The best seat in NASCAR isn't really a seat at all

MONUMENT HILL, Ariz. -- Sixty-one years before Arizona became a state, a surveyor named A.B. Gray stood atop this precipice scouting the nearby Salt and Gila rivers as part of an expedition dispatched by President James K. Polk. On Friday afternoon, Mike Owens of Arkansas sat in a lawn chair in almost the exact same spot, munching on peanuts and watching Nationwide Series cars circle the 1-mile racetrack below.

"You should have seen the 66-year-old guy who came with me. He beat me up here," said Owens, sporting a Razorbacks cap he bought, strangely enough, in nearby Buckeye, Ariz. "He went back to check on his dog. He's the one who got me up here. He said, 'You want to come up with me?' I said sure, I'll go with you. I got up here and said, 'I ain't believing this.' It is amazing, isn't it?"

It is that. The best seat at any NASCAR track in America isn't a seat at all, but a spot on this dusty, sun-baked hilltop overlooking Phoenix International Raceway. The track sells general admission tickets on what locals call "the hillside" for $35, and spectators gather in camp chairs under canopies set up to shelter them from the unforgiving sun. There are concession stands and souvenir shacks and portable toilets and even an ATM. Deputies of the Maricopa County Sherriff's Office patrol on ATVs. It's a great view, the entire track laid before you, surrounded on three sides by the mahogany-colored Estrella Mountains. But to see the real view, you have to make it all the way to the top.

It's a long, hot, sometimes arduous walk, often over loose gravel or rock, and always accompanied by the stories you've heard about rattlesnakes and scorpions and tarantulas roaming the hill. Urban myth holds that the facility calls in riders on horseback to sweep the hill of snakes before the race weekend, and that medics in the area are equipped with antivenin. Both stories, according to track personnel, are entirely fictional. You get brave a few times and peer under a large rock, hoping for something scaly and venomous, but find nothing. Wait, is that molted snakeskin? No, it's just a piece of scrub bleached white by the sun.

Concrete stairs lead to terraced rows where most fans set up camp, but the steps stop a long way from the top. You make for a barbed-wire fence climbing up the spine of the hillside, and find a path leading all the way to the top. The view is already stunning -- the rolling valley floor leading up the mountains, hundreds of majestic, 20-foot-tall Saguaro cactus, the desert Southwest exactly as you'd imagine it. Helicopters flutter overhead and land at a helipad adjacent to the racetrack, dropping off VIPs or perhaps even Sprint Cup drivers arriving for the day's two practice sessions.

A few huffing, puffing moments later the path winds its way to the summit, and the effort is clearly worth it. Everyone who's ever watched a Phoenix race on television has seen the fabulous panoramic shots taken by the camera located on top of this hill. But the better view, the one that leaves you more breathless than the hike to the peak, is in the other direction. All of the Phoenix valley opens before you -- the skyscrapers of downtown, Camelback Mountain, homes, farms, even the Arizona Cardinals' glittering new stadium, where the most recent Super Bowl was played. The Gila River meanders by, in much less of a hurry than the cars on Interstate 10.

How much more wild and untamed this view must have been more than a century ago, when A.B. Gray and his surveying party climbed to the top. The explorer never had the chance to see the area bloom with people -- he was killed in a riverboat explosion while serving as a colonel in the Confederate army in the Civil War -- but he's memorialized in a concrete market at the summit, a concrete cross inlaid with pieces of colored tile. Dedicated to all the land owners in Arizona, Gray set it in 1851.

There's another marker as well, a small brass plate that says the property is on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the National Register's Web site, the only such listing in the area of Avondale, Ariz., is the summit of 1,158-foot Monument Hill, the initial point for Gray's survey of the Gila and Salt rivers. Who knew the hill overlooking the Phoenix racetrack held such historic significance. But at the moment, the only other two people on the hilltop -- Owens and a teen-aged boy, his ears covered by Sprint FanView headphones -- seem much more interested in qualifying for that night's Nationwide Series race.

You could stand up here and gaze at the view, in any direction, all day long. But there's virtually no cover, and it feels much hotter than the listed 78 degrees. And then there's the wildlife. So far all you've seen are bugs, but Phoenix is the kind of place where you hear stories about scorpions in the garage area and big spiders in the media center. Who knows what kind of fanged, poisonous creatures may be lingering up here? But Phoenix sells about 5,000 hillside tickets for a Sprint Cup race, and track folks say they know of no encounters between fans and the local fauna.

So you begin the trip down. Suddenly there's a rustling in the underbrush, loud -- and close -- enough to be heard even over the buzz of the racecars circling below. A quick glance to the right reveals only a thick, green tail and scaly, clawed legs scampering off a rock. Is it a banded Gila monster? A collard lizard? A desert iguana? Only the hillside knows for certain.