Mount Graham (Dzil Nchaa Si\u0027an)

Mount Graham, Dzil Nchaa Si'an, Big Seated Mountain, is the tallest summit of the Pinaleno Mountains, a forested sky island rising out of the desert northeast of Tucson. For Western Apache people it is one of the four holiest mountains, a place of mountain spirits, prayer, and ancestral burials, and in 2002 the Keeper of the Register formally recognized the mountain as the largest property ever determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places on cultural grounds, some 330,000 acres. That standing collided with astronomy in the 1980s: in 1988, Congress authorized observatory construction on the mountain through a rare peacetime waiver of United States environmental laws, over sustained objection from Apache communities and environmental groups, and the Mount Graham International Observatory now operates the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope, and the Large Binocular Telescope near the summit.

The conflict has never settled. San Carlos Apache runners have carried a Sacred Run from the Old San Carlos Memorial in Peridot to the summit every year since 1991, and Wendsler Nosie Sr.'s 1997 arrest for praying on the mountain became a defining episode, followed by decades of Apache advocacy, now including the Apache Stronghold campaign. The practical situation for anyone else is narrow: the observatory side is visitable only on Eastern Arizona College's guided day tours each May-to-October season, the Forest Service governs the road and trail access, and Apache access to pray is mediated by permits that advocates call inadequate. This is an entry that should never read as a travel listing. It is a sacred mountain with telescopes on it, and the Apache communities' position, that the development should never have happened and their access should not depend on permits, belongs at the center of any honest account.

Visiting

The Coronado National Forest (USFS) governs general mountain access, and the Swift Trail (AZ 366) is seasonally gated. Observatory visits run only through Eastern Arizona College Discovery Park tours: May 17 through October 25, 9 am to about 4:30 pm, $75 per person ($60 discounted), 18-person limit, reservations through EAC. There is no public walk-in access to the observatory area, and the mountain's cultural sites are not visitor destinations.

Photo: Wars, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Large_Binocular_Telescope_Pinaleno_Mountains_AZ.40932.JPG))