Home, Home on the Range. . . : <i> where the dudes and the sybarites play</i>

You may be invited out for a picnic in your jeans at a desert state park, but when you do, your waiter will be gussied up in a tuxedo and serve your hot dogs, watermelon and caviar with white-gloved elegance.

Introducing the Mild, Mild West.

What would an old cowpoke feel about snails tossed in butter with wild mushrooms? Or duckling salad with pecans? Or mousse of salmon?

Or for that matter, how would old Leather Britches feel about a Russian bath or a Finnish sauna or an herbal wrap?

Only a short time ago Tucson meant horses, hayrides and steak fries. Now it’s golf, tennis, aerobics and high tea.

Forgive us our self-indulgences.

All this began a little more than four years ago with the appearance of the Sheraton El Conquistador, a snazzy resort that seems more in tune with Beverly Hills or Bel-Air than the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. This isn’t to deny a certain Southwestern appeal. Indeed, with the adobe touches it appears from a distance like one of those Navajo villagesin a Western flick.

Once inside, though, it’s strictly glitz.

Scattered about the grounds are 289 hotel rooms of which 47 are suites. This plus 150 casitas, each with its own wood-burning fireplace. Give Sheraton credit. It’s strictly low-rise.

And while there is riding, the emphasis is mostly on golf and tennis (16 lighted courts), biking and racquetball.

Sheraton’s swimming pool is surrounded by waterfalls and lagoons. And while no one expects to bump into the Lone Ranger, a sense of the Old West surely survives. Guests are delivered by buckboard to the Last Territory, a steak house with entertainment that’s strictly country-Western. Or there are picnics at Catalina State Park where vacationers wearing jeans are served by waiters all gussied up in tuxedos and white gloves.

Now that’s class.

As Sunday fades, out comes the Bromo Seltzer following a brunch Sheraton puts on that numbers 142 dishes, including 22 desserts. Afterward, to shake off the calories and assuage the guilt, patrons are given the option of working out in Sheraton’s fitness center.

Of late, Tucson is promoting a European-style spa image. Why travel clear to Baden-Baden or Montecatini when one can shape up at home, ask the resort operators?

Over at the Tucson National Resort & Spa the offerings include herbal wraps, Finnish saunas, Scottish showers, Swiss showers, Russian baths and a variety of other services aimed at helping the guest get on with the glow.

Under the supervision of Doris Hogue, formerly of La Costa, customers are dunked, rubbed, punched and scrubbed in a brand-new multimillion-dollar fitness center 20 miles northwest of downtown Tucson.

Guests fill their lungs with the fumes of a eucalyptus-scented sauna (“it’s like living inside a cough drop,” said one wag) and relax in what could only resemble an iron lung. They soak rays in tanning beds and work out with weights. The spa does pedicures, manicures, facials and provides rubdowns. For $98 they’ll put you through a routine that takes in everything from an herbal wrap to a shampoo and the artificial suntan for a total of 14 encounters with the gang from the Fountain of Youth.

For 15 years the Tucson National Resort & Spa was the staging area for the annual Tucson Open, a scene familiar to millions of Americans via the tube.

When owner William Nanini opened his one-time private golf club to the public, he added the spa to give golf widows a break while their husbands were running about with their carts and clubs.

The $20-million addition includes both men’s and women’s gymnasiums, a conference center, a gift shop and a ring of new poolside villas. Casitas with private fireplaces are spread across wide-open spaces where only jack rabbits once strayed.

A few miles away as the vulture flies, Loews 400-room Ventana resort backs up against the Santa Catalina Mountains with a natural waterfall that flows beneath the hotel into a man-made lake.

High tea is served in the lobby where pianist Sherry Hoffman (she appears like a character out of the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel) plays show tunes and light classical melodies for guests nibbling on finger sandwiches and spooning gooey desserts.

If that’s a trifle ho-hum, dusk signals the opening of the Flying B Bar & Grill with a disco that rocks till 1 a.m.

Loews occupies a stunning site, what with the Santa Catalina Mountains as a backup and the lights of Tucson twinkling a dozen miles away. Surrounded by mesquite, squaw brush and sage, the Loews property is properly proud of a gourmet restaurant that turns out snails tossed in butter, crayfish with mushrooms in a cream sherry sauce, mesquite-broiled duckling with cactus pear sauce and venison smothered in wild mushrooms and a Cabernet Sauvignon sauce.

Vacationers work out on 10 tennis courts and zip around a2 1/2-mile jogging trail that encircles the resort’s 27-hole golf course. Inside the Loews spa they do laps in a pool, pump iron in a gym and soak out the kinks in a sauna.

This is the Old West?

Similar activities are offered at Tucson’s newest resort, the $100-million Westin La Paloma. Opened only a year ago, the Westin La Paloma features low-rise buildings wrapped around a swimming pool andpalm trees to give the illusion of an oasis where jack rabbits peer from behind the saguaros.

What’s inside this lineup of adobe-colored haciendas? To begin with, 5 restaurants, 3 bars and 487 rooms. The 27-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus spreads its green in all directions.

Employing a little showmanship, the builders put in a water slide in the swimming pool along with a swim-up bar.

Westin La Paloma shelters a series of Jacuzzis as well as a health club with Nautilus equipment. Spotted around the grounds are 10 lighted tennis courts, jogging trails and hundreds of saguaros that were replanted after the resort was built.

If one overlooks the huge parking lot and the immense porte-cochere and concentrates on the mountainside, a sense of early Tucson remains--particularly when the sun flames out at sunset.

Cowpokes Still Lead

Fine, but what about the Old West?

Well, take heart. Although the majority of riding ranches are gone, a handful of cowpokes still lead dudes on wilderness trails. Seventeen miles northwest of Tucson and 30 miles from the city’s modern airport, the White Stallion is refreshingly unchanged. Its gift is space. With only 30 units, the White Stallion rises on 3,000 acres of grazing land and trails.

The ranch with its Texas longhorn cattle is operated by the True family--Allen, Cynthia, Russell and Michael--whose only concession to the modern ‘80s is a simple hot tub. Otherwise, the lounge with its piano and deep sofas and the billiards room and serve-yourself bar are like old prints from a turn-of-the-century photo album.

Peacocks roam about the yard. Cages hold white pea fowl from India, pheasants from China, fallow deer and African bighorn sheep.

Celebrities who have found solace at White Stallion include James Garner, Victor Jory, Cameron Mitchell, Leif Erickson and Hal Holbrook.

Down the road another family-operated ranch, the Lazy K-Bar, has been doing business since 1896. With accommodations for 45 guests, its units include half a dozen bungalows with 12-inch adobe walls.

The granddaddy of Tucson’s ranch-type resorts, though, is Bob Cote’s Tanque Verde, which abuts Sahuaro National Monument and Coronado National Forest.

Fifty-eight units are scattered among the mesquite, with 9,000-foot peaks framing the background.

Besides morning and afternoon rides, the ranch does overnight pack trips and provides free tennis lessons. Tanque Verde’s guests paddle about both indoor and outdoor swimming pools and others boil away saddle aches in a sauna and Jacuzzi.

This is a family-oriented ranch whose guests return year after year. Some families are into the second and third generations. Preston Trask of New York hasn’t missed a season in 38 years. And there’s the couple from Chicago that spends three months each winter thawing out at Tanque Verde.

Open year-round, Tanque Verde attracts huge numbers of foreigners. Europeans love it. So do the Japanese. One guest from Nippon showed up dressed like Wild Bill Hickok. Wearing a leather jacket, chaps, spurs and sufficient silver to open his own mine (plus a couple of six-guns slung at his hips), he slipped from his horse before the ride ever got started.

Terry Redknapp, who was reared in Britain, brings his daughter, Bronwyn, to Tanque Verde each year to escape the pressures of Los Angeles and enjoy the open spaces of the ranch’s 640 acres. So impressed is Redknapp with Tanque Verde that one year he sent to England for his mother. “I wanted her to see the real West,” he said with his clipped British accent.

Tanque Verde, which has been operating since 1868, appears like a page from a Western scrapbook. Old and rustically comfortable, it is an Arizona treasure. While adults relax at sunset on benches supported by tractor wheels, youngsters have a go at billiards and Ping-Pong in the tack room.

Rooms face mountains and desert, with forced-air heating to check the morning chill at Tanque Verde’s 2,800-foot elevation.

Former Cattle Ranch

A former cattle ranch, Tanque Verde welcomed the first guest in the early ‘30s. And although ruggedly comfortable, it gets a rave in Thomas Cook’s “300 Best Hotels in the World.”

Besides cookouts, riding and Western music, guests attend lectures in Indian lore by Bob Morning Sky. Jerry Brewer describes reptile life and proprietor Cote recruits volunteers to help band birds.

For Tucson, it’s the Old, Old West, not the Mild, Mild West of those new resorts with the sybaritic touches.

While logs crackle in the fireplace, the strife of city life seems far away--like the distant howl of a coyote.

Resorts/Ranches:

--Sheraton Tucson El Conquistador, 10000 N. Oracle Road, Tucson, Ariz. 85704. Telephone toll-free (800) 325-3535. Current rates from $120 daily. Beginning May 21 minimum rates start at $50.

--The Tucson National Resort & Spa, 2727 W. Club Drive, Tucson, Ariz. 85741. Telephone toll-free (800) 528-4856 or (602) 297-2271 in Arizona. Current minimum rates from $130. After June 1, from $65.

--Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, 7000 N. Resort Drive, Tucson, Ariz. 85715. Telephone toll-free (800) 424-2929 or in Arizona (602) 299-2020. Rates from $160 single, $170 double. Starting May 23 minimum prices will start at $70 single or double.

--The Westin La Paloma, 3800 E. Sunrise Drive, Tucson, Ariz. 85718. Telephone toll-free (800) 222-1252 (outside Arizona) or (800) 654-3588 (inside Arizona). Rates: $155 single, $185 double. (Prices will be discounted roughly 50% beginning May 24.)

--White Stallion Ranch, 9251 W. Twin Peaks Road, Tucson, Ariz. 85743. Telephone (602) 297-0252. Current rates, $103 a day single ($721 weekly), $160 a day double ($1,120 weekly).

--Lazy K Bar Guest Ranch, 8401 N. Scenic Drive, Tucson, Ariz. 85743. Telephone (602) 297-0702. Rates: $100 a day single, $180 double.

--Tanque Verde Ranch, Route 8, Box 66, Tucson, Ariz. 85748. Telephone (602) 296-6275. Current rates $160 a day single, $180 double (including accommodations, meals, riding, tennis and entertainment). Rates change May 1 to $109 single, $139 double.