Ajo Mountain Drive
— the desert that hides nothing.
Not only on a wall.
“A twenty-one-mile graded dirt loop through the Sonoran Desert, hard against the Mexican border. The Ajo Range rises to the east, the organ pipe cactus stands in stands you can count, and the road is quiet most of the year. Two hours if you stop, less if you don't. The monument holds the only U.S. population of organ pipes large enough to call a forest.
Ajo Mountain Drive, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ajo Mountain Drive is a 21-mile one-way loop through the heart of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in Pima County, Arizona, about 140 miles south of Phoenix. The monument covers 517 square miles of Sonoran Desert along the Mexican border and protects the only large stand of organ pipe cactus, Stenocereus thurberi, in the United States. The loop climbs into the Ajo Range, whose highest point, Mount Ajo, rises to 4,808 feet.
The drive runs through three desert plant communities in the space of two hours. Creosote flats give way to a mid-elevation belt of saguaro, organ pipe, ocotillo, and palo verde, then a high desert grassland on the Ajo Range slopes. The air is dry, the light is hard, and ravens carry across the silence. February through April brings wildflowers, Mexican gold poppy, lupine, and brittlebush, when winter rains have been kind.
The road is graded dirt, navigable by passenger cars in dry weather and impassable after monsoon storms. The loop begins at the Kris Eggle Visitor Center on Arizona 85 and takes most drivers about two hours with stops. The park is open year round; the comfortable season is mid-October through April. Entrance is $25 per vehicle. The Estes Canyon and Bull Pasture trailheads on the loop offer the only marked hikes into the Ajo Range.