Thursday, June 20th, 2019
Saturday, September 7th, 2019: Arts, Visual Art.
I spent my childhood and youth mastering classical figurative drawing and painting, and as a young adult, I created large-scale figurative paintings and polyptichs from imagination, relying on my academic mastery of human anatomy and three-dimensional rendering. But after that, I turned my back on painting, realism, and major art projects, and for the past 37 years, I’d turned out hundreds and hundreds of spontaneous, simplistic, abstracted drawings on paper, most of which took me on average a half hour to complete.
In recent years, admiring classical works in museums, and reflecting on my earlier efforts, I began to crave a bigger challenge, to carry forward the progress I’d made as a young artist. When I made the change from polyptich paintings to drawings 37 years ago, I had consciously conceived my drawings as components of larger installations, and the new work would extend that idea. My most ambitious visual art project ever was conceived in March 2018 and begun in February 2019. Eight months later, after many interruptions, I’ve finished planning, drawing, and preparing the surfaces, and am ready to start transferring my drawings to them.
The craft phases of this art project remind me of when I was an art student at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios, laboriously preparing stone slabs for lithography. Both processes are essentially medieval.
This project is intended to be a prototype for a future series of works, likely to be executed in oil paint on wood. Unlike in art school or in the Middle Ages, I haven’t had anyone to show me how to do things – I’ve done a lot of online research but have had to rely mostly on trial and error to find the best methods. I haven’t had access to a proper studio or a workshop for the prep work, which has made the process extra difficult and time-consuming, as I’ve had to constantly move the art panels, supplies, and tools in and out of my house, through the kitchen, from the porch where I did the “messy” work to my music studio which is being used as a drawing, drying, and storage area.
Here are views of the some of the stages in the process.
Art: Inspirations
Art: Brainstorming, Sketching & Drawing
This initial creative phase of the project took 5 months.
Craft: Preparing Wood Panels
This phase took almost a month.
Craft: Tracing the Drawings
After the lengthy process of preparing the panels, I thought I was ready to start tracing the drawings onto them. But a closer inspection revealed that I had a little more work to do on the drawings – another reason why it’s good to step away from your work from time to time. When you’re in the midst of it, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
After a couple more days of drawing, I began the tracing: securing sheets of parchment over each drawing, and tracing every line with a fine-point pen. This took a week.
Craft: Building an Easel
Now ready to transfer the traced drawings to the wood panels, I realized I had nothing to hold the panels erect while working on them.
The traditional way to support a painting panel is the easel. A new H-frame easel large and sturdy enough to support my panels ranges from $200 up, but professional studio easels tend to be closer to $1,000 and up. There are alternatives, depending on the size and weight of your work. Small paintings can be done horizontally on a table top. If you have a solid wall wide enough for your panel, you can simply rest it on cardboard boxes and lean it against the wall, but it won’t be stable unless the panel or canvas is really heavy. Very large panels or canvases are simply mounted directly on the studio wall.
I don’t have an unused wall wide enough to work on my paintings, but after despairing at the cost of ready-made easels, I suddenly realized I already had an easel. I’d built it when I first arrived in New Mexico, to hold a small dry-erase board for workshops I was giving on my Wisdom Project. It was warped and lacked some features I would need, but with a little more work I thought I could transform it.
It turned out that I had all the wood I needed – surplus lumber from previous building projects. All I needed was about $60 of hardware. The project took about 14 hours, including trips to hardware stores.
First Steps in the First Wilderness Part 7: Early September
Monday, September 9th, 2019: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Pretty good monsoon rains so far; weather cool from previous day’s storm. Vegetation in the canyons even thicker, obscuring the trail in many places. This was a recovery hike for me, gradually recovering capacity after yet another chronic pain setback. Hiking out, I ran into a couple in their 70s who were planning to camp at the spring near the top of the mountain and explore the back country during the next couple of days.
Treasure the Relationships That Don’t Last
Wednesday, September 11th, 2019: Relationships, Society.
(Note: None of the couples shown in these photos are still together…but their relationships made all of our lives richer)
The Problem of Marriage
Can you be single and happy? Our society doesn’t seem to think so.
A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly is subtitled: “A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.”
The first sentence of the article begins: “Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage….”
The article never questions the institution of marriage in our society – the author takes it for granted that young adults are going to get married. The primary focus of the Northwestern course is to enable students to marry successfully. What they teach is, in a nutshell: figure out who you are first, then find someone who shares your worldview.
It’s good to see someone in national media talking about worldviews, after I worked for years to clarify what they are, and to convince people of their importance. But how accurate are the worldviews of 18-year-olds? Wouldn’t it be better to partner with someone whose worldview is radically different, someone you could learn from?
And what about happiness? What do we mean by that? If we mean contentment and self-satisfaction, isn’t it more important to learn, to grow, to change, to see the world clearly for what it is – which can result in discomfort, even pain?
Statistics show that roughly half of adult Americans are unmarried, and 40-50% of marriages end in divorce. These statistics are mirrored among my own friends and family. Should we conclude that up to 75% of Americans are unhappy, mainly because they failed to achieve a lasting marriage? As someone who is single late in life, has never been married, and has no ambition to be married, should I consider myself a miserable failure, or just totally irrelevant?
Actually, I suspect that many of my married friends might consider me a failure for those very reasons. As a young adult, I spent years single and celibate, and felt little peer pressure to find a partner, but when I reached my 40s and found myself between relationships, I came under more and more criticism of my choices and behavior. Friends pressured me to “put myself out there,” to find a compatible partner and avoid the tragic fate of being “old and alone.”
In our society, young adults are expected to find a partner, make a long-term commitment, live together, get married, and form a nuclear family. Everything from our legal and economic systems to our architecture are based on that. Our housing industry creates privacy for isolated units of consumers, with locked apartments for single people and childless couples, and the holy grail, the fortress of the single-family home, designed for the nuclear family.
The social norm of marriage is part of our culture’s overall plan for our lives: establish a career, get married, make a home, and have children. A failure in any of those is a failure in life, condemning us to unhappiness. Conversely, those who succeed in all four are encouraged to look down on the rest of us. And they often do, like smug children who are rewarded for following the rules.
Marriage is considered so essential to happiness and fulfillment in our society that biracial couples, gays, and lesbians have fought for decades for the legal right to marry. To those who’ve been denied this right, marriage is a precious accomplishment.
Each time I came to the end of a relationship, friends called it a failure and blamed it on some personal inadequacy I needed to overcome via soul-searching, therapy, or some other form of “personal growth.” The assumption, shared by the instructors of the Northwestern course, was that these short-term relationships were just the trial runs, preliminary to the real thing. If I could overcome my own problems, I would ultimately find and keep a life partner, and that partnership would become the foundation for my happiness.
The Atlantic article is yet another example of how national media encourage conformity to social norms that few of us question. And it highlights our society’s bias against aging without a partner. As we age, the pressure gets worse, and self-satisfied conformists smugly condemn us single elders as miserable failures.
Is this fair?
Seeing Only Failure
I began life in a nuclear family, but my parents separated and divorced while I was still a child. Then my mom moved my brother and me in with her parents, and the rest of my childhood and youth were spent in a traditional, multi-generational extended family.
But my grandparents and most of the families in our neighborhood had stable marriages, and the overwhelming message from media and the society around me was that you met your personal needs by finding a partner and pairing off. Marriage would be the ultimate result of that, and it would in turn satisfy your duty to society when you and your spouse produced offspring. Unmarried adults were oddballs, objects of suspicion.
My personal needs were abundant. I was turned on by girls from my earliest memories, but I was undersize and sickly as a child, so I was harassed and bullied by other kids. I needed companionship and comfort as much or more than most.
I became an adolescent as our country entered the Vietnam War, and my generation was inspired by what has come to be known as “the Counterculture.” Many friends in my peer group agreed that marriage was an obsolete institution of a failed society. Only conformists got married. Freed from society’s shackles, we nonconformists would love honestly, equally, and respectfully, and if we fell out of love, we’d simply part ways, hopefully as friends. Liberated by “The Pill,” we also resisted having kids, partly because we didn’t feel mature or stable enough, and partly because we believed our parents’ generation had screwed things up so badly that we didn’t want to take the chance of bringing kids into such a damaged world.
Although I’ve seen much more of life since then, and have acquired much deeper insights, my adolescent introduction to relationships via the Counterculture bore abundant fruit. Beginning in high school, I’ve had a long series of intimate relationships, most of which were monogamous and lasted from two to six years. Several involved living together, either in a private apartment or group home.
As the Northwestern University course recommends, my first long-term girlfriend and I did share worldviews. But as the instructors of the course should know, our 18-year-old worldviews could form no stable basis for a long-term relationship, especially in the volatile world we found ourselves in. We were unformed adults, wildly romantic, naive and ignorant. We thought we were Aragorn and Arwen from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The best that could happen was that our worldviews would change radically as we explored the world, exercising critical thinking, gaining experience, knowledge, and wisdom for decades to come. The chances of our relationship lasting through those changes was minimal. It would certainly be unfair to both of us to try to “work it out” as we both turned into different people, and it would seem unfair to society as well, especially if we’d had kids, only to separate and divorce like my parents.
My high school sweetheart and I rejected marriage, in keeping with the Counterculture, believing our bond was deeper and more sacred because we respected each other as distinct individuals. But we grew apart, and eventually broke up. And a decade later, as I turned 30, both I and society had changed in many ways. The Counterculture was seen to have failed – its critique of the Establishment may have been valid, but it hadn’t offered any viable alternatives. The world had gotten scarier – with everything from economic recessions to serial killers and nuclear meltdowns – and the future looked a lot less hopeful. And I had gone from a timid, uptight, naive, and ignorant small-town prodigy to the ambitious, aggressive leader of a big-city bohemian post-punk enclave.
My fourth girlfriend was a young professional woman from an elite college, who proudly considered herself a feminist. By the standards of the Northwestern course we appeared misfits from the start. I was immersed in my bohemian milieu, living in a communal loft in the midst of an industrial slum, experimenting with art, music, and drugs, while she was part of the newly-minted yuppie class, a compulsive shopper, living in a luxurious, frilly apartment in an upscale neighborhood. And she made it clear on our first date that she had a life plan, and getting married and having children were her primary goals. I was honest in my rejection of both, yet we fell in love and spent two rewarding years together, learning from each other, after which she married, had kids, divorced, and eventually remarried after her kids were grown up.
A decade later, when I met my seventh girlfriend, the world and I had continued to change. Some of my friends were getting married and buying houses. My long-secure day job was imploding. I’d achieved national recognition as a musician and bandleader, but I’d also become a serious outdoorsman, falling in love with the desert wilderness, studying aboriginal survival skills, dreaming of going “back to nature.” My new lover was much younger, nearly as unformed as I was two decades earlier, and I was her first really “mature” and caring partner. But whereas she wasn’t much interested in marriage, she did announce on our first date that she planned to have at least one kid.
Despite our differences, we also had a fulfilling relationship for almost two years, and I ended up loving her so deeply that she changed my whole vision of life. Toward the end of our time together I told her I wanted to work toward marriage, and if that happened, would like to have children with her. It was a momentous, scary prospect that put butterflies in my stomach. A few months later, she left me for a man her own age.
Three of my long-term relationships, including that one, have ended in anger and pain, resulting in lasting grief and disillusionment and the criticism of my peers. There were long periods of celibacy between some of them. And ultimately, after the tenth relationship ended traumatically, years went by without one, until I found myself “old and alone.” Was there really something terribly wrong with me, as some friends had suggested?
I always paid close attention to my friends’ relationships. A few of them were never alone – they were always either dating, with ever-changing partners, or in some kind of relationship. Some were more like me – holding onto a relationship for a while, going through a more or less difficult breakup, then being single for a while before finding someone new. A few of my friends achieved stable long-term relationships. Some got married, often for economic reasons. Some of those had kids, while others stayed childless.
Some of my girlfriends left me for abusive men, which turned out to be a pattern for them. I suspect there’s an unconscious belief, on a biological level, that strong, aggressive men will be better protectors, although it’s actually more likely that they’ll be abusive. And both friends and girlfriends sometimes fell into “co-dependence” on alcoholics or addicts. I had a couple of girlfriends – artists both – who turned out to be addicts and were occasionally violent, and one – highly educated and creative – who inherited mental illness from her mother. After being burned enough times, I developed zero tolerance for the addiction or instability of others.
But from earliest adulthood, I always had a few peers who were perennially celibate and frustrated, apparently due to low self-esteem. Some of them self-medicated with drugs or alcohol. Some of them had an occasional one-night stand that left them even more miserable. Those of us who regularly got laid, and those of us who were mostly in relationships, always pitied them, and if we couldn’t sustain a relationship very long ourselves, we always feared we’d end up like them. The Counterculture slogans of free love and open relationships had long been forgotten. Instead of being liberated, we were paranoid of being left alone in a world that made relationships ever harder to form and sustain.
It got worse as we got older, and more of my peers got married and had kids. The older I got, the more I saw how the solitary among us were pitied, and the more difficult it became to be single, because I felt inferior, and I was afraid it was finally all over for me – I’d never have another girlfriend, never find a life partner, let alone my mythical soulmate.
When I made perhaps the most radical move of my life – the move from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’d spent thirty years, to a remote small town in the least populous corner of New Mexico – I’d been single, celibate, lonely, and depressed, for five years. Frankly, one thing that encouraged me to settle here is that on my first visit, I met more attractive single women than I’d met in all those years of loneliness in the crowded megalopolis.
I spent the first few years flirting with and getting to know all of those women, and the more I got to know them, the more red flags appeared. Eventually, I found myself lonely and depressed again in my new home.
Finding Myself
Before moving to New Mexico, during a long period of unemployment, I’d started a project to finally figure out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing here on Earth. I studied ecology and anthropology, and tried to make sense of powerful visions that I’d had throughout life, visions that seemed “spiritual” for want of a better word.
Venturing into the past, and into the spiritual realm, and trying to envision the future, made me aware of alternate interpretations of time – the diverse phenomena of motion and change. Our technocentric culture is ruled by the linear time defined by our machines – the strictly ordered forward progression from past to present to future, in standard increments of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Alienated from nature, our way of life perpetually creates problems, so we envision the forward march of time representing “progress” from the problems we created in the past to the imagined solutions of the future, and we want each generation’s life to be better than the previous.
Traditional societies, which depend more directly on nature for their sustenance, tend to seek stability and sustainability rather than change and progress, because to thrive, they must stay within the finite limits of resources in their local habitats. Thus they experience time in the repeating cycles of nature: the solar day and night, phases of the moon, seasons and harvests, and the longer cycles of drought, fire, flood, and human generations. Instead of associating their past with problems and their future with solutions, they honor their past and work to make sure the future will be just as good. This may be called cyclical time.
With their deep communal memories of cyclical time, oral cultures move through a landscape teeming with potential phenomena from both past and future, so unlike us, they’re prepared to adapt to surprises. Thus they may also visualize time as a lake, in which the surface is our present consciousness, and the depths represent the continuum of experience, past and future. I experienced a powerful vision of that simultaneous time once, with loved ones from my past, as well as strangers from my future, rising briefly from the depths, only to plunge back down into the darkness again.
To make up for the lack of attractive single women in my life, I had added a few images of past girlfriends to the walls of my house, and I’d put together “scrapbooks” to memorialize our relationships. Unconsciously, I was manifesting simultaneous time. One of the unexpected consequences of aging, and my new phase of life, was that I could truly live in the past, present, and future simultaneously.
As I observed my family, friends, and acquaintances in this new light, reflecting on their experiences and relationships and comparing them to mine, I suddenly realized that despite coming of age in the Counterculture, I’d been made to feel inferior as a celibate single person, and when a relationship ended, society had made me feel worse about the breakup.
But now, reflecting on the long series of romantic relationships I’d experienced, which felt just as present and real as anything in my current life, I felt like I’d achieved more, in some ways, than people who’d married young and maintained stable lifelong marriages.
I began to see the pain and trauma I’d experienced in a few of my relationships, and in some of our breakups, as priceless inspiration for some of my best art, music, and writing. All of those relationships, from first to last, were physically and emotionally rewarding. In all of them we professed profound love for each other and shared countless moments of warm caring and tenderness. None of my relationships were abusive. I’ve loved deeply and intensely and have been loved deeply back, year after year.
By spending at least a year – a full round of the seasons – in each of those relationships, we’d gotten to know each other in the context of natural cycles, in cyclical time. And now, all of those partners are still with me every day, in my growing awareness of simultaneous time. Most of them are still friends, though we may never see each other again – and I still feel the love we shared as a daily part of my life, every bit as real as the pain and frustration of chronic injuries and disabilities that come with aging.
I compare this new awareness with the previous belief, reinforced by my closest friends, that as each relationship ended, it became a failure, proving there was something wrong with me that had to be fixed, either through soul-searching, therapy, or some other form of “personal growth.”
The revelation of this past year is that contrary to the assumptions of the Atlantic article and many of my friends, happiness can result from a long life of “failed” relationships. Far from failing in my ultimate state of singlehood, I’ve achieved deeply loving relationships with not just one, but many diverse partners, in which we lived adventurous and fulfilling lives together. Sure, there was plenty of discomfort, distrust, anger, pain, and trauma. But as an artist, rather than seeing these as evidence of an inadequacy that needed to be “fixed,” I now see them as precious raw material for my creative work.
It turns out that being an artist has determined the course of all my relationships. I’ve always had personal passions, goals, and projects that have either competed with, deferred, or replaced relationships. Some of those things I could do with a partner around, but many took me places where my partner couldn’t follow. I’ve used long periods of solitude to take chances, explore dangerous places, and get a lot of work done. Some have called me selfish. It looks like I’ve been unable to let go of my ego, unable to lose myself in something bigger, whether a one-on-one relationship or a community where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
That’s partly true, but hardly anything in life is ever that simple. Like most artists, I’ve had to have a “day job,” conscientiously giving decades of my life to other people’s projects and the collaborative work of teams. I started a harvest festival as a gift to a community I wasn’t even part of, and have spent 13 years volunteering to make it happen.
And while in relationships, I’ve sincerely tried, and sometimes succeeded, in giving selflessly to those I loved. You can ask any of my ex-girlfriends about that.
My newfound contentment and appreciation of my past relationships doesn’t mean that I want to restart any of them! On the contrary – our paths diverged for good reason. We are all different people now, and what brought us together originally is no longer there.
Not the Only Way
Is marriage really essential to happiness?
What about the broader notion of “partners for life?”
The nuclear family?
Are any and all of those valid goals for young adults?
Are married people successes, and single people failures? And should solitary elders regret their failure to maintain permanent relationships?
The Northwestern University course maintains that a marriage can be successful if you first figure out who you are, then find someone who shares your worldview. But in a society as patently dysfunctional as ours, and as I certainly learned, finding out who you are is a lifelong project. If you’re really diligent about examining both the world and yourself, your worldview is guaranteed to change. What are the chances of your partner making the same changes, and continuing to share your changing worldview along the way?
We should never forget that we’re animals. The survival of our communities depends on at least some of us reproducing, and reproduction requires partnership. Many of us are clearly driven by biology to find partners we can reproduce with, without even thinking about it. Most of my peers did think about it, though, at the time when we were becoming adults, and we put off having kids until very late, if ever.
Anthropologists like a teacher of the course at Northwestern should be aware that marriage in our sense is the exception, not the rule, across the incredible diversity of human societies. In many, if not most indigenous societies, men and women pair up opportunistically, stay together as long as it works, then drift apart. They may have children together, but those children are raised by the community, not by a stable “nuclear family” in a private fortress home. The lives of both parents and children take place in the context of a small, intimate confederation of people of all ages and genders who work together to take care of each other, rather than in the context of atomized families that live isolated from each other in private homes like ours. Traditional societies tend to lack the stigmatization of single people that our society perpetuates.
The evidence shows that marriage is no sure path to selflessness. Many or most marriages have a dominant partner and lead to oppression or divorce. From my point of view, it isn’t just biology that drives people to get married and/or form permanent partnerships – it’s also insecurity – the fear of being on their own and taking risks. They seek safety and security, whether real or an illusion.
My Quest
Whereas some of my girlfriends and peers started adulthood with a conventional life plan, like getting married and having kids, I left my family home in the midst of a cultural revolution in which all the rules were supposed to be broken. For years I’d been told I had great talent and potential, and college was supposed to be an opportunity for me to explore that potential, and forge a new life path. But my family wasn’t rich, so like most of us I was forced to set aside my dreams in favor of developing a practical career.
Years later, when my first serious relationship ended and my time in the ivory tower drew to a close, it was like waking up from a coma. I found a magical world around me, waiting to be explored, and I started on my lifelong quest for experience, knowledge, and wisdom. That ultimately made it impossible for me to sustain a relationship, and it’s still ongoing. Death will be just another phase of it.
My quest has taught me different senses of time, different interpretations of what we call past, present, and future: living and loving in both cyclical and simultaneous time.
It’s showed me how extended families, in cooperative communities, can provide better caring and child-rearing than the nuclear family. How parenting can be uncoupled from romantic partnerships. How group living situations can be more supportive than the private home.
It has taught me not to wish for or expect a life partnership. On my quest, I’ve experienced love and caring in dazzling richness and diversity, and feel better for it. I treasure the moments, and no longer regret that they couldn’t last.
By falling in love with women who were radically different from me – and clearly incompatible – I learned new things and discovered new worlds, I gained wisdom and had memorable experiences that made my life richer.
Unlike most married people, who are constrained by the jealousy of their spouses, I don’t have to dismiss, forget, or deny my past relationships – I can continue to celebrate them.
Healthy communities need parents and children. I feel for my friends who are parents, and for their children, who, like the rest of us, struggle to deal with the dysfunctional society they’ve been brought into. I also feel for my aging single friends, who should treasure the moments of real connection they’ve had, no matter how few or far between.
My quest can be seen as the height of selfishness, but I continue to share what I’ve learned with anyone who will listen. My art, and what I’ve learned from my quest, are my gift to my community. It’s who I am, like it or not.
I’m not your type, you’re not my kind,
and love that’s born of this encounter
surely won’t endure the future;
and we know that love is blind.
But that’s no reason not to try!
but if we tried a thousand years
we could never get it right,
we could never get it better.
And now these days that get us nowhere,
these days of stormy weather,
these are the good old days,
these are the times we will remember!
(From “Tiare’s Theme,” a song I wrote in my 20s, after a breakup)
Monday, September 16th, 2019: Hikes, Pinalenos, Shake, Southeast Arizona.
This was our longest storm of the monsoon season; a vast, low cloud layer had covered the region, and rain fell intermittently all weekend. Without lightning and thunder, it was more like a winter rain.
Early Sunday morning, I decided to drive back across the state line to the Sky Island, to finish one of the hikes I’d never had time to finish before. The time difference, gaining an hour, was in my favor. I’d end the hike around sundown, but there’s a small campground at the trailhead, and I figured it would be empty due to the weather. So I loaded my vehicle with camping gear.
Unexpectedly, the rains had brought wildlife onto the highways. Shortly after I left town, a quail ran under my vehicle, and on the road to the Sky Island, a small bird dove suddenly out of the sky to hit my front bumper. Returning in the evening, I rounded a bend to surprise a large snake coiled in the middle of the road, and shortly after that, was barely able to miss a flock of two dozen turkeys running down the road en masse.
I was returning in the evening because when I got to the trailhead that morning, I discovered I’d forgotten my sleeping bag. What’s more, I’d forgotten my hiking orthotics, so on this steep hike I had to use my street orthotics, which aren’t as protective.
Overnight rains had drenched the thick vegetation that covers the trail, so that within a few hundred yards my boots and pants were soaked to the knees. The trailhead temperature was in the 60s, but the clouds parted, and after a little climbing, all my clothes were soaked from head to toe with either rainwater or sweat.
The clouds closed in again in afternoon, with sporadic drizzle, and on the upper slope the temperature dropped into the 50s. This is a well-maintained trail because it climbs through intact forest that was missed by the big wildfires on the crest, but for the same reason, once I entered the pine forest, I had no views. All I could glimpse between breaks in the trees was low clouds.
I’d never seen so many deer – white-tails – in any forest before.
The top of the trail, which I’d often fantasized about, was anti-climactic, because it just ended at the paved crest highway, with all the slopes and views hidden in cloud. Dripping wet, I trudged the five-plus miles and 3,000 vertical feet back down the trail.
Monday, October 7th, 2019: Cookes Range, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
First Visit: October
Local Landmark
I live on the southern edge of a vast mountainous zone extending at least 250 miles from east to west. But the peaks of this zone are uniformly rounded and undifferentiated. Our horizon consists of nothing but long ridges and gentle humps – nothing like the craggy, dramatic peaks we associate with the Rockies, the Sierra, the Tetons, the Alps, or the Andes. With one exception.
The landmark peak of our region features a dramatic granodiorite spire, dominating its small mountain range, which stands isolated in the midst of a high-desert plain southeast of here.
Conflicting Information
One of the first locals I met said he’d climbed it with friends in his youth. I had mountain-climbing aspirations in my own youth, but my focus had shifted, and now I was more interested in wildlife, watersheds, habitats, and ecosystems. My hikes usually led me to the top of a peak, but only to gain the views that would put my ecological knowledge in the context of the surrounding landscape.
Still, I’d read up on this peak when I first arrived, and the hike sounded daunting. I got it in my head that you should never try it alone. I’d heard it was something like a 12-mile round-trip with thousands of feet of elevation gain and technical rock climbing skills needed to get to the top, and if you started at dawn, you still might not make it back down by sunset.
However, despite its prominence as a local landmark, it wasn’t really that tall. The mountains I normally climb range from 8,000′ to 10,000′ – this was on the low end at 8,400′, and it wasn’t forested, so it didn’t have the habitat diversity of the taller peaks.
But it’s less than 40 miles away as the crow flies, and it was hard to ignore as I continued to look for new weekend challenges, so eventually I resumed my online research. The range wasn’t part of a national forest – it was managed by the BLM – and although there was a long record of people climbing the peak, the trail was not formally maintained, and both maps and directions differed widely from source to source. The only thing they all agreed on was the main access road. This county-maintained gravel road led in from the south, which would add a half hour or so to my drive.
Regarding the granitic spire at the top, sources said it requires either a Class 2+ or Class 3+ “scramble” to ascend, and everyone recommended not looking down, to avoid vertigo. Sources differed widely on the hiking distance – from 5 miles to 12 miles round trip – but they agreed roughly on the elevation gain: 2,600′ to 3,000′ cumulative. The differences apparently had to do with how close you could drive to the trailhead, on a newly-created BLM dirt road that was very bad and absolutely requires high clearance and 4wd.
The mountaineering class system is Greek to me – I’ve been climbing rocks and peaks for over 40 years without using it. Apparently Class 2 means scrambling up a steep incline, using your hands from time to time. Class 3 involves “moderate exposure” to a fall, carrying a rope for backup, and using your hands full-time. Hiking alone in the sandstone canyons of Utah, I often run into situations that I know I could handle, but don’t feel comfortable trying without other people to back me up. All of these situations involve using my hands full-time, but I have no idea where they rate on the Class system, nor am I interested. I just figured I would make a judgement call when I got up there, and if I didn’t feel comfortable climbing the last hundred feet or so to the top, so be it. Thank God my self-esteem doesn’t depend on things like that.
I got a reasonably early start for a Sunday, finishing my domestic chores and leaving home before 10am, but because I had to drive 10 miles past the mountain range and loop around east and north again, it ended up being a late start to the hike. The sky was fairly clear and the air was warming back toward the 80s in the high desert foothills where I would start the hike, and it was very windy when I arrived in the range. I mainly worried about high winds on the peak blowing my precious straw hat to kingdom come. If it came to that I’d just have to stow it in my pack.
The roads got more confusing the farther back I went, passing occasional cattle and isolated stock tanks in broad grassy basins that narrowed into shallow canyons embraced by the foothills. I didn’t see a house anywhere, but I eventually came to a corral and a locked gate. I’d brought the conflicting directions with me and compared them with what I encountered on the ground, and finally figured out which turn to take onto the BLM road.
That road provided the first serious test of my 4wd Sidekick. It was exceedingly rocky and deeply eroded, with patches of loose sand between the rocks – very slow going – but the Sidekick was more than up to it.
Online sources seemed to agree that you could cut up to 3 miles off your round-trip distance by driving this road to the “4wd trailhead,” but by 12 noon, more than two hours from home, I was well past where this trailhead should’ve been. I came to a stock tank with a disabled windmill and solar pump, and pulled off the road. I figured I might’ve passed the “trailhead,” but in any event it was time to stop driving and start walking. It turned out the trailhead, unmarked but obvious, was another half mile up the road.
Cairns and Cowpies
The trail begins as an abandoned mining road, eroded into a shallow gully, that leads from the more recent BLM road straight up an alluvial fan to the foothills. It’s marked by hundreds of cairns – one disgruntled online peakbagger said it was “over-cairned” – and in general this amateur trail is much better than most of the government-maintained trails I hike. Entering the foothills, it ascends a steep, narrow canyon, through dense brush, juniper, gambel oak, and pinyon pine, toward the left shoulder of the spire. The canyon bottom and surrounding slopes are very rocky, with many sheer cliffs that make bushwhacking off the trail virtually impossible.
There was a little water draining from the peak most of the way down the canyon – the higher I got, the more water I found seeping out of the rock cliffs – but there was also a lot of cowshit all the way to the crest of the range. BLM: Bureau of Livestock and Mining. Despite how wild it looks in the pictures, it felt less like wildlife habitat than most places I hike, and more like a big hilly ranch.
It was a steep, steady climb, with fewer switchbacks than most agency-designed trails, but it was such a high-quality trail that I was able to make pretty good time anyway. With the spire looming high above me most of the way, eventually I came into the grassy meadow of a saddle below the peak. Here, an old barbed-wire fence, mostly intact, delineated the rangeland on the east and west sides of the mountains. And here the trail failed me, at least temporarily. Cattle had made tracks in all directions across this saddle, and cairns were few and far between. By scouting around as usual, I was finally able to pick up the trail again. I was a little concerned about finding my way back, but as it turned out, I wasn’t concerned enough.
Scramble in the Sky
Getting closer to the peak, I was wondering more and more if I’d be able to handle the classified “scramble” up the rock face. Looking up from the high saddle, I thought I could guess what would be the easiest place to scale the bare rock. But it was still farther away than I thought.
From the saddle, the trail got much steeper, rockier, and more precarious. Midway to the spire there was a fifty-foot rock face I crossed, using a narrow crack, and halfway across, clinging to the bare rock, I encountered a baby rattlesnake hiding in a fissure. It got really upset and I had to find a way around it.
If I had looked down at times like this, I could’ve easily freaked myself out. After all, I was clinging to bare rock 3,500′ above the desert floor. But that never turned out to be a problem. I’ve always been a good climber and my concentration up there was as solid as ever.
Finally I got to the penultimate scramble. The cairns leading me up from the saddle had been plentiful, and I could see they continued up this slanting crack in the side of the spire. It definitely required both hands and feet, and I decided to leave my pack at the base of the rock, so I wouldn’t have to worry as much about balance. Then I started up.
It’s funny – like I said, while I was climbing, I didn’t look down. But I can see from the photo I took while climbing that despite the putative classification of 2 or 3, you are totally exposed to risk of death while climbing this spire! If you fall, you are not just injured – you die, bouncing down hundreds of feet before your battered carcass gets stopped by some bush.
But for me, the climb itself was easy, and I didn’t feel like I was taking unnecessary risk. And at the top, there are gentle talus slopes to cross, again marked by cairns, to get to the actual peaks. There are two, a lower south peak and the higher north peak, which has the only actual 360 degree view in our region.
The wind had died down and the weather was perfect up there. I spent a half hour or so soaking it all in. I signed the log, and discovered I was the first person up there in the past ten days. Then I scrambled carefully back down to the grassy saddle. Which is where the day started going horribly wrong.
Descent Into Perdition
I thought I had a pretty good idea of how the trail crossed the grassy saddle. But after easily following the cairns down from the peak, I suddenly found myself at the old fence, with no more trail and no more cairns.
I scouted around briefly, then crossed the fence at a low point and continued down a gentle slope toward the ridge I thought I had come up earlier. Still no more cairns and no more trail. I kept going down because I was sure I would cross the trail before I got to the ridge.
I spotted something that looked like a trail off to the left. I followed it farther down the ridge, and soon encountered a cairn. Great! I kept going, and the “trail” petered out. There were no more cairns.
I was on a steep knife-edge ridge above a deep, dark canyon, which I assumed was the canyon I’d followed to get up here in the first place. I found narrow trails with no cairns, and followed them for short distances, but they all turned out to be cattle or game trails, ending in thick brush.
The sun was going down, I had a 3 or 4 mile down-hike ahead of me, and even after I reached my vehicle, I would still be two hours from home. I was literally at the head of the canyon I believed I had come up, and although I wasn’t crazy about bushwhacking down a steep, rocky slope through dense scrub, I was sure that sooner or later I would encounter the trail. So I started down.
Emotionally, it was a little like jumping off a cornice on skis. You know you should be scared shitless, but you give in to the voice inside you that just says “Jump!” But here, instead of landing on snow, I was trying to maintain my balance on sharp rocks and boulders piled randomly and hidden under a maze of branches and foliage. I could at least console myself that I was wearing new boots with something called an “Ankle Bone Support System.”
I had to stay constantly focused, using both hands and struggling with the balance of my pack, as the canyon became more and more canyon-like the farther down I went. Oaks and junipers closed in and were joined by riparian trees and shrubs, and I had to shimmy under and between low branches, while constantly watching out for hidden rocks and boulders underfoot. Surprisingly, no matter how steep and rocky the slope, no matter how thick and trackless the vegetation, cattle had always been there before me. Down and down I went, but whenever I peered out through the vegetation I seemed just as high above the valley where my vehicle was parked. And there was still no sign of a trail.
I often wondered if I wouldn’t be better off getting out of this narrow, tree-choked gully and traversing the sides of the canyon. But the canyon itself was the fastest way downhill; traversing the slopes would slow my descent. What really worried me was that I’d get caught between sheer cliffs and a pour-off, a dropoff that I wouldn’t easily be able to get around.
I never did. But likewise, I never found the trail. I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the bottom, and the sun was still going down. It was really dark in that congested canyon. A year ago, when injuries and disabilities had eroded my confidence, I might’ve panicked at some point during that desperate descent. But I’ve been testing myself on difficult all-day solo hikes in remote places on a weekly basis for the past year, and I knew that panic was not an option. I briefly considered the possibility of having to spend the night in that nasty place. There were occasional ledges with tiny clearings. But I’d have to build a fire and spend the whole night sitting in front of it, shivering. I just kept going.
In one particularly challenging passage, I was climbing down a pile of sharp boulders and working my way through a maze of branches when my knee hit the point of a big rock and both hands reached out in opposite directions for something to steady myself on. I felt my left hamstring tweaking and my palms abraded by bark as my torso twisted in place, burdened by my pack. My thigh cramped up and the space was too tight to straighten my leg. It took me a few minutes to get out of that position, my whole leg throbbing. I thought I’d injured myself, but I knew that wasn’t an option. I had to keep going. So I ignored my burning hands and got my leg stretched out over a low limb, and took as many deep breaths as it required to relieve the cramping. And then I kept going downhill, through more mazes, taking big deep breaths and trying to concentrate even harder on where I was stepping.
After more than an hour of this, the canyon began to open out. I could see more of the valley below, and I looked up over my left shoulder for the distinctive spire. It wasn’t there! I suddenly realized that the canyon I’d climbed down was not the canyon I’d started up. The trail was a half mile away, in a completely different drainage. But in my favor, although I still had a long distance to bushwhack down this canyon, it should actually come out closer to my vehicle.
Eventually the slope alongside the canyon was gentle enough that I left the canyon bottom to hike down the open slope. But it wasn’t much easier – it looked grassy from a distance but was actually made up of randomly embedded rocks that I had to constantly watch for and step over or around. It was very slow walking.
I followed this slope down toward the valley for what seemed like ages. I still couldn’t see either the road or my vehicle. But finally, after crossing through a small pinyon-juniper forest, I spotted a segment of the road that I remembered. It was still far away, on the other side of the valley, but it was something.
I reached a heavily grazed part of the slope that was deeply eroded by gullies I had to cross, one by one, while swerving back and forth to avoid clumps of thorny mesquite. I lost sight of the road, but I suddenly spotted my vehicle, far off to the east. There seemed to be a deep canyon between us, so I tried to avoid it, veering to the left, but that just led me into more eroded gullies. Up and down, around and around. I was about to give up on finding the road when Voila! it appeared right in front of me.
I only had another half mile of road now before I’d reach my vehicle. The sun was just dropping behind the spire, on the western ridge, when I finally got there. Now all that remained was the perilous drive down the 4wd road – my Sidekick bottomed out once on a jutting boulder – and the long drive out the county road to the highway, and to the nearest town, where I hoped to get dinner sometime after dark.
Second Visit: April
Haunted By Bulls
Since my weekly hiking program hit the 20-mile, 6,000′ threshold, I’ve had to expand the radius in which I search for long weekend hikes to meet the goal. Hikes with at least 3,000′ of cumulative elevation gain are the target, and they’re all at least an hour’s drive from home.
On Sunday morning, when I considered my options, there were really only three that were reasonably close. One I had hiked last weekend, and I avoid hiking the same trail two weeks in a row. Another exceeds 9,000′ elevation, where deep snow could still be a problem. The only one left was the Spire, which tops out at 8,400′, an hour and a half away.
My only real concerns with this hike would be the presence of cattle, and the lack of clear trail across the high saddle. I didn’t want to repeat my desperate thrash down that steep ravine when I lost the trail on my first visit. It’s weird that this social trail has such a gap there, while all the rest of the trail is over-marked. And I’m never really excited about hiking in overgrazed terrain trampled and shat on by beeves. But I figured I could mark my way across the saddle with sticks or cairns or something clear enough to find my way back. And the cattle I’d just have to put up with.
The sky was mostly clear, and mid-day temperatures in the canyon bottom would be in the 70s. I arrived in the canyon earlier than expected, so I parked my vehicle near the start of the rough 4wd road and began walking the road itself, in order to increase my overall hiking distance and elevation gain.
The first thing I noticed was a couple of black cattle on the side of a hill, a couple hundred feet off to my left. One was lying down, but it immediately stood up when it saw me, and they both stood staring at me with great interest. They were both clearly males, and I interpreted this as bull behavior; cows or steers will usually either ignore you or start moving away. I’m paranoid about bulls because I’ve been charged or pursued by bulls in remote places, three different times during the past 30 years.
But that was always either solitary bulls, or bulls defending a herd. These guys were hanging out together, away from the herd, and may have just been young buddies. I kept walking, which gradually took me farther away from them, and they stayed put, while remaining vigilant. I passed the herd of cows and calves farther up the road. I knew they’d move around during the day, while I was up there hiking, and I hoped I didn’t return later to find the bulls blocking my way to the vehicle. But I’d deal with that when the time came.
Tower of Wind
I trudged up the 4wd road, winding around, down into, and up out of deep gullies. Picking my way over and around loose boulders and sharp ledges in the rough roadway, I finally reached the abandoned windmill where I’d parked the last time. A trickle of water was leaking out of the big stock tank and draining down into the ruts of the dirt road. I continued another 1/2 mile to the fork, and from there to the deeply eroded beginning of the trail to the Spire. My shirt and pants were coated with tiny winged insects that I brushed off from time to time.
Where the trail entered the mountains, there was a stream, running heavier than last time, and thick with algae and moss. I hadn’t seen any human tracks, but cattle had been up, maybe a week ago, pounding deep pits in the trail and shitting in the creek as usual.
The trail up to the ridge was much harder than I remembered it. It just seemed to be a steady 20-30% grade, exhausting, requiring regular stops to catch my breath. As with other recent Sunday hikes, I wondered if I’d give up and turn back before reaching the top.
There were butterflies and birds everywhere, but I was working too hard to pay much attention. Finally I reached the ridgetop, but that just led to another difficult traverse that I’d forgotten about.
When I reached the high saddle, and the trail disappeared as before, I started leaving sticks as markers to find my way back. It took me a while to find my way to the base of the super-steep hill that leads to the base of the Spire.
The wind, which had been gusty all the way up, was howling up there, and bitterly cold. I pulled my shell jacket out of the pack, put it on, and cinched down the hood. And then I started up.
This part feels like something out of the Lord of the Rings – you’re up in the sky, hoisting your way over tall, narrow steps of stone, between the piercing spines of cacti and yucca, feeling like an insect up there with the rest of the world laid out far below you.
It gets steeper and rockier as you go, until finally you face a rock wall that’s about 30 feet tall, with a zigzagging crack you have to climb. And that leads to the second wall, about 5 times as tall, with its own crack, ending at the talus slopes that surround the actual Spire.
I braced myself against that wind on the peak. Cliff swallows zoomed right past my head as I looked back down at the path I’d taken. I thought I could spot my vehicle, more than 2 miles away as the crow flies. And I could see a big white truck, parked farther up the 4wd road, a more recent arrival. I thought about the bulls and wondered what was waiting for me. I had a long hike back.
I pulled the log out of its jar in the summit cairn, and was surprised by the number of visitors in the past month. Especially since the only prints I’d seen on the trail had been from cattle, and none of them were recent.
Stuck in the Mud
From the Spire, the way down looks much more perilous than it really is. But it’s still a long, steep trail with a million loose rocks, and the piercing blades and spines of yucca and cactus.
I finally reached the 4wd road, and rounding a bend, saw the big white truck up ahead, and a couple of people doing something around it. It turned out they were stuck, with their big truck set exactly at 90 degrees blocking the road, and their back tires in a rut, in a little patch of mud from the leaking stock tank. They’d taken an ATV off the truck bed and it was parked on the bank above the road, just behind the open tailgate.
There was a man, maybe in his early 50s, and what I initially took for his daughter. But on a closer look, she might’ve been his younger wife. They were arguing about what to do, and neither one of them seemed to have any experience with this kind of situation. It was a 2wd truck and the tires were nearly bald. The guy said he’d been trying to turn around, but he’d clearly picked a terrible spot to do that, with a steep bank behind and a steep slope ahead of the truck. He said he’d let some air out of the rear tires, and I said not to let out any more or the tires could puncture. The woman was just standing there watching and looking worried.
“There’s some boards and other junk up around that old windmill,” I said, pointing up the slope.
The guy shook his head. “I don’t know what to do!”
I took a closer look at the tire, then glanced around at the disturbed ground below the stock tank. The rut wasn’t deep, nor was the mud, and the ground was rock hard all around. The rear tires weren’t even dug in – they were just sitting there in the little puddle. The only problem was the steepness of the bank behind the tires.
“What you need is a bunch of smaller rocks, laid out both in front and behind the rear tires. Just something to give you enough traction to get out of that rut, without destroying your tires.” I started gathering up little rocks and laying them in front and behind the tires. They just stood there watching me, seemingly clueless.
I knew it wouldn’t take much. After gathering and laying out a couple of small patches of rocks, I said, “That should do it. Just gun the engine. Once you’re out of that mud, you’re okay.”
He climbed in the cab and revved the engine, looking out the passenger window at me. But his tires weren’t even turning. “Are you in gear?” I asked. He looked down and blushed, reaching to disengage the emergency brake.
Then he gunned the engine, the tires immediately found traction on my rocks, and the truck took off out of the mud and up the dry dirt slope, where he parked it and got out.
“Yay!” cried the woman. “Thanks!” said the guy. “I’d give you a big hug if it wasn’t for this damn virus.”
“What’s up there?” he asked, looking up the road the way I’d come.
“I was just climbing the peak,” I said, pointing to the Spire.
“No, what about caves, and mines? That’s what we’re looking for.”
“I don’t know about caves. I’m sure there’s mines. This road seems to go all the way over the mountains, but I don’t think you should be driving it with that truck and those tires.”
I wished them luck and continued on my way. The little herd of cattle were grazing nearer to the road, but they ignored me, and there was no sign of bulls.
