Regions
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015: 2015 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
So Many If’s
The mountain range in the Mojave desert that I consider my spiritual home provides subsistence habitat for two large wild mammals: the mountain lion and the mountain sheep. Soon after buying land out there, I befriended the scientist who has become the senior authority on desert bighorn, and 23 years ago, he took me in a Fish & Game helicopter on a sheep survey of the range.
We flew over the highest part of the range; we flew over my land; and we flew across the rugged mountains of stone to a distant canyon where we rose stealthily from behind a ridge to surprise a small group of sheep grazing on the other side. A few years later I summited the central crest of the range and looked out across a vast internal basin toward that same canyon. The map showed no roads going in there, and the Desert Protection Act, which went into effect at that time, enclosed the entire area in federally protected wilderness, with no vehicle access.
For some reason I couldn’t explain, it looked to me like the Promised Land.
This year, two decades later, my birthday was approaching, and I still hadn’t tried to go there. So many things had gotten in the way, and my body was showing its age. I was plagued with back pain from a ruptured disc, and I was walking on a hip with no cartilage that gave me chronic pain, often prevented me from hiking, and had been scheduled to be replaced until my surgeon was hit by a car a few weeks earlier. Currently, it was aching from all the trips I’d made up and down a ladder while working on the roof of my house. But I still dreamed about visiting that hidden valley.
The week before my birthday, I consulted my scientist friend, who remembered the area well, decades after visiting it himself. His voice brightened and he recalled that place as really interesting.
He also told me that bighorn were dying all over the desert from pneumonia spread by livestock; populations had crashed as much as 75% in a few months. A recent survey was unable to find a single sheep in my mountains. So anything I could observe might be helpful.
There were many obstacles protecting that hidden valley. My friend warned me that there was almost certainly no water available there now. He had mapped three surface water sources there after a wet winter three decades ago, but none of them had been significant, and we had not had a wet winter for many years.
I checked the weather forecast and found there was a heat wave approaching: every day was supposed to be hotter than the day before. I was already getting a late start; afternoon temperatures would be reaching 90 degrees by the time I reached the mountains, meaning I would need to carry lots of water. Hiking all day in that weather, and/or climbing thousands of feet, all with no shade, I would need to drink more than a gallon per day, probably more than I could carry in my condition. But if I didn’t go now, I’d have to wait all summer for cooler weather in the fall, or even longer if I went ahead with surgery.
With no vehicle access, the only way in would be by climbing over one of the surrounding ridges. But those ridges themselves were hard to reach now, because the closed wilderness boundary began miles away from the base of the mountains. There was only one place where an open road penetrated the wilderness to the foot of a slope, and that’s where I hoped to start – if I could even drive any of those roads.
None of the “roads” reaching this mountain range are maintained; they’re all rough tracks over packed dirt, rocks, gravel, and loose sand, temporarily graded by miners in the 19th century and abandoned to erosion ever since, used sporadically today by desert rats and by the rancher who runs cattle around one corner of the mountains. All of these roads cross long stretches of deep sand at some point. A friend had been out recently and said the sand was very dry due to drought. Dry sand offers no traction, and my 2wd truck is front-heavy and bogs down easily.
None of my friends was available to join me at such short notice, so if I was going to do it, I was going to do it alone.
So many if’s: if I could reach the mountains by road without getting stuck in the sand; if my bad hip and ruptured disc would let me carry enough water in a heavy backpack up some of the most rugged mountains on earth, where there are no trails, you have to carefully pick your own way in advance to avoid insurmountable obstacles, and where bouldering skills are often needed, potentially climbing up and down thousands of feet in two days; if I didn’t get bitten by one of the rattlesnakes I was sure to encounter at this time of year; if I didn’t lose my balance or slip on one of the thousands of loose rocks and sprain an ankle or break a leg or fall into the razor-sharp two-foot-long spines of a yucca or the thousands of needles of a cholla cactus; if I didn’t run out of water and electrolytes and get dehydrated and lose my mind, as I almost had 18 years ago, with a friend, in our “death march” over some of the same ridges.
But would I rather grow old and die in some hospital bed without ever trying?
So I spent two days loading my truck with water and ice chests and everything I could think of to help me get there and back, plus supplies for alternative destinations in case my dream didn’t pan out.
The Ancient Road Warrior
It’s a two-day drive from home, and when I arrived at the halfway point late at night, I was surprised to find the cheap motel almost full. I was given the last upstairs room at the far end. The next to last space in the partially flooded dirt parking lot was occupied by what seemed an abandoned station wagon from the 1970s, completely filled with trash.
But when I looked closer, I saw the tires were all inflated, but bald, and the next morning as I was leaving my smelly room, I saw a man come out of the room below mine and open the driver’s door of this derelict: a big, hunched-over old guy in shapeless, worn-out clothes, with a thick shock of grey hair pointing outward in all directions. And I realized that he’d kept the driver’s seat clear.
Nighthawks Over Camp
Unless you use them regularly, you never know where a road is going to turn to sand. After more than an hour off the paved road, on the long, bone-rattling approach to the mountains, I suddenly found myself driving uphill in deep sand. At such a point, there’s nothing to do but keep going, because if you stop, you’re definitely stuck.
So I kept driving, with the solace that I was prepared to get unstuck, and the drive out would be downhill. Still, it’s nerve-wracking when you’re doing this alone, dozens of miles away from a cell phone signal.
But my success was short-lived. When I reached the spur road to my planned starting point, I found it closed off with a secure cable gate, despite being shown as open on the BLM access maps.
So I climbed to the nearby shade of the sacred cave that, for me, is the center of the universe, North America’s answer to Australia’s Uluru, and pondered what to do next.
It was mid-afternoon. In any event, I’d need to find a place to camp before starting out in the morning. I scrambled out of the cave and looked up at the mountain wall looming behind it at the head of an enclosed valley. A shallow dip in the ridge, perhaps 1400′ up, would give me access to the hidden basin behind. I decided to try it the next morning.
That night, I camped among boulders a few miles away, where I’d last camped on the winter solstice more than 6 years ago, with friends, in a very rare 6 inches of snow. We’d made a snowman – hard to believe now.
I uncapped and started on a bottle of the new Stone Ruination 2.0 that I’d picked up on the way, and sat in the shade of a boulder, watching the light change color on distant peaks. After a while I climbed down into the big wash and spent some time gathering and hauling back dead catclaw branches for firewood. After starting a fire, I laid out my bedroll in some level sand: plastic tarp, heavy foam mat, cheap sleeping bag, and pillow, with a partial mosquito screen rolled up nearby, just in case. As usual, I wondered about my dad, who taught me to camp in tents, and some of my current friends, who persist in using tents to shut out the stars at night. I feel lucky to have broken free of that.
As the sun started to set and I prepared dinner over gas stove and wood fire, I was treated to a rare exhibition by two or three nighthawks chasing insects in the upper air, swooping, flapping and twirling like big slender bats. And then the bats themselves began shooting through camp.
After dinner, I walked up the road a mile or so in the bright light of the half moon, listening to crickets at various distances off in the desert.
I slept well, only waking briefly a couple of times, to track the progress of the forked galaxy, after the moon set behind the mountains in the west and left the night to the stars.
Over the Wall
The last time I’d tried backpacking, several years ago, it was on a maintained trail, and I’d had to turn back after two miles because my feet, my back, and my hip were hurting too much. I had been wearing the cheaper hiking boots with less support, and my heavy old Swiss Army rucksack with no waist belt.
This time, I had better boots, but the same pack. I’d shopped again and again, but I just couldn’t abide any of these new neon-colored high-tech packs, and none of them were designed for desert conditions anyway. Just walking past a catclaw bush would rip that thin nylon to shreds, and most of those fancy suspensions would leave your back soaking wet with sweat in no time. I’d actually designed my own desert pack using natural materials, but hadn’t been able to source the materials yet.
I did update my stash with two collapsible 96-ounce plastic canteens, so that my total fluid load ended up including 8 liters of water and one liter of electrolyte drink. Plus that big sleeping bag, warm clothes for the cool night, jerky, cajun sesame sticks, energy nuggets from the Co-op back home for morning, and miscellaneous survival odds and ends, including maps, folding knife, lighters and my water zapper just in case I got lucky and found water. If that happened, I could stay a day or two longer!
I figure the total weighed about 30 pounds, almost a quarter of my body weight.
Incidentally, for the first time in my life, I had a walking stick. My mom had left it behind after one of her visits, and I’d put it in the basement never expecting to see it again. But with my bad hip, I knew I’d need all the help I could get. And it really did help. It was often in the way when climbing over boulders, but even more often, it took the weight off my bad hip, so that stick, more than anything else besides water and food, enabled me to get there and back, so thanks Mom!
The walk up to the base of the ridge, across many crisscrossing spines of rock and deep ravines, was challenging as usual. A beautiful specked rattler stretched across a small gully in front of me just as I started out.
The climb up the steep headwall, pacing myself in the heat, zigzagging back and forth to avoid sheer cliffs, took a couple of hours. The wonderful Mojave sage was finishing its bloom, but I enjoyed patches of its fragrance all the way up. Three-quarters of the way up, I came upon fairly recent scat from a group of 7 or 8 bighorn.
I reached the saddle at the top of the ridge with little pain in my hip, and for some reason I hardly felt the weight of the pack, unlike last time. And like most ridgetop saddles, this one was swept by wind, so that although it was midday and the sun beat down with no shade anywhere, it actually felt cool up there.
I knew the down climb would be the most dangerous part, but this turned out to be a complicated saddle, with successive shelves that dipped down gradually to the west, so that I couldn’t even see my destination, the hidden basin, until I’d worked my way around and down the sheer palisades of these rock shelves.
When I finally reached a viewpoint over the hidden basin, I saw that it was lower than my starting point, and my climb down would be even longer than my climb up.
Again and again, even with the stick, I stumbled and regained my balance, on a steep slope that wouldn’t have caught me in time if I’d fallen. It was a horrendous, fearsome down climb, worse than anything I’d done before.
Finally, two-thirds of the way down, I came upon a big granite outcrop eroded into caves and tunnels, and found shade in a shallow cave. After drinking and resting, I scouted the remainder of my route. I was getting tired, but it was not yet 3pm, with the hottest time of day still to come.
Six hours after starting, I reached the bottom, at the edge of a deep gully where my friend had found water 30 years ago. Everything was gone dry now, but in the distance was a boulder pile that offered shade, and I cut across the bajada toward it, through stands of cholla denser than I’d seen anywhere else in the range.
Sunset in the Lost World
The shade of the boulders wasn’t extensive, and cholla balls were scattered over the ground. I brushed some sand as clean as I could and laid out my sleeping bag to lie on. Tired but restless, I kept getting up and looking out from my tiny patch of shade. My water was more than half gone already, so I needed to stay put. I was totally alone in a very inaccessible place.
I found a small shard of the simple, disposable low-fired pottery that the People used out here. So they were over here! I thought of the 4-dimensionality of this place for those of us who’ve visited it for decades. All the different sites and elevations of the mountains are populated in memory with the family, friends, and girlfriends who’ve been with me here at different times. The People are just an added layer, still here with me in the eternal present, living the way I was taught to live at the school in Utah, at the other end of their territory.
Hours later, the sun started down and I shouldered my pack and got moving again. In the lowering light, the grandeur and mystery of this landscape, hidden for decades, grew before my eyes. Completely surrounded by high rock walls and boulder-strewn slopes, powerfully isolated from the outside world. The sunset light picked out towering cliffs and pinnacles as rugged as those in any other part of the mountains. Huge dry washes converged in the lower distance toward the central drainage of the basin, miles away. By some magic of topography, the big eastern canyon I’d wanted to explore caught the last light of the sun, turning brilliant gold behind foreground ridges that were already dark.
I worked my way down into the big washes, looking for a camp site, and found no evidence that anyone had ever driven in here. It was the first drainage I’d seen in these mountains without tire tracks or footprints. And there was no sign that cattle had ever been in here, confirming my friend’s 1985 report. This was probably the most pristine habitat in the entire range.
I walked down to the convergence of drainages. It was a huge wash, hundreds of yards across, thick with healthy stands of baccharis and other riparian shrubs. It was getting dark and I wanted a more enclosed camp, so I walked back up the northernmost drainage, the one I’d use in the morning to find my way out of the valley.
There, I found some outlying junipers with deep layers of duff underneath that I could use for padding on the hard sand of the wash. The light was falling fast, and I had no lantern nor anything to do after dark other than sleep. I made my primitive bed like the People, ate as much jerky and sesame sticks as I could, drank a little more water, and went to bed in the heart of the Lost World. The night was perfectly still, and a thin layer of clouds had been forming during sunset, so that I hoped for cooler weather in the morning.
Sunrise: The Old Ones
I slept well, but the sky cleared during the night. Hoping to make as much of the hike out as possible in the shade of the eastern mountain wall, I woke well before dawn, ate a bunch of energy nuggets and drank a half liter of my precious water, and was packed and on the way by 5:30am.
Coming down, I had vowed not to go back the same way. I would walk miles to the north, skirting the base of the eastern wall, to try the shorter climb to the pass I’d originally selected, the one with the closed road. Once I reached that road, it would be only two or three miles back to my truck, with its 15 gallons of drinking water, under the full sun of a hotter day.
As the drainage ascended to the bajada I began to find my first “modern” artifacts: a plastic shotgun shell casing oxidized into tatters, and an old rusted can with a wire threaded through it as a handle, just the way the People would do it, according to the way I was taught. You could prop it over a fire with a stick and cook a meal in that tiny pot adapted from a can the white man would toss aside as trash.
In the wash last night, and across the bajada this morning, I found many husks of skinny mushrooms and compact puffballs, always a surprise in the open desert. The decomposers seem to find something to work on in any habitat.
My first destination was the base of a spur of the mountain that projected out into the valley. I would need to get around it to reach the low pass. The bajada went up and down, I threaded my way around and between stands of cholla and creosote bush, and the rising sun began to gild the peaks to the north.
Still walking in the cool morning shadow of the eastern wall, I finally approached the projecting spur. At its base was a pile of ancient granite boulders, blackened with desert patina. I always check these patinated outliers for rock art, and from the pottery shard I’d found the day before, I knew the People had been here.
I lifted my pack, set it down, and walked over. As I rounded from the south to the north side of the boulders, I saw them. High up on the rock face, faint, and damaged in spots by the white hunters’ shotgun blasts, the marks were strange but their style was familiar. The People had been here, perfectly adapted to this harsh environment, living sustainably with minimal impact, neither firing the grasses nor damming the drainages nor building the machines of destruction that we’re so good at. If that is romanticizing the noble savage, so be it. It’s what we know about them, and no defensive, guilt-ridden news bytes about the destructive practices of other indigenous peoples in other places can invalidate that.
In the short time between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I’d found more than what I’d come for: wild, timeless habitat, and the presence of the people who lived as an integral part of it, eating wild food, making everything they needed, by hand, with the natural resources available here. Peaceful people who avoided conflict. People our soldiers decapitated, mounting their heads on poles as a warning to those who would not be civilized. Tell me about our progress: how we outsource the behaviors we no longer want to see, such as slavery, to distant lands that are destroyed to feed our hyperconsumption; how we learn to depend on money and machines to do everything for us, so that we become weak in body and spirit. Too weak and poor in spirit to live the way the Old Ones did.
There’s nothing shameful about admitting you’re wrong, you’re on the wrong path. There’s nothing shameful about admiring the people who came before you. That’s not romanticizing, that’s honesty. Your myth of progress: now that’s romanticizing.
The Climb Out
Recharged by my discoveries, I walked the final miles to the base of the pass. I believed I was going to make it, but I was still being careful. There were many challenges, routes to pick from a distance around cliffs and boulder-choked ravines. Loose rocks to avoid, some of them so big they appeared solid.
It wasn’t an easy approach; it never is, because the base of a steep drainage collects the biggest boulders, and erosion exposes the foundation rock which is too steep to climb with a pack. You have to aim for the alluvial parts of the slope, which lie between the exposures of solid rock. As I was following one of these slopes upward at an angle, I came upon a diamondback rattler asleep in the shade. Totally out. I admired it for a moment then looked for a way around that wasn’t blocked by yucca or catclaw.
In the same area, I found another shard of pottery which showed that the People used this pass as well.
Luckily, this slope got easier toward the top. I had climbed out of the shade; it was after 8am. When I got to the saddle, my water bottle was empty. I found shade behind a boulder and drained the remainder of my last big canteen into my drinking bottle. Then I walked east to scout the down slope.
It was totally gnarly. Walls of a different, dark red granite projected across from the south, probably impassible. The center of the drainage was choked with boulders as usual. The north side had some sediment but was in full sun.
I managed to find a way down between the central boulders and the red walls, stopping frequently to reconnoiter, weaving my way back and forth. The lower I got, the more I was forced into the boulders with their sheer drop-offs and impassible clots of vegetation. Still, it was a beautiful slope, dotted with pinyon pine and thick riparian shrubs. At one point a hummingbird dropped in front of my face to check me out. I could see the end of the road at the bottom, with a cleared turnaround. I just had to be smart and patient and keep going.
The walk back on the road was a walk in the park, but it reminded me again of how special the Lost World is, free of the roads we build for our machines, free of the giant trampling beasts we attempt to manage in our efficient but wasteful commodification of food.
I got back to the truck with a half liter of water. It was 10am, already fiercely hot, and there was no shade within 50 miles of driving for me to park in, wash up and rest for the remaining 10 hours until sunset. I needed a rest. I had pushed my deteriorated joints far beyond what they deserved. So, as a product and a lifelong victim of an advanced society, I headed for a motel with air conditioning.
Vision Quest 2016: Reading the Ground
Monday, May 23rd, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
Driving across northwestern Arizona the previous afternoon, I’d encountered heavy rains, and crossing the river before nightfall I’d seen a low ceiling of dark clouds ahead, hanging over the rugged mountains of the Mojave. But this afternoon, the sky had cleared, with only scattered clouds, as I parked my truck at Cowboy Camp. I started walking up the sandy wash past the big bend, and soon crossed animal tracks from the north, cut through the dry surface into wetter sand.
They were tracks of adult bighorn, and they’d been forcefully pounded, forming a ragged circular pattern in two places a few yards apart. Last summer in the mountains of eastern Arizona, I’d been lucky to see, for the first time, wild sheep jumping up and down in place, which John says is “play” behavior, so these tracks spoke to me in a way they couldn’t have before. Assuming it had rained yesterday or last night, these sheep had been here since, perhaps only hours before me. Scanning the area, I guessed there had been two sheep, perhaps yearling males. Backtracking down the wash, I crossed another set of tracks, including those of a lamb – probably a lamb and its mother. The adult tracks appeared again, high above the Gulch, in sand leading to the water hole fed by the seep in the narrow side canyon.
The recent rain gave me an unexpected opportunity to sharpen my tracking skills, since animals were more active now, and there was a clear contrast between fresh tracks and old, eroded tracks. I’d been encouraged in the weeks before the trip, when back home in New Mexico, I’d encountered my first mountain lion, then identified his tracks shortly afterward, near where I’d seen him last, associated with the prints of a group of javalina. The day after my arrival in the Mojave, I set out across the central basin into the main wash, and came upon a mountain bike track – illegal in the wilderness – and eroded footprints which I assumed were my friends who had visited only a week earlier. Near them were the tracks of a large dog, and farther up the wash, a large cat track, maybe a lion, and fox prints.
After the difficult climb to the Plateau, one of the toughest climbs in these mountains, I encountered one set of old footprints in the occasional sandy patches of the narrow gully. I’ve found solitary footprints there on some earlier visits, but not often. Here there was water, standing, the color of Lipton Tea, in hollows lined with patches of dead algae, sometimes wearing a thin scum, or sluggishly flowing over the lips of rock barriers. Later, talking this over with scientist friends, I concluded that there had been some good rain early in the winter, followed by gradual drying, through unseasonably warm weather that supported the kind of algal growth we usually see in late spring. This week’s rain had stirred up that dead algal mat. The old, eroded footprints had probably been made during the past two months. A single adult male hiking across this remote, hidden, hard-to-reach plateau, maybe familiar from previous visits, but possibly just drawn by the landmark pinnacle at its head. And there were recent sheep tracks, but only from one or two adults. I was reading a detailed story and drawing a picture from evidence on the ground that might’ve been mute before.
From then on, I was always looking for tracks, and reading more from them. In every wash and every drainage, I found the fresh tracks of one or two adult sheep, showing that individual sheep were responding to this week’s rain by ranging widely in search of fresh forage. I frequently walked jackrabbits or cottontails up from the big washes of the bajada, and their tracks were everywhere, along with those of ground squirrels.
During the Fish & Game survey of bighorn sheep, when I was doing my shorter hikes as the others were converging over peaks and ridges into a central drainage, I’d occasionally come upon the small knobby prints of the young women’s hiking boots and puzzle out where they’d come from and where they were going. And later, walking down the basin to the southern ridge, I followed vehicle tracks showing how the local rancher had driven his big contractor’s truck deep into the wilderness area and far up three tributary drainages in succession, places that hadn’t been driven in decades, insteading of walking like me. Holding the grazing allotment, he claims a legal right to violate the federal roadless area prohibition, but there are actually no cattle and no range improvements to check over here. He’s a younger man than me, in good shape, and isn’t recovering from hip surgery. Like so many, he just can’t be bothered to walk when driving is possible, and it broadcasts a message of disrespect to the public.
More than a hundred miles to the north, exploring a long, winding drainage between low foothills into a hidden basin, I came upon fresh sign of cattle a mile before I spotted them, way ahead of me, spooking and stampeding up a steep slope. Then I came upon a burn area – clear of living shrubs but dotted with the charred stumps of creosote and the fallen husks of Mojave yucca, broad evidence of a wildfire – but knowing that burned stumps can last for decades or even centuries, and perennial vegetation can’t easily regenerate in soil trampled by cattle, I had no way of judging its age.
Whereas the evidence of surface water may evaporate quickly after a rain, desert life that’s invisible most of the time will appear miraculously and persist longer.
Finally, returning from the last hike of my trip, I looked for the tracks I’d left on my way out, improbably found them in the midst of miles of open space, and tested myself by following them back, despite temporarily losing them over and over again as they vanished across stretches of bedrock. The desert was teaching me a form of literacy far more profound and essential than we learn in school, because it transcends our species and bonds us with our partners in the ecosystem.
Vision Quest 2016: Mesquite Canyon
Monday, May 23rd, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
The second day of the bighorn sheep survey focused on a drainage midway down the west side of the mountains. As on the first day, hikers would be dropped off at points to the north and south and gradually converge. The days were getting warmer, and the older, more experienced hunters maintained that sheep would rest during the day, so the group got up at 5 am and left before 6, leaving me alone in camp. I’d checked with them the night before, and they said they’d drive south at the end of the day, toward the final day’s destination, stopping somewhere to camp for the night. There was only one road south, and if I followed that, I’d eventually run into them.
So I slept in that morning, had a leisurely breakfast, and drove to the drainage they were converging on. It was an internal basin almost completely encircled by ridges, and I hadn’t been back there in over 20 years. Since the previous year, my curiosity had been focused on what I called the “Lost World”, the big southeastern basin, closed to vehicle traffic, and I believed that if I climbed a short canyon out of this place, to a low pass at its head, I’d get a view over into the Lost World. That was my modest goal for the day.
I drove the long sandy road into the encircled valley, passing one of the big white Fish & Game trucks and glassing in vain for the hunters, who were supposed to be somewhere nearby looking for sheep. I followed the old abandoned mine road up a narrowing wash toward the canyon I’d selected, until I reached some rocks my little truck couldn’t safely get over.
The day was warm, but I didn’t have far to go, and could expect shade from boulders or junipers once I got into the canyon. I loaded my pack and set off into new country I’d never hiked before.
This was a special place because it represented a gap in the range. The southernmost part of the mountains, a long and complex landscape in itself, was here neatly divided from the rest of the range by a fairly broad gap that became visible as I hiked into it. As before, I spooked both jackrabbits and cottontails as I followed the wash. Then I cut east across the gently rising bajada toward the mouth of my canyon.
No one on earth had the slightest idea where I was, or where I was going, but I felt that my plans were modest enough that I wasn’t taking much of a risk. And if the sheep group got worried, they could follow my tracks.
I dropped from the bajada into the wash coming out of the canyon, and came upon a grove of big desert willows, in the middle of which was a shaded hollow. Although the air temperature was mild, my body was overheating in the desert sunlight, and I stopped for a drink and some rest, still needing to catch up on the sleep I’d missed two nights ago.
As I got closer to the mouth of the eastern canyon, the main wash veered north. Suddenly I came upon a broad mesquite thicket, the biggest I’d ever seen in these mountains. Back home in New Mexico, mesquite grows like a weed, but here, it’s a rarity. The seed pods were prized by native people, and the wood made good tools. I’ve always looked upon it as a lucky find.
The wash continued to lead me northward, away from my destination, until I arrived at the mouth of a new canyon leading up into the north. Awesome but inviting, this canyon climbed between monumental walls of looming dark granite. At ground level, big, rounded and weirdly sculpted granite boulders lay half-buried in level, walkable white sand. I was faced with a moment of decision; looking up into this new canyon, I quickly abandoned my original plan.
The first thing I discovered here was sheep tracks, fresh since last week’s rain. It began to feel like the same sheep were preceding me everywhere I went. Then I came upon invasive tamarisk, but not the new growth we had in the northernmost drainages, which have been repeatedly cleared. These were old, long-established trees, with root stock a foot in diameter. Yet they were patchy in this canyon, instead of forming monoculture thickets, replacing native shrubs and trees, like they had on our land.
The tamarisk didn’t dismay me because this new canyon continued to unfold other surprises. During the lowest stretch, it was an easy walk, but every hundred yards or so there was a dogleg, revealing a new, higher stretch. Suddenly a patch of livid green appeared high up the eastern slope – another mesquite thicket, indicating water squeezing through a contact in the rock. I climbed up and examined it, but couldn’t find any surface water. Yet this must be a well-watered drainage, to support both mesquite and tamarisk.
I came to a pour-off, a jumble of house-sized boulders blocking the canyon, and had to climb around it, backtracking and struggling up and across a steep slope of loose rock and gravel. I ended up hundreds of feet above the canyon floor and decided to keep climbing, until I reached a place where I could look down into the next stretch of canyon. There I saw more groves of mesquite, sharing the canyon floor with patches of old-growth tamarisk. Could tamarisk reach an equilibrium state, sharing the drainage with native vegetation instead of crowding it out? This was truly a place of mystery, with its dark, looming walls and white, sandy floor.
The ridge above me, where I’d hoped to get a view into the Lost World, seemed to be getting higher and farther away, so I climbed back down to the canyon floor, where I encountered another, deeper, dogleg, with a north-facing cliff overhang that provided a large area of daylong shade. Here, I stopped for lunch, comfortable in the sand. What an amazing place! I’d found many beautiful places in these mountains, but this was surely one of the best.
Continuing north, I finally came upon surface water – a half-pint seeping into a rock hollow, it would soon dry up, but for now it supported wildlife. I climbed over or around more steep pour-offs or boulder blockages, discovering more thickets of mesquite, but leaving the tamarisk behind, until suddenly I topped out at the head of the canyon, emerging into a bowl-like basin in the sky, encircled by rugged ridges, with the wash splitting in front of me into two tributaries, each with a level white-sand floor beckoning in opposite directions, like a T-intersection.
Taking the right-hand tributary, I soon came upon another big thicket of mesquite. Ahead of me, I could see a low pass at the head of this wash, so I clambered eagerly up it, thinking it would give me a view into the Lost World to the east.
But after a quarter mile or more of climbing, I found myself looking down into another canyon system that curved away to the right. And in the far distance, over a shoulder of ridge, I could see the dry lakes to the south of the mountain range. South! How could I be looking south? This new right-curving canyon seemed to be dropping to the west, when I should be looking east! I was totally disoriented. Then I turned around and noticed a government survey benchmark, at the foot of a shrub, at the side of the low pass. What a coincidence – just as I found myself confused about directions, a team of surveyors from 90 or more years ago had left me a sign that I could check against my map, later, to figure out where I’d been.
From this pass, the basin I’d entered from the beautiful canyon looked even nicer. In addition to the wash opposite this one, there was another long drainage that came down between them. You could stay up here all day, in this secret, hidden world, just exploring. Both perennial shrubs and annual forbs were blooming here, and were bigger than elsewhere in the mountains – salazaria, Mojave sage, encelia. I returned and walked up the opposite wash, passing the biggest creosote bushes I’d seen anywhere around, and all the big shrubs were in bloom.
I’d come farther than planned, and I needed to allow time to look for the sheep survey group after returning to my truck. There was hours of potentially bad road to search before dark. So I had to start back, wondering when I’d get a chance to return and enjoy this new place more deeply.
The walk back was fairly easy. At the truck, I checked my topo maps and found that at that low pass, up in the sky, where I found the benchmark, I’d actually come full circle, looking back into the head of the canyon I’d originally planned to hike. It actually originated out of the north, so that my impression of the dry lake had been correct. To get an eastern view into the Lost World, I’d need to climb much higher over the wall encircling the high basin to the north. What a complicated topography – it even looked confusing on the map!
That evening, I drove and drove, farther and farther south, deeper into the desert and farther from paved roads and towns, with no sign of the group. The sun was going down as I drove past the southern tip of the mountain range, risking my truck in the deep sand of big arroyos where the road had been washed out by flash floods. Looking anxiously for the road I expected the group to take on the following morning, a road I’d never used or seen myself, I drove farther and farther up the low basin on the opposite side of the range, the mountains far away to my north. As night fell, I glimpsed a faint track out of the corner of my eye, behind one of the tall power transmission towers that lined the side of this utility road. I got my truck turned around, bounced it over a low bank of sand, and pulled off between the regular ranks of creosote bush in this otherwise desolate alluvial basin. The moon hung, nearly full, above the mountains to the east, as I warmed up leftovers for dinner, then went to bed, alone.
Vision Quest 2016: Science in the Storm
Wednesday, May 25th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Animals, Mojave Desert, Nature, Regions, Road Trips.
The suburban sprawl of Las Vegas became less finished, less dense and more expansive, and more under construction, as we drove north in a tunnel of freeway, surrounded by noise-barrier walls, with the newly snow-covered peaks of the Spring Mountains and Sheep Range closing in at west and east. The Paiute reservation went by in a flash, then the military and prison complexes began, first the artillery and bombing range with its mock Mideastern villages, then the drone base and the prisons for women and juveniles.
After the long drive to Beatty, we checked into our motel and stopped for an early dinner of Mexican food at an outdoor table by the highway, next to a group of retiree Harley hogsters and their wives. In the dusk, Jef drove us up the road to the Spicer Ranch, which the current patriarch is developing into a private mountain bike resort. Wonderful news for me, because I’d love to see these adrenaline-fueled machines outlawed from public lands.
Jef had raved about this new-age rancher who rode bikes everywhere, but Dave Spicer turned out to be a mellow, friendly guy. His ranch compound stretched all around, consisting of the usual meandering dirt roads, abandoned equipment, vacant houses and ruined sheds, and half-finished dams, ponds, and corrals. The ranch was sited here by his ancestors because massive springs drain from the slopes back of the compound, out of an area of colorful badlands, to vivid reedy marshes along the highway. As darkness fell, we tried to follow his directions to where we might find endangered Amargosa toads around irrigated meadows and ponds.
Jef parked in a grove of trees and we fanned out, quickly spotting toads. I helped gather them, and we added each to a ziploc bag which was marked, either “out of water” or with the temperature of the water where it was found, taken on the spot with a digital probe. We each accumulated toad-filled bags in our left hands, until we had a dozen or so. When Jef occasionally encountered a big invasive bullfrog, he’d grab it and sling it hard against a rock; bullfrogs prey on smaller native frogs and toads. Wind was blowing hard when we started, with lightning and thunder over the mountains, and the low, heavy clouds began to spit rain.
When we returned to the vehicle, wind and rain were lashing the little SUV, which Jef and Anthony began efficiently turning into a field lab. I sat in the back holding the metal clipboard of data sheets. As Jef and Anthony sterilized a forceps and scissors and Anthony prepared the individual glass culture plates, Jef handed me paper packs of wooden-stemmed sterile cotton swabs, numbering the plastic caps of glass sample vials and returning them to their rack which he likewise passed back to me. Then they both sterilized their hands and put on sterile rubber gloves.
For each bagged toad, Jef would remove it from its bag, announce its number, measure its length in millimeters, determine the sex and read off the bag data, all of which I would quickly note on the data form. Then I would rush to tear open the end of a swab package, handing it to Jef tip forward, and he would begin to swab the toad. Meanwhile I’d pull a vial out of the rack and struggle to twist the cap open, holding it up for Jef to insert the swab, then carefully return it to the rack. Then Jef would hold the toad legs-first toward Anthony, who would clip off a tiny bit of webbing between the toes as a DNA sample, dropping it onto a culture plate. In the process, Anthony would sometimes recognize toads he’d caught before, on previous trips.
Back in the lab on campus, Anthony would test all the samples for the spreading chytrid fungus, which is considered “the most significant threat to the world’s montane amphibian populations”, allegedly contributing to mass extinction. But field research generally raises more questions than it answers. Jef, Anthony, and other scientists haven’t even been able to figure out the mortality rate – how many animals infected by the fungus actually die.
After Jef restored the specimen to its bag and set the bag outside the vehicle, he and Anthony would remove their gloves, sterilize their hands and equipment, put on fresh gloves, and start with the next bagged toad, all in the confined space of the front seat, with everything they needed stashed precariously on the sloping dashboard or between their feet on the floor, the doors propped open for extra maneuverability, and weather gusting in from outside.
When all the toads were sampled and all the data were entered, Jef and Anthony would clean up and pack up, while in the back seat, I donned sterile gloves and lifted each vial out of its rack, snapping the wooden swab off so its tip remained inside and screwing the caps back on, changing gloves after each vial. Then we moved to a different location, collected more toads, and resumed the lab work, with the wind and rain hitting harder each time, and the night falling colder.
At our final location, along the Amargosa River south of Beatty, I caught a chill in my legs – I hadn’t dressed for the wind – and my body temperature dropped so I had to quit and return to the vehicle, where I sat hunched and shivering for about an hour, feeling sick, as they finished processing the last sample set with the doors cracked open and the rain and wind intruding. It was 1:30 am when we got back to the motel, and I fell asleep instantly.
We returned in the morning, and Jef pointed out that the entire riparian area had been bulldozed free of invasive tamarisk. There was no tamarisk to be seen anywhere now in this sea of green at the base of multi-colored badlands. The tiny river flowed clear through a wetland of cattail, riparian grasses and coyote willows, shaded by young cottonwoods. I wondered why the ubiquitous seed stock of tamarisk hadn’t regenerated. Maybe they’d poisoned it chemically and replanted native vegetation. Quite an expensive, energy- and labor-intensive project, like all conservation, only possible in an affluent society.
After our rough night, we spread out in a leisurely, meandering search for chorus frogs, which Anthony would take back as samples for his broader study of the fungal infection. I was lucky to find the first specimen, a pretty green one. Admiring it through the ziploc bag, I wondered what its fate would be as a pawn of science, but my mind was too exhausted to dwell on it.
Vision Quest 2016: Indian Wars
Wednesday, May 25th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
Long before I moved to New Mexico, during a period when my love affair with the desert was being tested, I was introduced to Dave, the archaeologist. He invited me along on a site survey, a search for sites or artifacts near a mountain spring in the Mojave National Preserve, we got to know each other a bit, and he gave me a copy of his master’s thesis. I told him about the Indian campsite I’d found in my mountains, and he said it was likely a girl’s puberty ritual site, a remote place that adolescent girls would visit with a female chaperone. The site included a flat-topped boulder with hand-carved hollows called “cupules”, in which the girls would mix paint for their faces, a part of the ritual.
In the years since, we’d fallen out of touch, but I knew he’d bought and moved into the former home of mutual friends, and I wanted to reconnect and get caught up on recent developments in desert archaeology.
Dave was on his way to a historic mining camp in the Preserve, where he was supervising restoration of cabins by volunteers. He invited me to join them, so I drove over in the morning to meet him at a crossroads, and followed him from there on a dirt road that climbed up into a steep area of granite peaks and slopes lush with perennial shrubs blooming red, yellow and blue, with cabins perched on ledges at different levels. It was an area I’d never visited, hidden from outside.
I’m not a fan of mining history or miner’s cabins, but I was quickly sucked into the volunteer spirit, and found myself brushing stain onto the frame of a cabin door while others bustled around me. Then Dave came up and suggested that I join him in a drive across the Preserve for some equipment. In his truck, we had our chance to talk.
My first question was a general one. Since first discovering traces of the Old Ones in this desert, 30 years ago, I’d developed a seemingly complete picture of its native inhabitants, the Chemehuevis, a branch of the Southern Paiute tribe that occupied southern Nevada and Utah. I knew archaeologists theorized that the Chemehuevi were recent migrants within the past 400 years, part of the so-called “Numic Expansion” from the northwest. But I took that theory with a grain of salt. I’d met Southern Paiutes who laughed at archaeologists and confidently asserted that their people had been here forever. I felt it was preposterous, and presumptuous, of Anglo scientists to rewrite the history of native people. Yet the other day, I’d seen a Park Service kiosk that claimed the Mojave Indians as prehistoric natives of the Preserve, omitting the Chemehuevis completely. I wanted to know which Indians I should talk to about the Native sites and artifacts I’d been finding, both here and in my mountains farther south.
Dave’s answer stirred up my settled local worldview. “Well, the Mojaves were here first. The Chemehuevi are newcomers to this desert. They came out of the north and kicked the Mojaves’ asses. You know about the Numic Expansion?”
“Yeah, I know about that theory. But the Southern Paiute had no history of a warrior culture. The Anglos just rolled over them with little resistance, everywhere they met. They avoided violence.”
“Well, that’s not completely true. They were guerrilla fighters. That’s how they beat the Mojave. The Mojave fought with clubs and tried to engage their enemy in hand-to-hand combat, while the Chemehuevis hid behind cover and shot them with arrows, from their powerful sinew-backed bows. They just kicked their asses, and the Mojaves gave up the desert and retreated to the River.”
“But how could the Paiutes have this overwhelmingly warlike, expansive culture of conquest for hundreds of years, then suddenly settle down and become peaceful once they’d migrated?”
“Well, they really didn’t. They fought back against the whites in the 19th century.”
“My impression was that they didn’t. Look at Carleton’s Campaign of terror, beheading them and mounting their heads on poles. We were the warlike ones, and we scared the shit out of the Chemehuevis.”
“Well, that’s true, but there are also accounts of Chemehuevis attacking whites. Dave Kessler, the rancher, was killed by Chemehuevis, along with a few other early settlers. And a war party of Chemehuevis trounced our military in a long, pitched battle at Zzyzx. You can read about that.”
“I will. I’ll read anything you can point me to. But I’m really having a hard time visualizing the Mojaves living out here. The Mojave are sedentary farmers. The Southern Paiutes are the ones who follow the old ways, nomadic hunter-gatherers perfectly adapted to the desert. How could some of the Mojaves live out here as nomadic hunter-gatherers, then just give it up and rejoin the main body of their tribe as settled farmers on the River?”
“That’s true. The Colorado River is the center of Mojave life and apparently always has been. But all the evidence shows this desert was dominated for millenia by what we call the Patayan culture, the ancient culture the Mojaves have inherited. I was on an excavation recently in the Woods Mountains, an amazing site with cultural materials in layers up to my neck, and it’s all Patayan, all Mojave.”
I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under my desert.
“The archaeologist David Earl has written about a big battle between the Chemehuevis and the Mojaves down in your mountains. The Chemehuevis just slaughtered them. They were not a peaceful people.”
It was a long drive across the Preserve to pick up the equipment at a historic ranch. On the way, we passed the stone cabin where my artist friend, Carl, had lived as a hermit for many years, perfecting his style of painting the desert. It was a high plateau lush with blooming shrubs in rainbow colors. The prehistoric cultures of the desert were Dave’s specialty – his passion – as an archaeologist. He was clearly sincere and conscientious. He gave me lots of references to papers and sources, and I needed to track them down and follow up. But I felt there were things in the prevailing view that didn’t make sense, that didn’t add up, and later, as I began to locate Dave’s references, I saw that the Numic Expansion remains controversial even among mainstream archaeologists. I kept seeing Calvin Meyers, the Paiute environmental activist, standing beside me on a desert mountainside, smiling out over the beautiful valley that our culture has since despoiled with a giant solar power plant. “We have our own stories. Why would someone else try to tell us where we come from?”
Dave mentioned rock art studies and theories alongside more conventional archaeology, which surprised me. In my experience, conventional archaeologists take a dim view of rock art studies, viewing them as pseudoscience, partly because rock art generally lacks a proven connection with dateable deposits and ethnographic accounts. But the desert is somewhat unique in that here, rock art is the most widespread, numerous, and visible artifact of prehistoric culture, so it can’t just be ignored. The last time I’d read about Mojave Desert rock art was when Whitley published his manifesto linking rock art with male shamans using psychedelics – I found that preposterous, citing all the petroglyph sites in exposed locations with clear functions of signage and wayfinding. Dave agreed that much of Whitley’s thesis had been rejected, but his identification of prehistoric motifs with “phosphenes”, the shapes we hallucinate or see under pressure to our eyeballs, is hard to dispute.
I asked him about treatment of the dead in prehistoric societies – did he think cremation or abandonment was more common, or were Native people just opportunistic and pragmatic? He felt treatment of the dead was a serious matter, following prescribed ritual. He mentioned cremation burials he’d found at Paiute Springs – rock cairns containing burnt bones and topped with upside-down metates, once again associated with Patayan or Mojave culture.
To me, the most important, most sacred, site in the desert is a cave that for me is associated with fertility and conception. It’s lined with colorful paintings with differing degrees of wear, suggesting that it was used and maintained for a long time, and I’d always assumed it was a Chemehuevi site. I thought I could remember young Chemehuevis visiting the site years ago, and it had later been purchased by members of the tribe and turned into a preserve.
But when I asked Dave for contrasting examples of Mojave and Chemehuevi rock art, what he showed me associated the oldest, most prevalent, and most coherent art – all the art I was used to, including the fertility paintings – with the Mojaves, the sedentary floodplain farmers, rather than the nomadic hunter-gatherers who were perfectly adapted to the desert. Apparently the association had been made by rock art specialists on the basis of comparision with patterns on Patayan pottery. Dave repeated his assertion that the campsite I’d found was a girl’s puberty site, and that based on my description of potsherds found there, it had to be a Mojave site, more than 400 years old. Anything old and lasting in the desert was from the Mojaves, not the Chemehuevis.
It was tough news for me to chew on, especially as I recalled the oral culture of the Chemehuevis, recorded by ethnographers, which included myths and legends describing the creation of this desert landscape. How could newcomers enter and conquer a strange land and then establish detailed and elaborate songlines – all-night song cycles including a place-based mythology – within a few generations, a process that the Aborigines of Australia had 45,000 years to develop? Is it likely that the Chemehuevis would have borrowed these songs and stories from the Mojaves, the people they conquered? That certainly isn’t what we Anglo-Europeans did when we conquered and imposed Christianity on the natives of North and South America.
Later, back at one of the miner’s cabins which had been “stabilized” with a new roof, windows and a furnished kitchen, Dave finished working on a contract for his latest project, a study of black homesteaders in the Mojave. Whereas the local historian, Dennis Casebier, had labored for decades to record and publish the stories of white homesteaders in the Lanfair Valley, nobody, including me, had heard the story of Lanfair’s counterpart, the adjoining black community of Dunbar. Dave had stumbled upon it accidentally, won a sizable grant for research, and was really excited to see it unfold.
The restoration group gathered around us that night: the serious “cabin brotherhood” from suburban California, the female nonprofit staff from Santa Fe, and their young Navajo carpenters from Gallup. The Santa Fe staff complained about “anti-cabin” forces in the Park Service, while the brotherhood spoke of their admiration for the old prospector who’d built this place, and their intimate relationship with his descendants. They’d set up a shrine of sorts to him and his family, along one side of the kitchen. So many obscure hobbies and subcultures in our huge, affluent society, consuming resources from all over the world!
Dave entertained us with the story of a Park Service ranger who, unwilling to appear ignorant, lectured European tourists on how the local name “Ivanpah” came from an early Russian prospector – whereas it’s actually derived from the Paiute term for “clear water”. One of the cabin brothers described a group of visiting Russians he’d encountered on a previous trip, high up on the rocky ridge above the cabins. They were all burly guys with long black beards, and they claimed to have walked almost 40 miles without food or water, but they refused any help or supplies, and they wouldn’t say where they were going.
The cabin brothers had unrolled their bedrolls in the back room, and most of the rest of us had set up camp outside, spread out across the upper slopes. But the young women from Santa Fe had pitched their tent inside a side room of the already weatherproof cabin, as if they weren’t sure whether they wanted to be indoors or out. They’d found a cell signal and sat inside the tent, inside the cabin, texting or Instagramming, to the amusement of the rest of us.
I laid out my bedroll in the duff under a juniper and wrapped the tarp around the sleeping bag for extra insulation. The temperature dropped into the 30s overnight, but I was snug as a bug in a rug.
A week later, I returned to my mountains for the last time before heading home to New Mexico. On one of the first hikes of this trip, looking down from the edge of the plateau, I’d noticed the house-sized rock outcrops standing out on the bajada, and I remembered that my friends had talked about hanging out there once, around the time they’d found artifacts in the area. Some old hippies I’d met camping in the gulch also mentioned finding artifacts around one of these rock piles, so it suddenly hit me that there were probably prehistoric sites nearby that I’d been walking past and missing for years. It occurred to me that this might be an outlier of the girl’s puberty site above on the plateau, a staging area where the girls might camp out after their long walk from home, before making the strenuous climb to the plateau. I couldn’t go home without taking a closer look.
