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Mojave Desert

Birthday Miracle

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014: 2014 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

Note: The photos below are viewable in high resolution. After clicking on the thumbnail, you can really get a sense of being there by clicking on View Full Size at lower right of the photo.

First view of my destination - the mountains on the horizon - from New Home Bench, above the Escalante River Canyons

A Spontaneous, Poorly Conceived Trip

Out of work, betrayed by faceless bureaucracies, threatened with financial ruin, sick for months with a mysterious infection that kept coming back, filling my aching head with mucus, making me disgusting to be around, slow and stupid, weak and tired from lost sleep, waiting in waiting rooms and in line at pharmacies, traveling sick in airport lines and crowded shuttle buses and crammed in airplane seats…

And now my birthday was coming up, and I had nobody around to celebrate it with, all my family and close friends were a thousand miles away – because we had drifted apart, I had moved, my attempts to make new friends were frustrated.

Antibiotics seemed to be working, but still tired and weak…needed to get out of my rut, to fool myself somehow into feeling good…a change of scenery? Couldn’t really afford to travel, even by road. But that seemed the only option, a camping trip. The cheapest place would be my land in the desert. What the hell, you only live once.

I immediately notified my partner in ownership – I never go out there without telling him – but it turned out he had already planned a trip without me, a father and son gathering with his son’s friends.

A sudden decision, no planning – a self-imposed deadline for departure – it was a setup for more stress, desperation and inevitable mistakes as I raced to pack, load the truck, get the house and my pathetic affairs in order. A heat wave was beginning. I have an impeccable list for these trips but I was two hours past my artificial deadline, the day was getting hotter, and I skipped the list.

A Desert in Ireland

Driving west across the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau on I-40, just past Holbrook, gently undulating steppes all the way to the horizon, 50 miles away on left and right. Suddenly I’m in haze, like fog, lying over the ground and obscuring the blue sky and scattered cumulus clouds above. The sagebrush and juniper look out of place, like a desert in Ireland. It’s been a hot drive, the AC is on, a curious harsh smell coming through the vents. Takes me a while to recognize it as smoke from a distant wildfire.

I drive through the monstrous tongue of smoke for more than an hour, and then there’s Flagstaff, with a dark sky of low clouds hanging about the San Francisco Peaks, which I glimpse through an opening, draped in fresh snow.

Wearing shorts, I stepped out into cold mountain air at the market, and it began to rain hard as I shopped for groceries and beer. One benefit of these trips is getting IPAs I can’t get at home. The beer shop had a new, lower-alcohol IPA from Stone that turned out to be a great new summertime beer.

Disgusted with the overwhelming generic yuppie landscape and cutthroat competitive traffic of Flagstaff – which I first knew as a sleepy little railroad town – I briefly tried to relax over a plate of carnitas in an upscale strip-mall taqueria, then raced onward through the black silhouettes of forested mountains toward the sunset and my cheap motel, where I could see lightning blinking above a dimly glowing horizon.

It wasn’t until the following noon in the Mojave, cresting the pass at Mountain Springs Road, that I suddenly felt happy and at peace, returning home to my golden mountains of stone riding like ships above their pale alluvial basins as far as the eye could see. On the way up the alluvial fan, while I was grinning at the summit peak over on the left with a suggestive white cloud hanging over it, a mature red tail hawk flushed out of the low roadside shrubs and swooped theatrically over the gravel road in front of me.

When I reached camp, met the LA crowd and saw their impressive array of expedition gear, I realized I’d forgotten my folding camp chair. Fortunately my partner generously offered me one of his for the rest of my trip.

Sleeping in the Open

Few clouds in the blue sky, little wind, warm but not hot. The rusty golden slopes, cliffs and peaks of ancient stone embraced the broad valley below us as I relaxed with the fathers in the shade of their canopy – the campsite has no natural shade – while the kids climbed around over the granite boulders. Their elaborate cooking gear and wheeled ice chests sat nearby in a ceremonial circle like Stonehenge.

We talked through the rest of the long day until sunset, when they burst into chaotic labor, trudging back and forth between their individual camp kitchens and their vehicles parked below in the sandy wash, servicing their kids’ needs and getting them ready for bed.

After dining, they all retired to the confinement of their tents, while as always I slept out in the open, watching the sky darkening, the stars emerging, and the Milky Way reassembling its vague, mysterious shape overhead. For some reason, on this trip I slept better on the ground than ever before; my 30-year-old ergonomically-designed sleeping pad felt so good that even with my bad back I could rest easily in any position.

I saw a falling star immediately on lying down, and woke sporadically through the night to enjoy the westward progress of the constellations and the galaxy.

Theriodonts and Chemehuevis

Warmer in the morning. The fathers were already preoccupied with leaving, returning to their deadlines and crises in the city, working hard to break camp and load their vehicles, while I fried bacon for everyone. With his father busy, one of the kids I hadn’t interacted with much gravitated to me and we talked about our favorite dinosaurs. I told him about the theriodonts, reptile ancestors of the mammals that provided evidence for continental drift. But in my mind I was regretting the way dinosaurs are used to pimp for Big Science.

I told him about the Chemehuevis and their 10,000 year cultural memory of the extinct horse. He seemed relaxed amid all the bustle of departure, enjoying my stories and our conversation, whereas one of the other kids had already had enough, immersing himself in computer games on his dad’s laptop, anxious to get back to his comfort zone in the city.

As they hurriedly piled into their vehicles, I asked them about the bag of trash they’d left. They all said they didn’t have room for it, apparently unaware it was theirs. This was the second time in a row they’d left me with trash to dispose of, but fortunately this time it was only half a bag. Last time it’d been two full ones that I had to sort for recyclables in the heat of Las Vegas. But hey, at least I got a chair out of it, that more than made up for a stinky load and a little dirt on my hands!

Amazing how much packaging trash and garbage families can generate in a couple of days – after an entire week of camping I can’t even fill a small grocery bag, let alone the full size hefty bags they bring. But then it takes me months to fill my city garbage can at home. They have the families, the urban lifestyle and high-pressure careers; I’m lonely and poor, but have plenty of time to focus on the little things.

Sweating in Silence

It was already quite hot when they left and I packed to head up to the shade house. I figured I’d spend the heat of the day in my hammock in the shade, then go for a hike around sundown. But I wasn’t thinking straight. Sundown would be very late.

I wanted to park at the overhang midway up the Gulch and take the shortcut path up the alluvial bench, but driving up the sandy wash I realized my 2wd truck probably couldn’t handle the deep sand of the first sharp bend, so I stopped in the narrows just beyond the beginning of the shade house road and filled my pack. Starting up the road I discovered that someone had recently driven up it – quite a feat since we’ve considered it undriveable for more than 20 years. Of course, this entire area is private property with a No Trespassing sign, but as any rural property owner knows, to many people that’s a challenge not an impediment.

Someone had obviously seen this as a Jeep commercial, one of those extreme off road opportunities with two-foot boulders to drive over. In the process they’d destroyed 20 years of beautiful native vegetation. With the sun directly above, the morning’s heat radiating from the 2,000′ rock walls above me, and still on antibiotics, I had to stop frequently to rest, even though it’s only about a half mile and a climb of 300 feet or so. At the shade house, I found a few cigarette butts lying around, and the macho trespassers had dumped out the old can of artifacts the kids had collected on previous trips: historic pottery, purple glass, and interesting pieces of metal.

I strung my hammock and began to read the library books I’d brought from home, but soon I was sweating in the shade, and it was only early afternoon. I had to go up on the roof and do some more patching to keep rays of sunlight from scorching me. I was sure it wasn’t as hot as when I had lived out here in the summer of 1992, but for some reason it was affecting me more now. I was uncomfortable for the rest of the day, and knew I wouldn’t be able to do any hiking, which is the main reason I come out here. Later, when I got back to civilization, I checked the temperature history of locations that match our land, and found that day’s temperature was likely 100 degrees, so in retrospect I didn’t feel like such a wimp!

In mid afternoon I became aware of an eerie silence. The night before, I’d strained to hear a single cricket intermittently chirping in the distance. I hadn’t seen any birds yet. Now, in the springtime, there should be an abundance of both birds and insects. The day before, we had talked about how the desert willow seemed to be blooming sparse and late. At camp I’d noticed how dark and shriveled the leaves of the creosote bush were. A female phainopepla appeared briefly at the shade house, but otherwise there were no birds and no bird or insect sounds throughout the entire day. It might have been the driest, and most dormant, I’d ever seen this place.

Finally, by 6:30 pm, the sun dropped behind the western ridge, and I began to pack for the trip back to the truck. I was so weak at this point I didn’t even feel like hiking the short distance up to the seep to check the motion sensor camera. The next day was my birthday, and I wondered how the hell I was going to celebrate in this unbearable heat?

Maybe it would be better to lie on the sand under the overhang in the Gulch, which is in shade from late morning. But I still wouldn’t be able to do any hiking, and I would probably exhaust my reading material early in the day. Sadly, I realized I’d have to leave my land and drive to someplace cooler to spend my birthday in comfort.

Driving back to camp I passed two cottontails huddled together under a bush.

I was staging my meals in order to make best use of the meat I had brought. The chicken would spoil first, so I had to grill it tonight. I waited until 9pm to start a fire; it was still uncomfortably hot out, but the chicken ended up tender and succulent. Finally, by about 10:30, the night started to cool off and I went to bed naked. There had been no moon either night, so the stars had it all to themselves.

Air Conditioning and a Pool

Awakening on birthday morning, I decided to head in the general direction of my favorite mountain range in southeast Utah, where I knew there would be moderate temperatures, alpine hiking, and shady camping in aspen groves. It was a long day’s drive and I didn’t want to spend my birthday driving, so I would need to find a comfortable motel, somewhere in the hot desert not far from here, to break up the trip. I envisioned air conditioning and a pool, someplace with little traffic, but I didn’t know where that would be yet.

As an omen of the day to come, by the time I had broken camp at 8:30 am, it was already too hot to exercise. I bid a sad farewell to my home in the Mojave, flushing a big jackrabbit out of the desert willows near our gate.

My route would inevitably take me through the southern tip of Nevada, but I wanted to avoid the madness of Las Vegas at all costs. Between Goffs and the 95, I stopped to top up my tank with the gas from the extra can, and checking the map I found there was a long way to bypass Vegas through the Lake Mead recreation area, which I knew to be fantastically beautiful. I would look for a historic motel in Boulder City, which I knew from old desert trips, when one of my biologist friends was living there.

El Rancho Boulder turned out to be perfect. I had the large, clean pool all to myself for a birthday swim. What relief after the extreme drought and heat! Decadent, yes. Wasteful and unsustainable, for sure. I spent my calendar birthday in a motel, but my spiritual birthday was yet to come.

Paiute Homelands

The next day’s drive was better than I’d remembered, better than I’d expected. The road past Lake Mead became vaguely familiar as I arrived at a massive roadside spring. I had stopped here with a girlfriend, not sure which, returning from a road trip decades ago. The garish clay domes and fantastic redrock outcrops were intimations of what I’d find far ahead in Utah; the Moapa Valley was a bizarre mix of huge trailer parks, irrigated farms, and McMansions on hills.

From my place in the California desert, to my destination in southeastern Utah, is the ancient homeland of the Southern Paiutes, people whose sophisticated way of life was, unlike ours, perfectly adapted to their environment. They were “environmentally sustainable” for thousands of years, until the Spanish enslaved them, the American frontiersmen and military hunted and killed them like wild game, the Mormons and other white settlers appropriated their fertile farmland and forced them into indentured servitude on Anglo farms, culture hero Mark Twain ridiculed them as subhuman degenerates – and now they’re forgotten or ignored by our culture of Mars rovers and Google Glass.

Yet they may thrive again as our tottering society consumes itself.

Back on the interstate, I made the improbable crossing through the monumental Virgin River Canyon into Utah and steadily uphill to Cedar City, where I took a road east that was new to me. After a week of increasingly hot weather I felt the temperature drop rapidly as the road climbed into aspen and fir forest, past lush alpine meadows and extensive snow-packed slopes. Suddenly, the heat was behind me! At 10,000′ there was an overlook from which I could see the towers of Zion far to the south. Then, driving faster because I was concerned I wouldn’t reach my destination that evening, I came upon the Markagunt Plateau, an amazing highland of brown and black lava flows in which an aspen forest has taken root. Snow beside the road, meandering trout streams, lots of roadkilled deer.

Then, descending into the Sevier River valley, with more lush pastures, ponds and lakes, incredibly beautiful country following the river north.

I turned east again across the high Bryce plateau, then down into dry ponderosa forest and the warm, dry Paria River valley with big silver-leaved trees along the floodplain. At the farming village of Henrieville I left all the tourist traffic behind. So peaceful here; I had to stop in the town for a red hen leading 7 grown chicks across the highway.

Climbing again toward dark, heavy clouds dragging tendrils of rain, through badlands divided by small running streams, more lush high pastures and meadows surrounded by ponderosa, and the smell of rain. What a country we’ve invaded, damaged and polluted!

I stopped for gas in Escalante and found the most beautiful gas station restroom I’ve ever seen.

Dropping into the red sandstone of the Escalante canyon, a powerful musky smell and edible Prince’s Plume blooming everywhere along the road, then up onto the vertiginous narrow ridge of New Home Bench overlooking the white domes and canyons of the Escalante Country. It was there that I realized more than ever how roadbuilding is a sin – and paved roads are a cardinal sin.

You will say I’m a hypocrite because I use these roads to quickly reach my favorite places, but two generations ago these places were reached by dirt roads that had vastly less ecological impact, and two generations before that people simply drove their old, high clearance cars across untracked land, getting to the same places that we’ve spent millions to pave. And before that, of course, they went horseback, and before that walked, and because of it were healthier than any of their descendants. All these places were always accessible, but with far less impact, and an unpaved track is quickly reclaimed by nature.

I began to think of the places where paved roads are most evil: Yosemite Valley, Tioga Pass, the Virgin River Canyon, Long Canyon, the Burr Trail, Comb Ridge…the list is endless.

At the edge of Boulder I turned off on the Burr Trail, a road my aboriginal skills instructor called particularly wicked, a road fought bitterly by environmentalists in a losing battle against redneck yahoos. Driving up Long Canyon, which should have been a hiking trail not a road, a fat red-brown marmot bounced across the road in front of me.

Camping on the Edge

The sun was setting behind the cliffs as I crested the head of the canyon, with my first view of the distant mountains that were my destination, dimly silhouetted far in the east, with visible patches of snow on the crests. Below, I saw a dirt trail off to the side and followed it to a campsite on the edge of a cliff overlooking multi-colored hills and canyons and juniper plateaus.

It was still mercifully cool up there, but I knew that down in the canyon lands to the east, it would be as hot as in the Mojave. I gathered just enough small firewood for a cooking fire. I reached into the ice chest for my birthday steak, which I had bought four days ago frozen but had thawed immediately. The lamb sausages had been waterlogged the whole time. I put them all on the grill and overcooked them; I joined the steak with a cabbage salad and saved the sausages for another night. Midges and lacewings attacked me gently after sunset; a bat hunted through camp, and an owl hooted down in the canyons before I went to sleep under clouds that gradually broke up and revealed the stars.

At dawn I was awakened by my first mosquito; the midges were bad in my ears and eyes. I hoped they wouldn’t be like this in the mountains.

Back on the Burr Trail, I passed a big but young mule deer buck standing in a dry meadow staring at me. He was so big I first thought he was an elk.

Down the legendary switchbacks into another long valley where I turned north into that amazing hidden country of sporadic, huge, lush farms and ranches, the prelude to my destination. I’d never approached it from the south before and I overshot my turnoff.

Salivating for Snow

My attraction to these mountains is almost as mysterious as my seduction by the Mojave. I remember driving past them with Katie on our rock art expedition in 1987, and thinking they looked inviting, a high, green, presumably cool oasis in the midst of a vastness of red rock. Somehow that vision got lodged in my mind; more than 20 years later I found myself retracing our expedition path, and ended up climbing to the summit and falling in love. Since then, I’ve found a few others who also treasure this remote, little-known range.

As far as I can tell, these very mountains were the eastern limit of the Southern Paiutes, the tribe I know and admire the most, the tribe that branched and became the Chemehuevis who claimed what is now my land in the Mojave. The group that lived in this area was called the Yantarii. Nothing seems to be known about them; they managed to evade our historical appropriation.

Back on course, across dramatic badlands and climbing up, up the big mountain from sagebrush foothills through pinyon-juniper into the ponderosa and then the alpine fir and spruce. Dark clouds swirled around the summits up ahead and I salivated for that snow! Someone had driven the road much earlier when it was saturated after snowmelt, and their deep ruts, meandering back and forth, had dried rock-hard so that it was very slow going in my bouncy, rattling little truck. It was yet mid afternoon and I wanted to park at the pass and try the summit hike.

I passed a rancher in his pickup truck; these mountains are grazed to the top. I passed groups of mule deer, and a small area of recent clearcut with a pile of ponderosa logs and a trailer. I passed the first aspen groves above 9,000′ and carefully inched my way up the final steep, rocky grade. Entering the fir forest near the pass I encountered an ATV trailer someone had surprisingly parked right in the road; I squeezed past it, rounded a turn and came upon a deep snowdrift blocking all but a couple feet of the roadway. So I backed to a wide place in the road, parked and loaded my backpack.

Talus and Tundra

The pass was only a few hundred yards past the snowdrift. Out of the trees I encountered a gale force wind, as I had in my previous visit. The air temperature was probably about 50 degrees, and the steady west wind was only slightly less than what would knock me down – maybe 60-65 mph.

The pass is 10,500′; the peak is only a thousand feet higher, at the end of a crestline of four progressively higher peaks. The initial slope is a gentle grade, but with my weakness and the relentless wind I felt uncertain starting out and quickly lost heart and breath. I kept having to stop to rest. I thought I might stop at the first low peak and turn back.

The crest line is true alpine tundra, which, I’m guessing, exists unusually in this latitude and elevation probably because of the constant cold wind. Thus the slopes are clear, and the approach is mostly a good trail, with occasional traverses of brittle diorite talus, festively decorated with orange lichen.

I reached the little grove of wind-stunted dwarf spruce and firs at the first peak, and tried to cross a snowdrift that blocked the trail between the trees. At first the snow was hard, then my boots sank deep and I got snow in them so I had to briefly take them off in that harsh environment. I was not feeling particularly robust at this point.

The trail to the next peak was much steeper. It just headed straight up the slope. I forced myself to try it. And somewhere in that difficult climb, in that howling wind, I got my spirit back.

At the second peak I was on top of the world. I could see across all the canyon lands, a maze of red, yellow and white rock to east and west, burning hot way down there while I was freezing up here: the engine of that wind. Ahead of me across the trail to the third peak was a slab of snow hundreds of feet long, with a small cornice facing me. I skirted it along a soggy slope that got steeper, until I had to find a way across the snow.

I found a place where it seemed to be shallower, and tried kicking my boots into it. It was soft but firm and I could climb over it. The rest of the third crest was nonstop talus, with that howling wind threatening to topple me from every loose rock I stepped on. Then there was the steep climb to the final summit, over big, sharp, barely eroded loose diorite chunks and slabs. Occasionally I saw a spider scrambling between rocks; I came upon three ravens; otherwise nothing but lichen and hardy tundra plants hugging the sparse soil.

The clouds were pulling back as I reached the summit. I couldn’t believe I’d made it, feeling the way I had at the start. I was so elated, I made a video for whoever may have wished me a happy birthday, back in civilization.

Coming back down was actually the hardest part, because without the heat of exertion I felt the cold a lot more. I cinched my hood as tight as I could around my face. The next day my lungs were burning and I coughed a lot, but after that it cleared up.

Waiting for the Dark to Fall

With this cold and this wind, my former campsite in an open grove at the head of a ridge was way too exposed, but I knew there was another attractive aspen grove protected in a bend in the road farther down. What I didn’t know was how cold it would get at night; I had only my lightweight summer sleeping bag.

When I pulled out beside the lower grove, I found faint old vehicle tracks that passed the grove up a gentle slope, and walking up I found one of the best campsites I’ve ever seen, in a mature grove of very tall aspens, some of whose trees had started to die, providing ideal bird nesting habitat. It hadn’t been visited or used yet this year; there was lots of dry firewood; there was a woodpecker working loudly high up in the canopy.

I got out one of the lamb sausages, sliced and mixed it with some seasoned black beans and rice I’d cooked days earlier in the Mojave. I started a small fire and sat waiting for the dark to fall. I thought about how I keep making these trips alone, because I have no one else to make them with. I know of only one other guy who might rarely go camping alone. Most of my friends would never venture it, and certainly not the climbs or canyon hikes I do by myself. The arrogant jocks and bullies who threatened me and called me a coward in high school are now all out of shape and in poor health and probably couldn’t handle a single night outdoors.

It was a chilly night, but I slept with all the warm clothing I’d brought, and in the morning I woke to a form of paradise.

Miracle in the Morning

My grove was full of birds and birdsong. The woodpecker was still working. The first bird I saw was a hummingbird, attracted to the red in my sleeping pad or mosquito screen. I lay in bed for a while as sunlight poured over the crest and gilded the high canopy. Then as I prepared my granola and made coffee, I marveled at the avian spectacle all around me. They were working the ground, the middle space, and the sunlit tops of the aspens. I saw flashes of blue and green, tan, red, black and white, all sizes from hummingbirds to jays. Small, sleek swallows kept swooping through my camp. I had my breakfast and while I was eating they all suddenly moved on, as an ensemble, to another grove nearby. Completely different kinds of birds, working independently, yet moving together as a group. I was surprised and inspired.

As I was rinsing my dishes I heard a sudden crashing at the low end of the grove and looked up. There, about 40 yards away, three bison were galloping away through the trees. Apparently they had been grazing their way closer and suddenly became aware of me. I sort of remembered hearing there were bison in these mountains, but had never seen them – and had certainly never seen bison wild, outside a national park or a billionaire’s ranch. Now my birthday celebration was complete! First a spontaneous, poorly conceived trip, then an insurmountable obstacle leading to an unplanned detour, and now these miracles!

Traversing the Middle Peak

I wanted to stay there forever. But like my LA friends, I had a deadline and a crisis back in town. I felt I needed to somehow get in cell phone range today to call my mortgage officer – today was the deadline for her to call the lender and extend my application. I could just assume she would remember, but if she didn’t I’d be screwed, with a lot of money down the drain. And I wasn’t sure how far I was from a phone connection: 3 hours, or as much as 6 hours. I was really out there.

After studying the maps I decided to try a new route across the mountains. To reach it I’d have to drive back down into the lower foothills. Before that turnoff, there would be others higher up that led to 4wd-only roads I needed to avoid.

But of course I turned off too soon, following a sign that seemed to point where I wanted to go. After many miles of steep climbing on a bad road at 5-10 mph, I realized I was on the 4wd road to hell. But if I turned back, I would likely miss my call. So I kept going.

It took me up across the southwest face of the northern massif. I gradually became confident. I was filling in the blanks of my knowledge of this range. I hadn’t encountered anything undoable. I saw the middle peak getting closer, with its solid granite outlier formation. I began to see exactly where I was on the map. I followed the road down toward the saddle connecting the peaks. Then I came to the bad spot.

Fortunately I was going down. I might not have been able to come up this part of the road. It turned to deep red powder sand with big, sharp rocks sporadically embedded in it. First there was a sharp turn that was just deep sand. Around the turn was a steep downslope of sand and rock. Using gravity, I inched around the turn and carefully lurched down the long rocky hill, and breathed a big sigh of relief at the bottom.

Now I was in an entirely new part of the range. I came into a fairly recent burn area; the entire north and east slope of the middle peak had burnt intensely in 2003 and the ponderosa forest on its slopes was being replaced by thickets of Gambel oak. The middle slopes were gently rolling, with large expanses of grassy meadows and sagebrush flats, with a few small groups of cattle grazing at great distances from each other. The road was, if anything, rockier than ever. I could see the canyonlands desert off in the distance, with its highway that might lead me in calling range, but I couldn’t hurry on this road.

After stopping to make lunch in a sunny flat at about 8,000′, I slowly made my way across and down the east side of the mountains into the desert, dropping into the canyon of a major creek and coming suddenly upon a major encampment of ATV enthusiasts with big trucks and RVs parked beside the stream. A few miles beyond I hit the paved road.

I still had no phone signal; I kept driving southeast through my old familiar canyon country, across the big river and over high mesas, until finally high up on the edge of Elk Ridge I saw three bars on the phone and pulled over to try calling the bank. It was 4:30 pm on Friday; she was away from her desk so I left a message.

I had hoped to do another hike before driving home, but I had used up the entire day driving across the best hiking country in the world, just trying to make a futile, and probably unnecessary, call. I was starting to think about dinner; I drove to the village of Bluff on the San Juan River, where I knew there was a good steakhouse, but as I passed it I realized I still had leftover lamb sausage, beans and rice, so I decided to look for a picnic spot on the river. Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed that my old favorite cheap motel in Bluff had re-opened.

Folk History in Bluff

Several miles later I was in a grove of cottonwoods beside the San Juan, starting to unpack my cooking gear, until I realized that my stove was buried under everything else, and there were bugs here, and no good camping spots, and no place to camp on the Navajo Reservation if I kept driving. So I decided to return to the Mokee Motel, get a room for the night, and warm up my leftovers there. The next day would be a reasonable 6 hour drive back home.

Per usual for this time of year, Bluff was hot as hell. After dinner, with the air conditioner rumbling, I intermittently read Richard McKeon’s Thought Action and Passion on the iPad and glanced at a PBS fundraiser on TV featuring mainstream, baby boomer folk music acts of the late 50s and early 60s, some of whom had been part of my childhood. Most of them were insipid, and I was reminded of why I don’t really like folk music. It’s a genre primarily consisting of uptight, overeducated urban white people self-consciously trying to reproduce traditional music divorced from the traditional context. Like professional sports, its another way in which our culture has specialized and commodified the life out of its traditional roots.

Tamales in Chambers

Traffic was light across the Navajo reservation. I was on the decompression leg of my journey. I still had the White Mountains and all the other watersheds of the San Francisco River ahead of me, and the open Gila Country, but first I had to stop somewhere for lunch. There used to be a Denny’s-type coffee shop attached to the motel at the Chambers exit on I-40, so that would be my first attempt.

It was open, and it was now a bare-bones Navajo eatery. A big TV was blasting at the end of the room; a pony-tailed older Navajo was eating and watching from his booth, and an Anglo couple were finishing lunch at theirs. I sat at the counter and a shy young Navajo guy handed me a menu. A middle-aged lady was cooking behind the order window.

I ordered tamales, and they came out looking good, with big whole kidney beans and rice. The tamales and sauce were much better than I’d expected. I took my time, reading from my iPad. The other diners left. The kid asked me if I wanted him to turn off the TV and I said sure. As I was getting up to pay, the cook came out and I told her I liked her tamales. She went to the other end of the room and started a long, soft-spoken reply that I couldn’t understand, so I smiled and chuckled and strolled out to my truck, to end a journey that turned out pretty well after all.

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The Lost World

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015: 2015 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

So Many If’s

The mountain range in the Mojave desert that I consider my spiritual home provides subsistence habitat for two large wild mammals: the mountain lion and the mountain sheep. Soon after buying land out there, I befriended the scientist who has become the senior authority on desert bighorn, and 23 years ago, he took me in a Fish & Game helicopter on a sheep survey of the range.

We flew over the highest part of the range; we flew over my land; and we flew across the rugged mountains of stone to a distant canyon where we rose stealthily from behind a ridge to surprise a small group of sheep grazing on the other side. A few years later I summited the central crest of the range and looked out across a vast internal basin toward that same canyon. The map showed no roads going in there, and the Desert Protection Act, which went into effect at that time, enclosed the entire area in federally protected wilderness, with no vehicle access.

For some reason I couldn’t explain, it looked to me like the Promised Land.

This year, two decades later, my birthday was approaching, and I still hadn’t tried to go there. So many things had gotten in the way, and my body was showing its age. I was plagued with back pain from a ruptured disc, and I was walking on a hip with no cartilage that gave me chronic pain, often prevented me from hiking, and had been scheduled to be replaced until my surgeon was hit by a car a few weeks earlier. Currently, it was aching from all the trips I’d made up and down a ladder while working on the roof of my house. But I still dreamed about visiting that hidden valley.

The week before my birthday, I consulted my scientist friend, who remembered the area well, decades after visiting it himself. His voice brightened and he recalled that place as really interesting.

He also told me that bighorn were dying all over the desert from pneumonia spread by livestock; populations had crashed as much as 75% in a few months. A recent survey was unable to find a single sheep in my mountains. So anything I could observe might be helpful.

There were many obstacles protecting that hidden valley. My friend warned me that there was almost certainly no water available there now. He had mapped three surface water sources there after a wet winter three decades ago, but none of them had been significant, and we had not had a wet winter for many years.

I checked the weather forecast and found there was a heat wave approaching: every day was supposed to be hotter than the day before. I was already getting a late start; afternoon temperatures would be reaching 90 degrees by the time I reached the mountains, meaning I would need to carry lots of water. Hiking all day in that weather, and/or climbing thousands of feet, all with no shade, I would need to drink more than a gallon per day, probably more than I could carry in my condition. But if I didn’t go now, I’d have to wait all summer for cooler weather in the fall, or even longer if I went ahead with surgery.

With no vehicle access, the only way in would be by climbing over one of the surrounding ridges. But those ridges themselves were hard to reach now, because the closed wilderness boundary began miles away from the base of the mountains. There was only one place where an open road penetrated the wilderness to the foot of a slope, and that’s where I hoped to start – if I could even drive any of those roads.

None of the “roads” reaching this mountain range are maintained; they’re all rough tracks over packed dirt, rocks, gravel, and loose sand, temporarily graded by miners in the 19th century and abandoned to erosion ever since, used sporadically today by desert rats and by the rancher who runs cattle around one corner of the mountains. All of these roads cross long stretches of deep sand at some point. A friend had been out recently and said the sand was very dry due to drought. Dry sand offers no traction, and my 2wd truck is front-heavy and bogs down easily.

None of my friends was available to join me at such short notice, so if I was going to do it, I was going to do it alone.

So many if’s: if I could reach the mountains by road without getting stuck in the sand; if my bad hip and ruptured disc would let me carry enough water in a heavy backpack up some of the most rugged mountains on earth, where there are no trails, you have to carefully pick your own way in advance to avoid insurmountable obstacles, and where bouldering skills are often needed, potentially climbing up and down thousands of feet in two days; if I didn’t get bitten by one of the rattlesnakes I was sure to encounter at this time of year; if I didn’t lose my balance or slip on one of the thousands of loose rocks and sprain an ankle or break a leg or fall into the razor-sharp two-foot-long spines of a yucca or the thousands of needles of a cholla cactus; if I didn’t run out of water and electrolytes and get dehydrated and lose my mind, as I almost had 18 years ago, with a friend, in our “death march” over some of the same ridges.

But would I rather grow old and die in some hospital bed without ever trying?

So I spent two days loading my truck with water and ice chests and everything I could think of to help me get there and back, plus supplies for alternative destinations in case my dream didn’t pan out.

The Ancient Road Warrior

It’s a two-day drive from home, and when I arrived at the halfway point late at night, I was surprised to find the cheap motel almost full. I was given the last upstairs room at the far end. The next to last space in the partially flooded dirt parking lot was occupied by what seemed an abandoned station wagon from the 1970s, completely filled with trash.

But when I looked closer, I saw the tires were all inflated, but bald, and the next morning as I was leaving my smelly room, I saw a man come out of the room below mine and open the driver’s door of this derelict: a big, hunched-over old guy in shapeless, worn-out clothes, with a thick shock of grey hair pointing outward in all directions. And I realized that he’d kept the driver’s seat clear.

Nighthawks Over Camp

Unless you use them regularly, you never know where a road is going to turn to sand. After more than an hour off the paved road, on the long, bone-rattling approach to the mountains, I suddenly found myself driving uphill in deep sand. At such a point, there’s nothing to do but keep going, because if you stop, you’re definitely stuck.

So I kept driving, with the solace that I was prepared to get unstuck, and the drive out would be downhill. Still, it’s nerve-wracking when you’re doing this alone, dozens of miles away from a cell phone signal.

But my success was short-lived. When I reached the spur road to my planned starting point, I found it closed off with a secure cable gate, despite being shown as open on the BLM access maps.

So I climbed to the nearby shade of the sacred cave that, for me, is the center of the universe, North America’s answer to Australia’s Uluru, and pondered what to do next.

It was mid-afternoon. In any event, I’d need to find a place to camp before starting out in the morning. I scrambled out of the cave and looked up at the mountain wall looming behind it at the head of an enclosed valley. A shallow dip in the ridge, perhaps 1400′ up, would give me access to the hidden basin behind. I decided to try it the next morning.

That night, I camped among boulders a few miles away, where I’d last camped on the winter solstice more than 6 years ago, with friends, in a very rare 6 inches of snow. We’d made a snowman – hard to believe now.

I uncapped and started on a bottle of the new Stone Ruination 2.0 that I’d picked up on the way, and sat in the shade of a boulder, watching the light change color on distant peaks. After a while I climbed down into the big wash and spent some time gathering and hauling back dead catclaw branches for firewood. After starting a fire, I laid out my bedroll in some level sand: plastic tarp, heavy foam mat, cheap sleeping bag, and pillow, with a partial mosquito screen rolled up nearby, just in case. As usual, I wondered about my dad, who taught me to camp in tents, and some of my current friends, who persist in using tents to shut out the stars at night. I feel lucky to have broken free of that.

As the sun started to set and I prepared dinner over gas stove and wood fire, I was treated to a rare exhibition by two or three nighthawks chasing insects in the upper air, swooping, flapping and twirling like big slender bats. And then the bats themselves began shooting through camp.

After dinner, I walked up the road a mile or so in the bright light of the half moon, listening to crickets at various distances off in the desert.

I slept well, only waking briefly a couple of times, to track the progress of the forked galaxy, after the moon set behind the mountains in the west and left the night to the stars.

Over the Wall

The last time I’d tried backpacking, several years ago, it was on a maintained trail, and I’d had to turn back after two miles because my feet, my back, and my hip were hurting too much. I had been wearing the cheaper hiking boots with less support, and my heavy old Swiss Army rucksack with no waist belt.

This time, I had better boots, but the same pack. I’d shopped again and again, but I just couldn’t abide any of these new neon-colored high-tech packs, and none of them were designed for desert conditions anyway. Just walking past a catclaw bush would rip that thin nylon to shreds, and most of those fancy suspensions would leave your back soaking wet with sweat in no time. I’d actually designed my own desert pack using natural materials, but hadn’t been able to source the materials yet.

I did update my stash with two collapsible 96-ounce plastic canteens, so that my total fluid load ended up including 8 liters of water and one liter of electrolyte drink. Plus that big sleeping bag, warm clothes for the cool night, jerky, cajun sesame sticks, energy nuggets from the Co-op back home for morning, and miscellaneous survival odds and ends, including maps, folding knife, lighters and my water zapper just in case I got lucky and found water. If that happened, I could stay a day or two longer!

I figure the total weighed about 30 pounds, almost a quarter of my body weight.

Incidentally, for the first time in my life, I had a walking stick. My mom had left it behind after one of her visits, and I’d put it in the basement never expecting to see it again. But with my bad hip, I knew I’d need all the help I could get. And it really did help. It was often in the way when climbing over boulders, but even more often, it took the weight off my bad hip, so that stick, more than anything else besides water and food, enabled me to get there and back, so thanks Mom!

The walk up to the base of the ridge, across many crisscrossing spines of rock and deep ravines, was challenging as usual. A beautiful specked rattler stretched across a small gully in front of me just as I started out.

The climb up the steep headwall, pacing myself in the heat, zigzagging back and forth to avoid sheer cliffs, took a couple of hours. The wonderful Mojave sage was finishing its bloom, but I enjoyed patches of its fragrance all the way up. Three-quarters of the way up, I came upon fairly recent scat from a group of 7 or 8 bighorn.

I reached the saddle at the top of the ridge with little pain in my hip, and for some reason I hardly felt the weight of the pack, unlike last time. And like most ridgetop saddles, this one was swept by wind, so that although it was midday and the sun beat down with no shade anywhere, it actually felt cool up there.

I knew the down climb would be the most dangerous part, but this turned out to be a complicated saddle, with successive shelves that dipped down gradually to the west, so that I couldn’t even see my destination, the hidden basin, until I’d worked my way around and down the sheer palisades of these rock shelves.

When I finally reached a viewpoint over the hidden basin, I saw that it was lower than my starting point, and my climb down would be even longer than my climb up.

Again and again, even with the stick, I stumbled and regained my balance, on a steep slope that wouldn’t have caught me in time if I’d fallen. It was a horrendous, fearsome down climb, worse than anything I’d done before.

Finally, two-thirds of the way down, I came upon a big granite outcrop eroded into caves and tunnels, and found shade in a shallow cave. After drinking and resting, I scouted the remainder of my route. I was getting tired, but it was not yet 3pm, with the hottest time of day still to come.

Six hours after starting, I reached the bottom, at the edge of a deep gully where my friend had found water 30 years ago. Everything was gone dry now, but in the distance was a boulder pile that offered shade, and I cut across the bajada toward it, through stands of cholla denser than I’d seen anywhere else in the range.

Sunset in the Lost World

The shade of the boulders wasn’t extensive, and cholla balls were scattered over the ground. I brushed some sand as clean as I could and laid out my sleeping bag to lie on. Tired but restless, I kept getting up and looking out from my tiny patch of shade. My water was more than half gone already, so I needed to stay put. I was totally alone in a very inaccessible place.

I found a small shard of the simple, disposable low-fired pottery that the People used out here. So they were over here! I thought of the 4-dimensionality of this place for those of us who’ve visited it for decades. All the different sites and elevations of the mountains are populated in memory with the family, friends, and girlfriends who’ve been with me here at different times. The People are just an added layer, still here with me in the eternal present, living the way I was taught to live at the school in Utah, at the other end of their territory.

Hours later, the sun started down and I shouldered my pack and got moving again. In the lowering light, the grandeur and mystery of this landscape, hidden for decades, grew before my eyes. Completely surrounded by high rock walls and boulder-strewn slopes, powerfully isolated from the outside world. The sunset light picked out towering cliffs and pinnacles as rugged as those in any other part of the mountains. Huge dry washes converged in the lower distance toward the central drainage of the basin, miles away. By some magic of topography, the big eastern canyon I’d wanted to explore caught the last light of the sun, turning brilliant gold behind foreground ridges that were already dark.

I worked my way down into the big washes, looking for a camp site, and found no evidence that anyone had ever driven in here. It was the first drainage I’d seen in these mountains without tire tracks or footprints. And there was no sign that cattle had ever been in here, confirming my friend’s 1985 report. This was probably the most pristine habitat in the entire range.

I walked down to the convergence of drainages. It was a huge wash, hundreds of yards across, thick with healthy stands of baccharis and other riparian shrubs. It was getting dark and I wanted a more enclosed camp, so I walked back up the northernmost drainage, the one I’d use in the morning to find my way out of the valley.

There, I found some outlying junipers with deep layers of duff underneath that I could use for padding on the hard sand of the wash. The light was falling fast, and I had no lantern nor anything to do after dark other than sleep. I made my primitive bed like the People, ate as much jerky and sesame sticks as I could, drank a little more water, and went to bed in the heart of the Lost World. The night was perfectly still, and a thin layer of clouds had been forming during sunset, so that I hoped for cooler weather in the morning.

Sunrise: The Old Ones

I slept well, but the sky cleared during the night. Hoping to make as much of the hike out as possible in the shade of the eastern mountain wall, I woke well before dawn, ate a bunch of energy nuggets and drank a half liter of my precious water, and was packed and on the way by 5:30am.

Coming down, I had vowed not to go back the same way. I would walk miles to the north, skirting the base of the eastern wall, to try the shorter climb to the pass I’d originally selected, the one with the closed road. Once I reached that road, it would be only two or three miles back to my truck, with its 15 gallons of drinking water, under the full sun of a hotter day.

As the drainage ascended to the bajada I began to find my first “modern” artifacts: a plastic shotgun shell casing oxidized into tatters, and an old rusted can with a wire threaded through it as a handle, just the way the People would do it, according to the way I was taught. You could prop it over a fire with a stick and cook a meal in that tiny pot adapted from a can the white man would toss aside as trash.

In the wash last night, and across the bajada this morning, I found many husks of skinny mushrooms and compact puffballs, always a surprise in the open desert. The decomposers seem to find something to work on in any habitat.

My first destination was the base of a spur of the mountain that projected out into the valley. I would need to get around it to reach the low pass. The bajada went up and down, I threaded my way around and between stands of cholla and creosote bush, and the rising sun began to gild the peaks to the north.

Still walking in the cool morning shadow of the eastern wall, I finally approached the projecting spur. At its base was a pile of ancient granite boulders, blackened with desert patina. I always check these patinated outliers for rock art, and from the pottery shard I’d found the day before, I knew the People had been here.

I lifted my pack, set it down, and walked over. As I rounded from the south to the north side of the boulders, I saw them. High up on the rock face, faint, and damaged in spots by the white hunters’ shotgun blasts, the marks were strange but their style was familiar. The People had been here, perfectly adapted to this harsh environment, living sustainably with minimal impact, neither firing the grasses nor damming the drainages nor building the machines of destruction that we’re so good at. If that is romanticizing the noble savage, so be it. It’s what we know about them, and no defensive, guilt-ridden news bytes about the destructive practices of other indigenous peoples in other places can invalidate that.

In the short time between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I’d found more than what I’d come for: wild, timeless habitat, and the presence of the people who lived as an integral part of it, eating wild food, making everything they needed, by hand, with the natural resources available here. Peaceful people who avoided conflict. People our soldiers decapitated, mounting their heads on poles as a warning to those who would not be civilized. Tell me about our progress: how we outsource the behaviors we no longer want to see, such as slavery, to distant lands that are destroyed to feed our hyperconsumption; how we learn to depend on money and machines to do everything for us, so that we become weak in body and spirit. Too weak and poor in spirit to live the way the Old Ones did.

There’s nothing shameful about admitting you’re wrong, you’re on the wrong path. There’s nothing shameful about admiring the people who came before you. That’s not romanticizing, that’s honesty. Your myth of progress: now that’s romanticizing.

The Climb Out

Recharged by my discoveries, I walked the final miles to the base of the pass. I believed I was going to make it, but I was still being careful. There were many challenges, routes to pick from a distance around cliffs and boulder-choked ravines. Loose rocks to avoid, some of them so big they appeared solid.

It wasn’t an easy approach; it never is, because the base of a steep drainage collects the biggest boulders, and erosion exposes the foundation rock which is too steep to climb with a pack. You have to aim for the alluvial parts of the slope, which lie between the exposures of solid rock. As I was following one of these slopes upward at an angle, I came upon a diamondback rattler asleep in the shade. Totally out. I admired it for a moment then looked for a way around that wasn’t blocked by yucca or catclaw.

In the same area, I found another shard of pottery which showed that the People used this pass as well.

Luckily, this slope got easier toward the top. I had climbed out of the shade; it was after 8am. When I got to the saddle, my water bottle was empty. I found shade behind a boulder and drained the remainder of my last big canteen into my drinking bottle. Then I walked east to scout the down slope.

It was totally gnarly. Walls of a different, dark red granite projected across from the south, probably impassible. The center of the drainage was choked with boulders as usual. The north side had some sediment but was in full sun.

I managed to find a way down between the central boulders and the red walls, stopping frequently to reconnoiter, weaving my way back and forth. The lower I got, the more I was forced into the boulders with their sheer drop-offs and impassible clots of vegetation. Still, it was a beautiful slope, dotted with pinyon pine and thick riparian shrubs. At one point a hummingbird dropped in front of my face to check me out. I could see the end of the road at the bottom, with a cleared turnaround. I just had to be smart and patient and keep going.

The walk back on the road was a walk in the park, but it reminded me again of how special the Lost World is, free of the roads we build for our machines, free of the giant trampling beasts we attempt to manage in our efficient but wasteful commodification of food.

I got back to the truck with a half liter of water. It was 10am, already fiercely hot, and there was no shade within 50 miles of driving for me to park in, wash up and rest for the remaining 10 hours until sunset. I needed a rest. I had pushed my deteriorated joints far beyond what they deserved. So, as a product and a lifelong victim of an advanced society, I headed for a motel with air conditioning.

 

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Vision Quest 2016: Reading the Ground

Monday, May 23rd, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

I tested myself by following my own tracks back to camp

Driving across northwestern Arizona the previous afternoon, I’d encountered heavy rains, and crossing the river before nightfall I’d seen a low ceiling of dark clouds ahead, hanging over the rugged mountains of the Mojave. But this afternoon, the sky had cleared, with only scattered clouds, as I parked my truck at Cowboy Camp. I started walking up the sandy wash past the big bend, and soon crossed animal tracks from the north, cut through the dry surface into wetter sand.

They were tracks of adult bighorn, and they’d been forcefully pounded, forming a ragged circular pattern in two places a few yards apart. Last summer in the mountains of eastern Arizona, I’d been lucky to see, for the first time, wild sheep jumping up and down in place, which John says is “play” behavior, so these tracks spoke to me in a way they couldn’t have before. Assuming it had rained yesterday or last night, these sheep had been here since, perhaps only hours before me. Scanning the area, I guessed there had been two sheep, perhaps yearling males. Backtracking down the wash, I crossed another set of tracks, including those of a lamb – probably a lamb and its mother. The adult tracks appeared again, high above the Gulch, in sand leading to the water hole fed by the seep in the narrow side canyon.

The recent rain gave me an unexpected opportunity to sharpen my tracking skills, since animals were more active now, and there was a clear contrast between fresh tracks and old, eroded tracks. I’d been encouraged in the weeks before the trip, when back home in New Mexico, I’d encountered my first mountain lion, then identified his tracks shortly afterward, near where I’d seen him last, associated with the prints of a group of javalina. The day after my arrival in the Mojave, I set out across the central basin into the main wash, and came upon a mountain bike track – illegal in the wilderness – and eroded footprints which I assumed were my friends who had visited only a week earlier. Near them were the tracks of a large dog, and farther up the wash, a large cat track, maybe a lion, and fox prints.

After the difficult climb to the Plateau, one of the toughest climbs in these mountains, I encountered one set of old footprints in the occasional sandy patches of the narrow gully. I’ve found solitary footprints there on some earlier visits, but not often. Here there was water, standing, the color of Lipton Tea, in hollows lined with patches of dead algae, sometimes wearing a thin scum, or sluggishly flowing over the lips of rock barriers. Later, talking this over with scientist friends, I concluded that there had been some good rain early in the winter, followed by gradual drying, through unseasonably warm weather that supported the kind of algal growth we usually see in late spring. This week’s rain had stirred up that dead algal mat. The old, eroded footprints had probably been made during the past two months. A single adult male hiking across this remote, hidden, hard-to-reach plateau, maybe familiar from previous visits, but possibly just drawn by the landmark pinnacle at its head. And there were recent sheep tracks, but only from one or two adults. I was reading a detailed story and drawing a picture from evidence on the ground that might’ve been mute before.

From then on, I was always looking for tracks, and reading more from them. In every wash and every drainage, I found the fresh tracks of one or two adult sheep, showing that individual sheep were responding to this week’s rain by ranging widely in search of fresh forage. I frequently walked jackrabbits or cottontails up from the big washes of the bajada, and their tracks were everywhere, along with those of ground squirrels.

During the Fish & Game survey of bighorn sheep, when I was doing my shorter hikes as the others were converging over peaks and ridges into a central drainage, I’d occasionally come upon the small knobby prints of the young women’s hiking boots and puzzle out where they’d come from and where they were going. And later, walking down the basin to the southern ridge, I followed vehicle tracks showing how the local rancher had driven his big contractor’s truck deep into the wilderness area and far up three tributary drainages in succession, places that hadn’t been driven in decades, insteading of walking like me. Holding the grazing allotment, he claims a legal right to violate the federal roadless area prohibition, but there are actually no cattle and no range improvements to check over here. He’s a younger man than me, in good shape, and isn’t recovering from hip surgery. Like so many, he just can’t be bothered to walk when driving is possible, and it broadcasts a message of disrespect to the public.

More than a hundred miles to the north, exploring a long, winding drainage between low foothills into a hidden basin, I came upon fresh sign of cattle a mile before I spotted them, way ahead of me, spooking and stampeding up a steep slope. Then I came upon a burn area – clear of living shrubs but dotted with the charred stumps of creosote and the fallen husks of Mojave yucca, broad evidence of a wildfire – but knowing that burned stumps can last for decades or even centuries, and perennial vegetation can’t easily regenerate in soil trampled by cattle, I had no way of judging its age.

Whereas the evidence of surface water may evaporate quickly after a rain, desert life that’s invisible most of the time will appear miraculously and persist longer.

Finally, returning from the last hike of my trip, I looked for the tracks I’d left on my way out, improbably found them in the midst of miles of open space, and tested myself by following them back, despite temporarily losing them over and over again as they vanished across stretches of bedrock. The desert was teaching me a form of literacy far more profound and essential than we learn in school, because it transcends our species and bonds us with our partners in the ecosystem.

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Vision Quest 2016: Mesquite Canyon

Monday, May 23rd, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

From this pass, the basin I’d entered from the beautiful canyon looked even nicer

The second day of the bighorn sheep survey focused on a drainage midway down the west side of the mountains. As on the first day, hikers would be dropped off at points to the north and south and gradually converge. The days were getting warmer, and the older, more experienced hunters maintained that sheep would rest during the day, so the group got up at 5 am and left before 6, leaving me alone in camp. I’d checked with them the night before, and they said they’d drive south at the end of the day, toward the final day’s destination, stopping somewhere to camp for the night. There was only one road south, and if I followed that, I’d eventually run into them.

So I slept in that morning, had a leisurely breakfast, and drove to the drainage they were converging on. It was an internal basin almost completely encircled by ridges, and I hadn’t been back there in over 20 years. Since the previous year, my curiosity had been focused on what I called the “Lost World”, the big southeastern basin, closed to vehicle traffic, and I believed that if I climbed a short canyon out of this place, to a low pass at its head, I’d get a view over into the Lost World. That was my modest goal for the day.

I drove the long sandy road into the encircled valley, passing one of the big white Fish & Game trucks and glassing in vain for the hunters, who were supposed to be somewhere nearby looking for sheep. I followed the old abandoned mine road up a narrowing wash toward the canyon I’d selected, until I reached some rocks my little truck couldn’t safely get over.

The day was warm, but I didn’t have far to go, and could expect shade from boulders or junipers once I got into the canyon. I loaded my pack and set off into new country I’d never hiked before.

This was a special place because it represented a gap in the range. The southernmost part of the mountains, a long and complex landscape in itself, was here neatly divided from the rest of the range by a fairly broad gap that became visible as I hiked into it. As before, I spooked both jackrabbits and cottontails as I followed the wash. Then I cut east across the gently rising bajada toward the mouth of my canyon.

No one on earth had the slightest idea where I was, or where I was going, but I felt that my plans were modest enough that I wasn’t taking much of a risk. And if the sheep group got worried, they could follow my tracks.

I dropped from the bajada into the wash coming out of the canyon, and came upon a grove of big desert willows, in the middle of which was a shaded hollow. Although the air temperature was mild, my body was overheating in the desert sunlight, and I stopped for a drink and some rest, still needing to catch up on the sleep I’d missed two nights ago.

As I got closer to the mouth of the eastern canyon, the main wash veered north. Suddenly I came upon a broad mesquite thicket, the biggest I’d ever seen in these mountains. Back home in New Mexico, mesquite grows like a weed, but here, it’s a rarity. The seed pods were prized by native people, and the wood made good tools. I’ve always looked upon it as a lucky find.

The wash continued to lead me northward, away from my destination, until I arrived at the mouth of a new canyon leading up into the north. Awesome but inviting, this canyon climbed between monumental walls of looming dark granite. At ground level, big, rounded and weirdly sculpted granite boulders lay half-buried in level, walkable white sand. I was faced with a moment of decision; looking up into this new canyon, I quickly abandoned my original plan.

The first thing I discovered here was sheep tracks, fresh since last week’s rain. It began to feel like the same sheep were preceding me everywhere I went. Then I came upon invasive tamarisk, but not the new growth we had in the northernmost drainages, which have been repeatedly cleared. These were old, long-established trees, with root stock a foot in diameter. Yet they were patchy in this canyon, instead of forming monoculture thickets, replacing native shrubs and trees, like they had on our land.

The tamarisk didn’t dismay me because this new canyon continued to unfold other surprises. During the lowest stretch, it was an easy walk, but every hundred yards or so there was a dogleg, revealing a new, higher stretch. Suddenly a patch of livid green appeared high up the eastern slope – another mesquite thicket, indicating water squeezing through a contact in the rock. I climbed up and examined it, but couldn’t find any surface water. Yet this must be a well-watered drainage, to support both mesquite and tamarisk.

I came to a pour-off, a jumble of house-sized boulders blocking the canyon, and had to climb around it, backtracking and struggling up and across a steep slope of loose rock and gravel. I ended up hundreds of feet above the canyon floor and decided to keep climbing, until I reached a place where I could look down into the next stretch of canyon. There I saw more groves of mesquite, sharing the canyon floor with patches of old-growth tamarisk. Could tamarisk reach an equilibrium state, sharing the drainage with native vegetation instead of crowding it out? This was truly a place of mystery, with its dark, looming walls and white, sandy floor.

The ridge above me, where I’d hoped to get a view into the Lost World, seemed to be getting higher and farther away, so I climbed back down to the canyon floor, where I encountered another, deeper, dogleg, with a north-facing cliff overhang that provided a large area of daylong shade. Here, I stopped for lunch, comfortable in the sand. What an amazing place! I’d found many beautiful places in these mountains, but this was surely one of the best.

Continuing north, I finally came upon surface water – a half-pint seeping into a rock hollow, it would soon dry up, but for now it supported wildlife. I climbed over or around more steep pour-offs or boulder blockages, discovering more thickets of mesquite, but leaving the tamarisk behind, until suddenly I topped out at the head of the canyon, emerging into a bowl-like basin in the sky, encircled by rugged ridges, with the wash splitting in front of me into two tributaries, each with a level white-sand floor beckoning in opposite directions, like a T-intersection.

Taking the right-hand tributary, I soon came upon another big thicket of mesquite. Ahead of me, I could see a low pass at the head of this wash, so I clambered eagerly up it, thinking it would give me a view into the Lost World to the east.

But after a quarter mile or more of climbing, I found myself looking down into another canyon system that curved away to the right. And in the far distance, over a shoulder of ridge, I could see the dry lakes to the south of the mountain range. South! How could I be looking south? This new right-curving canyon seemed to be dropping to the west, when I should be looking east! I was totally disoriented. Then I turned around and noticed a government survey benchmark, at the foot of a shrub, at the side of the low pass. What a coincidence – just as I found myself confused about directions, a team of surveyors from 90 or more years ago had left me a sign that I could check against my map, later, to figure out where I’d been.

From this pass, the basin I’d entered from the beautiful canyon looked even nicer. In addition to the wash opposite this one, there was another long drainage that came down between them. You could stay up here all day, in this secret, hidden world, just exploring. Both perennial shrubs and annual forbs were blooming here, and were bigger than elsewhere in the mountains – salazaria, Mojave sage, encelia. I returned and walked up the opposite wash, passing the biggest creosote bushes I’d seen anywhere around, and all the big shrubs were in bloom.

I’d come farther than planned, and I needed to allow time to look for the sheep survey group after returning to my truck. There was hours of potentially bad road to search before dark. So I had to start back, wondering when I’d get a chance to return and enjoy this new place more deeply.

The walk back was fairly easy. At the truck, I checked my topo maps and found that at that low pass, up in the sky, where I found the benchmark, I’d actually come full circle, looking back into the head of the canyon I’d originally planned to hike. It actually originated out of the north, so that my impression of the dry lake had been correct. To get an eastern view into the Lost World, I’d need to climb much higher over the wall encircling the high basin to the north. What a complicated topography – it even looked confusing on the map!

That evening, I drove and drove, farther and farther south, deeper into the desert and farther from paved roads and towns, with no sign of the group. The sun was going down as I drove past the southern tip of the mountain range, risking my truck in the deep sand of big arroyos where the road had been washed out by flash floods. Looking anxiously for the road I expected the group to take on the following morning, a road I’d never used or seen myself, I drove farther and farther up the low basin on the opposite side of the range, the mountains far away to my north. As night fell, I glimpsed a faint track out of the corner of my eye, behind one of the tall power transmission towers that lined the side of this utility road. I got my truck turned around, bounced it over a low bank of sand, and pulled off between the regular ranks of creosote bush in this otherwise desolate alluvial basin. The moon hung, nearly full, above the mountains to the east, as I warmed up leftovers for dinner, then went to bed, alone.

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Vision Quest 2016: Science in the Storm

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Animals, Mojave Desert, Nature, Regions, Road Trips.

The Amargosa toad

The suburban sprawl of Las Vegas became less finished, less dense and more expansive, and more under construction, as we drove north in a tunnel of freeway, surrounded by noise-barrier walls, with the newly snow-covered peaks of the Spring Mountains and Sheep Range closing in at west and east. The Paiute reservation went by in a flash, then the military and prison complexes began, first the artillery and bombing range with its mock Mideastern villages, then the drone base and the prisons for women and juveniles.

After the long drive to Beatty, we checked into our motel and stopped for an early dinner of Mexican food at an outdoor table by the highway, next to a group of retiree Harley hogsters and their wives. In the dusk, Jef drove us up the road to the Spicer Ranch, which the current patriarch is developing into a private mountain bike resort. Wonderful news for me, because I’d love to see these adrenaline-fueled machines outlawed from public lands.

Jef had raved about this new-age rancher who rode bikes everywhere, but Dave Spicer turned out to be a mellow, friendly guy. His ranch compound stretched all around, consisting of the usual meandering dirt roads, abandoned equipment, vacant houses and ruined sheds, and half-finished dams, ponds, and corrals. The ranch was sited here by his ancestors because massive springs drain from the slopes back of the compound, out of an area of colorful badlands, to vivid reedy marshes along the highway. As darkness fell, we tried to follow his directions to where we might find endangered Amargosa toads around irrigated meadows and ponds.

Jef parked in a grove of trees and we fanned out, quickly spotting toads. I helped gather them, and we added each to a ziploc bag which was marked, either “out of water” or with the temperature of the water where it was found, taken on the spot with a digital probe. We each accumulated toad-filled bags in our left hands, until we had a dozen or so. When Jef occasionally encountered a big invasive bullfrog, he’d grab it and sling it hard against a rock; bullfrogs prey on smaller native frogs and toads. Wind was blowing hard when we started, with lightning and thunder over the mountains, and the low, heavy clouds began to spit rain.

When we returned to the vehicle, wind and rain were lashing the little SUV, which Jef and Anthony began efficiently turning into a field lab. I sat in the back holding the metal clipboard of data sheets. As Jef and Anthony sterilized a forceps and scissors and Anthony prepared the individual glass culture plates, Jef handed me paper packs of wooden-stemmed sterile cotton swabs, numbering the plastic caps of glass sample vials and returning them to their rack which he likewise passed back to me. Then they both sterilized their hands and put on sterile rubber gloves.

For each bagged toad, Jef would remove it from its bag, announce its number, measure its length in millimeters, determine the sex and read off the bag data, all of which I would quickly note on the data form. Then I would rush to tear open the end of a swab package, handing it to Jef tip forward, and he would begin to swab the toad. Meanwhile I’d pull a vial out of the rack and struggle to twist the cap open, holding it up for Jef to insert the swab, then carefully return it to the rack. Then Jef would hold the toad legs-first toward Anthony, who would clip off a tiny bit of webbing between the toes as a DNA sample, dropping it onto a culture plate. In the process, Anthony would sometimes recognize toads he’d caught before, on previous trips.

Back in the lab on campus, Anthony would test all the samples for the spreading chytrid fungus, which is considered “the most significant threat to the world’s montane amphibian populations”, allegedly contributing to mass extinction. But field research generally raises more questions than it answers. Jef, Anthony, and other scientists haven’t even been able to figure out the mortality rate – how many animals infected by the fungus actually die.

After Jef restored the specimen to its bag and set the bag outside the vehicle, he and Anthony would remove their gloves, sterilize their hands and equipment, put on fresh gloves, and start with the next bagged toad, all in the confined space of the front seat, with everything they needed stashed precariously on the sloping dashboard or between their feet on the floor, the doors propped open for extra maneuverability, and weather gusting in from outside.

When all the toads were sampled and all the data were entered, Jef and Anthony would clean up and pack up, while in the back seat, I donned sterile gloves and lifted each vial out of its rack, snapping the wooden swab off so its tip remained inside and screwing the caps back on, changing gloves after each vial. Then we moved to a different location, collected more toads, and resumed the lab work, with the wind and rain hitting harder each time, and the night falling colder.

At our final location, along the Amargosa River south of Beatty, I caught a chill in my legs – I hadn’t dressed for the wind – and my body temperature dropped so I had to quit and return to the vehicle, where I sat hunched and shivering for about an hour, feeling sick, as they finished processing the last sample set with the doors cracked open and the rain and wind intruding. It was 1:30 am when we got back to the motel, and I fell asleep instantly.

We returned in the morning, and Jef pointed out that the entire riparian area had been bulldozed free of invasive tamarisk. There was no tamarisk to be seen anywhere now in this sea of green at the base of multi-colored badlands. The tiny river flowed clear through a wetland of cattail, riparian grasses and coyote willows, shaded by young cottonwoods. I wondered why the ubiquitous seed stock of tamarisk hadn’t regenerated. Maybe they’d poisoned it chemically and replanted native vegetation. Quite an expensive, energy- and labor-intensive project, like all conservation, only possible in an affluent society.

After our rough night, we spread out in a leisurely, meandering search for chorus frogs, which Anthony would take back as samples for his broader study of the fungal infection. I was lucky to find the first specimen, a pretty green one. Admiring it through the ziploc bag, I wondered what its fate would be as a pawn of science, but my mind was too exhausted to dwell on it.

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