Escudilla, Arizona's third-highest peak — where Aldo Leopold saw the last grizzly killed and began to father the idea of wilderness.
Off to the east, that great flat-topped mountain crowned with a fire tower is Escudilla — nearly eleven thousand feet, the third-highest peak in Arizona, and one of the most famous mountains in all of American conservation. Because it was here, around nineteen-oh-nine, that a young forest ranger named Aldo Leopold worked — and here that the last grizzly bear in Arizona, a great bear the ranchers called Bigfoot, was hunted down and killed. Leopold wrote about it years later in an essay simply called 'Escudilla,' and it broke something open in him: he saw that in killing the last bear, they had killed the wildness of the whole mountain. 'Escudilla still hangs on the horizon,' he wrote, 'but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It's only a mountain now.' That grief helped father the whole idea of wilderness. You're driving past the mountain that changed how America thinks about the wild.