Regions
Saturday, November 5th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
In this transitional season, I’d brought both my warm-weather sleeping bag and my super-insulated down bag, but with the (slightly incorrect) weather forecast in mind, planned to use only the warm-weather bag – a very cheap synthetic bag which is probably only good to the mid-40s.
On that first night I started out with only t-shirt and skivvies inside the bag, but had to pull on thermal bottoms sometime before dawn. Still, it was a deep, full night’s sleep.
But wind had come up before dawn, and when the sun reached my bed and I finally crawled out, it was blowing hard. First order of business was to boil water for coffee, but in the gale-force wind across camp I had to box my stove in to retain the heat, and it still took over a half hour to get it to boil.
The wind was so strong I had to lean into it to cross the campsite, and my back pain returned so that I was forced to walk bent over at the waist, anyway. Then I discovered the wind had blown the solar shower off the hood of the vehicle, and after only one shower, it had burst a seam landing on the rocky ground. I’d lost over a half gallon of precious water. I tried duct-taping it, but it still leaked. I filled it anyway and laid it in the sun upside down so it wouldn’t leak while I was out hiking.
I mentioned the other day that I had no agenda for this trip, but that wasn’t strictly true. I’d brought all the artifacts I’ve collected in past decades, up on the plateau at the “puberty site” below the statue, with the intent of repatriating them. Today I planned to hike up there, return the potsherds and tool flakes, and spend the night – my first backpack in 7 years.
For the past few years, I’d been hiking with about 25 pounds in my Swiss Army surplus rucksack, but for backpacking I would carry at least 10 pounds more, and when I pulled it over my shoulders, that extra weight felt like it would destroy me. I realize that serious mountaineers carry up to 65 pounds, which is simply inconceivable.
The day’s plan seemed crazy from the get-go, and it was only my typical bullheadedness that got me started. My back felt like it was being sliced in half at the waist, and I knew that one wrong move carrying that heavy pack would paralyze me. The pack felt so heavy that I didn’t think I could make it to the base of the plateau, let alone climb that perilous 500′ slope beside the dry waterfall. And the wind – one of our typical desert winds that blows steadily in one direction at 30-50 knots, in this case out of the northeast, and can last for up to 3 days. Assuming it didn’t blow me off the mountain or into a cactus or yucca, how could I possibly sleep up there, where it would be even worse?
Feeling about 100 years old, trudging up the dry, loose sand of the big wash, I forgot to stretch – something I’ve learned to do near the start of any serious hike, to reduce pain and protect my joints. Hiking near home, I’d forgotten how most desert hikes involve long, arduous walks in sand. On the plus side, the long, winding wash that drains the plateau is beautiful, with spectacular rock formations in the bends. And the bright yellow rabbitbrush added some color to this otherwise fairly drab season.
Now for the part I’d been dreading: the 500′ vertical climb to the plateau.
I’ve done this climb at least a dozen times since the early 90s – both solo and with friends, including a couple who haven’t been in very good shape. The last time I’d been up there was in April 2016, by myself. I’ve always considered it a dangerous climb – very steep, requiring many short bouldering moves and traverses of loose rock at the angle of repose, including sizable boulders that appear stable but tip or slide when you put weight on them. And plenty of yucca blades or cactus spines to impale yourself on if you make a single mistake.
But today, despite all that past experience, it truly terrified me. I felt there was a serious chance I’d be injured or even die trying to reach that plateau. I knew I had to try, but I was scared to death.
With a little reflection, I realized the several traumas and close calls in the past few years had undermined my confidence. On the surface, I was in really good shape, doing hikes up to 20 miles in a day, at 2 or 3 times the altitude and with far more elevation gain than I would face here. But those hikes were mostly on trails. I was out of practice for hiking in the desert.
If I did make it, how would I get back down alive? That scared me even more – downclimbing is always more dangerous.
I’d long forgotten the best route, so I just went slowly and stopped frequently. At that rate, after almost an hour, I finally made it up past the giant thumb rock, safely, to the little saddle where you drop over into the dry waterfall itself, and that accomplishment restored some of my confidence.
The next, and most spectacular, stretch involves using some simple bouldering moves to get past the smooth and sometimes slick exposed granite faces of the dry waterfall. I love this part because it’s all rock.
The plateau, which I’ve always considered the heart of the entire mountain range, is a rugged, rolling basin partly enclosed by steep boulder slopes at its eastern head and southern rim, and traversed by a winding streambed that drains from east to west. This area hosts most of the pinyon pine in the range, from the rim down to the wash itself.
It’s obviously favored ram habitat. Shortly beyond the rim I came upon the third ram skeleton I’ve found up here, and after that, some more recent lion scat.
This is one of the wettest parts of the mountains – there’s a sheep drinker with two large water tanks at the head of the plateau, and I’ve found water in the stream more often than not. But underscoring what a dry year this has been, the only evidence I found of water was a patch of damp sand below a discontinuity in the rock, midway up the streambed.
Near the head of the canyon there’s a raised bench or ledge a hundred feet above the south bank of the streambed, marked by a dramatic boulder pile. On that ledge is the most important prehistoric site I’ve found on the west side of the mountains – a truly magical place, the western counterpart of the sacred site on the east side. My sometime friend, the Mojave Preserve archaeologist, said it was most certainly used in girls’ puberty ceremonies. It consists of a large overhanging boulder, with a smaller boulder forming a sort of table under the overhang, and “cupules”, little bowls, ground into the stone tabletop, which he said were used to mix face paint.
The ground for a large area around shows evidence of ancient campfires and is littered with potsherds and the occasional stone tool flake. But in general, it’s a modest site, and raises a whole string of questions. There were no villages or permanent camps in these mountains – the nearest would’ve been on the river, almost 50 miles east, requiring very long treks between water sources. And the historical tribes familiar for these ceremonies were based almost twice as far away, to the west. It’s hard to imagine a small group of teenage girls, accompanied only by one or more older women, carrying pottery jars and other gear many days across the desert and up that dangerous climb, to perform a ritual in this extremely remote, often dry place.
The steady, gale-force wind was still scouring my campsite on the ledge. No chance of a fire tonight – I even scouted between the many big boulders for a calmer location, but the wind was penetrating everywhere.
But with that heavy pack off my shoulders, my energy returned. I did a short hike up the slope toward the statue – I’d been that way a few times, but couldn’t remember my previous route. Not that it matters much – every route involves climbing over, under, or around huge boulders all the way up.
I made it about halfway and realized I didn’t have enough time to go farther. But everything up there – the elegant pines, the house-sized, white granite boulders, the view across the open desert – is beautiful. And in the brief dusk after sunset, I climbed back down to the streambed and made it most of the way up to the sheep drinker at its head, maintained by the Bighorn Society.
With no fire, I had a cold dinner – the same nuts and jerky I’d had for lunch. I’d only brought four liters of water for the overnight, and in this cooler weather, with the wind, had saved two of those for the next day’s return hike.
One problem with backpacking solo is that there’s nothing to do after sunset, especially if you can’t build a fire. There you are, between 6 and 7 pm, with nothing to do but go to bed early! I had a lot of time for reflection, and decided it was time to relax my standards and adopt some modern, lightweight gear – replacing my heavy old canvas and leather pack with something ergonomic, and my cheap sleeping bag with something more efficient.
So I went to bed at about 7 pm, with my feet to the wind so it couldn’t blow sand into my bag. As before, I stripped down before getting in, and was warm at first. But with the wind roaring like a freight train, that didn’t last.
About an hour later, I added my thermal top – essentially a sweater. And an hour after that, with the wind still raging, my legs got too cold and I pulled on my thermal bottoms.
Still another hour later, my legs got cold again. That wind just sucks away whatever heat your body can generate – I’ve even gotten cold inside my down bag, which is good to well below zero. So I crawled out into the frigid night and pulled on my heavy canvas hiking pants, and got back into the bag.
That still wasn’t enough. After another hour, I donned my thermal cap, and an hour later than that, still awake, I got up again to struggle into my storm shell jacket, pulling the hood completely over my head before getting back in the bag. I can’t remember wearing a jacket to bed before, but may well have sometime in the dim past!
Soon it was midnight, I’d been lying awake for five hours, the wind was still raging, and my feet were cold. The only piece of clothing I had left was a spare pair of wool socks, which I managed to fish out of my pack and pull on over my heavy hiking socks, without leaving my bag.
But only a half hour later, I was cold again, with another six hours of increasingly colder night ahead of me. How could I survive? I’d been in this position before, and once, far too cold to lie still, had spent an entire night pacing back and forth, wrapped in a heavy coat, to keep my heat up.
So I tried the only remaining trick – I got up once again in the dark, and folded my plastic tarp over the sleeping bag, so that the open side was downwind. I had no way of holding it closed, but I had a couple of bungee cords that I used to anchor the side and corner of the tarp to my pack.
Amazingly, this finally worked, and I fell asleep almost immediately after.
Sunday, November 6th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
After that long struggle to get warm in the driving wind and plummeting temperatures, when I did fall asleep, I slept like a log. I woke at 6 am, feeling totally refreshed, as the southeastern sky was beginning to glow above the ramparts of rock surrounding my camp.
But the wind was still roaring unabated through the pinyon, juniper, and tall granite boulders, and even without wind chill, I realized the temperature had to be somewhere in the 30s now. There was no way I was going to crawl out of my tarp cocoon until sunlight reached my campsite.
That was another little detail I’d forgotten in my absence from this place. We feel protected camping next to a rock outcrop or under a high peak, but here, I was essentially down in a hole – at the western foot of a high ridge, where, still without the ability to build a fire in this wind, I ended up lying in shade for another three hours, until the sun finally topped the ridge and began to warm me.
While lying in wait, I remembered seeing a falling star before falling asleep last night – the second I’d seen so far out here. And I began pondering my plan for the day.
During my last visit to this area, a friend and I had hiked to a canyon just south of here, just over the crest that loomed above me now. Our goal had been to relocate a prehistoric olla – a ceramic storage jar – that he and other friends discovered under a juniper near the head of that canyon.
Our hike had been cut short by rain, so I still didn’t know exactly where that jar was, but it tantalized me as another part of the puzzle of our ancient cultural resources. Assuming I could make it safely down the dry waterfall, my hike back to base camp should only take a couple of hours, so if I could find a way from here over to the head of that southern canyon, and if I could make my limited water last, I should have plenty of time for a side trip before heading home.
After breakfasting on granola and an orange – no coffee today – I had less than two liters of water to get me back to base. Which depending on the side trip, could take all day. With the wind, it was still chilly, so I might be okay.
I believed the head of the side canyon was due south of me. I couldn’t see the actual crest, or a saddle which might be my point of access, because of intervening spurs of the mountain, but I could see a drainage that might be my way up. Much of it was boulder-choked, but I could also see some patches of bare, shrub-dotted ground that might provide an easier route. It would be an experiment.
As usual, the terrain proved much more complicated above than it looked from below. But after an hour of scouting routes, climbing over ledges, detouring around giant boulders, and crossing gullies, I found myself exactly where I’d hoped to be – on a ridge that formed the saddle directly at the head of the southern canyon. And there were junipers dotted all around, any of which could hide that olla.
What a place, and what a perspective! The wind was fading to a pleasant breeze, a majestic pyramidal peak rose a couple hundred feet above the head of the canyon, and I had views into the Lost World – the huge southeastern basin – as well as over Blockhead, the granite monolith on the south wall of our own interior basin, which we stare at from camp.
I ended up exploring the entire crest at the head of the canyon, peering under every juniper, but never saw the olla. I did find several great campsites – ridgetops in this range often feature level areas protected by boulders or low rock walls – and a few stone tool flakes. But my water was too limited to explore downward into the canyon.
So I found my way back down to the plateau campsite and packed up for the return to base. I had only about two-thirds of a liter of water left and would eventually start to dehydrate, but it shouldn’t be too bad.
I still wasn’t looking forward to the climb down to the bajada. But when I reached the rim, it didn’t look so scary this time. I took it very slow and careful, but still had a few near-falls – as usual, lucky to recover balance before getting in trouble. And before I knew it, I was back in the big wash.
On the way home, I tried to compare hiking here with the hikes I do back home in less arid country. It’s much more dangerous here. It’s not as hard on the feet, but with the slopes of loose rock and gravel, it can be hard on the ankles. And of course there are the long slogs through deep sand.
I’d finished my water halfway there and was just beginning to get a little dehydration headache when I finally dropped from the bajada into the wash below camp.
Back at base camp, I found a big tarantula nonchalantly strolling past my vehicle – it looked identical to the one I’d passed two days earlier farther up the gulch. My back was still hurting, as was my heel – probably a delayed reaction from the back down the sciatic nerve – so I took a pain pill. I was filthy and overdue for a shower, so I made further attempts to stop the leaking seam – I had a binder clip I use for bags of chips, and rolled up the taped seam, finishing with the clip, which slowed the leak to a slow drip.
All clean, the next chore was dinner. I’d used most of my catclaw the night before the backpack, grilling a whole chicken leg. That produced leftovers, which I would combine and reheat on the stove, but I still needed a campfire. I scrambled to the boulder above camp where friends had a stash of firewood, but the pieces were just too big for a one-person fire. I was taught the leave-no-trace school of fire-building – never use anything bigger around than your thumb. My catclaw fires use branches a little thicker than that, but I’m most happy with small-diameter firewood, and catclaw makes wonderful coals for grilling.
After sundown, as I was working, I was swarmed by clouds of insects that looked superficially like mosquitos, but didn’t buzz – and they bounced up and down like mayflies. The wind had vanished and the air was perfectly still.
I was pleased with my new gear. The folding chair had looked drab, even ugly, at home, but here the colors fit in perfectly, which had been my plan. People buy high-tech gear that looks great in the city, but it can make a campsite look like an REI showroom.
I was surprised and a little concerned about my water situation. I was running through 5 gallons – a third of my supply – in less than two days at camp. Yes, I’d lost a little in the shower leak, but I couldn’t account for the rest. In the old days, Katie and I had never brought more than 5 gallons for the two of us, for a 3 or 4 day stay. But then we hadn’t been hiking like I do now.
After dinner I mused about my fears and lack of confidence on the backpack. It was clearly all in my head, and my habit of pushing myself won out in the end.
Our campsite is elevated on a ledge above the wash, with a 180 degree view across the gulch and interior basin, ringed at the horizon by jagged ridges. Under the star-strewn sky, scanning that dark jagged profile, I was again reminded of how this landscape, which looks so bleak and monotonous to the novice, is for us filled with hidden magic – countless special places we’ve explored and shared, hidden to view until you’re upon them. Just gazing across this landscape triggers memories that span decades, flooding my head and heart. I thought about the desert journals lost in my house fire – all those details that might never return to mind.
In bed, I was soon joined by mosquitos, and got up to assemble the sleep screen I’d found on eBay to replace my burned original. Thankfully, it still allowed me to see the stars clearly: the early constellations of Cygnus, Cassiopeia, and Pegasus, and when I woke hours later to pee, Auriga and Orion. I saw three meteorites, including one that left a long trail.
Sunday, November 6th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
As at home, Saturday was to be my day of rest.
The wind was only a memory. And as I finished breakfast, sitting with my back to the sun, facing the dramatic peak north of camp and watching the occasional bird swoop from boulder to boulder, I was suddenly struck by the silence. At home alone, I’m always listening to music – usually streaming radio from some distant city. It keeps me company. But now, after that relentless wind on the plateau, the silence was welcome.
As occasionally happens, after taking a pain pill the night before, my back pain had vanished by morning. I’d started doing all the right things – stretching, walking a lot, lifting mindfully and using lumbar support – and it troubled me no more on this trip, which after a week under the threat of paralysis was a huge relief.
In the shade of the big boulder at the north end of camp, there’s a little alcove that at this time of year provides shade for one person, so I sat there reading for a couple of hours. I was so still and quiet that a covey of Gambel’s quail came within a couple yards of me, foraging for about a half hour, without ever noticing I was there.
Again, I scanned this landscape of precious memories – the ridges, slopes, canyons, bajada, washes. When I got up to pass from shade to sunlight, I felt the extremes of temperature – it felt like going instantly from the 60s to the 80s – something we’re not used to when living indoors – the power of the sun!
Despite the cool weather, I was frequently pestered by flies, in all sizes. I decided to revisit my old stash above camp – miscellaneous materials for the over-ambitious projects we had three decades ago: a 100 gallon galvanized water tank, some PVC pipe for a well lining, a wheelbarrow, a roll of barbed wire. It was eerie, like stumbling upon the work of a stranger – is that the bail I built, to clean rocks out of the well? Those projects will never materialize now – those materials will likely never be needed by those who come after.
This whole place goes on without me. Despite my early ambitions, I haven’t really made a difference. I’m so little a part of it, virtually insignificant, and that’s probably a good thing.
Back at camp, I discovered sunburn from the past two days of hiking. I’d forgotten to apply sunscreen – a hat protects me at home, but here, the pale, reflective rock, gravel, and sand that cover most of the ground bounce the sunlight up from below.
After lunch I moved to a sitting spot on the now-shaded east side of the boulder. In the past, in really hot weather, I’d always hiked up to the shade house in the side canyon with all the mining ruins. But now, this boulder shaded me enough that I didn’t need to leave camp.
By mid-afternoon the whole camp was in shade of the peak above, and the temperature quickly dropped. I hadn’t been planning to shower, but I had to gather more firewood, and that got me all sweaty again.
It felt like that windy, cold Thursday night on the Plateau had been my test, my trial, and this calm day had been my reward.
The meat I’d bought in Flagstaff last Tuesday had been sitting in my cooler for four days and nights, so I planned to grill it all tonight and keep the surplus for the following nights. I still wasn’t sure how long I could or would stay.
It took a while for the meat to cook – previous campers (maybe even myself) had set the rocks in the fireplace a little too high, and I had to remove some to get my new grill closer to the coals.
As the moon, Jupiter, the stars and Milky Way came out, I was reminded of my lifelong history with the night sky. The reflector telescope I had as a small child, the refractor I got a few years later. That led me to all the science stuff I had growing up, mostly from my dad: the telescopes, a microscope and collection of mounted slides, the Visible Man and Woman models, rocket models.
Life has led me away from science, and all that’s left is the images, the memories they evoke, seeing these things like the night sky as my life draws toward its close, like old friends.
My Dad wanted to do what I’m doing now – he was on that path. One of the inevitable tragedies of my selfish life is that I can’t pass on that desire, that momentum to the next generation.
Part of me wants to believe that only the time I spend here in the desert is real – but that’s not completely true – it’s only a fantasy I’ve believed in deeply.
Moving around camp, I began using my new headlamp out here for the first time – an innovation I finally picked up from other desert friends. At home, it allows me to hike longer, because I can return in the dark. Here, I was figuring out how and when to use it, versus my trusty oil lantern. The problem was I kept forgetting I had the headlamp on!
When the firewood ran out, I went to bed, the screen keeping me safe from buzzing mosquitos, and I saw another falling star before dropping off to sleep.
Sunday, November 6th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
Again, I found myself lying in bed after dawn, waiting for the sun to rise above the eastern ridge and warm me up. Meanwhile, I watched the mosquitos desperately trying to reach me through the screen. I got to know them individually, and finally, the most active one suddenly appeared inside! It had apparently found a gap under the screen’s edge. Now I had to get up.
As forecast earlier in the week, clouds had appeared before dawn, but they cleared as I had breakfast and got ready for the next adventure. After hiking northeast on the first day, and east on the second and third, today I would go southeast. First, up to Blockhead – the monolith on the southeastern ridge – and hopefully, if I had time, past it to the head of the canyon with the spring. It’s an area that shows on the map as a jumbled plateau punctuated by a maze of boulders and outcrops, leading farther south to Mesquite Canyon, which I explored a few years ago.
The approach crosses the bajada of the basin and the combined wash that drains the plateau and the spring in the northeast corner. After a little over a mile of bajada, you join the wash that drains the high southern end of the bajada, and eventually hit the old road into the southern gulch, which climbs through a low pass and drops into the big wash that drains the southeastern ridge.
My first objective was the old mesquite tree and its spring. It’s tucked away back in a canyon that winds tortuously between cliffs and fanciful outcrops of ancient granite. I knew there was tamarisk in this canyon, but I was under no delusion of finding water in the spring, which usually has to be dug out of deep sand. And I wasn’t prepared for the state of the venerable tree.
At least it wasn’t completely dead. New growth had emerged from its lower trunk, and I figured it would take a lot more than the current drought to kill a tree with such deep roots. But it was still pretty sobering. The water sources in this range all seemed to be dry – where was the wildlife getting its water?
I realized it had been gradually getting warmer, day to day, throughout my stay. My shirt was unbuttoned all the way down and I had to add sunscreen to my chest.
I climbed up the ledges behind the dry spring and continued up the narrower canyon winding south across the basin below Blockhead, until I reached a bend where I thought I should leave the wash and traverse the slope above. This was a new approach for me – I’d come over from farther west in the past. And on the traverse, I began to be pursued bees. They never actually stung me, but I vowed to take the opposite side on the way back.
Cresting the ridge below Blockhead is another of those magic moments, because you’re suddenly above the Lost World. But since the days were so short now, and I always wanted to get back to camp to shower before the sun set behind the peak and plunged everything into shadow, I realized I didn’t have time to continue to the head of the next canyon. All I could do was gaze longingly at the route above me.
I did have time to climb past Blockhead and check out the continuation of the ridge westward, where again I found natural campsites, level protected places along the crest. And I got even more spectacular views.
I was bee-free on the descent down the opposite side of the drainage, and the hike back across the basin was beautiful in the low light of late afternoon. But I still didn’t make it to camp before shade descended, and had yet another chilly shower.
This was the first night when mosquitos joined me for dinner. The moon was up later, approaching half. And I began to notice more satellites, which really annoyed me. Yes – I’m using them for my GPS messenger, and the images you see on these route maps. But I’m not embracing them happily. They’re a scourge on our night skies.
I thought about the tamarisk I’d seen so far, in three widely separated drainages. Our gulch actually seems to be the worst place in the range – at least here on the west side. The plateau is also bad, but not so much. Here in the desert, after more than a century, tamarisk remains confined to short stretches of drainage, as opposed to along perennial streams elsewhere in the Southwest. And in the drainages where people haven’t tried to “eradicate” it, it seems to have established an equilibrium with native plants, which often thrive in proximity.
Because it’s a wild plant, it’s smarter than you – if you fight it, it comes back stronger. In a place like this, the lesson may be: Don’t fight it!
Since the moon was still up after dinner, I took one of my moonlight walks up the gulch. Moonlight walks have been such a big part of my desert experience! Coming back, I heard a piercing ringing from the north bank, then an answering sound from the south. Crickets? It was really loud.
I thought about the old mesquite, and my favorite willow up on the plateau. Trees here overgrow in wet periods, then die back almost to the ground in a long drought, finally resprouting from their lower trunks. That seems to be a pattern of the desert.
I’m naturally tense, but dinner, beer, and a walk finally relaxed me. Back at camp I continued to study the sky. I saw a red star above Orion and wondered if it could be Mars. Through the binoculars, the Pleiades were so beautiful, and a dense area of the Milky Way below Cassiopeia. In bed, bracing my elbows, I could finally see three moons of Jupiter. Two more meteorites before I fell asleep, and of course the damn satellites.
Monday, November 7th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
I woke up on Monday not knowing how or when my trip would end. I only knew I had to reach a hotel at the Phoenix airport by Tuesday night, to catch my flight to Indiana (and family) early Wednesday morning.
The last time I’d talked to my mom, last Wednesday morning, she’d sounded upset that I might be out of touch for almost a week while camping in the desert. Like me, she’s prone to anxiety attacks, and throughout the trip I’d been increasingly worried about her.
I’d been sending pre-recorded text messages from my GPS unit, every day, to reassure her I was okay, but hadn’t briefed her to watch for those, and wasn’t sure she’d even notice the GPS emails among the dozens of junk messages she gets each day.
In addition, during each hike so far, whenever I crested a ridge and had a line of sight for dozens of miles out of the mountains and across the open desert, I turned on my cell phone and searched for a signal to call her, but could never connect with a tower.
By Monday, I could easily imagine her having a panic attack and calling on my friends to come out and find me. So I was worried about staying another day without being able to reassure her. But I was so happy to be here, and felt like I was only just settling in and getting started – I couldn’t remember any time in the past decade when I’d felt so at home on my land. I would really hate to leave a day early.
From our campsite on the ledge above the big wash, I gazed up at the peak looming to the north, where an ambitious but failed mine perches on a dizzying precipice just below the summit. The hike to that mine, which I’ve done many times both solo and with friends, is one of the most challenging hikes in the range, but the peak above it is the only place where I was sure I could get a signal on my phone to call and reassure my mom.
My imagined need to justify staying out here another day led me to completely ignore the difficulty and danger of that climb. When I decided to do it, packed and started off on the hike, I was only thinking of a quick out-and-back that would leave my afternoon free. I was in complete denial that it would be the scariest, hardest, and longest hike of the entire trip, with the sole purpose of making a phone call that turned out to be unnecessary.
The peak stands almost 2,000′ above camp, but you can’t see it or the mine from below, since massive rock outcrops rise between. The peak itself is only a mile and a half away in horizontal distance, making for a 25% average grade – which is pretty extreme in itself, far steeper than any of the hikes I do back home.
However, the lower half of the climb is misleadingly straightforward, on a gentler grade traversing bare ground between shrubs and smaller outcrops. Back in the early 90s when I was romping all over these mountains like a bighorn sheep, I would look at a distant peak and say “It’ll take me only an hour to get there”, and I was usually correct. Now, I couldn’t remember my estimate for this peak – fanciful numbers between 45 and 90 minutes were bouncing around in my head.
One ascent with friends, about 25 years ago, had gone bad because my partner’s girlfriend, who was in good shape but was afraid of heights, was having a major meltdown by the time we reached the mine. She had to be coached all the way down, step by step, in abject terror and hating us both for taking her up there. And on one of my more recent ascents, I’d tried a different route that turned out to be even harder, and fell and cut myself pretty bad on a rock coming down.
Today, it was at that halfway point that I realized my mistake. This was going to be a long, tough one. But there was no turning back, and at least I wouldn’t be taking the same route on the way down – I planned to cross the ridge below the mine and drop into the next drainage east, to check the seep above the shade house where I’d lived back in 1992.
The upper half of the climb to the mine involves finding your way around and over ramparts of granite that block the way forward, using bouldering moves that were made more dangerous by my heavy old pack, which has no waist strap and swings back and forth, threatening to throw me off balance – another example of my bullheaded commitment to old-fashioned, low-tech gear.
Getting past those stone ramparts gets harder and harder the higher you get, until the last one, which forces you to climb to the top of the outcrop overlooking the mine works, and then downclimb the north face, using more bouldering moves. On each of those successive ramparts I’d found scat from groups of bighorn sheep – mostly rams, I’m assuming, because that’s what I’ve seen up here before – but it was all months old, at least. In fact, I’d seen lots of old sheep scat on every slope, ridge, or saddle I’d been to so far, here around the rim of our interior basin on the west side of the range.
Well below the main works of the mine I came upon a graded ledge containing bed frames and springs for 5 people – a feature I’d completely forgotten. That, in addition to the collapsed hexagonal cabin above, would’ve hosted up to 9 workers at a time, on a knife-edge ridge exposed to the most brutal winds in the range – but also with the most spectacular views.
Taking a quick look around the mine works – nothing had changed since my last visit, in 2011 – I was reminded of some recent comments by a friend who knows these mountains much better than I do. He also knows and respects my interest in native cultures and prehistoric sites, and questioned why we’d bought this property in the first place, since it’s been so torn up and abused by Anglo mine works, ruins, and trash.
My co-owner, on the other hand, has long been interested in Western (colonial) history, including mining, and views this place as an open-air museum.
My own take is that – apart from these being the only large intact parcels of private land on this side of the mountains – it’s also the perfect base and point of access for nearly 50 square miles of wild habitat, for the prehistoric cultural sites that surround our basin, and for the plateau, the heart of the range. And although I could easily do without all the mining stuff, the broader history of our species shows that these ruins and this junk can provide valuable resources for a resourceful subsistence community, sometime in the unknown future after our own culturally bankrupt society fades away and the regional climate becomes salubrious again.
I’d only been past the mine to the actual peak once before, in March 1990, and I’d completely forgotten both the route and the configuration of the peak itself, which is a quarter mile beyond the mine and 300 vertical feet above. It’s a beautiful, completely wild, grassy little plateau, tilted westward, where you can completely ignore the mining junk below and revel in the 360 degree view, blocked only in the north, across another long canyon, by the north wall of the range.
There, I got my first cell phone signal in the past 5 days, and spoke to my mom, who, as it turned out, wasn’t worried at all.
I hated to leave that place, but the 1-1/2 mile climb had taken 3 hours, and I had to start back down – both to ensure a warm shower, and because I was dreading the descent. On the last climb to the mine, I was with a friend who knew of a partial trail down the eastern slope, past the mine tailings, into the drainage that led to our seep.
Holding onto an old water pipe, I made it past the tailings, to the upper stage of the old cable tramway they used to lower ore into the side canyon beyond, but could see no clear trail from there. There was only a faint suggestion that I began to follow, but it continued only as far as the next little saddle on the outlying ridge between this and the next drainage. Below that, there might’ve been a switchback, so I kept going, but any sign of a trail completely disappeared, and I couldn’t spot anything else on the surrounding slopes. So I began picking my way down this dangerous slope of loose rock, as carefully as I possibly could, aiming for what I thought was the outcrop of metamorphic rock surrounding the seep, far below.
As expected, it was a nerve-wracking descent. I remembered making it on acid, back in the early 90s, after dosing at the mine and having a total freakout when I contemplated this slope from above. The way I prepared myself then was by imagining I was a mountain sheep, clenching the ball of my foot with each step for better traction. Whether real or imagined, it worked back then, but the boots I wear now are far too stiff for that.
Crossing back and forth over the continuously steep and narrow drainage to the seep, to avoid sheer pouroffs and rock walls – sometimes on the surrounding slopes and sometimes in the boulder-choked dry streambed itself – I slowly and carefully made it past what I’d originally thought to be the seep, and finally to the cleft of the seep, whose dammed-up tank amazingly held water – the only standing water I’d seen yet within our watershed of almost 50 square miles. But the seep itself looked completely dry, and there were no bees using it.
The descent of less than a mile had taken almost three more hours, and I could forget that warm shower, but reaching this point, from which I had a clear and relatively easy route back to camp, was a huge relief.
Following the old water pipe to the shade house, I briefly checked it out. Someone had been here and left an empty pop bottle since my last visit, moving the old box springs under the roof, but everything was otherwise intact.
I found the old road to the shade house completely undriveable without major work – a boulder weighing several hundred pounds has fallen into the lower part, and all the steep sections have additional erosion.
My last night in the mountains was bittersweet. I built a tiny fire with the last of my catclaw, ate the last of my leftovers and drank the last of my beer, but I found myself compulsively walking away from both the fire and the lantern, to let my eyes adjust and experience the land in its natural state.
The strap from my sleep screen that secures it under my bedding had torn off the night before, so I tried to do without it at first, but the mosquitos were persistent again and I had to fit the screen around me as best I could. I really wished I could keep sleeping out there under the stars for the rest of my life.
