Some of the nicest moments I’ve experienced have occurred when I’ve
unexpectedly fallen into conversations with older people in the mood to
talk about their memories. Sometimes the content of these exchanges is
interesting, sometimes not. However, it isn’t so much the details of
the interchanges that make them so agreeable, but rather the pleasant
atmosphere that often encapsulates them, a vibe of dreamy recollection
that both focuses and soothes the mind.

A new book by Tucsonan Mary Ellen Barnes offers a similar kind of
experience. The Road to Mount Lemmon: A Father, a Family, and the
Making of Summerhaven is a neighborly, front-porch chat of a
memoir, chronicling Barnes’ early years in a family that was deeply
involved in the development of Mount Lemmon’s rustic Summerhaven
community. Like a cozy evening confab, it meanders from topic to
topic—a bit of Mount Lemmon history here, a family vignette
there—pausing occasionally to savor certain memories and
philosophize. Readers will likely find some of the stories captivating,
and others less so, but most will undoubtedly appreciate the book’s
reflective spirit that vividly conveys Barnes’ love for the Catalina
Mountains and her father.

Barnes’ father, a multifaceted go-getter named Tony Zimmerman, grew
up on the plains of Kansas. When he was 20, he moved to east-central
Arizona to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. He married, started a
family and, a few years later, moved to Tucson and continued
teaching.

In 1937, he had a life-changing experience. Accompanying his school
principal on a hunting trip to the Catalina Mountains, Zimmerman fell
in love—with the mountains, not the principal. By 1940, the
Zimmerman clan began spending every summer on Mount Lemmon, and in
1943, Zimmerman retired from teaching to devote himself full-time to
the mountain.

In the early 1880s, California botanist John Lemmon, combing the
Catalinas with his wife for new forms of flora, named the highest peak
for her. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the mountain
was primarily the domain of miners, homesteaders, hunters, bootleggers
and summer visitors. However, by the time Zimmerman launched his
midlife alpine odyssey, Summerhaven was beginning to evolve into what
would become a small, year-round community. Zimmerman played a pivotal
role in its growth: buying property; selling real estate; building
cabins; and operating a store, hotel, restaurant and sawmill.

The Zimmermans kept their house in Tucson, but Barnes spent much of
her time on the mountain, reveling in a multitude of idyllic
adventures: hanging with her dad; hiking; daydreaming; swimming;
painting; sledding; horseback-riding; working in the family businesses;
developing friendships with cowboys, firefighters and forest rangers;
attending dances; experiencing her first romantic stirrings; and, at
times, slipping into an almost mystical attunement with nature.

Anecdotes sprout in her narrative like mushrooms after a heavy
mountain rain. Some of them have a certain folksy charm—like
depictions of colorful mountain characters. Many, however, are simply
half-formulated musings or wispy recollections of mundane events.

This book does impart an avalanche of facts about the history of the
Catalinas. We learn that Mount Bigelow was named after a cavalry
officer, stationed at Fort Huachuca, who chased Geronimo around the
Southwest; the first phone line went up the mountain in 1911; an
official post office was established in Summerhaven in the mid-’40s;
the road to Mount Lemmon, originally called the General Hitchcock
Highway after an editor for the Tucson Citizen who had been a
U.S. postmaster general, was built largely by prison labor; and a radar
base existed from 1956 to 1970 on the site of the present-day Steward
Observatory, staffed by military personnel on the lookout for Soviet
aircraft.

Zimmerman remained a charismatic force on the mountain for nearly
four decades. Irrepressible to the end, he died in 1996, at nearly 104,
several years before the devastating 2003 Aspen Fire wiped out much of
the tangible evidence of his impact on Mount Lemmon.

Barnes is a solid writer with an eye for detail and a gift for
sparkling prose. This book, however, despite its ambitious effort,
lacks a sense of completeness; the loose group of sketches seems more
like context for a larger, perhaps fictional, work. Still, for those
interested in Southern Arizona lore and warm-hearted nostalgia, Barnes’
remembrances should provide an informative and enjoyable read.

This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2009.