Sam on top of the ridge, not far from where Richard’s horse had panicked. Gene’s horse was feeding a hundred yards away. Before I climbed on Sam I found a piece of wood jammed between the skin and hoof of its left front leg. I pulled it out, thinking I’d gotten it all. I hadn’t, though, and a piece of that stick eventually worked into a joint and caused Sam to go permanently lame.

 

Sundown was just minutes away and it would take at least an hour to get back to our truck. Forget what you’ve heard about horses being able to see well in the dark. Ours couldn’t. We rode them until they refused to take another step. We were in a bad spot. The knife-like ridge we were on dropped almost straight down for forty or fifty feet to the south of us. To the north was a steep slope covered with shale and a series of ten-foot-tall ledges. It was so dark and it was such a dangerous place that we couldn’t move very far to look for firewood, even if we’d had a flashlight, which we didn’t. There wasn’t a lot of wood on that rocky ridge anyway.

 

Gene and I spent the night trying to stay warm. The wind had blown the snow off the ridge where we were, but it was so cold our saddle blankets soon were frozen stiff. We had taken off the saddles and turned them on their sides, and tried taking turns using them as a windbreak. We even tried hugging each other to share our body heat. To make matters worse, Gene’s dogs barked treed most of the night. They’d caught a lion below us and there was no way we could get to them.

 

Long before daylight I thought I saw someone with a lantern walking up our ridge. The more we watched the light the more certain we were that whatever we were watching was moving toward us. Just before dawn we realized we had been watching a star. Gene’s dogs joined us after we’d saddled up and started off the mountain at first light. The lion they’d treed probably had escaped, but it also was possible that they had grown tired of waiting for us to show up and left it. ....

 

Bill Quimby

[Millhouse]

I might be mistaken, but I think the AZGF Game Warden has been there longer....maybe you meant the BA officers?