Indigenous Cultures
The Original Organic Abstraction
Saturday, May 13th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
In my earliest childhood, I was surrounded by the organic abstraction of midcentury textile patterns:
When I started experimenting with Sumi ink on paper in 2011, organic abstraction flowed spontaneously from my brush:
Then, a few days ago, I visited perhaps the most interesting rock art in the Mojave desert, in a lush canyon oasis on the sacred mountain of the Colorado River tribes, where their creator god began his journey down the river. During my visit, I encountered the kitsch of white peoples’ religion, I picked up their abandoned plastic trash, and I convinced an Anglo family to stop desecrating the site with their loud pop music.
Wednesday, May 17th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
Art on the Rimrock
From the Mojave Desert, I traveled northeast to the Colorado Plateau, where I camped among pinyon and juniper near the rim of a sandstone canyon. My campsite faced the setting sun across a broad, shallow basin blanketed with sagebrush.
In the morning, I drove farther into the back country, passing prairie dog colonies with their popup lookouts, and followed a trail down from the top of a mesa to a rimrock escarpment. Hundreds of feet below, a creek opaque with grey-green sediment raged, carrying water down from snow on distant peaks.
Near the end of the escarpment, ancient people had made pictures in the sandstone. These pictures are attributed to farmers from a thousand or more years ago who lived in earth houses, whose remains are found all across Utah, often under modern towns and cities.
Village in the Canyon
During completion of an interstate highway, a boy who lived in a canyon in its path told his father about ruins he’d seen on a hill that was being attacked by bulldozers. Eventually, the bulldozers were temporarily halted and a team of archaeologists surveyed and excavated the hill, finding the largest known village site of the mysterious farmers who are believed to have created much of the prehistoric rock art in Utah.
After the village site and its house ruins were excavated and artifacts removed, construction of the interstate highway resumed, almost completely destroying the hill and its ancient village. In partial compensation, the state opened a museum to store and display artifacts and educate the public about the vanished community.
The Canyon
The Art
Anglo settlers have always known this canyon to be rich in rock art.
The People
Apart from the rock art attributed to them, the ancient farmers are known for their earth houses, which archaeologists misleadingly call “pit houses.” This term reflects the Anglo-European bias in favor of technologically advanced societies that attempt to “rise above” nature and dominate the earth. Anglo archaeologists considered the ancient farmers more “primitive” than their Anasazi neighbors who built cliff dwellings far above the ground; in comparison, these primitive farmers seemed to be living underground in pits like animals.
But as I noted last fall in Closing the Circles, these “pit houses” were actually mostly above-ground, and both spacious and comfortable. Unlike the “pueblos” of the Anasazi and modern Indians of the Southwest, these earth houses were not defensive, indicating that their populations had achieved a peaceful existence. The boxy, densely populated “pueblos” with their dark, cramped rooms would more accurately be termed “fortified apartment blocks,” built and inhabited by a society that was out-of-balance, and fearful, like ours.
But most importantly, the earth houses of the ancient farmers were supremely adapted to their environment. These people did not try to engineer their habitat on an industrial scale like the Anasazi – or like our own society.
Of course, the best evidence of this society’s success would be seen not in their houses and other artifacts, but in themselves, their gardens, and the health of the natural ecosystems they inhabited, all of which seem to be lost to us now. But maybe not completely lost – modern tribes may be directly descended from the ancient villagers, and recent excavations in other parts of this area are showing that some of the ancient farmers’ fields and irrigation networks were used continuously into historic times, when they were appropriated by early Anglo settlers.
As the museum exhibit asks, “What can these ancient people teach us?” Unlike us, they put the well-being of the community above that of the individual. They lived in harmony with nature. And instead of trying to control nature, they adapted their way of life to changing conditions in a challenging environment.
As a result, they thrived for a thousand years in this place, sustaining a larger population than we do there, even with our advanced technology and vast wealth. But, also unlike us, they sustained their traditions of hunting and gathering, so that when conditions changed dramatically, instead of fighting nature, they could temporarily set aside their village farming way of life and became nomadic foragers and hunters.
The Girl
For me, the centerpiece of the museum was the multi-media story of a farmer girl who had died at the age of seventeen. From her damaged skeleton, forensic scientists had reconstructed the girl’s appearance and her likely life history, archaeologists had added cultural and societal context, a sculptor had created a life-size likeness of the girl, and a girl from a nearby modern tribe had voiced her long-forgotten story.
I’ve taken the liberty of creating this abridged version of the girl’s story, omitting some technical details and modern perspectives that can be found in the full museum version:
The Modern Nation
Anglo homesteaders came in advance of the modern nation, but within a century the nation had caught up. Its bulldozers razed the hill of the village, and its freeway paved the floodplain where the villages kept their farms, so that now the valley and its once-bustling community is merely a passing glimpse from the closed windows of the racing metal boxes rushing urban Americans from city to distant city.
I was told in the museum that Native Americans in the surrounding areas were outraged, and a native elder placed a curse on the Department of Transportation, leading to a series of mishaps and tragedies, and pleas from the government that the curse be removed. And later, laws were passed to prevent this sort of cultural destruction. But laws can be overturned, and arrogant, domineering nations seldom last as long as this community of People Who Adapted.
Homeward Bound
On my way home, I stopped in one of my favorite mountain ranges, at the far eastern edge of the territory of my favorite Indians, the heirs of the ancient farmers. I pushed my little truck dangerously through a raging stream to a clearing under tall green cottonwoods, below a cliff of layered sandstone.
When I got out of the truck, I discovered the ground was covered with shelled pine nuts. The modern Indians had used this very spot to process their harvest, a harvest they’ve sustained for thousands of years!
Crossing the last range of mountains toward home, I drove through a sleet storm at 8,500′:
Fall 2018 Part 2: Deep Time Traveling
Friday, November 2nd, 2018: 2018 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
After my adventure in the blizzard, I was kind of shaken up, and more than a little frustrated. My fall camping trip had started out with a big dose of stressful driving, and no camping. But there were supposed to be a few more prehistoric rock art sites that I hadn’t seen yet, in pretty wild country, far to the north. I hoped there’d be plenty of camping up there. I could even return to a site I’d used a couple of years ago, in the same general area.
First, and it would be a long drive, I’d check out one famous site at the eastern edge of the territory of the people they call the Fremont, the ancient culture I’ve recently become obsessed with. It was supposed to feature the famous “Barrier Canyon” style of painting, the most beautiful and mysterious style of prehistoric art in North America. It was just a few miles off the interstate, so not a place to camp, but it’d be an easy in-and-out from which I could proceed on back to the truly wild country.
As it turned out, the art was amazing, but the easy access meant there had been severe, tragic vandalism by Americans, both historic and modern. No different than the bullies I’d grown up with back east, kids who’d never been taught to respect beauty, kids so insecure they could only respond to mystery with violence.
Heading west on the interstate, I saw stacks of bundled firewood outside a gas station and, learning my lesson about fall camping in the high country, picked up a couple bundles. It was poor quality and way overpriced, but it was something.
I kept checking my maps, and determined that all the rock art sites near the interstate were on “high clearance only” roads. It was already mid-afternoon and I was still a couple hours away from the next accessible sites, and I didn’t want to be looking for a campsite after sunset. So I left the interstate and drove north up a long gravel road through sagebrush-and-mesa country toward where I’d camped two years ago.
I crossed the old bridge over the San Rafael River, there at the massive sandstone wall, and entered the big canyon with an hour or more of daylight to spare. My old campsite turned out to be taken by another solo man in a compact truck with funky camper shell, but I found an even better one, hidden in a grove of pinyon and juniper out of sight of the road. I suited up for a freezing night, got a fire going, and cracked a IPA. I set up camp at a leisurely pace, and cooked a fairly ambitious plate of food. Only one other vehicle passed, and then it was full dark down there in the big canyon.
Camping is a lot less fun with chronic pain. I’m still trying to sort that out. I can be athletic as ever, to a point, but then something happens and I’m a cripple for a while. My night in the canyon started out pretty uncomfortable, but I eventually found a position my body didn’t hate too much. Thin clouds kept drifting over, then clearing off. Cygnus was in view early, her wings spanning the dusty trail of the galaxy, then later Casseiopeia, Pegasus, and finally Orion and the Moon herself. Somewhere in there I managed to get a decent night’s sleep.
Campsites in this canyon all seem to be sunset camps, benefiting from late afternoon light but sunk in the shade of those thousand-foot walls for most of the morning. Bedding doesn’t air out, and your ground cloth is caked with red clay mud until late morning when you can finally lay it out in the sun. I had no plan for the day, but it’d been over a week since I’d been able to hike. So after everything was dry, I packed the truck, loaded my pack with warm clothes, water, and snacks, and crossed the dry creekbed to hike up into a shallow side canyon. I knew it’d likely be a short, steep hike unless I could find a way up the rimrock to the plateau on top. But at least I’d get a workout.
Of course, with my slow-healing injured foot, I’m not even really supposed to be hiking off-trail. But the only “trail” in this canyon is the 4wd road up the major side canyon, probably a 6-mile branch, and that was a ranch road, through an area that might be heavily grazed. I wanted more of a wilderness experience. When I made it up into my side canyon, I spotted a possible route to the top, and started climbing.
It was such a beautiful day, and such a beautiful place, I threw caution to the wind. I ignored my injured foot and scrambled up slopes of clay and loose sandstone that would’ve been dangerous even when I was in my best shape. I did some technical rock-climbing moves that, if unsuccessful, could’ve killed me. And of course, the most dangerous climb on these slopes is the down climb. But I made it halfway up the thousand-foot cliff, got to see an eagle and some crazy lichen, and returned safely to the valley floor by early afternoon.
Back at the truck, I debated staying another night in this idyllic place. But the weather made my mind up for me. Storm precursor clouds were blowing over, and a strong wind was moving down the canyon. I realized it’d been totally still since I’d arrived, but no more.
I drove on up the canyon and spotted a sign for another rock art site that I’d missed previously. When I opened the door to get out, the wind almost tore it off. It was gusting well over 50 mph. But the prehistoric art made it well worth the stop, and I encountered a big flock of some of the coolest birds I’ve ever seen.
There I was, in the middle of a vast wild area, with storm clouds filling the sky, a howling wind, and little more than two hours till sunset. I was near the head of the canyon, about to emerge onto the rolling plateau where there was little cover. I decided to drive to town, more than an hour away, and spend some time researching my next move.
But along the way, I got distracted by some intriguing signs. And I discovered one of the most amazing, and little-known, canyons in North America – the “Little Grand Canyon” of the San Rafael River.
Fall 2018 Part 3: The Rocks Begin to Speak
Friday, November 16th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
High Prehistoric Tech
Five days and nights of my trip were already gone, most of them spent driving, zigzagging north across the emptiest parts of three big Western states. Four nights in widely-separated cheap motels, a hair-raising escape from an alpine blizzard, a detour to check out spectacular prehistoric rock paintings, and finally a cold night camping in a breathtaking canyon. The weather was getting still colder and windier and I was running out of clean clothes. I drove to the nearest town, farther north, where on an earlier trip I’d discovered a cheap but fairly luxurious motel with a laundry room. There I edited my photos and prepared the first couple of Dispatches. I’ve never found a decent restaurant in that town, so I’d eat in my room, from the simple stash of groceries I’d picked up at the first town I’d driven to, and leftovers from my night camping and cooking out.
It was the northernmost point I wanted to reach: the northern edge of the territory of the prehistoric Fremont people I’m trying to better understand on these trips. From here, I’d gradually make my way south and west, stopping whenever I saw something interesting, making side trips to check out rock art, hoping to find good campsites in late afternoon. I still had a week before I was due to meet my friends on our land in the Mojave.
Two days later I hit the road south. But I’d barely driven a half hour when I noticed a sign for a museum in this tiny village. It turned out to have quite a bit of thematic overlap with the much larger museum in the town to the north, but its more homespun curation raised intriguing questions that would haunt the rest of my trip. It was chock full of prehistoric artifacts donated by the ranching families who’d found them on their land.
What’s our responsibility – not the responsibility of citizens of a nation or a “civilized” culture, but the responsibility of invading ranching families who find the artifacts of the native people their society has dispossessed, stashed all over their newly-acquired ranchland?
What happened to the people archaeologists call Fremont – did they evolve into the Southern Paiutes, or were they replaced by them? On past trips I’d observed that the core Fremont lifestyle had to be eminently peaceful, and I knew from historical and anthropological accounts that the more recent Southern Paiutes were a peaceful, pedestrian people who were victimized by the warlike, equestrian Utes.
Who made the rock art in the Fremont area? The government archaeologist for the Mojave National Preserve had assured me, with photographic examples, that the only rock markings Paiutes were capable of were random scratches used to efface the work of other tribes. He’d repeatedly confirmed the archaeological consensus that Paiutes were warlike newcomers who’d spread out of eastern California across the Great Basin within the past millennium, killing off other tribes and appropriating their land.
And finally, how much more advanced are we modern people than those “primitive, superstitious savages?” With all our power, speed, and convenience, do we really live better lives?
Needle in the Haystack
Gratefully leaving the little museum, I drove a half hour farther south to a turnoff where I expected to find a rock art site. What got me interested in prehistoric rock art in the first place? Thirty-seven years ago, when I was at a turning point in my growth as a visual artist, a friend sent me a postcard of a site called “Newspaper Rock.” It was the first time I remember seeing prehistoric rock art. Dense with symbols, some representational, some abstract, it resonated with the new work I was creating. My graphical work – drawings, paintings, prints and collages – had always encompassed both “pictures” and “messages,” but I hadn’t been fully aware of that distinction. In recent years I’d expanded my pictorial work from simple rendering to narrative composition, and that had led me to the use of images as symbols.
At the same time, I was beginning to explore the Southwestern deserts, and as I kept developing and focusing my work, it evolved into compositions made of stylized natural imagery inspired by what I’d seen on camping trips. And eventually, in 1987, my girlfriend and I were shown real prehistoric rock art, outdoors, tucked away in remote corners of the Mojave Desert. We were hooked! As artists, we had heard of so-called “Land Art” by people like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who used bulldozers and other heavy equipment to mimic the creations of ancient civilizations. But rock art was humble, uncivilized, intimate in scale, much better integrated into its natural environment. It seemed like it would’ve been part of the daily and seasonal life ways of the people who created and used it – people who lived lightly on the land, hunting and gathering, not building cities and temples like the inspirations of the “Land Artists” of the 70s.
During the postwar economic/science/tech boom of the 1950s, when the authorities wanted us to get out and burn gas on those fancy new highways – just like they want us to burn electricity now – AAA maps flagged prehistoric sites, including rock art. But those sites, all found in lonely places, were totally unprotected, and they were rapidly being destroyed by the vandals that are continually produced by our violent, narcissistic society. So by the time my girlfriend and I started studying rock art in the mid-80s, none of the sites were identified on commercially available maps, and on the ground, virtually none of them were marked by signs or had any sort of informative infrastructure. They were like the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Long before the internet, cell phones, or apps, we were shown rock art by friends, we picked up books at remote gift shops, we did research in libraries, we contacted experts by mail. We made our own lists and annotated paper maps. On road trip after road trip, camping and backpacking into remote canyons, we discovered work that blew our minds.
The Road Less Traveled
Stopping at museums, sidetracking for rock art, the short day was being chipped away at. I was approaching an interstate highway; if I took it west, there’d be many hours of driving through country I’d already seen, with little or no opportunity to camp, and I’d probably end up in a motel again. Alternatively, I could keep going on this rural highway, into a part of Utah I’d never seen. I spotted a grove of golden cottonwoods beside the road and pulled over to make a sandwich on the tailgate of my truck.
Mormon McMansions
I loved all the mountainous country I drove through that afternoon, but I never found a sheltered or private place to camp along the road. Every time I turned off to explore a promising dirt road, it ended almost immediately at a large, bleak parking area for RVs, in full view of the highway.
And I further confirmed some earlier observations about Mormon culture and society. I try not to be too critical of religions, because the secular alternative – capitalism – is what’s destroying our planet. But the Mormons strike me as more than a bit too materialistic and fond of ostentation. There seem to be plenty of poor Mormons, but that doesn’t stop the rich ones from throwing up a mansion next door. And their rural architecture is plain weird. From my perspective, raised on colonial, southern, and midcentury house styles, Mormon rural homes seem to have no clear historical reference point. They’re not post-modern, they’re just awkward and tacky. Mormon wealth doesn’t seem to be invested in quality, and even the oldest and simplest rural homes seem to be designed by aliens trying and failing to imitate earthlings.
As full dark fell and the temperature dropped toward freezing, I found myself in a very small town at close to 7,000′ elevation. There was a string of cheap motels, none of them appealing, so I picked one, checked in, and headed for a lit-up restaurant on the single historic block of the Main Street business district.
It was Saturday night, and Main street was empty. But the diner was packed. A distracted hostess greeted me, holding a baby by the belly, face-outward like a doll. I grinned and the kid beamed back. I was seated at the front facing the door, and while waiting to be served I realized the extremely loud music coming from behind me had to be live. I turned in my seat, glancing past tables of families and couples, to see a tiny cave-like stage at the back, reminiscent of the cage in the Blues Brothers movie, and a cute, stylish singer with short hair who’d been staring at me, waiting to catch my eye. I guessed I was the only single guy who’d shown up so far.
She flashed me a big smile. While I ordered, got served, and dug into my platter of pulled pork, she rendered a predictable series of country, folk, and pop standards, from Leonard’s “Hallelujah” to Dolly’s “Coat of Many Colors”, yelping and screeching with histrionic soul through the brittle sound system, accompanied by a full synth track. Between numbers she asked diners where they were from. All the families were local, but the couples, post-season tourists to nearby Bryce Canyon, were from Washingon state, Maine, and France. Exhausted after a long day, my ears battered by the singer’s piercing notes, I rushed through my just-okay meal. I left a generous tip, gave the singer a final optimistic thumbs up, and returned to my cheap, shabby motel room.
Native Explanations
29 degrees outside when I woke up Sunday morning. I’d taken many fall trips in the Southwest, running as late as early December, and the weather had generally been mild. My itinerary west would now carry me inexorably onto the dreaded interstate, with just one more side trip for rock art before leaving the Mormon state. I was beginning to realize it was almost impossible to both look for rock art and camp out on the same day. Looking for rock art just required too much driving, and too many hours stuck in a location where you generally weren’t allowed to camp.
But that one last site had more surprises. Not only had the local authorities provided signs to the site, they’d provided a large parking lot with a permanent restroom and shaded picnic area, paved paths to the rock art, institutional fencing around the rocks, and very detailed information panels below the art.
And they’d asked two tribes to contribute explanations: the Southern Paiutes and the Hopi. The Paiutes’ explanation was displayed as given, with no Anglo academic patronizing. Very refreshing, and something my archaeologist friends would probably never tolerate. After all, science was invented by Europeans, so we claim the ultimate authority on everything.
Prehistoric Literacy
With all the development around this site, I resigned myself to being accompanied by an evolving crowd of tourists, who mostly snapped a few pictures and hopped back in their new SUVs. But the petroglyphs were spectacular, and the message from the Southern Paiutes eye-opening. The information panels below the rock writings said that the Paiutes remember the so-called Fremont people – they know them as Nungwu. I hadn’t read this in any museum or book or on any web page – I had to come to this remote place to get the message. What more did the Paiutes know that the Anglo authorities didn’t?
The Indians made it quite clear that this is NOT ART – a paradigm shift I should’ve been prepared for. A Native American friend had given me LaVan Martineau’s book The Rocks Begin to Speak thirty years ago. Martineau, who learned from Paiutes, claimed that rock markings represented a universal sign language, a medium of communication, not an art form. But I’d either forgotten about that, or allowed my thinking to get lazy in the intervening years. Poor LaVan doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, which makes me feel better about not having one.
That distinction between what we educated Anglos call ART, and what we both precisely and generally define as COMMUNICATION, is a very important theme for me. After developing my visual art, at an early age, from figurative representation to the composition of enigmatic “messages” made up of naturalistic symbols, I reinvented myself in mid-life as a “creative professional” in the internet industry, and found myself using symbolic compositions – flowcharts and storyboards – as my primary communications tool, to develop screen designs and facilitate collaboration in multi-disciplinary teams. And eventually, when I resumed making art, I was explicitly composing symbols inspired by nature. Both art and communication, but perhaps more on the art side, since the communication was suggestive rather than didactic.
In any event, I thought the Paiutes’ interpretation of this famous site was brilliant. It didn’t make much sense to me, but that’s to be expected. I realized more clearly than ever that to understand “rock writing,” you had to be living in and using this landscape the way the Indians did. We Anglos with our technological, alienated lifestyle couldn’t experience the habitat the way they did.
According to archaeologists and anthropologists, Indians used to claim that they hadn’t made rock art – it had been made by “spirits” in the distant past. Native “informants” claimed that they didn’t know what it meant – they even sometimes claimed it was evil. Now here they were saying that not only did they understand it, but that it represented a universal language. So much for the culturally-specific rock art “styles” identified by archaeologists, like Barrier Canyon and Great Basin Abstract Curvilinear.
I actually hope the Paiutes are bullshitting us, providing an intentionally meaningless explanation to put the honkies on the wrong track yet again. I would rather not believe they’re calling “rock art” a written language to make them seem less culturally inferior to us literate, scientific Europeans, but that’s a possibility too.
I snapped my own pictures, realizing that the only way to begin to understand this work would be to camp out here, and go about my daily chores, with the “rock messages” as my backdrop. Only then would I begin to see it more like the people who made and used it.
But the day was still young, and the next sites were hours away, and I needed to keep moving west if I wanted to meet my friends in the desert. So I got back in the little truck and drove to the nearest city, where I had lunch in a big-city-style bistro, knowing from experience that local-style food would be dismal.
I did the hours of driving, into the sunset, and eventually left the highway again to enter a vast area, the eastern corner of the Mojave desert, which I’d entered only once before as a passenger with a biologist friend. There I discovered the worst road I’ve ever driven, and drove it, stressfully and painfully, to where, after sunset, I finally found a bleak but spectacular campsite – a huge area cleared for RVs at the foot of rock formations, surrounded at a distance by other huge RVs. Because in this day and age – as I discovered on this trip – most campsites are developed for giant RVs rather than us traditional folk who sleep on the ground.
After that city lunch, I just had a beer and snacks before hitting the sack. No sooner had I settled in than I discovered that I was directly under a low-altitude approach path for McCarran International Airport, with jets coming in every 90 seconds or so. Our society can industrialize even the remotest natural areas without even touching the ground.
Since there was no place to lay my ground cloth in this extremely remote place without potentially being run over by newcomers during the night, I emptied the truck bed and slept inside it, as I sometimes have to do when there are high winds. The eighth night of my trip, and only my second night of camping. But the night sky was my ceiling, the wheeling galaxy and constellations my constant companions through the night, and yes, as always, there were falling stars, although not as many as there were passenger jets. Little did I know what I was in for the next day…
Infinite Wonderland
In preparation for this trip, I’d copied a map off the internet that showed the next “rock writing” site to be just a few miles from my campsite. And there it was – again, with a large parking lot, informational signage, and fencing.
I followed a broad trail toward what appeared to be modest rock outcrops. I rounded a bend, and saw a house-sized boulder standing alone. I raised my field glasses, glimpsed familiar markings, and felt my heart swelling in my chest, the way it does whenever I stumble upon traces of the Old Ones. How do our bodies do this? How did the heart come to be the locus of love?
Refuge in the North
I’d never seen a place like this – a seemingly infinite wonderland of rock writing. I climbed up, and down, and around. I scanned with field glasses. I found more the farther I went. I spent hours there. No way did I see it all. I have no idea how much farther it went. There were numerous tinajas or natural water pockets, which go a long way toward explaining what native people were doing there to begin with. The brief notes I saw on the internet didn’t prepare me for this, and thank God! Fuck technology, fuck remote sensing, fuck satellites, fuck drones. The map is not the territory – the territory is far, far more interesting and enlightening. You had to be there, to hear it, to smell it, to feel it with your skin, your hands and feet.
But now I had another big decision to make. Damn it, that’s the problem with an unplanned trip! You start out thinking it’s going to be free and easy, just following your nose across the landscape, going wherever you want, but no! You have to find a place to sleep every night, and as the day goes on, the pressure mounts! And I still had to factor in a shopping stop in Las Vegas before I met my friends in the desert! Vegas, where the traffic would be a nightmare, coming from the north and slogging through the entire length of the city’s knotted freeway system. No way to avoid the stress of going directly from peaceful nature to mechanical mayhem, thousands of other stressed-out humans fighting each other like rats for space in the maze.
I didn’t have the heart for that yet, and I still had a few days left. So I decided to drive far out of my way, to the north again, to a little town in a canyon where I’d stayed several times before. It was a beautiful refuge where I could do laundry again, and edit my growing galleries of photos. And yes, there were more rock writings up there, sites I hadn’t visited yet.
The “mid-term” election occurred on my second day in the little town. A media event held elsewhere and broadcast in from the outside world – an event in which we function as mere statistics, pretending that we’re somehow “participating” in a “democracy.” I’d voted before leaving home, and the results were available when I woke up to do my laundry before hitting the road again. Everyone I voted for had won, but this “historic” event that others had worked so passionately for was of no real interest to me, since I dream of the collapse of the state that has caused so much harm from its beginning.
I packed up and drove back down the road, where I found another prehistoric site that added to the already profound revelations of this trip. It would be the last until next time around…
Honest Vegas
Going beyond even what I’d found at previous sites, this county publishes both online and paper brochures guiding visitors to and through its prominent rock art sites. I had one of these with me, but like my Grandpa, I reflexively avoid the instructions, and I regretted it halfway into my visit. In this case, the county’s wonderful brochure took the place of an all-day campout at the site – it enabled me to see, at a glance, the deep context around the rock writings: the ash deposits from old campfires, the scatter of stone tool-making flakes, evidence of both prehistoric residential and work areas. I would’ve found all that myself during a longer stay, but not during a short picture-taking visit.
Unlike the previous site, this was right off the highway. But like the previous site, it seemed endless – a maze of boulders down in a canyon, with panels near the head, but an unknown number hidden below, waiting for more time to be discovered. Frankly, during my early rock art explorations I never imagined sites so vast, rock writing so ubiquitous across the Native landscape, even as backdrops for everyday living. And this is just what’s accessible by vehicle. When you think about all the mountains and canyons that can only be reached on foot, it boggles the mind. These people created a pervasive mediascape that rivals ours – our smart phone screens, computer screens, TVs, movies, newpapers and magazines, billboards, bus ads, and graffiti – but unlike ours, theirs was made to be a permanent part of their habitat, to communicate between generations, and thus was strictly curated by tradition and by the community. And as a result of that and the way they lived, it’s more organic than ours could ever be.
When I first arrived, I took a wrong turn – again, the map is not the territory, and the brochure misled me – and spent an hour or so clambering down a tributary gulch that had a smattering of rock writings but wasn’t the main site. A Jeepful of Canadians followed me, and continued down the “wrong way” as I returned to find the official trailhead. Later, I heard and spotted them down there wandering through the maze, and we waved at each other.
It was now the moment of truth – or falsehood? Maya, the Veil of Illusion. I needed to get to Vegas to do my shopping for the desert meetup. And yes, the drive and traffic were as bad as expected, as bad as always, even though I beat “rush hour” by at least an hour. Our society, and what it has done to this planet, is obscene. Literally and completely obscene. And I’m not talking about separating immigrant families at the border, or appointing a sexual predator to the Supreme Court. Those are bad, but the nation’s current leadership is not the fundamental problem – that’s yet another reason why the recent election didn’t interest me. Our way of life, our way of using nature and each other, are catastrophic, apocalyptic – and Las Vegas is the epitome of all of that. In that sense, at least it’s honest.
Tuesday, March 14th, 2023: Coronado, Hikes, Indigenous Cultures, Society, Southeast Arizona.
I set out simply hoping to escape the snow in our local mountains – and ended up enduring hardship and danger in a remote, exotic landscape, to finally discover an ancient mystery.
City people think of mines as 19th century phenomena and copper as a 19th century commodity. But all the electronic and mechanical devices and machines we use are made of natural materials mined from holes in the ground that used to be natural habitat.
Electric cars use up to ten times the copper of conventional cars. Solar plants and wind farms consume massive amounts of copper. Mines and copper aren’t the past – they’re the future our colonial lifestyles and worship of progress have committed us to.
I live in a copper mining town – I can’t ignore or deny our impact on nature. It hurts me deeply to see these gaping wounds where wildlife and indigenous people once flourished, former heavens we’ve turned into toxic hells. 24-hour factories manned by dark-skinned laborers who are taught that they’re making life better for the rest of us. Hells we enlightened white professionals tend to avoid while fantasizing that our progressive lifestyles are saving nature.
As huge as our local mines are, they’re nothing compared to the ten-mile-long monstrosity over in Arizona. I was interested in trails in the mountains just north of the mine, but they were far enough away that I’d need places to eat and stay overnight after the hike, in or near the forbidding company town.
After weeks of sporadic research, I discovered a refurbished historic hotel in the quaint village below the mine town, reserved a room and put together some information on the closest of the trails. The topography of those mountains is incredibly complex – it’s not even a named mountain range, it’s just a confusing region of countless ridges and peaks, ranging from just below 4,000′ to just above 8,000′, rising between the valleys of a south-trending small river in the east and a south-trending large creek in the west.
A narrow, vertiginous paved highway leads north through the open-pit mine and up into the mountains, where it follows sinuous ridgelines for about another 50 miles to the base of the Mogollon Rim, finally climbing the Rim to the 9,000′ alpine plateau.
According to my topo map, the trail I wanted starts about 8 miles north of the mine, on a north-south ridgetop at 6,200′, surrounded by higher ridges and peaks. Trending generally westward, it first circles the head of a small north-south canyon then climbs to a high saddle on the next north-south ridge. This high saddle is the divide between two landscapes.
The first landscape is the north-trending corridor beginning with the mine and continuing up the highway. The second landscape, past the high saddle, appeared on the map as a long, broad valley descending westward between two east-west ridges.
Past the saddle, the trail appeared to descend this valley along the foot of its northern wall, through lower-elevation habitat I expected to consist mostly of exposed grass-and-shrublands. The entire trail was variously listed at 10-11 miles one-way, too long for an out-and-back day hike this far from home, so I planned to go only as far as conditions and time allowed – ideally 7 or 8 miles.
I usually avoid trails that start by descending and return by climbing, but beggars can’t be choosers. I do seek elevation gain, and while the map showed this trail descending from 6,200′ at its start to 4,200′ at its end, when I plotted it, the cumulative elevation gain over a 7-mile segment turned out to be more 4,000′. I would learn the reason for this soon enough.
I found little online information – this trail seemed seldom-used. I did find, in one old hiking trip report, mention of a prehistoric Native American pictograph site somewhere above that western segment of the trail below the east-west ridge, along with some vague, poorly shot photos. They didn’t clearly identify the location, which was both good for the site and bad for me, but they mentioned springs and black water piping left by a rancher in the vicinity.
Sunday’s sky was forecast to be mostly clear with scattered clouds and a high in the mid-60s. The drive took longer than expected, but in crossing the state line, I regained the hour I’d lost at home with daylight savings time.
As I drove through the mine, house-sized trucks and apartment-building-sized shovels operated in the distance, so dwarfed by the scale of the pits that I could barely discern them. But on the highway itself, I encountered virtually no traffic, nor on the narrow, winding, crumbling road with sheer drop-offs and no guard rails that climbs out of the mine canyon into the mountains. After pulling over briefly to check my map, I easily found the turnoff for the trail, a high-clearance dirt track. The map I’d brought showed the trail starting at the highway, but I decided to drive up the dirt road a ways instead.
The dirt road led to a ridgetop saddle with a big cleared parking area, where I found four pickup trucks with camper shells parked at random and 8-10 young people milling about with miscellaneous gear piled on the ground. Yikes! But their trucks were old and they were drably and cheaply dressed – not in the latest styles from REI – so I could tell they weren’t typical yuppie adrenaline seekers. And they were largely ignoring me, looking a little dazed like they’d just gotten up.
I parked and asked the nearest guy where they were from and what they were up to. He said they were near the end of a ten-day trip, mostly from Montana. They’d been in my hometown last week, and were planning a two-night backpack on this trail. He said he’d hiked it back in 2007 – but they all appeared to be in their early-to-mid twenties so he must’ve been about eight years old then. He mentioned the pictograph site and said it was right above a corral, with a black plastic water pipe running straight up to the site. That’s where they were heading and planning to camp.
As we were talking, one of the pickups drove away, back toward the highway. Perplexed, I thanked the young guy for the information, shouldered my pack, and headed off. It was chilly but sunny, so I tied my sweater around my waist, hoping the exercise and sun would keep me warm. I’d gathered from the old trip report that the trail began as a two-track mine road. Descending steeply into a narrow canyon through scrub and open pinyon-juniper-oak woodland, it was deeply eroded and blocked sporadically by boulders. The only tracks I found were from horses and a couple of hikers, from a week or more ago when the trail had been wet and muddy.
I began to realize that I’d misinterpreted distances on the topo map. I knew that in this first part of the trail the mine would remain visible on my southern horizon, but once I got past that high saddle it would be hidden and I would be in a new, wild, yet unseen world. Now, I began to realize that the high saddle was going to be much farther than I’d expected. This old road wound in and out of side drainages and forested habitat, traversing up and down steep grades, from which I couldn’t even glimpse the far ridge with the high saddle.
I was surprised to find Arizona cypresses on east-facing slopes. I have a couple of big ones in my backyard, but I’d never encountered them in the wild. Here, they were mixed in with pinyon, juniper, and oaks. From a distance, they looked much like firs or spruces, but at much lower elevation.
Eventually the road took me up over a low, rounded, exposed ridge, where a cold wind yanked my hat off. I was discouraged to realize I needed to drop into yet another deep side drainage before climbing toward the high ridge. I hadn’t noticed any of this up-and-down stuff on the map.
The old road ended at the bottom of the drainage, at a muddy, nearly dry stock pond and a low earthen dam. Below the dam I found a dilapidated trail sign pointing to an almost completely overgrown single track. This followed a trickle of water a few hundred yards to the edge of a cliff with fairly spectacular rock formations. From there, instead of climbing to the high saddle, the trail continued to descend, rounding an outlying shoulder where I found myself facing a dense forest across yet another narrow canyon. My high saddle was still hidden somewhere even farther above.
The farther I went, the steeper the climbs I faced. The next climb entered the forest, which turned out to be an almost pure stand of Arizona cypress. The grueling climb was only partly compensated by the botanical novelty. Disorienting, the cypresses felt like an alpine forest from three or four thousand feet higher – strange and mysterious. I saw the occasional pinyon or alligator juniper, but mostly just the stately cypresses, their branches densely interwoven.
Somewhere in that climb, the horse and hiker tracks ended and I seemed to be on virgin trail. By my watch I figured I’d gone a couple miles. I eventually climbed out of the forest and found myself facing east across a mile of intervening drainages to the cleared saddle where I’d parked. I could see my vehicle, but all the Montana pickup trucks seemed to be gone. Why had they given up on their trip?
The trail then curved to my right onto a south slope which was mostly scrub, facing the distant mine. Then, surprisingly, the trail began to descend again, rounding several more shoulders, still overlooking the mine to the south, before I finally spotted what must be the dividing ridge holding the high saddle.
This required yet another steep climb, but it was a huge relief to finally reach the little saddle which marked the divide between the “mine” side and the western backcountry I’d worked so hard to reach. It had taken me an hour and a half and more than three miles of steep up and down climbing.
The trail past the saddle was as steep as anything I’d faced so far, and much rockier. But gaps in the forest began to reveal a new world of endless western views and, to my right, the south slope of a ridge banded with red and white cliffs and ledges.
I’d left the cypress forest behind and was now dropping from open pinyon-juniper-oak woodland onto shallower grassy slopes dotted with shrubs. The narrow track got fainter and more overgrown, but I was reassured by the periodic appearance of long-established cairns.
The temperature remained in the low 60s, and a cold wind was hitting these open slopes so I had to tie my hat down tight. But the sun kept me warm.
I’d completely misinterpreted the map on this side, too. I’d expected the trail to descend a long valley westward along the foot of a high east-west ridge. The high ridge was there on my right, but a seemingly endless series of drainages cut southward from it, dissecting the valley into a seemingly endless series of rounded humps and deep gullies. My trail would have to climb down into and up over them like a rollercoaster. I was still hoping to find the pictographs, but I couldn’t imagine where anyone would put a corral in that convoluted landscape.
At this elevation, both catclaw acacia and honey mesquite grew together along the trail, and before long my skin, shirt, and pants all bore numerous scratches.
Up and down I went, over and over again, on a nearly invisible trail lined with sharp embedded rocks that had me stumbling and cursing. At several points I had to stop and spend minutes scouting among the dense, dry grasses for the trail ahead. In a few spots with bare dirt atop low ridges, I found the tracks of a man in sneakers who’d walked this way during a wet period, more than a week ago. Apart from him, no one.
Finally I reached the rounded top of the highest intervening hump and faced a big side canyon that cut far into the high ridge on my right. I found it on my map – it would require another steep downclimb of several hundred feet, and another steep ascent on the other side. Great.
I figured I’d gone five miles so far and simply had no chance of reaching the corral – which was also marked on my map – or the pictograph site. It was a beautiful day and this was a spectacular landscape, but it’d been one of the hardest hikes I could remember.
However, I still had time, so I carefully descended the dangerous, rock-strewn trail to the dense riparian corridor in the canyon bottom, where I found a creek carrying clear, ice-cold snowmelt.
Unfortunately, the trail seemed to end at the creek. The only clue was an old sign pointing downstream to a spring – apparently the creek is normally dry. I followed a faint path to where it ended at the bank of the creek. I crossed and saw a dim opening in the dense vegetation ahead, and shortly came to a tiny clearing where a barely discernable track switchbacked up the dark slope through the trees. Emerging from the riparian canopy, I found myself in what looked like a very steep, rock-filled erosional gully, but I kept climbing, and soon emerged on the familiar, overgrown, rocky, almost completely hidden single-track. A cold wind again threatened to take my hat, and I faced more rollercoaster ridges and steep climbs ahead.
The cairns had ended and I was left with only my routefinding skills. And past the big canyon, trail conditions deteriorated further, with the thorns of both catclaw and mesquite often blocking my way. With no hope of reaching the pictograph site, but with a little time still remaining before I had to turn back, I forged ahead as best I could. The rock “bluffs” above on my right were getting taller and more spectacular.
And after climbing up and down several more side drainages, I finally reached a deeper one where the trail really seemed to end. I explored a few options, but they all terminated in catclaw thickets and piles of rocks. Suddenly, returning from one of these forays, I noticed something bright red in the distance, just above the trail I’d arrived on.
It turned out to be a jumble of plastic cord, and next to it was a loose pile of galvanized water pipe, all stashed under a little tree. Scouting around a little I also found some loose lengths of black plastic pipe.
No corral – not even the hint of level ground on this high slope – but could this be the departure point to the pictograph site? I had no more time left – but shouldn’t I at least make an effort to find the water pipe descending from the bluffs?
I returned to the bottom of the steep little gully. Above me, giant boulders blocked the drainage below the cliffs. I laboriously climbed a little ways up, getting more and more discouraged in the boulder-choked drainage. But then I saw the black water pipe, draped over a boulder above! This had to be it!
It was obviously going to be a brutal climb, and I was sure that if I continued, I’d be stuck trying to find my way back to the vehicle in the dark. But I had a headlamp, and the last hour and a half of trail should be easy to follow. So I continued.
Having started in the gully, which was getting deeper, with sheer walls, I had to do some really dangerous moves to follow the pipe out of it onto the 45 degree, catclaw-choked slope above. From there, it was a long, slow, dangerous scramble toward the foot of the cliff, which loomed at least 150′ tall. But I was now absolutely sure this was the place – it matched what I’d read in the old hikers’ trip report, and I could tell there was an overhang and a ledge up there under the cliff.
Interestingly, although the pipe had clearly been abandoned, and surplus sections of it littered the slope, when I came to a tee fitting with shutoff valves, water was leaking out abundantly. It was still connected to the source, somewhere above.
Emerging onto the ledge below the bluff, I immediately spotted the pictographs, and the cave behind them, with its two seeps. The previous hikers had called it an Anasazi site, showing typical ignorance. But as I approached these signs from the deep past, my whole body registered its presence in a sacred place, starting with the tingling in my spine. I hadn’t felt like this since my last trip to Utah.
Canyon wrens cried and cliff swallows wheeled above as I explored the cave and the long ledge. It was blanketed with old cowpies and strewn with ranchers’ debris, but the rock writing was undisturbed. This was the most remote and little-known major site I’d ever found.
The Forest Service map I carried showed the corral nearly a mile west of here, in a fairly level spot. The 16-year-old memories of the Montana folks had understandably been a little rusty. But I was more curious about the water pipe, and the seeps under the cliff. This is normally a very dry area – the creeks and springs were running now after our wet winter, but would there really be a water source here, high on this slope, year-around? That would certainly explain the pictographs as well as the water pipe, and make this a precious site in more ways than one.
At this point, I no longer cared that I was late. But I was facing a really dangerous descent from the ledge, followed by a long climb to the high saddle, with countless brutal ups and downs before and after – hence the over 4,000′ cumulative elevation gain. My first job was to avoid injury on the way back down to the trail.
Taking it slow, I made it down safely, and vowed to take it easy on the entire return. But my left foot condition had been triggered for the first time in almost a year. I’d switched to winter boots in June when our monsoon started early, and when monsoon transitioned to snows I’d kept wearing them until now. Those boots have the stiffest available soles, but today I’d reverted to my old favorites, Goretex boots with slightly more flexible soles, and my foot was not happy. My knee was complaining, too.
If I took a pain pill, I would dehydrate faster, and with the arduous climbing in warmer temps, I was already running low on water. So when I reached the creek in the big side canyon, I stopped to fill and zap a liter bottle with my Steri-Pen. It was cold and delicious, and I popped a pain pill for my knee and foot.
After the steep climb out of that canyon onto the next shoulder, as I started down into the next drainage, I was surprised by voices. A twenty-something girl, wearing a bundle of fine rings through her nasal septum, appeared out of the scrub, followed by three tall young guys. As we talked, I learned they were part of the group with the pickup trucks. They said their other friends had had to leave early. I started raving about the pictograph site, but the girl said she’d also been here in 2007. I found myself liking them more and more for their cheap, well-worn gear and outfits. They were taking ten-day camping trips instead of competing for high-paying desk jobs. But I remained mystified about what they’d been doing all day, and why they’d gotten such a late start.
I continued and got lost in a badly overgrown area, wasting about 20 minutes scouting in several directions before relocating the trail. The final climb out of this remote backcountry to the high saddle seemed endless.
Once past the saddle, although it would still be a rollercoaster with brutal grades, on average it would be downhill – at least until the final climb to the parking area. I was mostly in shadow now and had to pull on my sweater. And those cypress forests were downright gloomy.
Most of the trees were less than 20 years old – many tall snags stood among them, but they hadn’t been killed by fire, so their deaths remained a mystery. The new trees and seedlings formed impenetrable thickets.
In the broad drainage before the final climb, another old two-track takes off north. I assumed it led to abandoned mine works. But checking the map again that night, I saw that it has its own Forest Service trail name and number – the Crystal Cave trail. It’s only a tenth of a mile long. But I couldn’t find any information on it online. More intrigue.
I’d hiked through time, from our misbelief that copper mining is an industry of the past, to our deluded future of “clean, green, renewable” technologies that rape Paradise and turn it into a toxic Hell, to the not-so-distant antiquity of sustainable indigenous culture. And back again.
I’d gained more elevation than on any hike since last October, before the winter snowstorms. Preparing to return to the mine town to look for dinner and my hotel room, I wasn’t sure whether I envied the backpackers, or should consider camping on these Arizona day hikes instead of sleeping indoors.
The fact is, whereas city people plan backpacking trips once or twice a year, and do the rest of their hiking in crowded parks near town, I get to do these remote day hikes every Sunday. Turning them into backpacks would subtract several days a week from the work I desperately need to finish at home, and camping overnight would reduce the time left for hiking – I’d have to return earlier to set up camp and cook. Although I do envy backpackers when I meet them, I get much more wilderness hiking in, week to week – and I still do longer camping and backpacking trips once or twice a year.
The sun set as I was driving back through the mine. I turned off into the company town for the first time, found the sole restaurant, where I orded dinner to go, and grabbed beer at the nearby supermarket. Architecture and infrastructure were functional, bare-bones, but well-maintained.
Then, in full dark, I located my hotel in the old village below. I was exhausted, sore, and starving. The little building, which is not staffed, and in which I was apparently the only registered guest, was dark and locked up for the night. I had the code but couldn’t figure out how to operate the coded entry, so I had to call and wait for the manager to show up and let me in.
After dinner and a shower, I was still so excited about the hike, I finally had to take a sleeping pill, sometime long after midnight.
