This blog is compiled and maintained by John Parsons, Rimrock, AZ for the purpose of preparing a "History of Buffalo Park." Inquiries may be addressed to: arizonahistorystories@gmail.com

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Nat White recalls Saving Buffalo Park in 1986

Nat White, November 18, 2008
Nat White describes 
The Buffalo Park 
"tipping point"

(Editor's Note: Nat White has lived in Flagstaff over 50 years.  During that time he's made a personal difference in many different ways. Perhaps his "finest hour" was his role in "Saving Buffalo Park in 1986.  Without White's dedicated, "never give up, never give in" determination, Buffalo Park as we know it would have been destroyed.  While many people stepped forward to join The Battle of Buffalo Park, Nat provided a vital front lines performance which helped turn the tide in circulating a Citizen Initiative and then getting out the votes for the win.  Nat has been a life long runner and is in the Earlham College Hall of Fame for his fleet feet.  Peter Runge, Head of the NAU Cline Library Special Collections and Archives conducted an oral history interview with White in 2008.  The narrative below was extracted from the transcript of that interview.)

NAU.OH.2008.122.1C 128616C Nat White- Part 3 Interviewed by Peter Runge November 18, 2008 Flagstaff Recreation Collection

https://archive.library.nau.edu/digital/collection/cpa/id/116181/

(Editor's Note #2: Neil Weintraub discussed "Saving Buffalo Park" with Nat White in 2009.  Here is Neil's column as it appeared in "The Arizona Daily Sun."

https://azdailysun.com/sports/buffalo-park-a-runner-s-paradise/article_c7ff05ae-32ba-5f00-83ae-83b6212368fd.html

Runge: I’m a slogger, a slow jogger.

White: Yeah, you might consider yourself a jogger, yeah, and you’re doing it for the fun of it, and you’re getting the exercise, camaraderie; but you’re not in it for the competition, you’re not in it to see how fast you could possibly run this particular distance or this particular loop or whatever. You know, Buffalo Park is a very important aspect of the running in this community. As I mentioned before, long before it was set aside as a park, runners and walkers used that-not as much as they do now-and they had races up there. But it has become, from the eighties on now, more and more of one of the places to run, one of the places to walk. And not only for the local runners, but for the elite runners. You’ll hear Jack Daniels talk about Shay, that died....

Runge: Ryan Shay?

White: Ryan Shay. He and these other elite runners would have these special distances, and special loops on Buffalo Park. For elite runners, it’s important to know what your progress is, and how you do that is to run the same loop. Now, you don’t want to run the track all the time, so you want to have a nice controlled loop to run, and Buffalo Park provides those, where you have terrain, you can have a different type of run, it can be more flat, or you can have graduals, so you can have the steep hills, you have the different distances, and so the elite runners are using that now as one of these test sites. "Every other week I’m going to do this loop and see if I’m progressing." So Buffalo Park has become quite a part of the running community. And of course it’s also the entrance to the trail systems, too.

Runge: Uh-huh. And it’s nice they have the quarter-miles marked off so like you were saying, if you want to do half-mile repeats, or three-quarter-mile repeats, it’s easy to find a variety of loops in there.

White: Yeah, you can do it. And it’s just a great vista. And it’s right in the middle of town! We were so smart as a community, and as a small group who organized to save Buffalo Park, because it was at a time when there were plenty of other places to run. And it was access. That’s another thing. It was access to the forest anywhere in Flagstaff. And now, you can’t get access anywhere. To the north, it’s difficult to get access from Flagstaff by foot. Along Fort Valley Road, it is impossible, except for the Urban Trail. Whereas before, anywhere you could just take a run, you’d go off to the left and you’d go up onto Observatory Mesa. And so back then, you’d think-and in fact, we did hear that-"Hey, you got the woods all around you. Why do you want to save these?! We need this access for development," and so on. And by passing that it’s just become more, and more, and more valuable-and it will, forever.

Runge: I was going to mention that. You’re actually reading my mind. That was like the next question I was going to ask. You just segued right into it. Could you talk a little bit more about the history of that, because if I’m correct, initially Buffalo Park was going to be set aside as some sort of wildlife environment.

White: When I first got here, there were still buffalos in Buffalo Park. It was the last six or eight months. It was all fenced-in, and the buffalos would occasionally get out, and there’d be a big news item: "Buffalo Got Out of Buffalo Park."

Well, how did that come to be? Well, in the sixties, the Chamber of Commerce and a group of folks got together and said, "We need a tourist attraction." Prior to that, Buffalo Park and a lot of the part of McMillan Mesa was part of forest service land, but that dates back quite a few decades. In a trade with land in the inner basin with the forest service for water rights and things like that, the City got hold of that land. So it’s been in the city a long time.

But approximately sometime in the sixties, maybe late fifties, there was this idea that we could have a wildlife park there and attract tourists. And that’s how Buffalo Park got to be. And when I got there, there was a big cage for birds-when I first got here in ’69. The buffalo had horns, so it [i.e., the birdcage] kept getting knocked off, and finally it got knocked off and it never got put back on. The trails were there. Some of the old wagons and stuff that are there, the idea is you got in this wagon and you took rides on what are now the trails-or some of the trails.

And there was an Indian village. You can still see on the west side the remnants of one of the cooking ovens for an Indian village there. You can still see some of the broken wagon parts. There was a doughnut-shaped lake to the right there, which they kept filled with water. They had a number of different little venues on this trail ride. But that had not been used for several years when I got here, although the buffalo-it did work, but the buffalo were still in there. And then that was removed.

Then it was just used as an open space and people would run there. About ’84, "grow or die" the mantra, "how can we get a loop road that went right through the middle of Flagstaff, up to the Mount Elden Road and around? And open up all that property for development." That was battered back and forth, and there was some resistance to it. It was called Gemini Parkway. There’s still a Gemini Road that goes by USGS, but Gemini Parkway was going to come right from where Enterprise is, right up the hill, cut right through the middle, and go right through the middle of Buffalo Park, and through what is the Lockett land and then up to Mount Elden.

Well, there was a group of us that didn’t like that. We felt there were other options. And so we voiced an opinion on that. So city council said, "Okay, what we’ll do is we’ll come across where the Buffalo is, and then we’ll skirt around the park to the west and go." Well, the neighborhoods to the west got all upset. "Okay, well, we’ll do that, but we’ll skirt around to the east." Well, the neighborhood to the east got all upset. About ... ’84? I’ll have to look at my records. This is really important, I’ll have to get the exact dates, but what happened is, August of ’84 or ’85, the city council said, "We’re gonna put Gemini Parkway right through the middle of Buffalo Park. And I was at that meeting, but it’s summer, everybody’s gone. I think there’s a picture in the newspaper of me being very.... "You can’t do that!!"

A group of us really got together very quickly-and all those people should be represented in the real story of this. I want to write this all down. I do have all the documents, but I need to write it all down. The Daliers, the Solbergs, Nelson, Shewalter, Garretson. There was a whole group of us, and within a few weeks we got something like 3,000 signatures to put it on an initiative, which stopped everything at that point.

It went to a vote, and the whole process of advertising it and promoting it was really wonderful, and we won 2:1 [two to one]. And so the vote was on a-I don’t know if you called it an ordinance-it’s an initiative, and I don’t know what it becomes now, but it’s a law that can only be changed by a vote of the people. It can’t be changed by the council. But basically it’s very simple. It just says that no roads could go through Buffalo Park, and Buffalo Park was defined.

(Editor's Note #3: The actual election for the Citizens Initiative was conducted in March 1986. )

I wish it had been a little bit more explicit, because since then there have been efforts to put other things into Buffalo Park, and I think there always will be. Right now, there’s this effort to put in Star Hinge. The whole purpose of Buffalo Park was a natural preserve. And its functionality has a lot to do with the views around it, and the fact that the city is all below it, and you really can’t see anything. You’re in the middle of a city, but you can’t see the city, you can only see the horizons.

So that’s how that came about. And after that, I think that was the tipping point of not the environmental, but.... Flagstaff has some neat things, and it’s not environmental. I mean, there are developers, there are realtors, there are business people [who] all believe this, that they have the views, the clean air, the small-town atmosphere, that we need to grow in a way that protects these essences of Flagstaff that we all love.

But this was the real focal, independent grass roots tipping point, where there was an organization. From that, things like F-cube came out of it. Probably a little presumptuous, but the idea of the 2020 visioning, the land development code-all of this municipal regulation, rules, concept and community overview of the community and what we want to be.

I think Buffalo Park was the awakening of that, although things that happened before that, Citizens for a Beautiful Flagstaff way back in the seventies, this response to development on Hart Prairie, all were part of that, but I think it got to the point Flagstaff was growing in the eighties. It had gotten up to 25,000, 30,000, pushing the 40,000 type of thing, and people began to get worried that we’re losing it.

I think Buffalo Park will have a very important part of the history of Flagstaff as we look back, as a tipping point. Yeah. And that’s another thing that we ought to get. If you’re interested in doing things like that, there’s still a lot of those folks around. We ought to just get [them] around that table and talk about Buffalo Park. In addition to that, we do have a lot. I have several boxes of letters and all that kind of thing, that had to do with Buffalo Park and the efforts.

Runge: Well thank you for doing that. I mean, Neil and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, and he goes, "Stop and try to imagine Flagstaff without Buffalo Park. It would be a completely different town."

White: Sure.

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