Mojave Desert

Fall 2018 Part 3: The Rocks Begin to Speak

Friday, November 16th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.

High Prehistoric Tech

Five days and nights of my trip were already gone, most of them spent driving, zigzagging north across the emptiest parts of three big Western states. Four nights in widely-separated cheap motels, a hair-raising escape from an alpine blizzard, a detour to check out spectacular prehistoric rock paintings, and finally a cold night camping in a breathtaking canyon. The weather was getting still colder and windier and I was running out of clean clothes. I drove to the nearest town, farther north, where on an earlier trip I’d discovered a cheap but fairly luxurious motel with a laundry room. There I edited my photos and prepared the first couple of Dispatches. I’ve never found a decent restaurant in that town, so I’d eat in my room, from the simple stash of groceries I’d picked up at the first town I’d driven to, and leftovers from my night camping and cooking out.

It was the northernmost point I wanted to reach: the northern edge of the territory of the prehistoric Fremont people I’m trying to better understand on these trips. From here, I’d gradually make my way south and west, stopping whenever I saw something interesting, making side trips to check out rock art, hoping to find good campsites in late afternoon. I still had a week before I was due to meet my friends on our land in the Mojave.

Two days later I hit the road south. But I’d barely driven a half hour when I noticed a sign for a museum in this tiny village. It turned out to have quite a bit of thematic overlap with the much larger museum in the town to the north, but its more homespun curation raised intriguing questions that would haunt the rest of my trip. It was chock full of prehistoric artifacts donated by the ranching families who’d found them on their land.

What’s our responsibility – not the responsibility of citizens of a nation or a “civilized” culture, but the responsibility of invading ranching families who find the artifacts of the native people their society has dispossessed, stashed all over their newly-acquired ranchland?

What happened to the people archaeologists call Fremont – did they evolve into the Southern Paiutes, or were they replaced by them? On past trips I’d observed that the core Fremont lifestyle had to be eminently peaceful, and I knew from historical and anthropological accounts that the more recent Southern Paiutes were a peaceful, pedestrian people who were victimized by the warlike, equestrian Utes.

Who made the rock art in the Fremont area? The government archaeologist for the Mojave National Preserve had assured me, with photographic examples, that the only rock markings Paiutes were capable of were random scratches used to efface the work of other tribes. He’d repeatedly confirmed the archaeological consensus that Paiutes were warlike newcomers who’d spread out of eastern California across the Great Basin within the past millennium, killing off other tribes and appropriating their land.

And finally, how much more advanced are we modern people than those “primitive, superstitious savages?” With all our power, speed, and convenience, do we really live better lives?

Needle in the Haystack

Gratefully leaving the little museum, I drove a half hour farther south to a turnoff where I expected to find a rock art site. What got me interested in prehistoric rock art in the first place? Thirty-seven years ago, when I was at a turning point in my growth as a visual artist, a friend sent me a postcard of a site called “Newspaper Rock.” It was the first time I remember seeing prehistoric rock art. Dense with symbols, some representational, some abstract, it resonated with the new work I was creating. My graphical work – drawings, paintings, prints and collages – had always encompassed both “pictures” and “messages,” but I hadn’t been fully aware of that distinction. In recent years I’d expanded my pictorial work from simple rendering to narrative composition, and that had led me to the use of images as symbols.

At the same time, I was beginning to explore the Southwestern deserts, and as I kept developing and focusing my work, it evolved into compositions made of stylized natural imagery inspired by what I’d seen on camping trips. And eventually, in 1987, my girlfriend and I were shown real prehistoric rock art, outdoors, tucked away in remote corners of the Mojave Desert. We were hooked! As artists, we had heard of so-called “Land Art” by people like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who used bulldozers and other heavy equipment to mimic the creations of ancient civilizations. But rock art was humble, uncivilized, intimate in scale, much better integrated into its natural environment. It seemed like it would’ve been part of the daily and seasonal life ways of the people who created and used it – people who lived lightly on the land, hunting and gathering, not building cities and temples like the inspirations of the “Land Artists” of the 70s.

During the postwar economic/science/tech boom of the 1950s, when the authorities wanted us to get out and burn gas on those fancy new highways – just like they want us to burn electricity now – AAA maps flagged prehistoric sites, including rock art. But those sites, all found in lonely places, were totally unprotected, and they were rapidly being destroyed by the vandals that are continually produced by our violent, narcissistic society. So by the time my girlfriend and I started studying rock art in the mid-80s, none of the sites were identified on commercially available maps, and on the ground, virtually none of them were marked by signs or had any sort of informative infrastructure. They were like the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Long before the internet, cell phones, or apps, we were shown rock art by friends, we picked up books at remote gift shops, we did research in libraries, we contacted experts by mail. We made our own lists and annotated paper maps. On road trip after road trip, camping and backpacking into remote canyons, we discovered work that blew our minds.

The Road Less Traveled

Stopping at museums, sidetracking for rock art, the short day was being chipped away at. I was approaching an interstate highway; if I took it west, there’d be many hours of driving through country I’d already seen, with little or no opportunity to camp, and I’d probably end up in a motel again. Alternatively, I could keep going on this rural highway, into a part of Utah I’d never seen. I spotted a grove of golden cottonwoods beside the road and pulled over to make a sandwich on the tailgate of my truck.

Mormon McMansions

I loved all the mountainous country I drove through that afternoon, but I never found a sheltered or private place to camp along the road. Every time I turned off to explore a promising dirt road, it ended almost immediately at a large, bleak parking area for RVs, in full view of the highway.

And I further confirmed some earlier observations about Mormon culture and society. I try not to be too critical of religions, because the secular alternative – capitalism – is what’s destroying our planet. But the Mormons strike me as more than a bit too materialistic and fond of ostentation. There seem to be plenty of poor Mormons, but that doesn’t stop the rich ones from throwing up a mansion next door. And their rural architecture is plain weird. From my perspective, raised on colonial, southern, and midcentury house styles, Mormon rural homes seem to have no clear historical reference point. They’re not post-modern, they’re just awkward and tacky. Mormon wealth doesn’t seem to be invested in quality, and even the oldest and simplest rural homes seem to be designed by aliens trying and failing to imitate earthlings.

As full dark fell and the temperature dropped toward freezing, I found myself in a very small town at close to 7,000′ elevation. There was a string of cheap motels, none of them appealing, so I picked one, checked in, and headed for a lit-up restaurant on the single historic block of the Main Street business district.

It was Saturday night, and Main street was empty. But the diner was packed. A distracted hostess greeted me, holding a baby by the belly, face-outward like a doll. I grinned and the kid beamed back. I was seated at the front facing the door, and while waiting to be served I realized the extremely loud music coming from behind me had to be live. I turned in my seat, glancing past tables of families and couples, to see a tiny cave-like stage at the back, reminiscent of the cage in the Blues Brothers movie, and a cute, stylish singer with short hair who’d been staring at me, waiting to catch my eye. I guessed I was the only single guy who’d shown up so far.

She flashed me a big smile. While I ordered, got served, and dug into my platter of pulled pork, she rendered a predictable series of country, folk, and pop standards, from Leonard’s “Hallelujah” to Dolly’s “Coat of Many Colors”, yelping and screeching with histrionic soul through the brittle sound system, accompanied by a full synth track. Between numbers she asked diners where they were from. All the families were local, but the couples, post-season tourists to nearby Bryce Canyon, were from Washingon state, Maine, and France. Exhausted after a long day, my ears battered by the singer’s piercing notes, I rushed through my just-okay meal. I left a generous tip, gave the singer a final optimistic thumbs up, and returned to my cheap, shabby motel room.

Native Explanations

29 degrees outside when I woke up Sunday morning. I’d taken many fall trips in the Southwest, running as late as early December, and the weather had generally been mild. My itinerary west would now carry me inexorably onto the dreaded interstate, with just one more side trip for rock art before leaving the Mormon state. I was beginning to realize it was almost impossible to both look for rock art and camp out on the same day. Looking for rock art just required too much driving, and too many hours stuck in a location where you generally weren’t allowed to camp.

But that one last site had more surprises. Not only had the local authorities provided signs to the site, they’d provided a large parking lot with a permanent restroom and shaded picnic area, paved paths to the rock art, institutional fencing around the rocks, and very detailed information panels below the art.

And they’d asked two tribes to contribute explanations: the Southern Paiutes and the Hopi. The Paiutes’ explanation was displayed as given, with no Anglo academic patronizing. Very refreshing, and something my archaeologist friends would probably never tolerate. After all, science was invented by Europeans, so we claim the ultimate authority on everything.

Prehistoric Literacy

With all the development around this site, I resigned myself to being accompanied by an evolving crowd of tourists, who mostly snapped a few pictures and hopped back in their new SUVs. But the petroglyphs were spectacular, and the message from the Southern Paiutes eye-opening. The information panels below the rock writings said that the Paiutes remember the so-called Fremont people – they know them as Nungwu. I hadn’t read this in any museum or book or on any web page – I had to come to this remote place to get the message. What more did the Paiutes know that the Anglo authorities didn’t?

The Indians made it quite clear that this is NOT ART – a paradigm shift I should’ve been prepared for. A Native American friend had given me LaVan Martineau’s book The Rocks Begin to Speak thirty years ago. Martineau, who learned from Paiutes, claimed that rock markings represented a universal sign language, a medium of communication, not an art form. But I’d either forgotten about that, or allowed my thinking to get lazy in the intervening years. Poor LaVan doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, which makes me feel better about not having one.

That distinction between what we educated Anglos call ART, and what we both precisely and generally define as COMMUNICATION, is a very important theme for me. After developing my visual art, at an early age, from figurative representation to the composition of enigmatic “messages” made up of naturalistic symbols, I reinvented myself in mid-life as a “creative professional” in the internet industry, and found myself using symbolic compositions – flowcharts and storyboards – as my primary communications tool, to develop screen designs and facilitate collaboration in multi-disciplinary teams. And eventually, when I resumed making art, I was explicitly composing symbols inspired by nature. Both art and communication, but perhaps more on the art side, since the communication was suggestive rather than didactic.

In any event, I thought the Paiutes’ interpretation of this famous site was brilliant. It didn’t make much sense to me, but that’s to be expected. I realized more clearly than ever that to understand “rock writing,” you had to be living in and using this landscape the way the Indians did. We Anglos with our technological, alienated lifestyle couldn’t experience the habitat the way they did.

According to archaeologists and anthropologists, Indians used to claim that they hadn’t made rock art – it had been made by “spirits” in the distant past. Native “informants” claimed that they didn’t know what it meant – they even sometimes claimed it was evil. Now here they were saying that not only did they understand it, but that it represented a universal language. So much for the culturally-specific rock art “styles” identified by archaeologists, like Barrier Canyon and Great Basin Abstract Curvilinear.

I actually hope the Paiutes are bullshitting us, providing an intentionally meaningless explanation to put the honkies on the wrong track yet again. I would rather not believe they’re calling “rock art” a written language to make them seem less culturally inferior to us literate, scientific Europeans, but that’s a possibility too.

I snapped my own pictures, realizing that the only way to begin to understand this work would be to camp out here, and go about my daily chores, with the “rock messages” as my backdrop. Only then would I begin to see it more like the people who made and used it.

But the day was still young, and the next sites were hours away, and I needed to keep moving west if I wanted to meet my friends in the desert. So I got back in the little truck and drove to the nearest city, where I had lunch in a big-city-style bistro, knowing from experience that local-style food would be dismal.

I did the hours of driving, into the sunset, and eventually left the highway again to enter a vast area, the eastern corner of the Mojave desert, which I’d entered only once before as a passenger with a biologist friend. There I discovered the worst road I’ve ever driven, and drove it, stressfully and painfully, to where, after sunset, I finally found a bleak but spectacular campsite – a huge area cleared for RVs at the foot of rock formations, surrounded at a distance by other huge RVs. Because in this day and age  – as I discovered on this trip – most campsites are developed for giant RVs rather than us traditional folk who sleep on the ground.

After that city lunch, I just had a beer and snacks before hitting the sack. No sooner had I settled in than I discovered that I was directly under a low-altitude approach path for McCarran International Airport, with jets coming in every 90 seconds or so. Our society can industrialize even the remotest natural areas without even touching the ground.

Since there was no place to lay my ground cloth in this extremely remote place without potentially being run over by newcomers during the night, I emptied the truck bed and slept inside it, as I sometimes have to do when there are high winds. The eighth night of my trip, and only my second night of camping. But the night sky was my ceiling, the wheeling galaxy and constellations my constant companions through the night, and yes, as always, there were falling stars, although not as many as there were passenger jets. Little did I know what I was in for the next day…

Infinite Wonderland

In preparation for this trip, I’d copied a map off the internet that showed the next “rock writing” site to be just a few miles from my campsite. And there it was – again, with a large parking lot, informational signage, and fencing.

I followed a broad trail toward what appeared to be modest rock outcrops. I rounded a bend, and saw a house-sized boulder standing alone. I raised my field glasses, glimpsed familiar markings, and felt my heart swelling in my chest, the way it does whenever I stumble upon traces of the Old Ones. How do our bodies do this? How did the heart come to be the locus of love?

Refuge in the North

I’d never seen a place like this – a seemingly infinite wonderland of rock writing. I climbed up, and down, and around. I scanned with field glasses. I found more the farther I went. I spent hours there. No way did I see it all. I have no idea how much farther it went. There were numerous tinajas or natural water pockets, which go a long way toward explaining what native people were doing there to begin with. The brief notes I saw on the internet didn’t prepare me for this, and thank God! Fuck technology, fuck remote sensing, fuck satellites, fuck drones. The map is not the territory – the territory is far, far more interesting and enlightening. You had to be there, to hear it, to smell it, to feel it with your skin, your hands and feet.

But now I had another big decision to make. Damn it, that’s the problem with an unplanned trip! You start out thinking it’s going to be free and easy, just following your nose across the landscape, going wherever you want, but no! You have to find a place to sleep every night, and as the day goes on, the pressure mounts! And I still had to factor in a shopping stop in Las Vegas before I met my friends in the desert! Vegas, where the traffic would be a nightmare, coming from the north and slogging through the entire length of the city’s knotted freeway system. No way to avoid the stress of going directly from peaceful nature to mechanical mayhem, thousands of other stressed-out humans fighting each other like rats for space in the maze.

I didn’t have the heart for that yet, and I still had a few days left. So I decided to drive far out of my way, to the north again, to a little town in a canyon where I’d stayed several times before. It was a beautiful refuge where I could do laundry again, and edit my growing galleries of photos. And yes, there were more rock writings up there, sites I hadn’t visited yet.

The “mid-term” election occurred on my second day in the little town. A media event held elsewhere and broadcast in from the outside world – an event in which we function as mere statistics, pretending that we’re somehow “participating” in a “democracy.” I’d voted before leaving home, and the results were available when I woke up to do my laundry before hitting the road again. Everyone I voted for had won, but this “historic” event that others had worked so passionately for was of no real interest to me, since I dream of the collapse of the state that has caused so much harm from its beginning.

I packed up and drove back down the road, where I found another prehistoric site that added to the already profound revelations of this trip. It would be the last until next time around…

Honest Vegas

Going beyond even what I’d found at previous sites, this county publishes both online and paper brochures guiding visitors to and through its prominent rock art sites. I had one of these with me, but like my Grandpa, I reflexively avoid the instructions, and I regretted it halfway into my visit. In this case, the county’s wonderful brochure took the place of an all-day campout at the site – it enabled me to see, at a glance, the deep context around the rock writings: the ash deposits from old campfires, the scatter of stone tool-making flakes, evidence of both prehistoric residential and work areas. I would’ve found all that myself during a longer stay, but not during a short picture-taking visit.

Unlike the previous site, this was right off the highway. But like the previous site, it seemed endless – a maze of boulders down in a canyon, with panels near the head, but an unknown number hidden below, waiting for more time to be discovered. Frankly, during my early rock art explorations I never imagined sites so vast, rock writing so ubiquitous across the Native landscape, even as backdrops for everyday living. And this is just what’s accessible by vehicle. When you think about all the mountains and canyons that can only be reached on foot, it boggles the mind. These people created a pervasive mediascape that rivals ours – our smart phone screens, computer screens, TVs, movies, newpapers and magazines, billboards, bus ads, and graffiti – but unlike ours, theirs was made to be a permanent part of their habitat, to communicate between generations, and thus was strictly curated by tradition and by the community. And as a result of that and the way they lived, it’s more organic than ours could ever be.

When I first arrived, I took a wrong turn – again, the map is not the territory, and the brochure misled me – and spent an hour or so clambering down a tributary gulch that had a smattering of rock writings but wasn’t the main site. A Jeepful of Canadians followed me, and continued down the “wrong way” as I returned to find the official trailhead. Later, I heard and spotted them down there wandering through the maze, and we waved at each other.

It was now the moment of truth – or falsehood? Maya, the Veil of Illusion. I needed to get to Vegas to do my shopping for the desert meetup. And yes, the drive and traffic were as bad as expected, as bad as always, even though I beat “rush hour” by at least an hour. Our society, and what it has done to this planet, is obscene. Literally and completely obscene. And I’m not talking about separating immigrant families at the border, or appointing a sexual predator to the Supreme Court. Those are bad, but the nation’s current leadership is not the fundamental problem – that’s yet another reason why the recent election didn’t interest me. Our way of life, our way of using nature and each other, are catastrophic, apocalyptic – and Las Vegas is the epitome of all of that. In that sense, at least it’s honest.

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Fall 2018 Part 4: Bittersweet Journey Home

Saturday, November 17th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

The Discoverer’s Duty

As I dove into the smog-choked Las Vegas basin, my trip entered its final phase. As usual, I’d used up much of the day checking out the last prehistoric site. My intention had been to drive through Vegas at mid-day, stock up on supplies for desert camping, and hit the road again at mid-afternoon with plenty of time to find a camp site in a familiar part of the Mojave. Instead, the sun was setting as I pulled into the Whole Foods parking lot in the upscale shopping mall and tucked my old, mud-splattered truck between the sparkling luxury SUVs and sports cars of the suburbanites.

I’d spent more than a week far from cities and industrial civilization, immersed in nature, walking through ancient campsites, surrounded by the art, the writings, and the ghosts of the Old Ones who’d lived lightly and sustainably on this beautiful desert land. Now I was suffering the usual shock of returning to civilization: the stressed-out crowds milling through a generic and completely artificial environment, competing against each other in their conspicuous consumption of the ravaged earth’s bounty. I tried to stay calm but failed.

It was dark by the time I emerged with my purchases. It’d been a long day, my crippled arm was sore from driving, and my only practical option at this point was to head for the cheap motel I knew in nearby Boulder City. My cooler still needed block ice, which is becoming increasingly harder to find, but I found it in the Boulder City Albertson’s, and as stressed as I was, while leaning over to rearrange my ice chest in the bed of the truck, I forgot to bend at the knees, and triggered my always-lurking lower back pain.

The whole trip so far had entailed a lonely struggle to keep my various sources of chronic pain at bay, while many of the routine chores of traveling – driving, reaching, turning, bending, lifting – threatened to cripple me. This is what I’d tried and failed to explain to my doctor before leaving: we never know when this kind of pain is going to be triggered by something, and when it is, if we don’t get immediate relief, we’re going to be crippled and our plans waylaid. Fortunately, I still had a dwindling stash of the emergency meds that are getting harder and harder to refill, as our Puritanical society wages war against doctors, pain sufferers, and legitimate pain relief.

Would I be able to continue with my trip, or would the pain sabotage my plans? I was really looking forward to finally camping out with friends in the familiar, welcoming environment of the Mojave Desert. But with the pain threatening me in the background, I had one more duty to fulfill before joining them.

In Part 3 I mentioned the ranching families who’d collected artifacts from their land and put them on display in the local museum. It was actually apparent from the displays that these collections were only on loan – the families still considered these relics of the people they’d displaced as their private property. Like all of my family and friends, I was raised in a society that is confident in its superiority over indigenous peoples and its right to virtually everything those natives once used or created.

As a child, I inherited a handful of arrowheads that my Dad discovered or was given by his elders back east. Everyone took for granted that anything you discovered was your property. Decades later, Katie and I went crazy when we started to find potsherds and stone tools around our desert cave. She was already beginning to collect historical artifacts and dead bushes to assemble into art back in the city. This was even better. We never gave a second thought to collecting parts of the landscape that others had left behind.

But now, more decades later, like most of my camper friends, I had a small collection of artifacts that I’d dragged around from home to home and that mostly spent their time hidden away in boxes. I had no one to leave them to, and I figured that when I died, some rushed, stressed-out acquaintance would probably end up tossing them in the trash without even looking at them. Unlike the Mormon families, I didn’t believe finding and collecting them made them my “property” – even if I’d found them on land I owned – because I don’t really believe in land ownership in our Eurocentric, legal, capitalistic sense.

There are a couple of sanctioned dispositions available for prehistoric relics in our society: transfer to science (archaeology), or repatriation to tribes. I’d kept pretty good track of where these – mostly potsherds – had come from, but after what I’d learned on this and previous trips, I’d lost faith in archaeologists, and I was really confused about what, if any, contemporary tribes had jurisdiction over the source of my collection.

My ultimate conclusion was that every generation needs the experience of discovery that I and my friends had had, the realization that people actually lived off the land and created things here that were both beautiful and functional, in this exotic place we initially treat only as a recreational playground. The best place for artifacts is where we find them, not in a private collection or even in a museum. My hope is that by returning these pieces where they came from, I can help launch someone else on the path I’ve followed, through the veil of civilized illusion to a clearer view of humans in nature.

Nuwuvi Desert

Returning those artifacts was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. When we’d found them, more than 30 years ago, we were camping a quarter mile or so off a lonely dirt road, after parking our vehicle on a dirt trail under a telephone line alongside the road. Now, the road is paved, it’s the main highway through a National Preserve, and where we parked our vehicle is a big, paved parking lot with a sign proclaiming “Scenic Overlook.” Whereas we used to wait a half hour or more between passing vehicles on that road, there’s now continual high-speed traffic, and almost always tourists parked there.

A cold wind was blowing – there was a high wind advisory across the desert for the next 24 hours – and in order to pull on my jacket and load my backpack, I had to squeeze between the open doors of other vehicles and the bodies of milling tourists, in this place that had once been so remote and lonely. I could feel them staring at me as I dropped over the edge of the parking lot and headed down into the desert alone. They soon left, and others arrived, as I revisited our cave and the spots where we’d found these creations of the old Indians, always aware of the strangers’ curious eyes aimed at me from a distance. It was a bittersweet visit, but it also felt like a circle was beginning to close. Now, my only future duty here would be to remove the furnishings of our cave, and it would be ready for someone else.

Now that I was in the National Preserve, the revelations of my journey through Southern Paiute territory were constantly on my mind. Until now, I’d taken the name “Mojave Desert” for granted – I’d even defended it against the Anglicized version “Mohave” used in Arizona. But the name had taken a more sinister dimension after I discovered that my sometime friend, the Park Service archaeologist, had ensured that signage and kiosks in the National Preserve identified only the Mojave Indians as natives of this desert, completely erasing the Indians I knew to be its historical inhabitants, the Chemehuevi branch of the Southern Paiutes. He was following the archaeological consensus that the Southern Paiutes were a violent, invasive group that forced the Mojaves out of the desert a few hundred years ago. And maybe he’d made friends in the Colorado River-based Mojave tribe, and was also playing favorites. But my journeys, as well as my recent anthropological readings, had revealed a contradictory story. Now I was primed to reject the very name of my beloved desert.

The name Mojave is a Spanish corruption of “Aha Macav,” the Mojaves’ name for themselves. Nuwuvi is what the Southern Paiute call themselves, and I now feel we should call it the Nuwuvi Desert, for the peaceful people who tell us they’ve always lived there, the people whose entire prehistory reveals a consummate adaptation to challenging arid habitats.

With that in mind, I headed home to my land in the Nuwuvi Desert. As the Chemehuevi say, “kaiyani” – my mountains.

Bittersweet Homecoming

When I discovered this mountain range, it was the remote, hidden oases I was attracted to. Scattered all over the range, a few miles apart, were isolated spots where water seeped out of the rocks and filled small basins that I, my friends, and our wild animal companions could drink from. These springs and seeps were sacred places. And now, after years of severe drought, they were drying out, one by one. The fracture zones that stored rainwater within the mountains were empty, and who knew when they’d ever be replenished? Our vaunted science is brought to its knees by the Great Mysteries, but many scientists, in their ignorance of the broader context, continue to aid industry in its unsustainable capitalist exploitation of resources we’ll never fully understand. A prominent geologist, a friend of a friend, is one of the founders of the controversial water project which aims to privatize the aquifer below our land and sell it to the city of Los Angeles.

One accidental theme of this visit consisted of revisiting places within a few miles of camp that I hadn’t seen in decades. Nooks and crannies I’d explored more than 20 years ago after first acquiring this land, but had avoided since, for whatever reason. And in every place we visited, I was, as usual, awed by the resilience of life in an environment that seems so parched and challenging to us weak, enervated domestic creatures.

At one point, returning from a hike, a couple miles from camp, I stopped to get something out of my pack. I took it off, set it on the ground and got what I needed, but when I tried to lift it to put it back on, I felt the old stabbing pain again, the one that can break out a sweat, stop me in my tracks and make virtually everything painful for the next week or so. Fortunately I caught this one early enough, but I still had to be super-mindful and careful for the rest of the day. The new normal.

Outdoor Life

The high winds came and went, and returned four days later, in the cycle I remember from winters past. Wind so strong, in this landscape of mountains surrounded by vast basins, that you had to lean into it to remain standing. And everything in your campsite has to be weighted down, or it can be blown away and impaled on the nearest bush of thorns or spines.

In the still intervals we could hear the birds stationed about their wild territory, calling to each other. The moon was coming back from new, its thin crescent slice growing barely perceptibly each night, but it set early to leave the sky to the stars, the constellations, the galaxy, and the always-present meteorites and high-altitude jets. We even saw a satellite once rushing down its orbit from pole to pole.

One thing I’ve always loved is to listen to the wind moving across the basin below camp, from shrub to shrub, from miles off in the distance to yards away in the big arroyo. But my companion noted that it even sings a complex “chorus” across the boulder-strewn slope above camp.

Driving Into Winter

As I was leaving our desert mountains, a cold wave was clamping down on the Southwest. I was reluctantly returning to a New Mexico home where the nighttime temperatures were in the teens. And the time change was working against me, so I didn’t get very far the first day of driving. And all my warm clothes were dirty from camping, so I had to do laundry again, and got a late start the second day. It took three partial days to get home, wrapped in thermal layers even in the truck so that when I stepped out for gas or to take pictures, I wouldn’t freeze.

This trip of revelations had also been a sobering lesson in how challenging camping can be when you’re struggling to cope with pain and physical conditions that need to be treated daily. I’d slacked off because it wasn’t convenient or there just wasn’t time, and I needed to get back on the program and resume spending a couple hours a day at home treating my conditions, including my daily schedule of stretching and working out, that I pursue mainly as conditioning for these wilderness trips. It’s all a very lonely pursuit, now that my friends and I are scattered all over the place, and busy lives rarely allow us to meet up. We didn’t know how lucky we were when we were young, healthy, childless, and couldn’t care less about our jobs back in the city.

Tragic Legacy

What did I learn from those two-and-a-half weeks of exploring what most people assume is old familiar territory for me? Why do I keep going back to Southern Paiute territory, when my friends are flying off to Spain, Iceland, or Australia, and probably not spending any more money to visit those presumably more exotic places, when you consider my gas and lodging costs?

Something that was percolating, annoyingly, below the surface of my consciousness, is how I’ve spent my life. Yes, as an artist, a bohemian, and an outdoorsman, I’ve had an incredibly exciting life. No complaints there. But I’ve also had two separate professional careers, two separate phases of my working life, one throughout the 1980s, the other from the late 90s through the mid-teens, that chewed up huge amounts of time, energy, and natural resources, and didn’t necessarily make our world a better place. It’s high time for me to acknowledge and deal with that, in some way.

The mid-term election in the U.S., with its corresponding social media hysteria, is probably one thing that forces me to deal with my professional legacy. The software interfaces that I led the design of, not just as a worker bee, but as an acknowledged “guru,” have turned out to be a force of destruction. I long ago stopped believing that they were a force for good, as some of my colleagues hoped in the beginning. But now it’s obvious that, like virtually all of our technology, they’re alienating us from nature and each other. They’re making it easier for capitalists to exploit us, to track our behavior and steal our private information. They’re addicting us, deluding us, depressing us. They’re even driving people to rape and kill each other, as in the case of Facebook and Myanmar. So much of my precious life, misdirected and wasted on works that betray my deepest principles.

Actually, it’s more likely that my recent discovery of my old friend James’s death is what started me on this re-evaluation. James recognized that to the extent you pursue a career in the capitalist economy, you’re part of the problem, and he had the courage to resist it his entire life. People can say that’s what isolated him and made him unhappy. But there are alternatives, people I know who, while forced to work in the capitalist economy, put their hearts into building resilient local communities. I tried to do that with my Harvest Festival, but although it succeeded for the community, it was a community I wasn’t able to join. There are no guarantees, and most attempts will fail, because the destructive power of our society is almost irresistible.

In addition to the revelations about rock writing, the Nungwu, Southern Paiute culture, and the Nuwuvi Desert, one significant discovery was the hidden, gradual, pernicious conversion of our country’s wild lands for mechanized recreation. It hasn’t been publicized, even in conservation-oriented regional media like High Country News, which are usually more focused on urban-centric politics anyway. In remote rural places, trail networks have been widened and developed for the new quad ATVs or UTVs, and tent campsites have been razed and graded into parking lots for monster RVs. And of course, in southern Nevada and eastern California, vast areas of high-quality, productive natural habitat in the desert have been destroyed and replaced with huge industrial solar plants and wind farms. Gas-powered RVs now have fuel economy in the single digits. Imagine how much natural habitat would need to be permanently destroyed to power a big electric RV in the future! That’s the world we – and our engineers and tech billionaires – are destroying for our children. I wonder how many of those engineers and entrepreneurs will eventually wake up too late to their tragic legacy, like I did.

I’ll have to think much more about the paradigm shift from rock art to rock writing, and the ubiquity of rock writing in native habitat. I still don’t understand the relationship between artistic expression and symbolic communication in my own work. Maybe I don’t need or want to understand it, just to continue to experiment with it in my future work – and I do have specific work planned and waiting to be made, when I can find the space and time to make it.

Regarding the development of roadside prehistoric sites – along existing roads – I can often lament the fact that a road was made there in the first place, especially when sites have already been severely vandalized. But the development I saw on this trip was uniformly protective and enlightening. And the vast majority of sites are still out there, hidden away, only accessible by strenuous hiking, waiting for future generations to discover and learn from. So that much is good.

In all, another bittersweet journey. Wish you could’ve joined me – we’d have much to remember and savor together.

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Spring Trip 2019

Monday, May 27th, 2019: 2012 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

A Test

During the past five years, my body seemed to be failing and accumulating injuries and disabilities. I could’ve easily assumed this was irreversible – the new normal.

But I was lucky in that I’d stopped pursuing a career and had few responsibilities except to myself. I had as much time as I needed. I kept experimenting and working harder and harder to stay in shape. I’d spent the past six months in training, working on my strength and flexibility to get around the rotator cuff tears in both shoulders, very gradually increasing my hiking distance and elevation until I even passed the point I was at when things started falling apart. The only question was, could I hike off-trail in the desert mountains I loved, with all the steep slopes of loose rock? I’d already learned that loose rock was the ultimate challenge for my chronically injured foot.

So in addition to the meeting, this trip was a test for my body. And ironically, after more than 15 years, I’d finally acquired a 4wd vehicle, and this would be the first test of that, too.

The first thing I discovered was that I had to re-learn hiking out there. Since my foot injury, I’d lost my confidence and had to regain it, going slower and more deliberately, more mindfully, especially downhill. But I did OK, doing rugged hikes easily and even some construction work that required moves I couldn’t have done a few months ago.

And so did my vehicle. I ended up on old abandoned mine roads, where the Sidekick kept crawling through deep sandy washes, rocking back and forth 60+ degrees between deep ruts on its truck frame, and climbing straight up loose shaley slopes, to many places my 2wd, low-clearance truck would never have reached. The Sidekick never had a problem, nor did my body. We both passed the test.

Hitting the Road

Arrival

The main reason for this trip was a long-planned meeting between those who love our mountains. But the hot days of summer were coming, and since there’s no natural shade at our campsite, I’d designed a shade canopy that I hauled out, in pieces, on top of my new vehicle to assemble onsite.

Second Day

Meeting Day

After the many months and numerous communications required to plan and schedule our meeting, it ended up being pushed back to a date that was closer to the heat of summer than some of us were comfortable with. But as the date approached, the forecast was for a cooling trend, and in the event, temperatures were mild for the entire week I camped in the desert. In fact, I was too cold the first night sleeping out, and had to progressively swath myself in all the layers I’d brought, because my warm-season sleeping bag wasn’t enough.

Wind out there can be fierce, but the day of the meeting was calm. And the day after, we even got rained on briefly, which is a very rare treat. We were so blessed by the weather, the rocks, the plants, the animals, and the people!

The Day After

After most of the others left, a remaining friend and I hiked over to explore a corner of the mountains I’d never seen. We were amazed at the vitality of both flora and fauna after a wet winter. More jackrabbits, cottontails, birds and reptiles than we’d encountered in a long time. And around camp, with the blooming desert willows, there was a constant swarm of hummingbirds.

We could see a storm moving over from the west, and as we crested a ridge, rain began to fall lightly, and strong gusts of wind threatened to blow us down.

On the Road Again

Different Desert

In search of prehistoric rock writings I hadn’t seen before, I headed to a different part of the desert, a part I’d only visited briefly before and wanted to explore thoroughly in future trips.

Climbing

After rain drove me out of my solo campsite after dark, it soon stopped, encouraging me to wait it out. It ended up raining four separate times in six hours, but only for 10-20 minutes at a time. The last time it rained, I simply wrapped my sleeping bag in my plastic tarp. After the rain stopped, I slept well for the rest of the night, and in the morning, started hiking up the mountain behind camp.

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Fall Trip 2019: Part 1

Sunday, November 10th, 2019: 2019 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

Blinded by the Light

I started this fall’s road and camping trip in a conflicted state of excitement and anxiety. On the one hand, I was proud of the past year’s hard work and the accomplishment of recovering from five years of multiple disabilities and surgery, to regain strength, mobility, and the stamina to hike farther and higher than before all this started. I was eager to test my new abilities alongside those of my younger friends, who provided a benchmark for what I hoped to do in my favorite stomping grounds of the Mojave Desert, Great Basin, and Colorado Plateau.

On the other hand, three months earlier, while treating sciatica in my right foot, I’d experienced a sharp pain in my left knee that had plagued me two or three times in the past decade. I’d always assumed it was patellar tendinitis, treated it by hiking with a knee band or sleeve, stuck to my mindful stretching and strength training, and it’d always gone away within 2 or 3 months. But within the past couple of weeks I’d become worried that the knee pain would get in the way of my hiking on the fall trip, and I started practicing some additional, commonly recommended treatments for patellar tendinitis.

But those treatments made the pain significantly worse, to the point where on the eve of my trip I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hike much at all. Driving with a manual transmission, working the clutch with that knee hour after hour, is especially hard, and it seemed like my aging body was out to sabotage my dreams again.

Following the pattern I’d developed during recent years, I hoped to explore southeast Utah, southeast Nevada, and the east Mojave over a period of up to 3 weeks. But last minute plans involved joining a younger friend in the desert at the beginning, where we would discuss a joint itinerary to occupy the first week and a half. The weather forecast for the desert was calm with mild temperatures before I left home, so we were expecting some easy camping and good hiking.

Planning to leave home on Monday with a 6-hour drive to Flagstaff, I put off most of my packing until Monday morning, figuring my long experience would make packing straightforward – and it was. I’d acquired a 1995 Suzuki Sidekick 4-door 4wd last winter and tested it a bit in a short desert camping trip in May, but this would be the first significant test, since I planned to explore some serious back roads that wouldn’t have been accessible for my 2wd truck. With the back seat removed, cargo space was so ample that all my gear barely showed above the windowsills, and the only thing I had to carry on the roof rack would be gas cans. Which was good, since with apparent rotator cuff tears in both shoulders, I couldn’t lift heavy weights that high anyway.

Unfortunately, the final drive to Flagstaff occurred as the sun was setting directly in front of me in a cloudless sky, and with the high profile of the Sidekick and the small sun visors, it meant I spent the better part of two hours driving with one hand raised to block the sun. Why didn’t I stop somewhere and wait for the sun to set? At times, I had zero visibility on the Interstate with its heavy truck traffic, steep grades, and 75 mph speed limit. It was so nerve-wracking I was a mess by the time I reached my motel.

I’d researched and located a Cajun restaurant near the motel, and walked over there in the dark after checking into my room. The food was great but it turned out to be a much longer walk than expected, through a semi-industrial neighborhood with heavy traffic and few sidewalks or street lights, where massage parlors were the only open businesses. I felt like I was in a slum in a big city, not a historic railroad town high in the mountains.

Smelling of Mildew

Flagstaff is my routine shopping stop for camp food and any needed gear. I needed a few items that turned out to be hard to find, so it took me most of Tuesday in a town that is one of my least favorite. For example, I went to 5 different places in different parts of town before settling on plastic gas cans and a new plastic water jug – cheap but important items that are mostly poorly designed and built.

In the meantime, I’d heard from another friend that he might be able to meet me the next morning to show off his native community in the desert. So I was planning to spend this night in the dying river town and drive to his place Wednesday morning, after doing laundry that would give me enough clean clothes to last a week of camping.

So again, I ended up driving due west toward the setting sun in another cloudless sky, on the high-speed Interstate with even steeper grades, reaching town again a nervous wreck from holding up my hand and squinting for poor visibility, to check into a dilapidated motel room that smelled strongly of mildew – normal for a dying town that pins all its current hopes on the cannabis industry.

Then I drove a half hour north past the big reservation farms for dinner at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants – since the dying town lacks a good dinner place.

Pleistocene Lake

Wednesday morning I did laundry at the motel, bought block ice to fill my two coolers, and headed down to my friend’s native community.

There, I entered the small resort area, parked, and walked to the restaurant on the lake shore. A wall of glass overlooked a choppy sea that extended for 2 miles to a steep alluvial fan at the foot of distant mountains. Completely blanketing the fan was a vast, unexpected city. Not that the lake was expected – it was all as surreal as a Star Trek set. So much water in the desert, all of it draining from mountains up to a thousand miles away! So much hubris, the unsustainable engineering of habitat for humans by our industrial civilization. While waiting for my friend, I watched private fishing boats venturing out from the harbor of the small resort, and a small ferry shuttling passengers between this and the much larger resort on the opposite bank.

My friend arrived, we had lunch, then I drove us around the area as he gave me a tour and told me the story of his people and their land. First we went to a spring that featured in ancient legends I’d read about decades ago. The preservation of this spring on public land was my friend’s first achievement as a custodian of his people’s traditions, and he was understandably very proud of it. As a precious water source in what used to be undeveloped desert, it featured a rock outcrop which used to be covered with petroglyphs, but most of them had been chipped off by whites – including government agents – to use as yard decorations. My friend pointed out how the one panel that remained represented an ancient map showing the Pleistocene shoreline of a lake that was similar to the present lake, indicating that the river had been dammed naturally at one point thousands of years ago. The map even showed village boundaries on an island which is now a peninsula.

We talked about LaVan Martineau, a white man taught by Southern Paiutes in Utah, who published interpretations of rock writing which are generally dismissed by archaeologists and other white experts. We agreed that Martineau probably offered a better perspective than most of the so-called experts.

He told me the story of a historical conflict with another community at this place, a raid and massacre, and retaliation of the survivors, which included one of his wife’s relatives. The spring had since been used as a stagecoach stop, and a stock watering hole for a native rancher. My friend pointed the way to the actual spring, which I found silted up, with just a damp spot at the base of a shrubby hillock. When I returned to the vehicle, my friend was talking to his nephew, who was out there hunting rabbits with a friend.

In the space of a few decades, the community has overcome huge obstacles to win back a small fraction of their traditional lands from our rapacious and unsustainable imperial society. They freely admit to making mistakes during their long, lonely learning experience. Even gaining control over the private resort within their boundary required a long struggle, but it now represents their main source of income and jobs that gradually attract more far-flung, disenfranchised community members to this developing haven.

With that income and a few hard-won grants and loans, they’ve developed basic infrastructure – government, public works, a health clinic, fitness center and small cultural center – all recent and well-maintained. My friend proudly showed me around their large organic farm, a work in progress where native plants have been tended as cultural and nutritional resources. Then he showed me the head of the lake, where silt from upriver was constantly settling and posing a danger to recreation. He shook his head at the folly of our dominant European society, and recounted a story from one of his elders.

As the downstream dam was being completed by our government and the ancestral farms of his people were being flooded, the lake extended upstream, drowning a vast riparian forest. His elder, who was then a young girl, said she watched as coveys of quail gathered for refuge in the branches of drowned trees, far from the spreading shore, and as the water rose and drove them from the branches, they tried to fly to shore, and fell one by one to drown as their short wings failed them.

Continuing the theme he’d introduced at the desert spring with its petroglyph map, my friend kept musing about deep time, and how different this landscape would’ve looked in much wetter periods of the earth’s history. He freely admitted that his people are recent immigrants from farther north, an archaeological consensus I’d come to doubt.

Leaving him in midafternoon, I drove back through town for gas and headed west toward my mountains and the rendezvous with my camping partner. He was still far away, and expected to arrive after 9pm, long after dark. We agreed to meet in the ghost town just off the stretch of highway which had been closed for years, as the state gradually replaces bridges washed out by flash floods.

Showering Onstage

The ghost town is on a main railroad line, and when I arrived, trains were passing in opposite directions every 5 minutes, each blowing their horns loudly as they approached the rarely used crossing. I pulled into the abandoned tungsten millsite, an industrial ruin from the 1950s, sparsely surrounded by sprawling, decrepit tamarisk trees and the mostly collapsed ruins of bungalows and post office from a town that had finally died in the 1970s. It was a junky place but would be nicer in the dark. As the sun set, I gradually felt myself shifting my gaze upward to the emerging stars as the stress of preparing and driving was removed from my shoulders. The moon had set in early afternoon, and falling stars were sporadically streaking the cloudless night sky. I realized again how our culture, with its tech obsession and downward focus on screens, deprives us of an accurate worldview and gives us spinal problems and neck pain. And I was grateful for the desert’s liberation from our unhealthy habits.

It had been a long, hot day, and my first desire was to get clean. Among the ruins of the millsite I found a raised wooden platform with an H-frame of pipe overhead and an adjacent lower structure that provided a handy shelf. I’d bought a cheap solar shower bag in Flagstaff, filled and hung it from the frame, and set my hurricane lamp on the shelf along with soap and towel. The engineers of passing trains had a dramatic view of my “sleek, powerful body,” all lit up on stage, but it was total bliss to get clean outdoors in mild weather under the arching canopy of stars.

Still worried about hiking with knee pain, I cracked a beer, ate some snacks, and waited for my younger friend, who eventually arrived around 10pm. Meanwhile, train traffic had decreased to one every 20 minutes or so, but a strong wind had come up. A recently updated forecast suggested we were in for fierce winds during the next 48 hours. This is a typical challenge of desert camping. I’ve had very capable friends who were literally driven out of the desert, in both day and night, by unbearable winds. We quickly agreed to lay out our sleeping bags in the partially ruined assay shed, a sheet metal building with 3 standing walls and a roof, all riddled with bullet holes but adequate as a windbreak.

Miraculous Oasis

Unfortunately the sheet metal walls and roof rattled and creaked loudly all night, and the trains continued to blow their horns and shake the ground underneath us, making for sporadic sleep. But we were in our beloved desert, so we woke on Thursday, another cloudless day, with good expectations.

Our first impromptu decision was to visit the major spring in the area, which we’d both heard about but had somehow avoided for decades. It was a straight shot up the alluvial fan from the ghost town, but the road to it turned out to be the most challenging of my entire trip. My vehicle was perfectly adequate, but going was very slow over boulders and washouts. Like most backcountry roads, this is an example of a road that was never built and is never maintained by the authorities – it consists of tracks and tread laid down by “users” – private individuals who drive it, reroute it, and repair it as needed for their own access.

The spring, a true desert oasis in the midst of barren foothills, was a revelation to both of us. A golden eagle soared overhead as we got out and began exploring. The vegetation, from cottonwood and willow trees to thick, incredibly tall cattail thickets and a lot of riparian vegetation I didn’t recognize, was rampant for a long distance up the canyon, and at its head was a true spring, a short overhanging bank out of which water flowed continuously. Miraculous!

Night of Brutal Wind

We had lunch at our vehicles below the oasis, then headed back south, toward a campsite from which we hoped to hike into the southern end of our mountains, which I’d never explored before. The temperature was mild, probably in the low 70s, but I drive with my windows closed to keep out the dust, and my new vehicle’s high profile means that the big windows let in more solar radiation, turning the entire vehicle into a sweltering hothouse regardless of outside temperatures. I avoided using the air conditioner because my shop had said it was on its last legs and needed major repairs, so before we were halfway to our destination I was drenched with sweat, frustrated and angry. Eventually I stopped, and my friend pointed out that all I had to do was find a way of covering the windows facing the sun. Why hadn’t I figured that out for myself? I used a towel and a dirty t-shirt, and from then on I was okay, but it pointed out a major flaw of my new vehicle.

On the drive up the side road to the basin where we planned to camp, I flushed a mature, classically-colored redtail hawk out of the roadside brush. The wind was really fierce when we arrived in camp, in a broad wash at the foot of a cliff. There was a big stone fire ring, and an incongruous dead, rust-colored Christmas tree and two store-bought wreaths leaning up against the cliff, near where I’d previously found boxes of clay pigeons. Two months till Christmas, and everything dead already – how inconsiderate!

As we began to unpack our gear in the howling wind, the first thing that happened was that a small, colorful bird, which looked to me like a warbler, flew up erratically and landed on my friend’s hand. The poor thing was fluttering and staggering in the wind, and next, as I set up my folding chair and changed into my hiking boots, it zigzagged laboriously over and perched on the back of my chair, behind my left shoulder. Neither of us had ever seen a bird behave like this. My friend was enchanted. I was too, but I also wondered if it were simply disoriented by the wind.

There was enough daylight for a short hike, so after the bird left, we headed north toward a low saddle in a west-trending ridge. There, we discovered a stand of tall milkweed-like plants we’d never seen before on the slopes of these mountains. And at the top, we looked down into a lush, hidden canyon that confused me for a while, until my friend explained that the opposite slope was the main divide between us and the next watershed, where we’d both hiked in the past. The canyon below us was actually a hidden part of the complex basin we were camping in.

Back in camp, I started a fire, using the dead wreaths as kindling, while my friend made salad. I’d brought a couple of whole chicken legs, but with the solar heating in the vehicle, the ice chest hadn’t functioned adequately and I was afraid the meat had spoiled. We both smelled it and it seemed okay, so I started it grilling over my friend’s charcoal, the wind whipping through everything we did.

The salad was excellent, but at my second bite I discovered the chicken was rancid, so it became a meatless dinner. Fortunately I’d also made pilaf, so it wasn’t all fiber!

How to sleep became a real challenge, and I recalled that I’d had wind problems the last time I’d camped here. It was at the end of a long flat space, and the wind was traveling down that corridor unimpeded toward our only sleeping spot. We both made our beds independently, struggling against the gale. Since it wasn’t that chilly, I was optimistic and crawled into my warm-weather bag wearing only underwear and a t-shirt. But I was soon cold enough to pull on thermal top and bottom. And even that wasn’t enough. I sat up and put on my fleece jacket.

And got even colder with the wind rushing over me, drawing away my body heat despite the layers of insulation. So I decided to resort to the tactic I’d learned in survival school, which had worked many times in the past. I got up, raced downwind to the vehicle, and dug out my heavy, military surplus rubberized poncho. I laboriously wrapped that around my sleeping bag and snapped it shut from the inside – it should provide a solid windbreak.

But within minutes, I realized that even that wasn’t enough. The wind was so strong it was actually using the heavy poncho as a sail, to push against me and threaten to turn me over in bed. Now I was really angry! What kind of a camper was I, after decades of camping in this desert, that I couldn’t figure out how to sleep in the wind!

Well, I’d slept in a vehicle’s passenger seat before, as uncomfortable as I knew it would be. I laid some weights on my bed to keep it from blowing away, and went to transfer cargo inside my vehicle so I could recline the passenger seat. Then I unsnapped the poncho, bundled up the sleeping bag, and laid it out inside the Sidekick. At this point I was so pissed off I was ready to give up on the whole trip.

Determined to sleep, I even took a sleeping pill. And it worked.

Southern Passage

I ended up getting more than 5 hours of sleep, and in the morning, the wind had begun dying down. When I got out of the vehicle, I saw that my friend had built a low wall of gear boxes around his head, to effectively keep the wind away, and he’d had a good night’s sleep outside as a result. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

We had a long hike planned for this Friday, but we both agreed to move camp first. We would try the abandoned mine, the only other likely campsite in this basin. And by the time we got there, the day was proving to be calm, and completely cloudless yet again.

We parked the vehicles on a ledge high above the basin, not far from a gaping vertical shaft, simply a pit in the ground, that appeared bottomless until your vision adjusted to its shadowy depths. As we packed for our hike and I prepared my foot protection and knee strap, my friend noticed a coyote crossing the foothills below us and checking us out from time to time.

This was a hike I’d dreamed about for years: exploring a “southern passage” between tall outlying ridges, a 5-mile north-south corridor of seemingly level bajada between this basin and the mouth of a southern canyon which held the only known perennial water source in the southern part of the range. It was such a natural walking route that I wondered if we’d find any prehistoric remains.

As it turned out, the first remains we found were more recent – colorful plastic balloons, formerly helium-filled but long deflated, stuck in thorny shrubs, blown from thoughtless and unaccountable family celebrations hundreds of miles away, which my friend gathered into his pack to carry to some urban landfill. These deflated balloons appear more and more in the wild lands of the west, a form of litter that’s mostly out of sight, out of mind as more young people are raised to be strictly urban dwellers, isolated from the consequences of their lifestyle.

We crossed the straight tracks of rodents between hiding and feeding places, encountered the bleached belly plates and shell scales of dead desert tortoises, and the bleached skull fragments of bighorn rams. As we walked gradually uphill to what turned out to be a watershed divide early in the passage, we noticed that while the steep eastern ridge consisted of pale, finely fractured rock, the equally steep western ridge was dark and composed of big, wind-rounded granite boulders and pinnacles, which made it look far more rugged. High among the boulders we saw more of the tall milkweed-like plant we’d discovered the day before.

We were drawn to a section of western slope with boulders hollowed by wind into domed caves, and inside one I found mountain lion scat surrounded by bighorn scat.

We explored a short, winding side canyon which featured spectacular geology and a small “window” rock, unusual in these mountains.

Shortly after that we approached a dramatic, house-sized free-standing boulder, and sure enough, I found a faint petroglyph at its base.

Then we reached the mouth of a big canyon on our right, the head of which was a natural pass between the northern and southern parts of the western ridge. I saw that timewise, we’d reached the halfway point of our hike if we wanted to get back before dark. And getting back before dark had become an obsession with me. I’d ended up hiking and camping in the dark many times in my youth, but I believed that avoiding that was a mark of hard-earned wisdom, and the very idea of finding my way back to camp after dark, over ground that was dangerous to my vulnerable body, made me angry. I told my friend I would start heading back, but as usual he wanted to keep going.

We had only just parted when I heard him yelling, and turned to see him waving me over.

He was standing near the edge of a deep wash, pointing to prehistoric potsherds littering the desert pavement, shards of ceramic with such a glossy red finish that they seemed to have been recently dropped there and broken up. I’d found lots of potsherds in the desert, over a 35-year period, but had never seen such fresh-looking examples. They covered an area of several dozen yards, and all seemed to be from the same pot.

My friend still wanted to hike farther, so I headed back north toward the low divide. Along the way I found faint vehicle tracks and large, glowing patches of golden shortgrass which seemed to be unique to this southern habitat. Passing a bouldery outcrop I encountered a busy flock of small birds, and after trying to photograph them realized they were a mixture of species.

My friend caught up with me about halfway, and we both enjoyed the colors the setting sun painted on the surrounding peaks as we arrived back in camp. My left knee survived the hike pretty well, but I had somehow developed a weird cramp in that thigh – and the long trudges up the loose gravel of the bajada had really fatigued my leg muscles.

I’ve been so proud of my hard-won recovery from disabilities, and my regained capacity for hiking, but part of my recovery has involved retraining myself to protect my chronic foot injury by taking shorter steps. Of course this increases my handicap compared to my much taller – not to mention younger – friend. But in all it was an exhilarating day.

We both showered and started making dinner. I had some fresh sausages to grill and hoped they wouldn’t turn out bad like last night’s chicken. This campsite was much better situated, with a fantastic view in the moonless starlight. The night was totally calm, the sausages we fine, and my friend made delicious salad as usual, while we both enjoyed the frequent flares of meteorites. Finally, an easy night camping!

Something happened midway through the evening that neither of us could explain. While preparing dinner I noticed, out of the corner of my vision, a sharp burst of white light on the western silhouette of the ridge above us. All my friend noticed was a flash of light from somewhere above. All I can imagine is that it was an exploding meteorite, something you hear about but rarely see.

Journey Underground

I started Saturday with the unexplained thigh cramp that would hamper me for the next few days, especially while driving and working the clutch. We planned to move camp again to the base of the canyon that featured the perennial spring, beyond the south end of the passage we’d walked Friday. But first I wanted to get some photos inside the mine, which we’d taken a brief look at after dinner the night before. It looked amazing!

This was the first true desert mine system I’d ever been able to explore. Others I’d come across were either vertical shafts with rickety dry-rot ladders, flooded tunnels, low unbraced burrows half-blocked with debris, or dangerous-looking diagonal bores. This began with a solidly-braced tunnel, mostly tall enough for me to walk upright, passing below ventilation shafts that eventually led to a T-intersection. The left side continued to a right turn, where it eventually led to a small chamber that had a bricked-up doorway – some kind of lockable storage room. Inside was a broken folding lounge chair.

The right tunnel led to a vertical shaft going down about 40 feet, with a well-preserved ladder. There appeared to be another tunnel leading off from the bottom. Beyond the shaft our tunnel continued a ways to a cave-in, where there had apparently been another shaft leading to the surface.

It was a clean mine – virtually no trash, nor was there much in the way of artifacts. The floor of the tunnel was cracked from having been flooded by rain draining through the air vents. There was rodent scat everywhere, and I found some weird tiny wings on the floor which my friend identified as grasshopper wings – food for rodents. Then he found two bird nests, deep into the transverse shaft, in an area that received virtually no light. Swallows?

Since I have little interest in mining history or the Anglo exploitation of the West in general, I was surprised that this mine turned out to be one of the most impressive things I experienced on my trip. The fact is, I just love going underground!

Canyon of Death

We packed up and drove out of the mountains, to another ghost town by a railroad side line where we lunched in an old concrete bunker, one of the few standing structures. From there, around the south end of the mountains past the small, remote salt mining camp, which was inactive that day. Then east and north to our turnoff for the road to the spring. That minimal road, where I’d destroyed one of my truck tires 3 years ago, turned out to be an easy drive to the big wash downstream from the spring, where we decided to set up camp. By then it was mid-afternoon and we both needed shade, so using bungee cords we strung my big new tarp between our roof racks for an impromptu canopy.

We hung out a couple hours, drinking light beer, until we felt like hiking again. The sun was going down and I figured, from my previous map studies, that we had less than a mile to go to the spring. But I was way wrong!

After a mile of walking we were just getting to the mouth of a steep canyon. On the way, our hike had taken a spooky turn when my friend found the severed head of a lizard impaled on the thorn of a bush. I knew it had to be the remains of a meal by a loggerhead shrike, a small but very aggressive bird. I also found parasitic mistletoe growing on a creosote bush, something I’d never noticed before – I’d gone so far as to proclaim to all my desert friends that it only parasitized catclaw acacia in this habitat.

After we entered the canyon things got more apocalyptic. There was some kind of apparently parasitic vine over many of the shrubs – I remembered seeing it in a canyon at similar latitude on the east side of the range. The multicolored, striated and jumbled rock was beautiful, but early on, we came upon the recent skull and skeletal torso of an old bighorn ram, and after that, we encountered a trail of bighorn bones, most of them from lambs, leading all the way up to the spring. And fairly recent bighorn scat everywhere, scattered among the bones. I figured all the mortality was probably from the respiratory epidemic, but had no way of knowing how recent it was. And then there was that lion scat I’d found the previous day, not far from here.

Before we got to our destination, I realized we had gone a mile and a half, the sun had set, and even if we turned back now, we’d probably end up walking over rough, unfamiliar terrain in the dark, struggling to find the right way back on ground that was dangerous for my chronic foot injury. I got angry and began complaining to my friend, who was already far ahead of me, around a bend in the canyon.

When I began to catch up with him he urged me to keep going, and suddenly yelled “There it is!” I looked up and saw a couple of huge camouflage-painted fiberglass tanks, the usual setup installed by the Bighorn Society to maintain game populations for hunting. The canyon was very steep and rocky – it would’ve been beautiful in its natural state – and despite their camouflage, the tanks looked totally out of place.

There was a small metal drinking basin below them, fed via some kind of float valve, and a piping system higher above that fed groundwater from the original spring by gravity down to the tanks. Directly behind the tanks was a stash of equipment used by the Bighorn Society crews. The whole thing was repugnant.

We climbed up and found the original spring had been dammed and was completely silted up, so to get to its water you’d have to dig deep. Now the only water source was artificial.

We began the long hike back to camp, with me complaining angrily along the way, and pushing myself to walk too fast with my short steps. Fortunately we came across an old roadway that we’d missed on the way up, and it gave us a much easier path to camp that turned my attitude around. There was still a bit of light left in the sky when we finally arrived, and I raced to take a shower, with my water bag perched atop the spare tire mounted on the Sidekick’s dusty tailgate, before starting dinner.

My friend made and shared salad as usual, and I simply warmed up a can of chili that I’d picked up on a previous trip. Another calm, cloudless night, but this time I lay in my sleeping bag listening to coyotes calling, a short distance out on the bajada below our camp, while overhead the meteorites continued to streak their brief trajectories.

Messages From the Past

By Sunday morning we’d been camping out for 3 nights and 2 days. We’d done two fairly short hikes and one longer one, through the passage. But we’d also spent a lot of time driving. I had indicated up front that I was anxious to get to Utah and didn’t want to spend much time in the desert, so we decided to head northeast into Nevada, where we both wanted to explore some wild country that we’d only recently learned about. On the way I could shop for food and other supplies.

It would take more than half a day of driving to get there, and we convoyed and arranged to make frequent stops to reconnoiter. Before we left California I thought of a stop that might be interesting for my friend – a famous petroglyph site in a canyon near the Colorado River – so we detoured over there. It’s an amazing site and we both appreciated the stop, but it left us facing a different route north as the day was coming to an end. My friend had mentioned an interest in the mountains on the Arizona side of the river, so I suggested we spend the night in a campground I’d discovered on top of one of those ranges.

Temperature Drops

As we’d been driving, the temperature had been dropping and wind had been rising. I hadn’t seen a weather forecast for nearly a week so I had no idea what was happening. It was just our luck.

I did think to buy firewood in Arizona before we reached the mountains. That would turn out to be a true blessing.

As we approached the mountains, I could see a long cloud mass hanging over it, reaching toward the river in the west. It was the first cloud cover I’d seen since leaving home, and would be the only clouds I saw until the last day of my trip, a week and a half later.

The sun was setting as we drove the steep, twisting road to the crest. We found the campground, at aptly named Windy Point, only occupied by one other party, a young couple traveling in a rented RV. The wind and cold were already brutal up there. We quickly set up camp in the most protected site we could find, surrounded by pinyon and juniper, and I started a fire with our new wood. It turned out to be some kind of well-seasoned juniper, cedar, or cypress, smelled great and gave off plenty of heat.

My friend made us a hearty stir-fry with sausage, cabbage, and kale. We enjoyed the fire for a while, then went to bed, where I had a “bedgasm” crawling into my down bag for the first time this year. Seldom have I so appreciated this overstuffed bag, which is normally too hot. But the wind and cold were getting worse, and after a short while I got up to move my cooking basket over, as a windbreak. After that I slept really well.

Driving Vs. Camping

On Monday I woke to find my one-liter water bottle frozen – only about 2/3 frozen, not frozen solid like I’ve had happen a few times before. The 5-gallon jug still had enough liquid water for making coffee and washing last night’s dishes. I was actually energized by the cold weather and was really glad we’d gone up there. But we were continuing a pattern of long drives, no base camps, and less time for hiking. Today we still had another long drive and shopping to do.

We convoyed off the mountain and drove north to Boulder City, where I planned to shop at Albertson’s. Separating, we came up with different plans for lunch. My friend bought supermarket chicken pieces before I could suggest stopping at a good local taqueria. He ate his chicken bits in his truck while I waited an excessively long time for my fresh tacos. It was another indication of different trip styles. My family and lifelong friends have always approached long camping trips as “road trips” in which spells of camping are interspersed with stops at museums, motels and restaurants along the way. Opportunities to do laundry, restock supplies, and process the experiences in nature. By contrast, my younger friend gets in the mindset that once you start, you should be camping out every night and eating only from your vehicle’s stockpile of groceries.

From Boulder City we paid the exorbitant fee to drive through the federal recreation area and bypass Vegas traffic. It’s an endlessly beautiful drive but a long one, ending back at the Interstate, where we gassed up for our venture into the unknown.

We had both been into these national monuments on the Nevada/Arizona border before, and each visit had whetted our appetites for more. This Monday, we only had time to drive in and quickly find a campsite as the sun was setting again. The site we found was spectacular, but the weather had gotten even colder so there was no opportunity to clean up after the long day. I’d bought decent steaks and grilled them, to accompany more of my friend’s salad. And I felt, more than on previous nights, the hassle of the extra chores I have to do to care for my aging body while camping, and how much harder it seems to be to do everything with my cheap, elderly camping gear. All the doors of my vehicle creaked loudly on their dust-filled hinges and everything was plastered with dust from the back roads. I continued bitching and moaning while we were getting ready for bed.

This site was a few thousand feet lower than last night’s, and despite the increasing cold I was unable to sleep in my over-insulated down bag, going to bed feeling dirty and getting even sweatier, tossing and turning in the confined space. I ended up resorting to another sleeping pill just to salvage a few hours of rest before dawn.

Suffering Oasis

By Tuesday, my friend had gotten a weather forecast on his smart phone. We were at the beginning of a serious cold wave. Everyplace in Utah was heading toward the teens at night. My friend really needed to stop driving and start hiking, and he suggested we head east to find a base camp at lower elevation – hence warmer – in the adjacent national monument, which was terra incognita for me. We could camp there for days and hike off in different directions. He seemed to know exactly where to go and sang its praises, so I packed up and followed his vehicle into new territory.

The first part was driving over a pass that I’d long wanted to see. I was actually more interested in the mountains above the pass, but on our low-elevation agenda we dropped down the other side into a vast basin rimmed by low cliffs in the far distance. Those cliffs were apparently our camping destination.

First, he led me to a sprawling oasis, one of the biggest I’d ever seen in the desert, reaching down a shallow valley surrounded by low, stark volcanic hills. It was incredibly lush with tons of unfamiliar vegetation, including screwbean mesquite, but it was also overrun by burros, and there were tiny tropical fish in the water, probably introduced mosquitofish. Someone had started to build a steel fence to keep out the burros, but they’d abandoned their supplies with the job unfinished and the damage continued.

I also found several examples of honey mesquite burdened with mistletoe, again negating my former belief that it stuck to catclaw acacia, and supporting another friend’s observations in his community by the river.

We hiked through much of the oasis and had lunch there, before continuing deeper into the national monument. Like the canyon with the bighorn drinker, this desert spring was a once-magical place that both impressed me and made me sad.

Max Bails

The next road took us up onto a volcanic plateau, and that’s where things turned really bad for me. As if I hadn’t been having problems all along!

Like me, my younger friend had recently bought an off-road vehicle – in fact, just before the trip, so this was literally his first chance to put it to the test. His was used like mine, but much newer, larger, more expensive, and more capable in some ways. The differences really came into high contrast on these backcountry roads (see video in Part 2).

The road to his proposed campsite was a track over a plateau of embedded volcanic cobbles, and he immediately raced off ahead of me. Meanwhile, my vehicle – with all new shocks and struts and reduced tire pressure – was riding so rough that I had to slow to less than 5 mph to keep from getting shaken apart. Eventually he got so far ahead that he stopped and waited. When I caught up I was totally freaked out. I said it would take me until well after dark to reach camp at this rate, and we all knew how little I liked that.

So he suggested we turn around and re-enter the other monument, where there was a good campsite he knew about a ways to the south, on a good road.

But I misunderstood him, and first, he led me much deeper into the Arizona side, to cross back over to Nevada at a place far from where I expected. He was moving so fast up ahead there was no way I could signal him to stop, so I just followed, shaking my head in frustration. At least this particular road was much smoother than the previous.

When we finally emerged onto another high plateau, I saw his vehicle parked by the road while he explored a small pile of boulders. He said there were several possible camping areas here on the plateau, but they would all be really exposed to wind. The site he had in mind was farther south, off a side road that he claimed was well-graded for passenger vehicles like the vans and big RVs we’d seen yesterday on the way in. Then he raced off again.

Well, the side road turned out to be almost as bad for me as the volcanic cobbles. It ran over dikes of rock and sections of really coarse gravel that threatened to shake my vehicle to pieces, and I finally totally lost my temper. Ignoring my vehicle apocalypse, I sped up and raced after him, bouncing and banging over the rocks and gravel. I caught him just as he was disappearing down another side track toward a big wash, in an area of low, stark volcanic hills with no trees, boulders, or shade of any kind. I honked for him to stop, and we both got out and met halfway between our vehicles. I announced that I was leaving, would head back to town, and probably proceed onward to Utah from there. We hugged, and that was the end of our trip together.

I drove more carefully during the long slog out of the monument, and took the river road up to the nearest town, where there was a Best Western where I could earn points. Near the motel I found a car wash which would be my first stop the next day. I was sore all over and took a pain pill before warming up leftovers in my room and hitting the sack early.

Next: Part 2

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Desert Trip 2022: Prologue

Friday, November 4th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

Coming Home

Three and a half years had passed since I’d last visited my place in the desert, the place I’ve long called my spiritual home. That’s the longest absence in the 32 years since my Los Angeles friend and I bought the place, but the time span of three and a half years doesn’t begin to convey the changes I, and our society, have gone through.

COVID being the most obvious one, of course, and the reason why I didn’t visit in early 2000. But then my house caught fire, I was only minutes from dying or losing it completely, I had to shuffle between emergency housing for over a year, and repairs still haven’t been completed. Shortly after the fire, I had a near-death experience during a routine dental procedure. And this year, I was hospitalized for three weeks with a mystery illness and again came close to dying.

Since 1989, I had visited our land at least once a year, except for the years 2001 and 2002. That was also one of the hardest times of my life. Traumatized by the end of a relationship, broke and in debt after the collapse of my dotcom business, I’d begun reevaluating my whole existence. What had long felt like a spiritual quest now seemed an idle fantasy, and those remote desert mountains seemed irrelevant to my future.

But in 2007 I renewed my connection with the place by organizing annual campouts with others who love it, including several new friends – a new community brought together by our desert land. These eventually led to a more formal, conservation-oriented meeting in 2019, engaging scientists with Native Americans. I’d almost finished organizing the second meeting when COVID hit in 2020.

Why do I even own this place, and why is it so important to me?

Originally, in the mid-1980s, after falling in love with the desert and learning that people had lived there prehistorically, I gradually found myself wanting to live out there, off the land, like those prehistoric people. My artist friends and I had been camping out there throughout the decade, “domesticating” it for ourselves and generally finding it comfortable and pleasant as well as beautiful and magical. And as I learned more about the natural resources available, it seemed actually doable.

I took a course in aboriginal survival skills, and in spring 2002, after an unusually wet winter, I moved to my land and tried to survive. I relied on local water sources and began harvesting wild foods, but as most would expect, it’s not easy to go straight from civilization to a desert wilderness. And I had a girlfriend back in the city. So the desert would remain a place to visit, not to inhabit.

From the beginning, my co-owner and I had been telling people we wanted to be “stewards” of our land. On sporadic visits, we worked hard cleaning up trash and trying to eradicate invasive plants that conservationists said were destroying native habitat. But we were both struggling with jobs and relationships in the city and never had enough time to be real stewards in the desert.

At that last meeting in 2019, each of us spoke about how we came to love the desert, and what it means to us, and we each had completely different stories. In the end, it’s like asking: Why do people fall in love with each other?

Despite our early impression of comfortable camping, the desert eventually lived up to its reputation as a harsh mistress. Numbing, immobilizing heat in mid-summer. Sudden plagues of unknown insect pests that can drive you out of camp. Days of relentless, scouring gale-force wind that makes even the simplest chore an ordeal. Winter nights that freeze your water jugs solid.

I mentioned the prehistoric denizens, and my own failure to make the desert home. Does anyone actually live out there now? Not in our wild mountains, but a few diehard desert rats remain on or near the highway – like our local rancher, who lives in a house with indoor plumbing and electricity like the rest of us, driving to the nearest town for supplies. And the survivors of the last native inhabitants live similarly modern lives on their reservation, a few hours’ drive away.

Conservationists bemoan the damage caused to natural habitats and populations by industrial society: water sources fouled by domestic livestock like cattle and burros, fatal respiratory diseases spread to native bighorn sheep, riparian habitat degraded by invasive tamarisk, soil crusts trampled by off-road vehicles, underground aquifers threatened by commercial water development. I’ve heard scientists say the desert – or even the entire planet – would be better off if humans were completely eliminated.

A Different Kind of Trip

In recent decades, as my focus broadened to the native tribes and their territory in the Southwest, I spent less and less time on our land and more time exploring other parts of that territory. Even though I allocated up to three weeks for these trips, driving hundreds of miles between states and mountain ranges stressed me out and left me with less time for camping and hiking.

I gave myself ten days for this trip, with no agenda other than simply to reaquaint myself with our land. It had been far too long.

Stuck in Flagstaff

It takes two days to reach the land, and Flagstaff is the midway point, where I typically stop for the night and shop for groceries and other supplies.

I’d spent a few hours on Saturday packing, and being out of practice, I’d forgotten how to protect my lower back when lifting the heavy water jugs, so I triggered my severe back pain and jinxed the trip before it even started. I knew it could only get worse since I would later need to lift the even heavier new ice chest in and out of the vehicle.

All my camping gear, except for sleeping bags, was new and untested, since my old gear had been destroyed in the fire. So another purpose of this trip was to test the new gear. (By the way, gas cans, carried in vehicle when empty, go on the roof when full. I use the small boxy cans because they’re easier on my back to lift and more stable on the roof.)

Late Sunday morning, after loading up, I started the engine, and felt it lurching and stumbling. There’d been no previous warning, so I shut it off and restarted. It seemed to be missing a cylinder, but it was driveable, and there was no way I was going to delay my trip another day to get it checked out locally. Maybe the problem would clear up as the engine warmed up.

Instead, the drive over the mountains to Flagstaff became a seven-hour ordeal. I faced a dramatic loss of power that required downshifting and revving to the redline to get up grades on the highway, and that was especially nerve-wracking on the interstate, under pressure from tractor-trailer rigs on a tight schedule and city drivers enraged to be caught behind me. And I was burning through fuel much faster, with gas prices that were already burdensome.

I made it to Flagstaff, but spent an hour Monday morning driving all over town trying to find a shop that would check my engine. The shop I finally found was downtown, but they couldn’t help me until afternoon.

Flagstaff is one of those Western boom towns that suffers from overdevelopment and hectic traffic. I’ve come to hate it, and strive to limit my time there to the bare minimum. But this time, I was stuck there for two days, most of which I had to spend wandering around town on foot, waiting for the shop to get started. My vehicle needed a tune-up, and parts had to be ordered overnight. And as a traveler from out of state, I was price-gouged by the shop.

I ended up walking loops around downtown, and out to the northwest along the Rio de Flag, a man-made drainage channel that features an artificial pond and riparian corridor. I spent hours one morning in the library reading from a surprisingly limited selection of magazines. None of my experiences made me want to return for more.

Finally, late Tuesday afternoon, I was able to do my shopping and hit the road, with only time enough to reach Kingman, a little over two hours west. By that time I needed to do laundry, in order to have enough clean clothes for a week of camping. So it was a third night in a motel – all in all, car trouble increased the cost of my already expensive trip by about 50%.

The whole time, I was suffering from back pain, wondering if and when it would immobilize me and require emergency treatment. And driving, hammering the accelerator to get up those grades, triggered my chronic hip pain. Was this simply destined to become another poorly-conceived trip from Hell?

My packing is always guided by a Gear List I started decades ago and have continuously updated, but I failed to update it before this trip, so there were some new developments, like a USB C adapter for my camera, that required a last-minute search in Flagstaff, and a few things I disregarded in my rush, like firewood, that turned out to be important once I reached the desert.

On the plus side, the forecast was for mild weather throughout my stay, with mostly clear skies and temperatures ranging from the high 40s to the low 70s. Unfortunately, this was the forecast for the nearest settlement on the highway, more than a thousand feet lower than I’d be camping, and I’d unconsciously stored it in my mind as the weather to prepare for – leading to some issues in the days ahead.

Next: Day 1

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