Henry Brean
Fifty years ago, as residential development pressed closer to the mountains surrounding Tucson, a group of hikers and environmentalists joined forces with local officials to preserve public access to some of the wild lands that remained.The resulting trail access plan, adopted by the Pima County Board of Supervisors in 1976, called for the acquisition and permanent protection of more than a dozen urban trailheads, including nine leading into the Santa Catalina Mountains.One of those decades-old access routes is now permanently closed.Early this month, county officials quietly shut down the trail and trailhead at the north end of Campbell Avenue. The paved parking lot has since been torn out and the entrance to the trail blocked with a wire fence.
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“Permanent closures are rare but do occur,” said Victor Pereira, director of Natural Resources, Parks and Recreation for the county.In this case, the half-mile trail leading straight north into the Pusch Ridge Wilderness Area was decommissioned because it did not connect to any established U.S. Forest Service trails in the Catalinas and did not meet the county’s standards for safety and accessibility, Pereira said.For example, one 200-foot segment of the trail climbed a rocky slope at a 35% grade, “more than triple the acceptable maximum of 10% for a segment of that length,” he said. Since the entire trail easement was only about 10 feet wide, there simply wasn’t enough room to replace the steep stretch with switchbacks or climbing turns.Pereira said the county also received complaints from nearby residents about people parking illegally at the Campbell Trailhead after dark, making noise and leaving behind trash and graffiti, but he insists that was not the reason for the closure.“We don’t close trails just because of that. That’s just part of doing business,” he said. “The bottom line is that we decided to close the trail because of a lack of trail connectivity (and) the substantial investment of resources required to improve the trail in accordance with our standards.”But that decision isn’t sitting well with some of the people who fought to protect public access to the Catalinas in the first place.Barbara Coon is a long-time member and the current program chairwoman of the Southern Arizona Hiking C …
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