Jim Hambacher, center, starts up the Blackett's Ridge with other members of the Southern Arizona Hiking Club in Sabino Canyon on Nov. 27. The hiking group, started in 1958 by Arizona Daily Star reporter and future outdoor columnist Pete Cowgill, is celebrating 65 years and has grown into one of the oldest and largest hiking clubs in Arizona.

 Mamta Popat, Arizona Daily Star

Cindy Zokhrouf has been on top of the world for much of the past four decades, and she owes it all to the Southern Arizona Hiking Club.

Since she joined the group as a self-described hiking “neophyte” in 1986, she has climbed roughly 290 mountain peaks in Arizona and elsewhere, including “every peak you can see from Tucson, north, south, east and west,” she said.

“I’m now 80 years old and still hiking,” Zokhrouf said. “I credit the hiking club with this passion I’ve followed in my life. It’s opened up my life for me and brought me so many friends and adventures.”

Cindy Zokhrouf joined the Southern Arizona Hiking Club in 1986 and is still hiking at age 80. 

SAHC will mark its 65th anniversary on Tuesday night with a history presentation during its monthly meeting.

Any celebrating there is to be done beyond that will happen where it usually does with this bunch: out on the trail.

Blackett’s Ridge

Before the sun was even up on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, club members were already gathering in the parking lot at Sabino Canyon Recreation Area.

The destination that day was Blackett’s Ridge, a roughly 6-mile-long, out-and-back route that climbs almost 1,800 vertical feet up the southern flank of the Catalina Mountains.

Guide Jim Hambacher described it as a regular training hike for the club. About a dozen people showed up to take part.

Hambacher said he joined SAHC 17 years ago and became a guide seven years ago after his retirement from Texas Instruments freed him up on weekdays.

Now, he leads hikes a couple of times a week. He estimates he has made the climb to Blackett’s Ridge about 300 times.

It takes a lot to keep Hambacher off the trail.

For example, he said, the club shut down completely for a few months during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, but he and some of the other regulars kept hiking together anyway.

Members of the Southern Arizona Hiking Club walk in Sabino Canyon towards the Blackett's Ridge trailhead in Tucson last month. The hiking group, started in 1958 by Arizona Daily Star reporter and future outdoor columnist Pete Cowgill, is celebrating 65 years and has grown into one of the oldest and largest hiking clubs in Arizona.

Then, about 15 months ago, Hambacher went in for a triple bypass. He was back on the trail 8 weeks after the surgery.

“I like to hike solo, too, but it’s safer in a group,” he said. “My wife was glad when I decided to join a group.”

At the trailhead

The Southern Arizona Hiking Club was launched in casual fashion by Arizona Daily Star reporter Pete Cowgill in 1958.

Pewte Cowgill, 93, founder of the Southern Arizona Hiking Club and long-time Arizona Daily Star outdoor writer at his home on North First Avenue on Dec. 14, 2018, in Tucson.

He simply ended one of his weekly “Tucson Trails” columns with an open invitation: Anyone interested in forming a hiking group should meet him at noon that day at Hutch’s Pool in the Catalina Mountains.

A freak snowstorm prevented the first organizational meeting that November, so Cowgill tried again the following month. And so it was that at Hutch’s Pool on Dec. 14, 1958, a hiking club was born.

As Cowgill described it in “Tucson Trails” two weeks later: “The club doesn’t have a name yet, it doesn’t have a written constitution, it doesn’t have a membership list; in fact about the only thing the club has is a desire to go hiking.”

So that’s what they did. On Dec. 28, 1958, he and his 11 fellow charter members met at 9 a.m. and climbed Wasson Peak, the highest point in the Tucson Mountains.

In the more than six decades since, SAHC has grown into one of the largest and now oldest clubs of its kind in Arizona — and maybe anywhere else.

“I’m happy and proud to be the founder of the club,” Cowgill, age 93, told the Star in 2018, on the occasion of SAHC’s 60th anniversary. “It’s a good outfit.”

He died a few months later in March of 2019, but his legacy lives on — not just with the club but in the maps, guidebooks and actual trails people still use to explore the outdoors.

Over the years, Cowgill and other SAHC members published full-color topographic trail maps for the Catalina, Rincon, Santa Rita and Chiricahua mountains

In 1975, he and fellow charter member Eber Glendening published "The Santa Catalina Mountains: A Guide to the Trails and Routes," an essential, pocket-sized manual now on its fourth edition.

Zokhrouf said there are a number of trails around Tucson that were built, improved and even named by club members, including one along the east side of Bear Canyon in the Catalinas.

The club has been around so long now that a few of the routes established by members aren’t hiked anymore because people don’t know about them, she said.

Hiking community

Newly elected club president Tamara Derickson said the current membership stands at 811, down from a pre-pandemic peak of well over 2,000.

Members range in age from their late 20s to their late 80s, but retirees make up the largest block.

Members of the Southern Arizona Hiking Club walk in Sabino Canyon towards the Blackett's Ridge trailhead on Nov. 27.

More experienced hikers serve as guides, a tradition that dates back to the earliest days of the nonprofit volunteer group.

The calendar on the SAHC website features at least one hike almost every day. On particularly busy dates, members can choose from as many as six separate outings, from “walking on a sidewalk all the way to hiking mountain peaks,” Derickson said.

Club members also venture out of state and occasionally overseas to tackle national parks and mountain ranges far from Tucson. Several such trips take place each year, with as many as 60 people participating at a time.

Derickson is a relative newcomer. She joined about two years ago, shortly after she moved to Tucson.

“I didn’t know the area, and I didn’t know much about hiking,” she said. “The club means a lot to me. It’s been a really good community.”

Nancy Debolt didn’t have much hiking experience, either, when she joined SAHC about 13 years ago, after she retired.

“Since then, I have seen more of Southern Arizona and more of the whole state than I ever thought I would,” said Debolt, who now serves as the club’s new member and orientation chairwoman.

She is one of about a dozen club members who have completed every section of the Arizona Trail, which stretches 800 miles across the state from Mexico to Utah.

The accomplishment earned her an award from SAHC, which also recognizes members for such feats as finishing every trail in a given mountain range or conquering a certain number of peaks or canyons.

“Our founders were really into bagging peaks,” Debolt said. “It kind of gets in your blood once you get started.”

Her own trail

Zokhrouf can certainly vouch for that.

She grew up in New York State, where the outdoors called to her at a young age. “We played in the woods. We didn’t call it hiking,” she said.

Zokhrouf moved to Tucson in 1984 and officially hit the trail for the first time with a guy she was dating. The relationship didn’t stick, but the hiking did.

Inspired — and, in some cases, joined — by her fellow club members, Zokhrouf went on to climb 13 of the 17 highest peaks in the U.S. and stand atop the highest points in 45 of the 50 states.

She also served on the SAHC board of directors and, in 1992, authored its first comprehensive list of canyons across the region. She hasn’t hiked them all, she said, but she’s hiked a lot of them.

Zokhrouf insists she has slowed down a bit since she turned 80. Of course, her version of slow is different from other people’s.

She still hikes twice a week or so. Most Wednesdays, she leads an off-trail bushwhacking group, though she skipped her most recent outing so she could join another guide’s hike in Sabino Canyon. The trek covered 9 miles with 1,100 feet of elevation gain, just another walk in the park for her.

“Joining the Southern Arizona Hiking Club was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Zokhrouf said. “I found my passion.”

These destination trails exemplify the beauty of Southern Arizona and are fit for every skill level.

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Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@tucson.com. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean