Why he matters
Most of the names on Scottsdale’s trails belong to ranchers, founders or donors. One belongs to a teacher. Melvin Marcus was a glacier geographer who spent his career on ice fields and mountain slopes around the world and more than two decades at Arizona State University, where he was known for one thing above all: taking students into the field and teaching them to read landscapes.
He died in 1997, five years before anyone noticed that a stretch of lumpy McDowell foothills was the wreckage of a mountainside. The ASU researchers who worked that out named it for him. The result is the Marcus Landslide, among the largest known landslides in Arizona, and a family-grade interpretive trail that carries his name.
Where to find his mark today
The trail. The Marcus Landslide Trail, about 1.5 miles each way with a 0.7-mile loop onto the slide itself.
The trailhead. Tom’s Thumb Trailhead on 128th Street, where the trail starts; turn left while everyone else climbs.
The setting. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve, the protected land that let the slide sit undisturbed long enough to be found.
Walking his landslide
The trail is wide and nearly flat on the way out, so the effort goes into looking. Watch for the hummocky ground, the oversized granite blocks scattered on the bajada and the breakaway scar on East End above. The loop climbs onto the slide mass, and that is where the story makes sense. Interpretive signs explain the geology as you go, and the Conservancy runs guided geology hikes here in the cool season.
The full story
Melvin G. Marcus was born in 1929 and was on ice young: in the summer of 1948 he was a member of the first “high ice” expedition of the Juneau Icefield Research Program in Alaska. He became a geographer, climatologist and glacial geomorphologist, stood six foot six, and studied glaciers in Alaska and New Zealand, mountains in Turkey and Nepal and the vegetation of the Grand Canyon. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1973, then moved to Arizona State University in 1974.
At ASU his reputation rested on fieldwork. He led students to the Yukon and Alaska’s icefields, the Himalayas, the Southern Alps, the Colorado Rockies and the Grand Canyon, trips that many of them described as life-changing. He served as president of the American Association of Geographers and headed national commissions on geography education. On March 2, 1997, he died of a heart attack while snowshoeing at about 11,000 feet in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. He was found in the snow with his dog, Sushi, curled beside him.
Five years later, in 2002, two ASU graduate students on a field trip in the eastern McDowells, geography doctoral student John Douglass and geology student Brian Gootee, realized that the boulder-strewn ground below East End was the deposit of a huge rock avalanche. With geographer Ronald Dorn, they published it in the journal Geomorphology in late 2004 as one of the largest Quaternary landslides in Arizona outside the Grand Canyon, and informally named it the Marcus rock avalanche in honor of the late ASU professor, with the permission of his wife, Mary Ann, and son Andrew.
The land was already coming into the Preserve under the 1995 and 2004 sales taxes. When Scottsdale opened the permanent Tom’s Thumb Trailhead in 2012, the landslide was an easy walk from the lot, and the Marcus Landslide Trail made a teacher’s name a destination. ASU’s Melvin G. Marcus Memorial Fellowship still pays for graduate students’ field work. The wider period is in the resort metropolis era.