Category: News

Arizona State Parks and Trails invites visitors to the parks on New Year’s Day for its annual First Day Hikes. The events are part of a national collaboration in all 50 state park systems that began three decades ago to kick off the new year in a healthy and exciting way. Several Arizona state parks will host First Day Hikes on Monday, January 1, 2024. During the hike, park rangers, naturalists, and volunteer guides will share information about Arizona’s plants, wildlife, natural resources, regional history, and recreational opportunities. The distance and rigor of the hikes vary from park to park,…

In 2022, when the southeastern Arizona community of Willcox confronted state regulations that would’ve halted new groundwater irrigation in the largely agricultural area, voters and special interest groups mobilized to defeat the ballot measure by almost two to one. They acknowledged that, as in other rural areas of the state, more groundwater was being pumped out of the Willcox Basin than was naturally refilled, and they agreed something should be done about that overdrafting. But bringing the area under the state’s existing rules, as the measure proposed to do, wouldn’t give the rural community enough control to guide development in…