Shortly after sunrise on the second morning of our visit at KBI’s retreat house, Father Pete Neely arrives to take us to Arivaca. There is frost on the windshield as we pile into our rental cars, but when we arrive at the Bueños Aires National Wildlife Refuge the temperature is reaching into the sixties.
During the hour-long drive from Nogales we see vistas of wide-open desert, rugged mountains rising up along the horizon, towering cactus plants and yellow traffic signs warning us we’re traveling through an open range area. In Arivaca, a desert town of approximately 600 residents that was founded in 1878 and lies a little more than 10 miles north of the Mexican border, we pass a post office, a church and few shops on the main street.