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Mojave Desert

Vision Quest 2016: Growing Up in the Desert

Friday, June 10th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

On Sunday morning the boys climbed the steep rock face above camp

Desert Wind

I spent four days on our wilderness land before the fathers and sons arrived, hiking aggressively at first, then resting for a couple of days up in the shade house high in the side canyon, swinging in my old Yucatan hammock as the winds began to build. Our desert wind often arrives in cycles, tickling gently at first, then hitting you with sudden overpowering gusts that threaten to sweep your campsite away, followed by waves that diminish to intervals of stillness. If you pay attention to your surroundings, you can often hear the wind traversing or approaching across the landscape like distant surf, a sensation I seldom get tired of.

As night fell in camp on Friday, I’d made and finished dinner, started a modest fire, and was sitting by the fireplace, a beer in hand, wondering if they would show up at all. If they did, it would be very late, since they’d have to wait until school was out, pick up the boys, and pack, before heading out from Los Angeles.

My partner in the land had warned me that a pack of teenage boys was about to destroy my peace and quiet. He’d been so apologetic that I spent days worrying if there’d been an unspoken message behind his warnings. Were they bringing something that would really disturb and offend me?

Suddenly I spotted a flickering light way out in the lower wash, and a vehicle emerged, bouncing along between the moon shadows of desert willows. Within minutes, my peaceful world changed into excited greetings, hugs and introductions, and the urban energy of male bodies rushing around unloading and setting up gear. It turned out the boys had had only a half-day of school, so they’d been able to leave early.

I knew most of them from past trips, but one father was new, as were his son and his son’s friend. All five of the boys were long-time school friends, age 12 going on 13, on the cusp of teenage life. The group would spend two precious nights here in the wilderness and head back to the megalopolis midday Sunday, joining hordes of other weekend warriors funneled inexorably back into the concrete and steel maw of the Los Angeles freeway system.

Rock in the Water

I really like these fathers and sons, and the new additions turned out to be just as welcome. The dads are all involved in entertainment industry culture, but they also yearn for a life that’s more authentic, and the desert allows them to be more like what they want to be. As busy as they were attending to their kids, I was able to spend quality time, one on one, with each of them, and with each of their kids, before they left, learning about their projects, their dreams and frustrations.

On Saturday morning, I led them all on a group hike up to the seep on our land, where I’d found water from the heavy rain at the beginning of the week. It’s the only reliable water source for wildlife for miles around, as well as being the most geologically spectacular place in our canyon system. We hiked up the big side canyon and across into the narrow gulch below the seep, along the old pipeline the miners had laid after damming up the dry waterfall below the seep, forming a murky pool the size of an old-fashioned bathtub. There’s a beehive in a crack of the sheer wall above the seep – bees commonly colonize desert springs – and the narrow defile between cliffs of brilliant metamorphic rock is usually alive with their buzzing.

My partner and I had climbed high above the dark pool, but most of the men and boys were sitting or standing on a ledge directly over the water. Suddenly one of them casually tossed a fist-sized rock into the pool, and I gasped. My partner chastised them sharply, and I added, “That’s the only source of water for wildlife here. You just made it smaller. Water is sacred in the desert – please try to understand and respect it.”

It’s hard for city kids to absorb lessons they only get for a few days out of the year, on rare camping trips. In traditional societies, there’s a balance between constant observation and imitation of adults working outdoors, and learning by trial and error as kids explore nature on their own. Kids make mistakes, usually causing minor damage to themselves as much as to wildlife and habitats. I thought of a much worse incident, years earlier, when I’d been hiking up a switchback trail through steep, dense forest with a mother and her 7-year-old daughter. Near the bottom, we’d passed two other hikers coming down. At the top, we stopped for a moment, and the girl leaned over, pried up a 20-pound rock from the side of the trail, and pitched it over the edge, where it bounded and crashed down through the trees. She wasn’t an angry or violent kid, just a kid with so little experience in nature that she wasn’t aware her playful action could seriously injure or even kill someone below us. I ran down to the bottom of the trail, shouting, but the other hikers were thankfully long gone.

The afternoon after our hike, I sat in camp getting to know the new father, while the boys used an air rifle to shoot at cans in the background. He mentioned how, as adolescents, we’re prepared and subtly pressured by our parents and teachers to attend college, which inevitably leads to a professional career of some kind. After college, we’re drawn by the jobs and stimulation in cities, where we eventually end up with partners, to raise kids in an increasingly expensive and stressful lifestyle, overworked and overwhelmed by responsibilities, while yearning for a simpler, more authentic life, somewhere less congested, constrained, and over-engineered. The father shook his head wearily, admitting that his son was being groomed to follow him into the rat race, repeating the same pattern over and over from generation to generation.

Allahu Akbar

My partner had brought the biggest steaks I’d ever seen, enough for all of us, which he grilled that night. After a delicious dinner, we gathered our chairs close together around a roaring fire, and the kids asked one of the dads to share some limericks. The boys were at the age where they relished rudeness of all kinds, and while we men were drinking beer and getting politely loose, the kids soon became hysterical. One of them started to recite a limerick and interrupted it with a shout of “Allahu Akbar”, and the other kids howled, echoing it, until it felt like I’d stumbled into a Young ISIS rally. For the rest of the evening, until bedtime, anything anyone said resulted in an instant chorus of boys screaming “Allahu Akbar”, with one or two of the fathers joining in for solidarity.

It surprised and disturbed me and I had no idea where it came from – I felt like my friends had suddenly turned into Islamophobic strangers. Now I thought I understood what my partner had been warning me about before their arrival. When I was finally able to ask, one of the dads said it was a meme that had appeared on YouTube at some point and gone viral.

Adolescence has always been a time for acting out, breaking rules, exploring your boundaries in society, and I remembered from my own youth how easily kids merge into a mob. I realized I wasn’t used to being around teenagers, but could expect more of this as my friends’ kids got older. I also missed female energy. Whereas women had joined us during the first few years of powwows I’d organized out here, they’d gradually dropped out, and I’d been told that at least one mother avoided these desert trips because they were a much-needed opportunity for fathers to bond with sons.

Contrary to popular misconception, the desert is also a woman’s place. I’ve often had better times out here with women than with men. Among desert Indians, men were the hunters and toolmakers, women the gatherers and basketmakers. Hard versus soft, but all equally at home. We men need women out here to keep us out of trouble.

Teenage Zen

On Sunday morning the boys climbed the steep rock face above camp while the dads took their time getting ready to leave, and I was able to do more catching up with them, as well as with their sons as they flitted restlessly in and out of camp.

One of the dads, a photographer and aspiring filmmaker, was looking forward to the start of shooting on his first feature film. He’d been a teenage football hero, and his film would expose the dark side of high school sports in Texas. The new dad revealed that he sometimes experimented with electronic music, having released an album that sold fairly well several years ago.

His son and friend joined us and I asked them if they were into music at all. It turned out that all the boys had played together in bands at one time or another. The filmmaker’s son appeared and admitted he’d sung in one of the groups. I had no idea of any of this and was duly impressed. I like all my friends’ kids, and would like to be a part of their lives, but I get so little time with them.

Different kids impress me the most on different trips. This time it was one who’d avoided all eye contact on previous trips and was hostile when I tried to approach or interact with him. It seemed like he had some deep, lifelong issues that nobody had been comfortable talking about.

But on Sunday morning, he came over, sat facing me, and talked about his embrace of Zen meditation. He’d started attending a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles, initially with his dad, but now it was clearly part of his identity. The change was like night and day. I congratulated him, and we parted with warmth and affection – as we all did – when the fathers and sons finally had to head back.

Each of the boys’ faces lit up as they told me how much they love being out here and look forward to coming back. I think the main thing they respond to is the freedom, in contrast with their overwhelmingly constrained, totally man-made urban environments. The desert can definitely function as a playground for adults as well as children – hence the Rad Dudes, the extended family from Orange County that has plagued our land in the past, with their heavy metal music, case after case of beer, and illegal automatic weapons they use to shoot up everything in the environment. But these boys were learning lessons in the midst of all the noise and fun – maybe even some lessons they’re not getting in school.

Inside Out

As I prepared to visit the ecological field station, my friend, the manager, tried to set my expectations about their busy schedule and limited availability. After I arrived on Friday evening, he said I was welcome to join them for a movie, but added, apologetically, that it would be a kid thing. In the event, everyone on the preserve showed up for a viewing of Pixar’s animated feature, Inside Out: in addition to the manager’s family, there was me, the young female grad students, and the visiting plant illustrator, all crammed into a tiny loft around a modest-sized flat screen TV.

As the movie played on, the kids moved restlessly back and forth between their friends “the girls” and their parents’ laps, napping and waking for spells – they’d seen it before. I’m always surprised at how Hollywood screenwriters take the in-progress scientific hypothesis of the day and turn it into established fact, and this movie was no exception. Apparently Descartes was right, the brain is a fairly simple machine, fully understood by science, and human personality and behavior are uniformly predictable, the result of a mechanistic formula that could be summarized glibly in a TED Talk. Even the “personality islands” that made up the heroine’s character were pictured as Rube Goldberg contraptions. The dominance of reductive science couldn’t have been clearer.

But it was only a movie, and for an evening, I felt like part of an extended family circle, sheltered here by the desert we all love.

Railroad to Childhood

The last day of my visit, in late afternoon, with heavy clouds massing over the Cove, I played with the kids at their swing set in the sand of the side yard, at the foot of a big granite boulder. These kids are growing up in the wild desert, among scientists who are studying it, the first kids I’ve known that have had that precious opportunity. They were full of family questions that cut to my heart: did I have kids, where was my wife, did I have brothers and sisters, what about my mother and father, and so on. They begged me to push them in the swings. The girl, older, wanted to go higher and faster, but the boy didn’t want to go too fast or too high. I pushed them the way they wanted, my battered, hopeless heart beginning to glow. I need to find a way to be around kids more often.

At our early dinner, the overworked field station manager finally seemed to relax, we adults had a good talk, and the little girl covered a page of green construction paper with love notes to me. Then the kids and I climbed into the Suburu for the ride over to the group camp. Dusk was falling as we rumbled down the narrow dirt road toward the low house nearly hidden at the foot of the white granite cliffs. I got out to unlock and open the gate, leaving it chained but unlocked for our departure.

The large class of college students, too big for the bunkhouse, had set up colorful tents far out in the rolling juniper-, yucca- and cholla-covered bajada to both sides of the house, and with night falling, they were bustling back and forth between there and the rows of big vans parked in front. While the kids’ mom prepared to deliver the standard briefing, I followed the kids into the boulders behind the house.

They went straight to the two rustic wooden shower enclosures, which they explained were their railroad. The rope hanging from above the enclosure, normally used to hoist a water bag, was used to call the train. The corner bench in the enclosure was a seat, and the wooden shower platform was the sleeping bunk. We called a train and took our places for the ride. The kids curled up side by side on the platform; later, we changed places, and I lay there trying to pretend, feeling my distant childhood through a mist of time. But they soon tired of this and ran outside, jumping from boulder to boulder to a ridge of granite where they could watch the students walking to and from their distant tents. Night was falling quickly, and the juniper-dotted bajada, the distant granite ridges, and the sky above had all turned shades of indigo. We perched there side by side, watching the lights of cars pass on the highway, two miles away across the bajada, speculating about them and the students passing closer at hand. The girl climbed down into a cavity between boulders and picked a flower, holding it up for me to smell.

The little boy got anxious about his mom and tore off to find her. The house windows glowed yellow in the blue dusk and we could hear a murmur from inside. I was supposed to keep the kids away from her while she briefed the class, but it was clearly impossible. I went and peaked inside; a female grad student assistant who had been here before was sitting on the kitchen counter with the boy.

The talk dragged on and on, in response to the large group. Enfolded by the close darkness of the cloudy night, the kids and I and the grad student kicked a soccer ball back and forth across the gravel in the small pool of yellow light outside the kitchen windows. It was late and the kids were hyper, yelling and screaming. But later that night, in my bunk in the residence hall I’d helped build long ago, I lay awake replaying that day in my mind’s eye like a priceless gift.

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Vision Quest 2016: The Sheltering Desert

Monday, June 13th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

Siesta in my Yucatan hammock

The Friendliest Place to Camp

The Sheltering Desert is the astonishing memoir, long out of print, of two German geologists who escaped internment during World War II, living off the land for two years in the remote desert of South Africa. It also hints at one of the main reasons why I fell in love with the California desert: despite its reputation as a harsh land of extremes, it’s the most comfortable natural environment I know of for living outdoors.

Luxury With Less

My dad introduced me and my brother to camping in the bourgeois tradition, as a gear-dominated activity beginning at the sporting goods store, followed by lengthy rituals of packing, unpacking, assembling and disassembling expensive equipment that he believed was essential for our comfort and safety, and had to be laboriously maintained. He loved nature, but warned that it was a potentially dangerous place that you had to prepare for and protect yourself from, and we only camped in official campgrounds with restrooms and showers and lots of neighbors.

I was burdened by his legacy of habits, fears, and inhibitions for decades. But by the time I finished grad school, in my mid-20s, I’d started to break free, as one of a tribe of hippie bohemians who were as much at home outdoors as in. I explored the country as a hobo for a couple of years, sleeping rolled up in a wool blanket in boxcars, or on the ground, in jungles near a railroad yard. My friends and I slept in bedrolls under bushes in small-town parks, in hammocks strung between cottonwoods in the bottom of canyons, and in rockshelters in the open desert. I discovered less stress, and paradoxically more comfort, with less gear and less effort, and I gained a more intimate and complete experience of nature. Finally, I attended a Paiute skills class and learned how to make everything you need by hand, from local materials, and got a taste of total liberation from Western technology.

I’ve camped without a tent now for almost 40 years, both alone and with friends and girlfriends, in cloud forest, on the beach, in deep snow, and on top of a volcano in Guatemala. When bothered by mosquitoes, I set up one of my sleep screens, domes of netting that can accommodate one or two people without blocking our view of the sky.

Exploring Without Trails or Compass

Apart from a few small areas within national parks, there are no trails in the desert. But because the rock-dominated landscape has plenty of landmarks and unimpeded vistas, it’s virtually impossible to get lost. By requiring you to read the landscape, the desert teaches you better orienteering skills.

Hiking off-trail in a landscape of stone, particularly jointed granite or metamorphic rock, isn’t just walking – it often requires all four limbs and bouldering technique as you scale or lower yourself down small cliffs, or look for ways over, under, or around house-size boulders that obstruct slopes hundreds of feet tall. You need to climb or cross broad slopes of loose rock, including boulders that look solid but begin to slide or tumble when you step on them. It requires you to understand the landscape far more intimately, to observe more closely and pick your route carefully in order to reduce risk and effort and avoid fragile soil scrusts, obstacles, and backtracking. It’s hugely more challenging than trail hiking, it engages more of your body, senses, and mind, and requires you to be totally present, at risk of serious injury or death. In other words, it’s one of the healthiest things we can do as human animals.

Hiking Under the Moon and Stars

While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I once set out to hike off-trail alone through a dense redwood forest, up a steep mountainside, planning to build my own primitive shelter at the top from branches and bark, and spend the night. I didn’t have a compass, but there was a half moon and I thought I’d be fine.

Instead, it got colder up there than I expected, I hadn’t brought enough warm clothes, even a fire failed to warm up my little shelter of tree limbs, and sometime after midnight, unable to sleep, I decided to head back down.

That turned into the adventure of a lifetime, since the canopy and cloud cover mostly blocked my view of the moon and left the forest pitch-dark, so I had to go by feel, running into fallen tree trunks as big around as I was tall, and falling into the deep pits left when their trunks had been uprooted. I got hopelessly lost, but I hoped that if I just kept following gravity downhill, I’d hit a stream that I might be able to follow to the road.

Surviving that experience just made me want to explore more of the world after dark, and my desert turned out to be the perfect place to do it. Our granite mountains, and the gravel and sand that erode from them into canyon bottoms and arroyos, mostly consist of quartz crystals that reflect moonlight and even starlight, so that under a full moon in the middle of the night, you can imagine that you’re seeing colors.

Of course, the best place to hike is across fairly level ground: the alluvial fan, the bajada, big dry washes and canyon bottoms. I draw the line at scaling cliffs by starlight or in shadow, but I’ve done it under a full moon.

I’ve done several night hikes with friends in familiar locations, but my favorite was a solo exploration of an unfamiliar basin near the southeast end of my mountains, about ten years ago. There was a three-quarter moon rising, so there would be plenty of that cool, mysterious reflected light shining across the mountains and the vast openness to the east. Taking nothing but the clothes on my back, I walked from camp, a mile or so down an abandoned mine road, and around the foot of an outlying ridge, into the new basin on the other side. From there, I started up the first good-sized wash I came to, as it meandered down from the dark mountain wall in the west. As I got closer to the western wall, the moonlit sand led me around the foot of another ridge, south into a hidden valley. After I had gone about four miles, I came to the base of a pouroff or dry waterfall, a cliff that was only about fifteen feet tall and probably had plenty of good climbing holds. But it was in deep shadow, so I called it a night and headed back to camp.

Like the forest, the desert wilderness is a totally different place at night, and it has valuable lessons and skills to teach us, to make us more complete and functional as human animals.

Meteorites Every Night

During my month-long vision quest, I occasionally had to spend the night in town, in a motel room. And every time I visited friends, they were anxious to offer me a comfortable bed. But every night I spent inside, I missed sleeping out under the stars.

Our eyes need the desert. Endless vistas, with fascinating landforms a hundred miles or more away, help restore our vision from the abuse of constantly focusing at short range on screens. My first night out, lying on my back watching the moon and stars, I saw them all doubled as usual. But by the second night, only the moon and the brightest stars were faintly doubled – I was able to focus the myriad others into single points of light, without straining.

I see meteorites every cloudless night I spend sleeping out. Falling stars, every single night. Some before falling asleep, and some upon waking before dawn. Most of them brief, thin scratches like lighting a match, but sometimes miraculous living bodies of fire throwing off sparks and trailing an incandescent wake. Three days into this trip, I woke two hours before dawn to see the second biggest I’ve ever seen, streaking just above the western horizon, sputtering yellow, green and blue sparks.

Some nights I sleep straight through, but I prefer to wake briefly throughout the night to check the progress of the heavens, watching the moon set and the fainter stars emerging, until the constellations themselves, both familiar and forgotten, merge into an extravagance of heavenly lights. Watching Naugupoh, the dusty trail of spirits, finally rise in the east, a mysterious glowing cloud, forked and split in the middle, embracing the whole world, from the faraway north to the faraway south.

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Rendezvous With Deep Time

Sunday, April 30th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

Arrival at Night, and the First Day

I got a late start, and entered the mountains just as full dark was falling and all the stars were coming out on this moonless night. The military refueling flights were occasionally deafening as they droned though their long mechanical circles overhead, but they stopped at 10 pm. Snug in my sleeping bag, there under the glittering arch of heaven, I felt much more comfortable and at home than in my bed back in Silver City.

On the first day, temperatures were mild, with alternating wind and calm, clouds and blue sky, and I hiked up to the Shade House. There, I strung my hammock and lay reading and watching birds and pollinators move among the nearby shrubs and boulders. The clouds, some tantalizingly dark, brought temporary humidity but no precious rain. I was plagued by gnats, but at least they didn’t bite. I hiked up to the seep and found the catch basin dry – something that only happens in the deepest droughts.

A Walk Across the Bajada

The next morning I woke to a cold wind and put on layers of fleece before making breakfast and coffee. Discouraged by the drought, I thought of leaving and going elsewhere. But the sky cleared and I saw the big boulder pile 2 or 3 miles across the basin, where I knew there were inner chambers with shade from the full sun of afternoon and views out across the bajada.

The walk across the bajada reminded me that this is a special place for plants. I found dense stands of healthy bunchgrass, and surprising groupings of very different plants living together in harmony, in a desert that’s more commonly known for plants that isolate themselves from each other with chemical repellents. Many were blooming, long after the “official” annual bloom, from the tiny annuals at ground level to the tall cholla cactus and creosote shrubs. And I came upon bees, butterflies, birds, rabbits and hares, all enjoying springtime on the bajada.

That night it was so windy I had to anchor even heavy things down and turn my sleeping bag away from it, to the south. I could tell the wind was on the rise and planned to leave in the morning, discouraged by both wind and drought.

Rendezvous With Deep Time

High winds in the morning. I took my time packing up, and on the way out down the broad main wash, noticed a wedge of snow on Mount San Gorgonio, a hundred miles away through a haze of wind-raised mineral dust.

Then, just outside the mountains, I unexpectedly came upon a vehicle driven by someone I only knew as a legend – the geologist who’d discovered this place and helped put it on the international map of earth science. He was bringing some young students out, hoping they’d like it enough to resume research out here. So I turned around and joined them, and the legend gave me some glimpses of an incredibly dynamic, and incredibly ancient, story.

Here, the crust of the earth, then consisting of sedimentary – the limestones, shales, and sandstones of the Grand Canyon – and ancient metamorphic rocks such as gneiss – had been folded under unimaginable forces, and interpenetrated by younger granite rising from below, and the interfaces between the rocks were incredibly complex. In fact, much of the story remains a mystery today after decades of study.

In this migmatitic exposure, beautiful marbles had been formed, and embedded with colorful skarns in reds and greens. Layer upon layer of granites and recrystallized carbonates that had flowed over and under each other repeatedly, to be eroded across eons and exposed here for us in frozen waves and thin sheets like iced cream. Almost two billion years of the Earth’s history we hiked over, up a few hundred feet of steep mountainside.

The students hungrily scanned the rocks at their feet, but the legend kept redirecting their attention up to the deep blue of the sky behind the stony ridge, and to the special plants scattered around them, like the red Dudleya and the barrel cactus, that thrive on this particular substrate. And I pointed out my new obsession, biological soil crusts, which arise at the interface between rock and life. Easily missed knots of nondescript black matter in fissures of white stone. Subdued now in the drought, but ready to swell and glisten after a rain.

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Return to the Lost World

Thursday, May 11th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

First Glimpses, and the Dream

I first saw the Lost World in April 1994, from high on the central ridge of the mountain range:

In a large and complex range, with many interior basins, this is the largest: a valley eight miles long and four miles wide. And since the passage of the Desert Bill in October of that year, it can only be legally accessed on foot.

But the barriers in the way of entering this remote valley are even greater. The Lost World is almost completely surrounded by eighteen miles of high, steep ridges and peaks. Its mouth is little more than a mile wide.

That opening at the south end of the valley is two miles from the nearest legal road, a poorly-maintained track through deep sand. From the road, it’s a two-mile hike uphill across low desert through sparse creosote scrub. There are other points where a legal road approaches within two-to-four miles of the valley, but most of those approaches involve a strenuous climb over the intervening, steep, tall ridges that almost completely encircle the valley.

I returned for another view in October 1994, and again in December 1998. I was clearly becoming obsessed with that vast, unexplored, difficult to reach valley:

Many years passed, in which I dreamed of somehow getting back in there. I remembered that in 1992, a friend who studies the wild mountain sheep had taken me in a helicopter over the north end of this valley, and across a deep canyon on the east side where I could see lush vegetation. He’d also given me a map of water sources that he’d made in a very wet year, and the map showed that even in a good year, the Lost World is devoid of water sources except in two places, both near the mouth of that canyon we’d flown over. So unless I visited after several years of heavy rainfall, I’d need to carry my own water for miles into the valley. And the warmer the weather, the more water I’d need to carry.

2015: The Northeast

The barriers to access, and the lack of water, stood in my way for over twenty years. It wasn’t until 2015 that I first set off to enter the Lost World, hiking up a smaller exterior basin on the east and over a high, steep ridge, to end up near the mouth of canyon we’d flown over. Unfortunately, the desert was still in a deep drought, and I had ended up hiking into a heat wave, so the springs were dry and I only had enough water to get back out. So I was only able to explore about two miles of the main valley floor. However, beyond my wildest expectations, I discovered potsherds, worked stone, and petroglyphs – prehistoric rock art of the Old Ones – showing that people had spent time over here, in wet years when there was reliable water nearby, probably near those very boulders.

In 2016, I did an eight-mile round-trip hike from my land in the north, up to a ridge that overlooks a northwestern corner of the Lost World. There, I had a limited view of the valley’s eastern wall, including part of the area I visited the previous year. I wanted to go back, but there was a wall in my way.

The routes I took in and out of the valley in 2015 were extremely rugged, prompting me to take a closer look at the alternatives. One was two miles to the south, but looked even more rugged on approach. Another was far to the west, and would involve a long hike around and over a narrow pass that opened into the lower, southwestern edge of the valley. Again, I would have to carry all my water. And this spring, I finally found myself in the desert again with a forecast of cool weather and rain, the best conditions I could hope for.

2017: The Southwest

I had a three hour drive to get near the pass, including about forty miles on paved highway, interrupted by several miles of detour on dirt roads, and ending on thirty miles of poorly-maintained or unmaintained, and heavily eroded, gravel, sand, and bedrock tracks. On the way, before I got to the really bad parts, I had to stop and deflate my tires for traction in sand. So I didn’t arrive in the mountains until early afternoon. Once I’d located a campsite, I did a two-mile hike to the mouth of Mesquite Canyon where I knew there’d be afternoon shade at the foot of a short cliff. There, I encountered abundant cottontails, jackrabbits, quail, and mourning doves, and anything red I carried was an endless curiosity for hummingbirds.

By the time I returned to camp, heavy, dark clouds had formed over the northern part of the range. I gathered branches for firewood and grilled all the meat I had left from last week’s shopping. Just as I finished laying out my bedding, it began to rain.

I quickly gathered my things up and retreated into the now-crowded cabin of my truck, where I watched and listened to heavy rain on the metal roof and lightning and thunder eight to ten miles to the north. It rained intermittently hard for about forty-five minutes. Then I unpacked all my bedding and laid it back on the wet sand. It was so windy, I had to turn my sleeping bag around, but after that, I finally got a good night’s sleep.

I woke early the next morning, and was able to load my pack and start hiking toward the pass by 9 am. The weather was perfect for conserving water – it would be in the 60s all day. I figured I would aim to be back by 6, for a total of nine hours of hiking. Over open ground, I could theoretically make eighteen miles in that time, but I knew I’d be stopping a lot for photos and side trips. And “open ground” is misleading in desert scrub, where every dozen yards you need to detour around a sprawling creosote, catclaw, or cactus, around an even larger granite boulder or outcrop, or down into and up out of a deep wash with steep banks of loose sand.

After the first mile of gentle uphill slope, I entered the pass itself, two miles of traversing across the foot of a steep ridge, with views of distant mountain ranges to the south between smaller, isolated peaks that form the southern walls of the pass. This pass is a really beautiful and interesting area in itself, but I was on a mission and didn’t linger much.

Finally I came out into the southwest side of the Lost World, and rounded an outlying shoulder of ridge to get my first view to the north and the extent of the big valley. Both sides of the valley are scalloped by cross-ridges and tributary canyons, many of them sizable basins in themselves, but I intended to march north past as many of these as I could, to see how far up the main valley I could get in the time I had.

Of course, the most thrilling aspect of visiting a place like this is the fact that you’ll be the only human in a huge area, perhaps the only human visitor in decades, and you will see no buildings or vehicles or ruins or any other sign of human life other than the prehistoric petroglyphs and tiny artifacts I found in 2015. I hoped to find more rock art, so I did stop and explore any prominent outcrops or boulder piles along my way that exhibited desert varnish, the black bacterial weathering that provided a canvas for the Old Ones.

In the end, I found no rock art – not surprising, since according to my biologist friend there are no springs on the western side of the valley – but I did penetrate to the northern half of the valley, where I had a view of the entire northern ridge line, including all the points where I’d looked down into the valley since 1994.

What a glorious day! I found no shade on my route, but the weather was cool enough that I didn’t need any for a change. There were so many birds out, everywhere, following me, curious about what I was doing, making noise if they thought I was threatening a nesting area. By the time I had rounded that last shoulder of ridge and taken my pictures to the north, it was time to quickly grab a snack and immediately head back. My left foot and right hip were hurting pretty bad, so I downed a couple of painkillers as well. As glorious as the day was, and as beautiful as the valley and pass were, it was a fairly painful trek back. I figured my round-trip hike to have been about thirteen miles, the longest hike I’d done in seven or eight years, since my hip condition began to deteriorate, and I had surgery.

By the time I returned to my campsite, the sun was going down, and I was exhausted, sore, and thirsty. But as I approached the back of my pickup truck, I heard a loud buzzing, and discovered that hundreds of bees were swarming the bed of my truck. I suddenly realized they’d been attracted to water that had pooled in the pickup bed from last night’s rain, since the truck was parked downhill on a slight incline. All my stuff was locked in that truck. What was I going to do?

I knew they could be Africanized “killer” bees, which have been known in this mountain range for decades. But I was desperate. I thought if I could get into the truck somehow, I could drive up the wash so that the water would drain out, and maybe the bees would lose interest. I skirted the edge of the swarm to see if bees were moving around the doors. They were, but they seemed to come and go on the passenger side, so that I might be just able to race over, unlock the door, jump in, and slam it closed without any bees following me. I didn’t give myself time to think, I just set down my pack, took the field glasses from around my neck and set them on the sand, and pulled the camera out of my hip pocket and also set it down on the sand. My folding chair was leaning against the pickup bed, so I grabbed it and moved it away, careful to move slowly so I wouldn’t anger the bees. Then I watched the bees moving past the passenger door, and made my move when I saw a short break in their traffic.

I made it, and got the door closed without letting any bees in! But before leaving that morning, I’d packed the truck willy-nilly with all my unrolled bedding and everything else I didn’t want to leave outside, so now I had to pack everything into the narrow space behind the seats, and awkwardly maneuver over the brake and shift lever into the driver’s seat. Finally, I drove a hundred feet away, up the main wash, left the truck, and cautiously walked back over to the campsite to get a drink of water from my pack.

But now, a second group of bees had separated from the main group and were swarming all over my pack, my camera, and my field glasses! My heart sank. I was so tired, so thirsty, so sore. How was this going to end?

I walked away up the wash, a hundred feet from the swarm, and sat down on a rock ledge. But soon, a bee followed and found me, so I moved another hundred yards out into the desert. I was alone in the middle of nowhere without water, food, or shelter, all of which the bees now controlled.

And even way out there, another bee tracked me and started harrassing me, so I had to get up and keep moving. I made a great circle out into the desert, thinking I’d come up on the truck from the opposite direction and see if they were still swarming the bed. On the way, I remembered that beekeepers use smoke to control hives, and I remembered I had a lighter in my pocket. I knew that dead yucca blades generate a lot of smoke, and although there were few yucca in this basin, I’d seen one up the wash, so I detoured over there, pulled off some dead blades, and scrounged some dead grass for tinder. Soon I had a smoking torch.

By the time I returned to the truck, there were only a few, sad-looking bees crawling along the bed. The sun had dropped behind the western ridge and it was noticeably cooler. When I walked over to camp, I saw only a few bees, so I started a fire in last night’s fire ring. The wind was blowing north, so smoke from the fire would keep any remaining bees away from my pack. And soon, the remaining bees were gone, and I was able to get a drink of water out of the pack, and to drive my truck back over.

I figured that with the area in shadow, it had probably gotten too cool for the bees, and they’d headed back to their hive, which was probably up Mesquite Canyon, or even over the high ridge in the next drainage. I could probably have just kept walking circles out in the desert and waited for them to leave. But the experience had really spooked me, and turned me off camping in this area. So I packed up and drove outside the mountains onto the vast western alluvial fan, where I camped that night at lower elevation on desert pavement, among very sparse scrub, with a sunset view of bright sand dunes and distant, dark ranges.

In the morning, there were just a few bees left crawling feebly around the bed of my truck. I planned to spend the day and night in town resting my foot and hip and restocking for my next attempt to reach the Lost World via an eastern approach.

2017: The East

I had so much business in town, I didn’t get back to the mountains until mid-afternoon the next day. On the way down the long dirt road past the eastern side of the range, I saw trucks blocking the way ahead, and came upon a young woman urging a tortoise across the road. She turned out to be a recent biology grad consulting for the gas company, doing tortoise training for their pipeline maintenance personnel, big guys who hovered awkwardly in the background.

I encountered two more tortoises on that road – probably a record – because the tortoises know when rain is coming, and emerge from their burrows to drink. Eventually I reached my destination and scouted a place to leave the truck opposite the canyon I was hoping to use as a route to the Lost World. Then I loaded my pack and headed up this basin I’d never explored, toward a spring I’d long heard about but never visited.

It turned out to be a mostly overgrazed bajada of soft sand undermined with animal burrows, a slow and uncertain walk uphill, but it was a cool day and rain clouds were gathering all across the desert. I was carrying a rain shell and a plastic tarp to throw over my pack, and as always was actually hoping for rain. I’d started at 2 and wanted to be back by 6 to look for a campsite, so I could theoretically cover as much as eight miles round-trip.

At the head of this basin is a giant formation of granite that looks like the Dark Tower of Barad-Dur in the Lord of the Rings, abode of the Evil Lord Sauron, so I came to think of this area as the Canyons of Mordor.

The ungrazed lower part of this basin was rich in biological soil crusts, and as I got farther in, I came upon some of the biggest silver cholla I’d ever seen. Then I encountered more birds, who teamed up and challenged me in groups, flying straight up and flapping their wings at me, showing off their dramatic black-and-white banding.

Finally I reached the head of the basin and dropped down into the main wash, which curves out of sight below the towering ridge line, which is dauntingly stony. I’d seen lots of old cowpies out in the basin, and now I came upon some abandoned plastic piping, indicating that ranchers had fed the spring water down for their cattle at some point.

Then I came around a bend of the wash, saw a big boulder covered with desert varnish, and realized some of the patterns on the rock had been made by the Old Ones. I was surprised, since friends who knew of my interest had visited this spring and hadn’t said anything about the art.

I continued up the wash, and found lots more abandoned piping, and thickets of invasive tamarisk I had to fight my way through. The canyon became steep, narrow, and winding, and there were many pouroffs and blockages of house-sized boulders that had rolled down from above, in addition to thickets of catclaw and tamarisk. The surrounding slopes, of dark, ancient granite, are topped by many strange pinnacles that our imagination can easily make into recognizable forms. But it’s a world of stone, even more so than other parts of the range.

This is supposed to be an important spring, but the higher I climbed, the more I despaired of finding water. And the ridge above wasn’t getting any closer, it was just getting steeper and more forbidding. This would not be a good route into the Lost World. Then clouds began pouring over the peaks, and I knew it was time to turn back. A few drops of rain were beginning to fall and I was getting cold.

By the time I got back to the truck, it was raining lightly. I was anxious to get to my favorite campsite – in fact the only campsite – on this side of the mountains, but it was a long stressful drive at low speed over deeply eroded dirt and rocks and uphill through deep sand. It began to rain harder, and when I finally reached the site, someone else had claimed it with a big truck and loads of gear. I wasted some more time looking in vain for another site, then I gave up, turned around and drove back down to the main gravel road out of the mountains.

I headed north, through increasing darkness and intermittent heavy and light rain. Night was falling and the storm was spreading, and the road had high banks with no place to pull out. I reached a high area of desert pavement beside a smaller mountain range and was finally able to pull off under a transmission tower. Someone had camped here and left their fire circle, but it was under a damn powerline and transmission tower, and after seriously considering it, I realized I wasn’t set up to cook dinner or lay out my bedding in the rain, a situation I’d never had to provide for in the past. This was a new experience and nothing to really complain about – being driven out of the desert by rain!

I still had to stop somewhere and re-inflate my tires. I did that in the dark, in heavy rain, beside the road. It takes a half hour. I reached town, and a motel, by 9 pm, under continuing heavy rain in the desert.

Perspectives

What’s next? Well, it would be cool to explore all those side basins and canyons. But that would take multiple days, and too much water to carry. If only we’d get several wet years in a row, to recharge the fracture zones in the granite and get the springs going again. Then maybe there’d be water on the east side, and I could actually live in the Lost World for a few days. It can’t hurt to dream!

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The Original Organic Abstraction

Saturday, May 13th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.

In my earliest childhood, I was surrounded by the organic abstraction of midcentury textile patterns:

When I started experimenting with Sumi ink on paper in 2011, organic abstraction flowed spontaneously from my brush:

Then, a few days ago, I visited perhaps the most interesting rock art in the Mojave desert, in a lush canyon oasis on the sacred mountain of the Colorado River tribes, where their creator god began his journey down the river. During my visit, I encountered the kitsch of white peoples’ religion, I picked up their abandoned plastic trash, and I convinced an Anglo family to stop desecrating the site with their loud pop music.

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