![]() Maximum summer temperatures hover near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and winter temperatures can drop to well below freezing. Average precipitation now ranges from less than 8 to as much as some 12 inches, most of it falling in the July, August and September. Cottonwoods and willows formed dense woodland environments, or "bosques," along the banks of rivers and some drainages. Black gramma, creosote bush, tarbush, honey mesquite, soaptree and datil yucca, lechuguilla, ocotillo, common cholla, sotol, various prickly pear cacti, hedgehog cacti and numerous other species many of them useful as food and resources to the Mogollon form a crazy quilt of vegetation across the desert sands. ![]() They comprise a mix of desert grasslands, various scrub brushlands, mesquite dunelands, sand dunefields, lava flows, playas (shallow lake beds) and river basins. The desert basins, dissected by mountain washes and streams and by a very few rivers, lie between the elevations of 10 feet. Annual precipitation declines to 20 to 25 inches. About four dozen plants, several with edible fruits, grow only in this region. Again, plants from the higher and lower belts wander into this range. Annual precipitation falls to 25 or 30 inches.īetween 65 feet the lowest band of true forest in the region the ponderosa pine and Gambel oak define the character of the plant community. Several shade-tolerant shrubs with edible fruits grow within the forest stands. Willows line streamsides, and lodgepole pines pioneer areas cleared by fire. ![]() Plants from higher and lower zones sometimes extend arms of growth into this band. Annual precipitation ranges from 30 to as much as 90 inches, with winter snow drifts often lasting well into the spring or even early summer.Īt 8000 to 9500 feet, the vegetation increases in abundance, with dense stands of dark-green Douglas fir mixed with the white-barked quaking aspen assuming the dominant role. Several dozen other plants, including trees in the conifer family and shrubs with edible fruits, also appear in the zone. On the higher peaks, at elevations from about 9500 to 11,500 feet the windiest, wettest and coldest environment in the Mogollon region spruce and fir trees dominate, reaching the timber line and growing in dense stands along the banks of streams and the edges of alpine meadows. Much of the rubble and soil filling the basins washed down from the mountains during the much wetter times of past ice ages. The land reflects the geologically recent torment of continental rifting, structural fracturing, volcanism, erosion and sedimentation. The mountain ranges, with peaks as high as 12,000 feet in elevation, run north and south, roughly parallel, and they embrace the desert basins, with river valleys as low as 1000 feet in elevation. In the Mogollon cultural region, the Indian communities occupied what may be the most geologically and ecologically diverse landscape in the United States. Each culture had to develop differing farming practices, technological capabilities, hunting strategies, gathering techniques and food preparation methods. This meant, for example, that a Mogollon band which lived in a low mountain river valley in southeastern New Mexico and a Hohokam band which lived in the Sonoran Desert south of Phoenix had to adapt to differing growing seasons, temperature ranges, rainfall patterns, resources, and game and wild food plant communities. The Mogollon had to adapt to the forested mountain ranges and high Chihuahuan Desert basins of southeastern Arizona, southern New Mexico, western Texas, and northern Chihuahua and northern Sonora the Hohokam and their cultural cousins, the Patayan, to the relentlessly hot Sonoran desert country of south-central and western Arizona, southeastern California and northern Sonora and the fabled Anasazi, to the arid canyons and mesas of the Colorado Plateau. As the desert Indians of the Formative Period (early first millennium to late prehistoric times) emerged from their hunting and gathering past and turned increasingly to a village and agricultural future, the three major groups the Mogollon, the Hohokam and the Anasazi all belonged to the same cultural congregation but they occupied differing environmental regions.
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