Rocks
Vision Quest 2016: Bones of the Living Earth
Thursday, June 9th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Rocks.
Two of the three reasons why I first fell in love with the desert had to do with rocks. One: I spent my early childhood in the foothills of the Appalachians, playing around cliffs and caves and outcrops, and I love that in the desert, the bones of the earth are exposed, dominating the landscape, instead of buried under forest and foliage. And two: the boulder piles I first encountered in the desert offered natural shelter.
Mountains Alive: Landscape, Weather & Orientation
Peaceful peoples around the world hold mountains sacred, unlike dominant societies that disfigure them with prominent castles, industrial mines, watch towers and antennas.
Mountains are part of the living skin of the earth, rising, tilting, eroding, shaking, or erupting. They shape climate and weather, channeling wind and forming clouds, storing their water and making it available for humans and wildlife, and providing habitat and shelter for level upon level of diverse ecosystems.
Those who live, work or play in mountains rely on their peaks, pinnacles and canyons as landmarks for orientation and wayfinding. This is even more true in the desert, where the lack of uniform forest cover makes unique landforms visible.
Joints, Contacts & Basins: Storing & Releasing Water
People talking about mountains and water often refer to the rock’s permeability or impermeability, but mountains rarely consist of a single solid mass of rock. Granite is a plutonic rock, formed as a great mass of molten material rises through the earth’s crust, cooling and crystallizing into bulbous shapes that continue to settle and deform as they cool, resulting in a three-dimensional network of internal fractures or joints.
Rainwater or snowmelt trickles into these fracture networks, which become storage reservoirs as they slowly fill with water. When the water encounters a solid, impermeable surface below it, it will look for a way out: a seep or spring.
Channeling Water: Erosion & Sediment
In granitic mountains, the shape taken by the cooling surface of the pluton provides the original framework for the landscape. Once the living rock is exposed to the air, wind, rain and snowmelt follow hollows and joints on the surface, polishing and eroding for eons, sculpting canyons and valleys, carrying sediment down and away from the mountains, spreading nutrients and creating habitat for diverse communities of life.
Alluvial Fans & Basins
Sediment carried down the mountains by streams and floods is deposited outside, building up for eons to form alluvial fans which gradually bury the living mountains up to their shoulders, separating mountain range from mountain range by broad alluvial basins.
In the bottom of each basin, the alluvial fans of opposing ranges may meet in a big arroyo, or they may drain into a playa, a dry lake with no outlet, sometimes accompanied by a salt marsh and/or wind-formed sand dunes. Alternately flooding and drying out, dry lakes collect, concentrate, and expose mineral salts which become another valuable resource for humans and wildlife.
Volcanic Rock
The southwestern Mojave is crossed by a belt of recent cinder cones and the extensive lava fields they produced. Volcanoes are both destroyers, in the short term, and creators, in the long term: creators of mountain habitat, and conduits elevating mineral nutrients to the surface from deep inside the earth.
Plutonic Rock
We desert dwellers know that the best drinking water comes from granite.
Metamorphic Rock
Sedimentary Rock
Interface With Life
Biological soil crusts, which have been around much longer than humans, were one of my major discoveries on this trip.
Shelter
Tools & Signage
Mining
Mining by dominant societies has been terribly destructive to both human communities and natural ecosystems, but ironically, my friends and I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the desert for all these years if these mountains hadn’t been full of valuable minerals, and if we hadn’t had access to the roads built and long abandoned by miners and prospectors. I actually bought my land from an old prospector who just loved being out there and used prospecting as an excuse for camping in the mountains.
As likely applies to the other sciences, many if not most geologists work for private industry, prospecting for minerals to be exploited. Compartmentalization in science, as in the larger society, undercuts accountability, since a specialist has little or no knowledge of the larger system his work will impact.
Landscape Engineering
The engineering of natural habitats for sole human use appears to be the critical error leading to the downfall of dominant societies across time and space, from ancient city-states in the jungles of Southeast Asia, to the modern United States. You can see examples of this all over the desert.
Sunday, November 8th, 2020: Bear, Hikes, Nature, Pinalenos, Plants, Rocks, Southeast Arizona.
The days were getting cooler. About time – it was the second week of November! Last night we had a high wind advisory, so before leaving for my Sunday hike, I drove into town to check my burned house for fallen limbs. Sure enough, the small elm that leaned over the burned back corner had dropped a limb on my patio.
It had rained a little last night, but the sky had mostly cleared as I drove west. I’d decided to try a new trail, over across the state line, that I’d avoided in the past. I wasn’t sure why. The range was supposed to have the densest black bear population in the country, and this trail went up Bear Canyon. But black bears are shy – I was actually hoping to see one.
It’s hunting season and that area, although far from any town, is popular, so I was also expecting to run into hunters.
The two hour drive passes through some of the loneliest country in the West.
The approach is up a beautiful valley strewn with boulders, between two mountain ranges – the tall one I was hoping to climb, and a lower, drier range that reminds me of my favorite mountains in the Mojave. Golden granite boulders, cliffs, and pinnacles. Balancing rocks. Lots of them.
I wasn’t sure about finding the trailhead, but finding the turnoff was easy. And sure enough, the road to the trailhead was almost completely blocked by a group of hunters with several big trucks and a tent already set up. I waved and carefully passed them onto a badly eroded 4wd track that I pursued for another hundred yards before pulling off and parking.
It took me a while to find the trail – there was no marker, but after one false start, I backtracked and discovered a crude cairn. The trail turned out to be used and maintained primarily by cattle, until it started climbing out of the canyon onto the ridge, where it became a narrow footpath, sometimes hard to follow. I was the first person to use it in a long while.
Aside from the granite, I like the trails on this side of the mountain because they take you from high-desert Sonoran habitat up into mixed conifer forest – and the two ecosystems intermingle in a broad elevational band, in a really interesting way. This side of the mountains shows no evidence of having burned, but the habitat is really complex. I wonder if this is the way all our Southwestern mountains were before wildfire suppression?
It was a big climb – over 4,000′ in 6 miles – and it exposed me to a cold west wind most of the way. Once I reached the crest it was freezing cold, but still mostly sunny. I took a side trip up the little peak which is known for ladybugs in warmer weather, but today was far too cold for them.
The trail continues past the ladybug peak to connect with the scary road that climbs these mountains from the north side. On the way, I got a view north – to Safford, the “city of the plain” – and west, to the highest peaks of the range.
On the way down, I lost my footing in soft dirt trying to bypass a fallen log, and had a bad fall. The wind was brutal and I was starting to get a chill, so I put on all my warm clothing. Then I passed a young guy who was wearing shorts – but unlike me, he was still climbing and generating body heat.
I’d been impressed by the trail going up, but coming back down it seemed a lot rockier and more difficult. Once again, I was fooled by the time change. The sun was setting earlier than I expected.
Near the bottom, I heard footsteps behind me. It was the young guy from the crest. I asked him about his hike, and where he was from – he was from Indiana, like me! He said he’d gone stir crazy, trapped in Indianapolis by COVID, and had decided to take a solo three-week road trip around the west. He was working remotely and hiking as much as possible. He said he just can’t get enough of the West. I sensed that his days in the flatlands of Indiana are numbered. I don’t know how people can stand living in a place with no mountains…
Tuesday, May 14th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Plants, Regions, Road Trips, Rocks.
Day Four: Hike
Today was forecast to be hot, and despite the high wind forecast, the air was still and already warm in camp as I started the day. Tomorrow I needed to make contact with the folks who were traveling to the ceremony, and that would mean driving outside the mountains for a cell signal. But today was my free day, and I planned to hike.
Unfortunately, the flies and gnats were just as bad as last night.
Where should I go? On my last visit, almost 18 months ago, I’d done all the iconic hikes. There was one canyon I’d been wanting to explore, but the mouth of it was almost three miles away across gently undulating open desert with no chance of shade.
I finally decided to head up our main canyon, with the tentative goal of reaching its head on the crest, with a view east. I’d tried that once, 32 years ago, but had been stymied by a confusing maze of stone fins and pinnacles.
For the first mile and a half, my gaze was rooted to the sand of the big wash, where I was delighted at the bloom of wildflowers and puzzled by the vehicle tracks of trespassers during recent months. A big truck, some kind of UTV or ATV, and two or three dirt bikes. These people treat the whole desert as their God-given playground and can’t be bothered to walk anywhere; they consider it a failure if they have to get off their butts.
Before the trip, a friend had suggested I might find a decent bloom around the cave, but the flowers here in my home range were far more spectacular – and this was not even close to the best bloom I’d seen here. And that’s just the flowers – the rocks in this range are also more diverse and beautiful than those elsewhere in the desert. It’s wilder, richer, and more forbidding than other ranges I know.
Past the dry waterfall, I was approaching the old miner’s cabin, which used to be maintained by a family of gun nuts from Huntington Beach. The truck had to turn back early, but the dirt bikers and ATV rider drove up the banks to avoid boulders in the wash, trampling vegetation, until they reached the base of the old, deeply eroded road to the cabin. And that turned out to be just too rugged for them.
Fortunately the cabin is falling apart, the junk around it slowly rusting away.
Having reached the cabin, I remembered that an old, now-impassable road climbs behind it to mine works and a roofless drystone cabin farther up the canyon. I went a short way up that and discovered a developed mule trail with stone retaining walls branching off, appearing to lead into the next canyon south. This is a canyon I backpacked into and partially explored more than thirty years ago, but I remember nothing of its upper reaches. It’s hidden from below, which makes it doubly intriguing, so I made a snap decision to follow the old trail.
It was blocked in several places by big chollas, but it eventually led to a saddle overlooking the hidden canyon, and from there down into a side gully, where I stumbled upon a mine, almost completely hidden behind a thicket of catclaw acacia.
It turned out to be an unusually long tunnel for this range. It went almost straight back for more than 150 feet, and another man had explored it recently – I could tell because he’d broken a living branch of catclaw to reach it. Any tracks in this protected environment would last forever, and his were the only human tracks before I arrived.
I dug out and turned on my headlamp, and nearing the back, found bones, and then parts of animal skeletons – a spinal column, a collapsed rib cage, and what appeared to be a couple of skulls. And at the very end was a patch of damp mud.
The old trail had washed out around the mine entrance, but I could see some sort of manmade ledge farther down the gully toward the hidden canyon, so I climbed over the washout and kept going. A bend of the hidden canyon lay below me, and I thought I could discern a continuation of the trail across the slope above the bend, so I used that to reach a narrow stretch of canyon upstream. This canyon is exceptionally beautiful and decorated with spectacular rock, but it’s also full of long-established invasive tamarisk, in apparent equilibrium with native riparian vegetation.
Including honey mesquite! This is one of only two canyons in the range where I’ve found big stands, probably cultivated prehistorically by Native Americans. The other mesquite canyon also has spectacular rocks. I’d made the right choice in detouring over here.
I was amused to encounter a shrike who stood on a yucca blade only ten feet away from me, making continuous agitated calls while holding an insect in its beak.
I began encountering what would turn out to be a series of natural rock dams across the canyon bottom, some requiring technical bouldering moves to climb over. And suddenly I found myself at a fork in the canyon, where two branches of seemingly equal size converged. One featured a towering cliff and a narrows that looked potentially impassable, so that’s the one I tried.
I was able to get through the narrows, climbing more natural rock dams, and the canyon just kept getting more spectacular, until suddenly I spotted a pinyon pine ahead! This range is low enough that pines only survive on protected slopes at its highest elevations, so my heart always soars when I come to these trees that were so important to native people.
There were only a few in this stretch of canyon, but they beckoned me onward.
I next emerged into a basin where more drainages converged, and far above, I could see what appeared to be the crest, dotted with more pines. I wasn’t sure which route to take from here, so I climbed a rock formation a hundred feet or so above the wash, where I could get a panoramic view.
The main drainage came steeply down from a saddle that seemed to be on the crest, but I couldn’t tell if it would overlook the east side of the range or only the main canyon to my north. Also, the slopes of that drainage were really rocky and potentially hard to traverse. To the right was a slope that featured stretches of grassy ground, potentially easier to traverse, until the route vanished over a divide into a side drainage that seemed to lead to a higher saddle. I was sure that route would lead to the true crest, so that’s the one I would try.
To get there, I had to proceed up the main wash. But above it on the left was a sort of ramp that looked easier going, and after climbing it I discovered another big stand of mesquite. The mesquite here was really thriving – in fact all the vegetation here seemed to be doing better than that around the cave farther north.
Dropping back into the wash farther upstream, I reached a stretch of rugged ground congested with boulders, thorns, and cactus that took some getting through before reaching the grassy slope I hoped to take to the crest. This required a steep climb, but there were parts that almost hinted at a trail, and dramatic rock formations both near and far as landmarks to memorize for my return.
Wind had been rising as I climbed. The forecast finally seemed to materialize.
Up and up I climbed, over the divide into the next drainage. And there I began to find cairns. I believe these to be remnants of the old Sierra Club peakbagger group, and I dismantle them wherever it’s convenient – this is supposed to be a wilderness, not a recreational area. Still, it surprised me to find them in this obscure, hidden canyon that I hadn’t even explored until 35 years after first arriving. It suggests that even fewer Anglos know these mountains now than then, which has got to be a good thing.
Back and forth I meandered to avoid obstacles in the new drainage, steadily approaching what I really hoped would be the crest. As is typical, there were lots of fallen skeletons of big pinyon pine strewn across the slopes here.
Hours had passed since my planned turn-around time. The wind was howling as I reached a saddle on the crest, but I was ecstatic. I’d only been on this central stretch of crest once before, over 30 years ago, and never at this spot. I made my way higher and farther south to get a view of the iconic rock formations along the southern crest. Clouds were massing along with the wind and the temperature was dropping, which was fine with me.
I hated to turn back – I wanted to stay up there forever! That’s the way it always is. But the longer I waited, the colder my shower would be in camp that evening.
I had no trouble retracing my route down. And as usual, I paid more attention to the ground, finding a couple of old ram’s horns from mountain sheep, and a mushroom under a tiny nurse shrub.
It was when I reached the hidden canyon that I became entranced by the exotic rocks. The sky had grown overcast and mostly dark, and the wind bore directly down the canyon from the northeast. But in the lower stretch the sun came out again for a while.
The wind was so strong now, I was sure my tarp had blown away and been ripped to shreds in a catclaw. I’d forgotten to pack it away before leaving camp, and the little rocks I use to anchor the edges were surely inadequate. I feared I wouldn’t be able to sleep in that wind and would have to leave the mountains during the night.
But miraculously, my tarp was intact, and the wind died shortly after I finished my shower. The flies and gnats never returned, and I enjoyed a delicious dinner and a peaceful last night in my sacred mountains.
Since I’ve known these mountains by hiking them extensively for 35 years, I guessed that today’s hike only covered between 7 and 8 miles out and back, and when I plotted it on my mapping platform a week later, it turned out a bit under 8, with a little under 2,200 feet of accumulated elevation gain. But including many stops, it took 8-1/2 hours to complete.
It interests me to compare this with the hikes I do back home, which are all to some degree preparation for hiking in the desert. Two weeks earlier I’d hiked 18-1/2 miles near home in the same amount of time, with almost 60 percent more elevation gain, on maintained trails. The hardest hike I do near home, more than 16 miles out-and-back with over 5,000 feet of elevation gain, only takes a half hour longer.
Though much shorter, with much less elevation gain, today’s hike in my desert mountains felt harder than either of those, and as I discovered during the next week, it took a more serious toll on my body than any hike I’ve ever done near home – even the bushwhacks in severe weather. It was also more dangerous, but interestingly, I never stumbled or fell, which happens regularly on those hikes near home.
Numbers aside, it felt like one of the best ever, one I won’t forget. I wondered how much longer I’d be able to do this.
Monday, January 27th, 2025: Animals, Greasewoods, Hikes, Nature, Rocks, Southeast Arizona.
After my return from back east with increasingly crippling knee pain, my doctor had prescribed something that sounded familiar. Later, after looking it up, I realized it was an anti-inflammatory (NSAID) he’d ordered for my hip pain back in 2008, when I’d tried every NSAID on the market, and every one had caused stomach cramps so bad I had to reject them all, adding that entire class of medicines to my growing list of drug allergies.
But in desperation, I took a dose Saturday after breakfast, and then, immediately after taking it, discovered it’s taboo for patients allergic to the antibiotic sulfa. I’ve always been told I almost died of anaphylactic shock after being given sulfa at age 2.
To my considerable relief, I didn’t die. I didn’t develop stomach cramps, and three hours after taking the drug, my knee pain disappeared completely for the first time since early May 2024.
Okay, I thought. Let’s put it to the test. There’s a small mountain range over in Arizona that I’ve wanted to explore for five years. It lies directly across a lonely highway from the much bigger and much taller mountain range I’ve climbed dozens of times. It lies within the same national forest, but it’s neither federal wilderness nor wilderness study area, and as far as I could tell it’s all cattle range.
The map shows no hiking trails, but the mountains, rising from 4,600 to 6,900 feet in elevation, are traversed by a sparse network of dirt roads, only a few of which seemed to be maintained. Virtually no information about this little range is available online – hours from the nearest city, it seems to be ignored by hikers, mountain bikers, campers, and recreationists in general.
Recalling my history of conflicts with livestock, you might assume I would join the crowd and likewise ignore this unpopular rangeland. But the northern part of the range has one irresistible attraction: it looks very similar to my spiritual home, those sacred mountains in the Mojave Desert. It virtually screams “DROP ACID AND HIKE ME!”
So on Sunday morning, after taking a second dose of the new drug, I packed for an overnight trip across the state line, where for the first time since last August, I would try to hike more than a mile. My optimistic plan was to walk one of the abandoned roads from an interior basin up to a pass where I could survey the possibility of someday climbing to the crest. As usual in a situation like this, I really had no idea what to expect. I might run into an aggressive bull, or a locked gate with a No Trespassing sign, or a sandy road my truck couldn’t handle. My knee might betray me. In those eventualities, there were other less interesting options nearby.
It was another day without clouds, temperatures forecast to reach the 50s. Under full sun it would feel much warmer, if not for the steady west wind I found to be blowing all day. The ranch road in was very well-maintained, but my eyes were constantly drawn to the fantastic rock formations it twisted between, and I stopped every hundred yards or so for pictures. It was all even better than I’d expected – after cresting a low rise, you wind down into a hidden basin surrounded by low hills to the south and spectacular mountains, cliffs, and pinnacles in the west and north.
The ranch house lay just out of sight at the north end of the basin, but the road I wanted turned off south. The basin is dotted with huge spreading trees which I was surprised to identify as Emory oaks – we have much smaller ones around home – and in less than a quarter mile the road turned bad and I pulled off to park in a clearing near several of these majestic trees. At the edge of that lovely basin, in this landscape dominated by stone in endless organic forms, I was already in heaven and I hadn’t even started hiking.
The map shows a powerline following the road, and once there, I realized it’s actually the opposite – the road I planned to hike is the powerline utility road. It’s a minor powerline serving a ranch on the west side of the range, so since the powerline was laid, the road hasn’t been maintained, and coming from the east, I didn’t see any vehicle tracks until I approached the pass much later.
My knee seemed fine, and I didn’t anticipate any sustained grades to threaten it, but on every single decline, I practiced a duckwalk I’d found in a YouTube video by a physical therapist that was recommended to relieve knee pain. I did that all day, on what was probably a hundred or more short descents.
Cattle had used the road, but only rarely, and the most recent cowpies were a couple weeks old. I spotted a herd lounging a half mile north near a corral and water tank. Another hike I’d considered follows a dirt road that branches south, offering a possible route to the summit of the range. But when I reached that branch, I could see that the southern part of the range doesn’t feature those spectacular rock formations, so I kept going on my powerline road, forcing myself to move at a leisurely pace and take shorter steps than my body seemed to want to.
Up and down across side drainages, the road gradually took me higher above the basin, yielding better and better views. I found the fairly recent track of a single hiker who must’ve been about my size. I came upon modest ranch infrastructure, and mused enviously that this must be one of the prettiest ranches in all Arizona.
Eventually I could see the powerline heading up to the pass, the hills closed in at each side, and I began to wonder if my knee would really hold out that far. The past six months had been hell in so many ways. Taking care of my mother had distracted me some from the pain and the inability to hike, but my soul had been grieving, and I’d often wondered if I would ever be able to hike again. At times, my future seemed utterly hopeless.
In this basin dominated by oaks, I came upon the occasional juniper and was surprised to encounter small manzanitas. Back home, manzanita only seems to grow above 8,000 feet, but here – and in another range to the south – at similar latitudes, I’ve found it between 5,000 and 6,000 feet. Why the difference?
After more than two miles, my knee still seemed fine – another surprise, since for months, every time I’d walked a mile, I’d ended up in severe pain. The road became steeper and more deeply eroded as it climbed to the pass, but I kept moving carefully upward, admiring the steep, rocky slope on my right, behind which the northern crest was hidden, about a thousand feet higher.
That wind was howling down from the pass, and no matter how tightly I cinched my hat, it still blew off from time to time. But now I was sure I was going to make it, and since one of my favorite experiences is to crest a pass for the first time and see over into the next watershed, discovering completely new territory, I was really stoked. I’d been eyeballing possible routes to the crest on the east side, ever since beginning my hike, and now I would learn whether a better route exists on the west side, taking off from this road.
Wow! That wind was just blasting through! The west side of the pass descends at a much gentler grade, with the less interesting southern mountains on your left, but on your right, there’s more spectacular rock, and what appears to be a straightforward route upward to the crest.
It was no place to linger in this wind, but I began to believe I might return someday.
Of course, the trail back threatened to be much harder on my knee, since it was mostly downhill. But I kept carefully duckwalking down every incline, and it seemed to work. The low angle light from the western sun made everything in the landscape stand out now – my reward for the climb to the pass. And gradually, I realized I was experiencing a miracle – just as my mother has recently been able to stand up and walk after being confined to a wheelchair since September, I was now hiking miles without pain for the first time since early May.
I don’t buy the old myth, perpetuated by Western pundits from Aristotle to the new age self-help gurus of the 80s, that human life should be a quest for individual happiness. Happiness – a steady state of comfort and carefree living – has always been a meaningless concept to me. My curiosity drives me to take the kind of chances that result in moments of joy – like this day of pain-free hiking through a beautiful landscape – between long stretches of hard work and suffering. Giving up the extremes in favor of the safe and predictable seems like a poor trade-off.
My lower legs were now aching – anti-inflammatories do nothing for lactic acid. Charting my route later, at home, I would find I’d hiked over seven miles with an elevation gain of 1,000 feet. I can’t really describe how ecstatic I was by the time I reached the truck. In all those seven miles the only litter I’d seen was a single smashed beverage can. Without that, it would’ve been too perfect.
Driving out between the rock formations, I passed a late-model utility vehicle parked below some boulders and pinnacles, and realized this area is even more spectacular than the most famous bouldering destination in California, yet the online silence suggests it’s either undiscovered or ignored. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I’d reserved a room in my new favorite motel south of the range. And after a burrito and a peaceful night reminiscing about my hike, I emerged before dawn to find thousands of sandhill cranes flying directly overhead, moving north from the small lakes that dot the valley to the south. The parade lasted for at least 90 minutes – another miracle to top off yesterday’s.
