This week on Arizona Illustrated, we go off the beaten path.

And one of Arizona's most popular tourist destinations.

I want them to come and see it and see how beautiful it is and see that there's another side to Tombstone other than gunfight.

Architect Jesus Robles takes us to one of his favorite places from the running waters of Sonoita Creek.

One can slow time under the giggling of the cottonwoods A massive effort to bring back an endangered species.

We didn't have a lot of chances to really study them in the wild like you might with other species.

And so there's a lot of questions out there that are not fully answered.

And a trip to Wilcox to visit Apple Annie's.

You know, we're done with it.

And I. I feel like more of a MASH Hello and welcome to another all new episode of Arizona Illustrated I'm Tom McNamara.

And today we're joining you from Tombstone, Arizona, the town founded in 1877.

And you know, for a lot of people around the world, Tombstone embodies their vision of what the Western frontier is all about.

It's been mythologized in films, television, even on an episode of Star Trek at its peak in the 1880s after Silver was discovered.

The town had nearly 14,000 residents.

110 saloons and 14 gambling halls by boom turned to bust and the population dwindled to fewer than 700 people in the early 1900s.

It was designated a national historic landmark district in 1961 because it was one of the best preserved specimens of a rugged frontier town.

Today it's home to just over 1200 people, but receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

The mine, the Cochise County Courthouse, historic saloons and the world's largest rosebush are all popular attractions, but wander a little farther off the beaten path and you may end up here at St Paul's Episcopal Church, the only church in the world built from Adobe and a Gothic revival style.

And it's been a cornerstone of this community for 140 years.

Throw up your hands.

We're here for your guns.

[Gun fire] (Tony) The Western themed atmosphere in Tombstone, Arizona, is known to audiences from across the country and around the world.

[Gun shot.

Applause] [Western music] Tombstone began as a prosperous mining operation in the 1870s, but it had lost much of its luster after that.

(Jon) The main news always was how many ounces of silver came out of the hills.

But years later, a writer in Los Angeles found Old Marshall Earp got wrote a book called Frontier Marshall.

made a movie and that led to the last movie and put Tombstone really on the map.

[ominous music] (Tony) And that's been a blessing for the current economy (Jon) We have a tremendous brand name.

Everybody's seen the movie or the last movie or the one before that.

(Tony) Explore beyond the familiar attractions, however, and you'll find additional discoveries that can also transport you to a bygone era.

[Old timey piano] (Tony) Built in 1882, St. Pauls Episcopal is known as the oldest continuously operating Protestant church building in the state of Arizona.

A sanctuary for reflection and spiritual guidance for generations.

[Piano continues] (Mary) When I moved to Tombstone I was an Episcopalian, so I sought out the Episcopal Church, and that was in 1999.

I just really felt at home here.

I do tell people about the church quite often.

I want them to come and see it and see how beautiful it is and see that there is another side to Tombstone other than gunfights.

It's just it's a beautiful place.

And it's it's it's a relaxing place.

[Piano ends] I'm Heather Rose, and by day, I'm an insurance adjuster.

I also am a priest.

(Tony) Heather Rose and her husband moved from Scottsdale to the small community of Pearce, Arizona, in 2016 after discovering St Paul's in Tombstone and becoming active there.

She wanted to get closer to the congregation, so the couple bought a house in town.

Eventually, she took advantage of an Episcopalian leadership program That seeks vocational priests in rural areas.

(Heather) Since 2018, I started as a lay vicar, and then I became a deacon a year after that.

And then I was ordained a priest in July of 2020 during COVID.

[Mysterious music] (Heather) Formerly a priest since July 11th of 2020.

You know, and that was an odd time to start.

But it's definitely worthwhile because, you know, I do feel like God gave me a purpose, you know, and that's a huge gift.

You know, I think everybody wants to be used for a purpose, you know, in life.

[Uptempo music] (Heather) It's incredibly special because not only is it like you walk in and you feel like you're going back in time , which a lot of our parishioners dress in 1800 garb.

But I mean, you just think of the only time what has transpired in there, you know, down through the ages, the people who have worshiped there.

“And I believe it is because Jesus sees not only this man's physical condition, but the condition of his soul.

” (Mary) It makes me feel peaceful It makes me feel at home.

I do Bible study here and I've learned so much.

I can go home and preach to my husband, which I do.

And I just it's a family.

[Organ music] (Dennis) I love old buildings and this building is so historic and it's so well made.

It is just a blessing to be in here sometimes.

[Congregation singing] This tower is the replacement tower from the one when the church was built in 1882.

The history that we have on it indicates that the original bell tower was struck by lightning and destroyed and this one was subsequently built.

What's so neat about it is the bottom portion of it is still adobe block.

And you if you could come around and look inside, you would see the original adobe of the church building itself.

(Bob) Obviously, a scaffold has to go up first.

The whole thing has to get scaffolded.

(Tony) Bob Vint is an architect in Tucson who is working on a new renovation project for the bell tower.

Vint is also familiar with the church's history.

(Bob) Very interesting story behind the church.

It's the first Protestant church built in southern Arizona, and it's the second oldest church in southern Arizona, the only one older being San Xavier mission built during the Spanish colonial period in the late 1700s.

[Organ music] (Bob) The minister who organized the construction and raised the money to build it was Endicott Peabody who was from New England, actually from a wealthy New England family, went into the priesthood, came out here at the age of 25 and got this church built.

(Bob) Upon entering the church through this pair of gothic pointed doors, you come through a small narthex into the nave and you will feel the space swooping up into this high triangular roof form.

And it's framed by really intricate trusses that can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

This type of truss work is found in Gothic cathedrals in Europe.

All these traditional elements you might find in Notre Dame du Pari.

So this is a very small reinterpretation of the Gothic style built in this frontier town in the 1880s, with mud, adobe walls and stained glass that came around the horn to San Francisco by clipper ship.

So it's a little outpost here in in southeastern Arizona.

(Tony) And Bob Vints connection to this building is more than professional.

(Bob)I was baptized here in this church many, many years ago, and there's a family photo of me in the arms of my godmother on the steps of St Paul's.

I've been aware of this place all my life and I never get tired of coming here.

(Tony) It's another side of Tombstones of rough and tumble Western image.

Its not even loaded.

Ya big oaf!

[Gun shot] (Dennis) People were tough and had to be tough to survive then and here.

You walk in here and it's so quiet and so peaceful and it's like, God really touches you here.

All the people that have prayed or come and wept or sought God or thanked God, it's almost like imprinted in the walls.

There's a depth and a sense in here that you're stepping back in time and yet, you know, with God, time doesn't exist.

When people come, a lot of times they come to see the history of the building and on accident they'll encounter God I annoint you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

[Organ music] Now, the minister who got this all started, Endicott Peabody, oversaw construction of the church and then moved back to New England after only a couple of months in Tombstone.

There he met Franklin Delano Roosevelt and eventually performed the marriage ceremony for Franklin and his wife, Eleanor.

In 1905 FDR was elected president for the first time in 1932.

Tombstone is one of Arizona's favorite tourist destinations, but in his favorite places, S.A. architect Jesus Robles takes us down a road, much less traveled to the San Rafael Valley in neighboring Santa Cruz County.

Where time seems to move slowly and once perception of land and light is transformed There is a place in Baja Arizona the rests in my memory and daydreams more as a passage than an arrival to a specified destination.

A confluence of history, cultures, landscapes, biomes and folklore.

It is as much defined by the roads, trails and stories that lead you from the Tucson basin into the valleys and high desert grasslands of the Madrean archipelago.

As you traverse the 80 plus miles, you wind through a two lane road in the valley between Santa Rita and the Whetstone Mountains on your way to Sonoita The twists and turns unfold, views that still inspire as much as the first time one lays eyes upon them.

The subtle gain in elevation and changing landscape, evoking memories and emotions untethered to this place.

Once at the Sonoita stop sign turn right towards the town of Patagonia, from the running waters of Sonoita Creek one can slow time under the giggling of the cottonwoods.

Visiting local favorites like the trails at Nature Conservancy's, Patagonia Sonoita Creek Preserve, or the sanctuary at Tucson, Audubon's Patton Center for Hummingbirds.

It is worth a stop for a bite and drink at the Wagon Wheel Saloon, the local bar where the likes of Jim Harrison and Charles Bowden may have traded stories of the border and modern folklore.

From town, you head another 15 miles east, slowly moving through the mineral rich Patagonia mountains whose canyons and ancient sycamores can speak to the layers of a cultural past that has spanned a millennium.

As you move through this cultural and geologic time written in the landscape, the road rises out of a canyon and breaks the ridge at the western edge of the San Rafael Valley.

I am immediately taken by the beauty and expanse of the grass flowing over the horizons as time and the place seem to merge under the sky into a familiar yet evolving frontier.

The grasses tell the story of the seasons from greens of summer to velvety golden hues of fall to a shimmering silver through winter.

For most of the year, a warm golden hue blankets the land against the crisp blue of the desert sky.

The valley is held by the Canelo Hills to the north and northeast, Patagonia mountains to the west and the Huachuca mountains in the east.

The road drops into the bowl that feeds the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River flowing directly south into Sonora, Mexico, about ten miles as the crow flies, before it meanders and turns back north, down the next valley to Tucson.

As you head back north towards Sonoita leaving the San Rafael Valley, you come to the climax of this journey.

The view from Canelo Pass gives you a prospect South into Mexico and the entire valley.

I can start to imagine the peoples and wildlife for ages moving with the soft grade of the land towards water.

Favorite Places is a collaboration between our show, the Southern Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Arizona Daily Star.

And for more on these thoughtful and personal visual essays, you can visit azpm.org/favoriteplaces as Westerners continue to move into the Arizona territory in the late 1800s and 1900s, little is known about what the environmental effects would be.

People either didn't think about it or didn't care.

Now the mask bobwhite quail was one of the first victims of this growth.

Nearly driven to the brink of extinction.

But now there's an effort underway to reintroduce the species into its historic habitat.

Working with the quail It's always a little bit funny to me thinking back because first thing out of college I actually went to work for a dairy company.

That was fine, but it wasn't quite what I had been meaning to do with my life.

I went back to school and took all the core courses in wildlife biology and then when I finished those courses, I got my first position out here at Buenos Aires Before this was a national wildlife refuge.

it was a ranch.

And so the name of the ranch was Buenos Aires Ranch.

So all this land was bought up from the ranch in order to protect the endangered Masked Bobwhite.

The Masked Bobwhite is mostly found in Sonora, Mexico, where we are right now at Buenos Aires in southern Arizona is considered the northernmost part of their historical range.

Those first sightings were being recorded in like the late 1800s, pretty much about the time they found the bird.

They were noticing, you know, we're not seeing a lot of this bird.

They already found it in a state of decline, basically as soon as the Endangered Species Act was drafted Masked Bobwhite went on right at the beginning, they're one of the first species that were on there.

We didn't have a lot of chances to really study them in the wild like you might with other species.

And so there's a lot of questions out there that are not fully answered about their history and their preferences.

You know, habitat wise, food wise, raising young.

you know, the decline can be attributed to the changing landscape because of ranching.

But you cannot blame ranching for their decline in its entirety.

You've got decades of drought that were changing the landscape.

And so we always have to be doing different kinds of habitat restoration efforts.

We have prescribed burns reseeding with native plant species.

And so you have all these efforts that you have to do, you know, to help the Masked Bobwhite, but not hinder other, you know, other wildlife species on the refuge.

About 2017 is when the reintroduction side of the program got revamped.

Our second facilities in Oklahoma with our partners, they kind of have a duplicate of our flock just in case something catastrophic happened.

Everyone's not in one place, and so they focus on providing those chicks for the summer brood releases Four times over the summer months.

They are going to utilize Light Hawk, which is made up of pilots who have their own airplane.

They donate their time, they donate their plane, they donate their fuel.

We had almost 300 birds on the plane today.

So we're here in 3 hours.

We've never lost a bird.

It's interesting.

cause you get the birds on their It's like being in a barnyard for 3 hours.

But it's really it's really cool.

It's important to kind of get the species going again.

We'll meet the plane and we'll go ahead and pick up those birds, you know, and we'll bring them back down to the refuge we'll divide the chicks up into those brooder boxes with the parents.

And that starts the fostering process or the bonding process.

We're going straight to hey, here's your kids.

Please, please take these.

You know, and so it's a little bit unnatural because you're just skipping all those things that they would have done in the wild before they got to.

Here's my kids.

You know, we do tend to have more success using a male as the foster parent than we do with the female.

That's not to say we don't have females who take because we do somewhere in the range of 10 to 14 days we prepare the boxes, we get the chicks in the boxes, and then we we drive out to those those designated spots that we've already picked.

When they come out, you want to make sure that they're not in the wide open.

You don't want them to be picked off immediately upon coming out.

You want them to have a nice kind of safe zone and they just kind of wander off into the grass and disappear with their parent.

When we're releasing the broods, the chicks are too small to wear radio.

So the the foster parent will get the radio collar.

So each bird has its own frequency on that radio.

And so you're using your antenna to basically hone in on that frequency, and then you're able to go and locate that bird.

This program's been going on for a lot of years, and we've still got a lot of years ahead of us.

But, you know, the dream is to get to that point where those birds are are thriving and surviving.

We don't need to reintroduce we don't even need to have captive birds because they're out there and they don't need us anymore.

And so that's that's what success is, is to have multiple generations of wild born birds out there making a population that is self-sustaining.

If you're in this field, you've seen what mankind does to the earth.

The changes that we've made, and that has effects on wildlife.

It just does.

We're here because we're supposed to be stewards of the earth, and we're sharing this earth with all kinds of other wildlife, including this little bird.

And it doesn't affect someone in another state.

It doesn't even affect people in this state.

But, you know, these birds matter.

You know, all wildlife out here matters.

You know, there's the ecosystem, there's a balance and it's thrown out of balance.

When we destroy habitat.

Does it affect you and I, our life if they're not here?

No, it doesn't.

But, you know, they were here, too, and they deserve to still be here.

If you're fortunate enough, when you visit Tombstone, you will meet Miss Sonny, who's the international tourism director here.

You've been here 11 years in this wonderful town.

You didn't come here to mind, Silver.

You came here from Los Angeles.

Yes, I did.

Yeah.

Why?

I came to the town too tough to die, because I love it here.

The weather, the people, the closeness of the community.

I just love it here.

But most people are here for a day.

You're here for a life.

Now, what?

What is the essence of this place that just fascinates you?

I guess the historic significance of the town yeah.

We are deprived of history, so many places, and here we thrive on it, and we cherish it and we keep it going.

Wilcox, Arizona was founded at about the same time as Tombstone and has a similar Western charm.

Though its economy is based more on agriculture than tourism.

Yet Apple Annie's and Wilcox has found a nice way to combine the two.

And it's especially popular in the fall with the corn maze and the pumpkin patch.

This next story was produced and edited by our exceptional student employee, Ashland Johnson.

Right now we are in our um pumpkin festival mode, so you can come out enjoy the day and pick pumpkins.

On the weekends we offer hay- rides out to the pumpkin patch, or if you come during the week, you'd walk out, and we have our corn maze that's open every day through October.

My name is Mandy Kirkendall, I'm the Director of Fun here at Apple Annie's The corn maze is a lot of fun.

We have three different mazes in one.

We have an easy, intermediate, and challenge maze, so you can decide how lost you want to get.

Whether you want to spend 10 minutes or an hour in the maze, you can choose which one you want.

And it's just fun to watch people come through and they're so excited when they come out, and they found their way out of the maze.

And it's really a kind of a team building thing for families and friends.

It was a good challenge.

We saw a lot of people going around in circles, and it was that was fun to watch them.

It made me feel really good about my sense of direction.

I felt very good.

It was, it was the kind of thing where, you know, you're done with it, and I I feel like a more of a man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So every year we get together and decide what we want our theme to be.

For instance, this year we are promoting other things to do in Wilcox.

There's wine tasting, there's birding, there's hiking Wilcox is really known for the ranching and the cattle industry here, so we promoted those things.

And we plant the corn here, then when it's about six inches tall, somebody comes out from the company, and uses GPS, and a backpack and they walk around and spray this field for two days, and then magically it grows just like the picture.

I come to the Apple Annie's Pumpkin Patch just for fun with the family.

This is, I think, like our second time coming here.

We're actually from Tucson, Arizona, today.

So we made not too long of a drive, but a little drive out here, Um like my sister said, just enjoy a day here with family.

I haven't been here since I was like, 14 years old, so I'm excited to just get into the fall spirit and celebrate one of the best months uh of the whole year.

We just like to have good, clean fun, come out and really show off the farming aspect.

Entertainment is fun, but this is great where you can come out and actually see where your vegetables are grown, and pick a pumpkin.

Cut the pumpkin right off the vine.

I love the ambiance of the pumpkin patch and the corn maze, but I also really like the local produce um aspect of Apple Annie's.

I'm really passionate about like local agriculture.

So I think this is like a really great place to be.

You feel like you're a part of the process.

Uh you know, when you're at the grocery store, that's what's given to you.

But here you can it's almost like a treasure hunt.

You get to try to find something that is better than what you could have gotten somewhere else.

Uh, and then you go home and you to see if you're right.

Yeah.

My family started this business.

We planted our first apple trees in the early eighties, and then we opened to the public in 1986.

Over at our orchard, which is down the road.

We have three locations.

It's very personal to us.

I mean, we put our blood, sweat and tears in this.

We work year round on it for people to come here to enjoy it.

I hope people are making memories um, and they think about it throughout the year, and think about it as a happy time.

Because people come here because they want to.

You're not forced to and people are having fun, and you just see them taking pictures and laughing.

before we go, here's a sneak peek in a story we're working on.

Folks would ask to come and see Mel's work in the studio.

But it was kind of uncomfortable having strangers in our house that kind of made us Fast-Track the idea into finding a space thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another all new episode.