Kofa Mountains Weren’t Always the “Kofa Mountains”</h1> <article> <h1>Kofa Mountains Weren’t Always the “Kofa Mountains”</h1> <p>Andrea Aker — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:53:00 +0000</p> Q: What happened to the SH Mountains? I can’t find them on any maps anymore. A: Nothing happened to them. It’s not like they disappeared or something. It’s just that over the years they got renamed, and rightly so. They are now known as the Kofa Mountains, located about 70 miles northeast of Yuma. The SH Mountains were so named back in the 1800s either by miners or soldiers who noticed that from a distance they resembled outhouses. I will leave it to you to figure out what SH stood for. Suffice it to say, it is not a word one would expect to read in this newspaper. In the interest of delicacy, the SH range was also known over the years as the Short Horn or Stone House mountains until the mapmakers finally settled on Kofa. 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When he left about four months later, he had turned a single ponderosa pine log into a 30-foot tall Indian head, and he left it there for posterity. The work was one in Toth's series of giant heads that he carved in every state and four Canadian provinces. He called the effort "The Trail of the Whispering Giants," and dedicated it to what he considered the mistreatment of Native Americans by early settlers and the federal government. 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A: I thought this was going to be an easy one, and I was prepared to pad it out with a lot of cheap jokes about my masters. Instead, it got kind of complicated, so I had to cut out the jokes, which is just as well because I would have had to explain them to my masters anyway. This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots. Kim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, went to some pains to explain the differences to me. He is a very patient man. 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A: Because many years ago, the city fathers and mothers thought big. Unfortunately, they also thought wrong, or at least incorrectly. The result is today we have a downtown downtown and downtown uptown, although we know of people who think of anything south of Northern Avenue as being practically the inner city. According to Dave Reichert, head of the Phoenix Planning Department, back in the 1960s, when we only had one downtown and it was downtown, the city’s leaders had dreams of grandeur. 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A: We take up this question with some reluctance because the entire staff and faculty of Valley 101 has a deep abhorrence of airports, which extends to even writing about them. At the same time, however, we always thought Sky Harbor was a cool name, in a 1950-ish, let’s-go-out-to-the-airport-and-watch-the-planes-land kind of way. Actually, the name Sky Harbor goes back to 1929, a fact we found in Desert Wings, a history of the airport written by Michael Jones, a city Aviation Department employee. 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Most folks believe the art of pullin’ legs attached to tenderfeet began with the arrival of windjammin’ mountain men, prospectors and cowboys. But it seems that Arizonans have been tellin’ whoppers to newcomers much earlier. 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A: Tucson is usually a little bit cooler than Phoenix because it is a little bit higher up. You may not actually have a sense of ascending when you drive there because you are lulled into a state of semiconsciousness because it is the most boring drive in the world. 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