Elk, Bear, and the Big Animals — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
Let me properly introduce the large animals, because your odds of meeting one today are genuinely good and a couple of them matter for safety.
Elk are the big one. Arizona's herd is enormous and these mountains are the heart of it. A bull elk in autumn can weigh seven hundred pounds and carry a rack of antlers wider than your car is long. They are most active at dawn and dusk, which is exactly when the light is worst, and they come out onto this road. If you see one, expect more — they move in groups, and the second one is what hits you.
In September and October the bulls bugle: an unearthly rising whistle that ends in grunts, echoing across a meadow at dawn. It is one of the great sounds in North America and worth getting up early for.
Black bears are here in good numbers, shy, and mostly interested in whether you left food out. Mountain lions are here too and you will almost certainly never see one, though it is entirely possible one will see you.
Lower down, watch for javelina — collared peccary — which look like small wild pigs, travel in family squads, have poor eyesight and a strong smell, and are best admired from the car. And in the meadows, pronghorn: the fastest land animal in the Western Hemisphere, built to outrun a predator that has been extinct for ten thousand years.