Ever wonder why they're called the Superstition Mountains? It's a wonderful name for a range this wild and strange-looking, and the story behind it is worth knowing. It doesn't come from the treasure hunters, and it's older than the Dutchman.
It goes back to the people who lived out on the flats below these peaks for centuries — the Akimel O'odham, the river people that early settlers called the Pima. They knew these mountains long before any prospector, and by the accounts that have come down, they regarded this range with real caution — a place wrapped in powerful stories, a place you didn't go wandering into lightly, tied to old tales of a great flood and of strange things happening among the peaks. When American and European settlers arrived and heard that the local people spoke of these mountains with such wariness and such stories, they summed all that up in a single word — superstition — and the name stuck to the whole range. The Superstition Mountains: named, in a way, for the respect and unease that older peoples felt looking up at them.
And you can see how they earned it, can't you? A jagged wall of dark volcanic cliffs standing straight up out of a flat desert, full of hidden canyons and strange spires, catching the storms — a place that just looks like it's keeping secrets. The name fit so well it's outlived everyone who first spoke it. Roll on into the superstitious mountains.
Photo: John Fowler · CC BY 2.0
