Words and photograph by Daniel Wakefield Pasley.
Sara Plummer Lemmon (b. 1836, d. 1923) was an amateur librarian, nurse and self-trained botanist. After marrying her husband (also a botanist), Civil War veteran John Lemmon, she sold her library in Santa Barbara, CA and traveled to Arizona to honeymoon with John. While documenting and painting plants in the Santa Catalina Mountains, Sara and John (with the help of local E. O. Stratton) scaled the tallest peak in the range, at which point they promptly named it after Sara by giving it the name she took from John, ergo the mountain, which mountain lies just outside the town of Tucson, Arizona, was and is called Mount Lemmon.1 Before returning home to California, Sara managed to discover and catalog for the first time a variety of species native to the mountain and surrounding areas.
Now a paved road leads up one side of the mountain to the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter2, a 4x4 track leads up the other, and running from top-to-bottom-bottom-to-top is a network of world class singletrack; Aspen Draw, Green Mountain, Bug Springs and Molino Basin—which singletrack when strung together and ridden in succession is called The Lemmon Drop.
Featured: Matt Hall in the middle of Bug Springs in the midst of one of the coldest winters on record.
- It's name in the language of the native Tohono O'odham is Babad Doʼag. [↩]
- Operated by the University of Arizona's science program, the observatory offers various learning opportunities and workshops to the public in addition to its higher education and research functions. [↩]
