Shutterstock
It’s a sky island just an hour from Tucson
An hour north of Tucson, the Santa Catalina Mountains rise more than 9,000 feet out of the Sonoran Desert. Most people drive past on the highway and never look up.
But one road climbs that mountain, and if you take it, you’ll pass through six completely different worlds before you reach the top. The summit runs 20 to 30 degrees cooler than the city below.
In summer, that matters more than you’d think.
Flickr/Seclusive Nature
Named for a botanist who climbed it on her honeymoon
The mountain carries the name of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a botanist who reached the summit in 1881 with her husband John Gill Lemmon and a local rancher named Emerson Stratton…