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We are in collective agreement, as organizations, businesses, and individuals, that more can be done to permanently protect the Great Bend of the Gila. We support designating this remarkable landscape as a national monument to ensure the cultural, historic, and natural resources are safeguarded for future generations.

Located southwest of Phoenix, the Great Bend of the Gila has been home to Indigenous Peoples for millennia. Vibrant communities have long flourished here, thanks to the Gila’s life-sustaining waters and irrigable soils. The imprints people left behind are still visible—dwellings, canals, pottery, trail systems, geoglyphs, petroglyphs—and they can still be experienced today. At least 13 federally recognized Tribes have cultural, historical, and ancestral ties to the Great Bend of the Gila. These ties live on through oral and written history, story, song, ceremony, pilgrimage, and other traditions and ways of knowing.

People have used the Gila River valley as a travel corridor for thousands of years. Several ancient and significant Indigenous trails cross this terrain. With the coming of Euro-Americans, the valley also became an overland route between Spanish settlements in Sonora and missions along the California coast. Father Eusebio Kino blazed this trail in 1699 and Juan Bautista de Anza formalized it in 1775.

The Sonoran Desert is the most biodiverse desert in North America, and this is on full display in the Great Bend of the Gila. These lands are important to the active recovery of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn. Other iconic species in the area include mule deer, desert bighorn sheep, javelina, Le Conte’s thrasher, and many other animals and plants.

The Great Bend of the Gila is also a place where residents and visitors can explore and enjoy the abundant recreational opportunities, including bird and wildlife watching, hiking, camping, and hunting. Designating the Great Bend of the Gila National Monument would safeguard these recreation opportunities as well as create economic opportunities for local and regional gateway business.

This remarkable landscape is currently threatened by the relentless expansion of the Phoenix metropolitan area, by insufficient management funding, and by vandalism and theft of cultural resources. Permanent protection of the Great Bend of the Gila will preserve the irreplaceable cultural, historic, and natural resource for the enjoyment and benefits of future generations.