Monday, July 1st, 2024
Thursday, May 16th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Artists, Arts, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Stories, Trouble.
Katie
Now we approach the main event of this ceremonial trip to the desert, which I’ve been hinting at obliquely, because it was too immediate, too painful, and there were others involved whose privacy I need to honor.
Remember this is only my version – others will differ. Why do I share such personal stories? Is it even appropriate? For me at least, sharing and hearing your responses helps me process these difficult experiences.
Forty years ago I began exploring, discovering, and falling in love with the desert with Katie, a fellow artist, musician, and writer. A mutual friend had shared his discovery of a magical place, a small basin lined with boulders and surrounded by cliffs, and my partner and I turned a boulder pile there into a home away from home – The Cave. Katie was the one who first found artifacts from the indigenous people who once camped all over that area. Those sparked our curiosity, inspired our art and music, and set me on the path I’ve followed ever since, as I broke away from my colonial Old World legacy to become a student of indigenous cultures. All in all, we explored the desert Southwest together for eight years.
At our home in the city, she was my bandmate and songwriting partner. We were ambitious, we worked hard, we competed. We were leaders in a fast-evolving, unstable community facing one crisis after another. Neither of us set limits to what we wanted to accomplish – as our music gained followers and admirers, we both continued to write and make art, and Katie experimented with new genres and media, learning to reproduce prehistoric pottery and rock writing, building assemblages from materials found in the desert.
She was a force of nature, challenging everyone around her. She changed the way I live, making me braver, more confident, more proactive. She could’ve coined the Nike motto, “just do it”.
But her dark side included anger and violence, and in the midst of all that ambition, all that work, all that turmoil, our relationship fell apart. We tried to remain friends, making trips to the desert together in the new decade, but Katie began to struggle with inner demons that drove me away and eventually destroyed her.
By the time they did, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her for 24 years. None of her many old friends and admirers had, and few even knew where she was. Her surviving family chose me to lead a memorial ceremony at our cave in the desert, believing that our time together there had been the happiest period of her life. And as the date approached, I was forced to revisit the trove of her creative work that survived in my personal archives, and to review the experiences we shared in the desert.
I discovered a file of song lyrics Katie had written before and during our time together, and decided to try putting them to music. It went well, and in the process I awakened to the nature and significance of her talent, and came to see her and her work in a new light.
Together, we’d been too competitive, and I was too insecure. Katie lacked the experience to set her own lyrics to music, and as time went by, I’d resented the competition and refused to help her. Now, too late, I realized that while I was writing from my head, she’d been writing from her heart, her eyes, her ears, her nose, her skin. Her lyrics lacked the irony, the sophisticated vocabulary and clever turns of phrase admired by critics and hipsters – they seemed simple or even juvenile, but that’s because they were economical. They clearly and honestly evoked the strong feelings of childhood and youth and the sensory experiences of engaging with our beloved desert. I realized, too late, that she’d been the only lover who’d ever truly shared my passion for the desert and its native cultures, the only fellow artist who like me had found her greatest inspiration in the magic of the desert. And I realized, too late, the talent that we’d lost, and that she’d never been rewarded for.
Climbing the steep trail
Indian summer
Following ancient feet
Up to the hunting grounds
Where are the mountain sheep?
I keep looking around
Writing on the rocks
Said I would find them here
After we broke up, Katie continued working on music and art for only a few more years. Her demons took over, and as she lurched back and forth across the country trying to find work or shelter, she lost all her old music, art, and writing. My archives preserve the only significant holdings of her creative legacy, so before heading out to the desert, I turned them into digital files and printed scrapbooks to share with her family at the ceremony.
Day Five: Reunion
I usually hate to leave my land, but after yesterday’s hike I felt ready. Driving out the mouth of the big wash onto the alluvial fan, I got a signal, reached Katie’s family, and made a plan to meet them at their rental in town. I had a long drive ahead – I decided to avoid the washed-out, abandoned highway and take back roads for about 45 miles to the next highway. Those roads would be maintained, but were sure to be heavily washboarded. They drop 2,000 feet in elevation and cross much starker habitat.
The backroads gave me views of other beautiful, remote ranges. But my lightweight vehicle’s MacPherson struts made driving that washboard an ordeal. And as I approached town after three hours of stressful driving, I discovered where all the wind from the forecast had ended up. The entire valley was beset by towering dust storms, including the house my friends had rented. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, they had adult kids who hadn’t been born back then, and we spent hours catching up as the dust swirled and blasted around their compound. I used their wifi to book a room at a nearby chain hotel where I could get points. The place was rundown, but I was still exhausted from yesterday’s hike, and slept well anyway.
Day Six: Ceremony
Yesterday’s wind and dust storm had vanished by morning. I’d assumed we would drive and hike to the cave, do what we needed to do, and leave. But in the morning, it became clear that they intended to spend the entire day out there. So I led them all in a caravan across the desert. As I said, I had no plan, but I’d brought ingredients.
We parked and loaded our packs for the day. I’d briefed them in advance on the dangers of the desert: sunburn, dehydration, cactus spines and catclaw thorns. Now I told them the hardly believable story of how I’d first discovered and fallen in love with this beautiful place – the start of the greatest love affair of my life, and the only one that has lasted.
I led them to the Cave, past fanciful boulders and flowering cacti, and they each took a look inside, and assured me that they now understood why it’d been so important to Katie. Then I led them over to the larger rockshelter nearby where we could assemble in shade for the rest of the day.
My artist friends and I had originally fallen in love with the desert partly because in this place it had largely belied its nature as a harsh wasteland. Although it could get cold in the winter and on occasion the wind would drive us away, in general it was a really comfortable place to camp out. And that’s what we found today. It was warm enough that we could shift back and forth between sun and shade, from the intimacy of the big cave to the spacious view of the ledge in back. I’d worried that we might be spotted from the road and interrupted by authorities, maybe even forced to leave. But traffic was unusually light; few stopped and no one seemed to notice us.
I always prefer to enable a group to lead itself through consensus, and that’s what I tried to do here. I began by sharing my gifts, starting with the scrapbooks I’d spent the past week preparing. Throughout the day, they all studied them carefully. A childhood friend had brought sage bundles and set one burning. And I set up a boombox playing tracks of Katie’s music, so we were surrounded by her voice and her bass lines for the next two hours.
We made lunch, and part of the group moved out back for some sun.
After a while, one of the women asked if we could regroup to share our stories of Katie, so we gathered in a circle in a corner of the big cave. I was asked to begin, and I tried to tell the story of my time with Katie. We were all overcome as I described how I’d failed her – how the world had failed her, had never found a way to handle her talent, her brilliance that had destroyed her in the end. Then her younger sister struggled to express how much she’d loved and admired Katie – like Katie herself, the feelings we were bringing out were too hot to handle.
I was especially moved to hear how the younger generation had only seen Katie’s positive side – the loss was greater for them, to discover her work after they’d lost her forever. How strange that while she’d lived a long life, we were only honoring such a short period of it, saying that was the best. Had the rest of her life really been wasted? Apparently not for her nieces and nephews. So sad, so seemingly pointless that we were only celebrating her now, after she was gone. I was feeling worse and worse, guiltier and guiltier, that I hadn’t been able to help her, to save her.
The sharing of stories devastated and depleted all of us, and we were rising to disperse when Katie’s younger brother asked me for some songs. Of course, I’d brought my guitar – as leader, I was basically on call for this group all day – but I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I stumbled through the two songs of Katie’s that I’d put to music in the weeks before. The first was the song in which she shared the experience of discovering the desert and its cultures. By the chorus of the second song, the one she’d addressed to me personally, I was breaking down, and that’s how I finished. And then we all moved out back, into the sun. One of the other elders had brought a boombox with a mellow playlist, and as we talked, we became aware of a big male chuckwalla, the largest lizard in the desert, perched on the tall boulder pile fifty feet away.
He made his way down toward us, and clambered into a flowering shrub where he began eating the blooms – they’re vegetarians, but I’d never actually watched one doing that. They’re usually shy, but some of our young ones approached within eight feet, and he ignored them. Then he moved even closer to our group, seemingly to observe us. As the young people said, “This is his home – we’re just passing through. He feels safe here.”
The sun was sinking toward the western cliffs. We’d spent seven hours out there together. Again, one of the women came and asked me to lead them in the final phase. So we packed up again and walked over to what would now be known as Katie’s Cave.
The women surrounded me outside the Cave and we conferred and agreed on the details. Then they followed me inside and formed an arc around the sister and me, who would perform the ritual. At this point, we were all overwhelmed.
And afterword, we hugged, and kissed, and thanked each other. A solitary jackrabbit sat on its haunches nearby, watching us.
We hiked back across the desert to our vehicles, and said our goodbyes.
I called ahead to the reservation, and my friend arranged a room at the tribal rate. It took almost three hours to drive there, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch. The restaurant was closed, but the staff, generous as ever, hauled a microwave and silverware to my room so I could warm up a frozen dinner from their freezer.
While eating, I looked something up online. After the ceremony, I’d recovered a vague memory of a similar ritual held prehistorically by this tribe. Based on the ethnographic record, it sounded much like the ceremony we’d invented on the spot. The place, and its memory of the ancestors, had surely guided us.
What to do with my grief, my guilt? That would be the work of the following days and weeks.
Sunday, May 19th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Artists, Arts, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
Day Seven: Singers
I was on the reservation to see my friend, and to rest up. In my mind it was the natural place, and he was the natural person, to visit after performing that ceremony in his tribe’s territory.
Before we started breakfast, he gave me a miniature gourd rattle, a symbol of my role in the ceremony, a role he’s performed himself. He spoke of the difficulty of learning the ancient ceremonial dialect, part of his legacy as a hereditary chief. We share a passion for the desert’s past, so over breakfast, we discussed prehistory and talked about our families. He said young people in the tribe want me to lead them to remote sites I’ve discovered, so we should start planning a return visit.
Then I arranged to stay another night, he went off to help his son, and I spent most of the day in bed.
Day Eight: Saddles
It was time to head home, and today would be the hardest part – the five-hour gauntlet of the interstate highway, competing with those giant tractor-trailer rigs in my little rattletrap. The dangerous wind had returned – when I first stepped outside in the morning, I was almost blown over.
The drive was nerve-wracking as usual, but it got better at the end, after I finally left the interstate for a lonely two-lane across the high plateau, and eventually reached the little alpine valley where I would dine at my favorite rural restaurant and sleep in the rustic fisherman’s motel. The drive home from the desert is just too far to tackle in one day, and I’d decided this would be the best way to divide it up, before crossing the multiple mountain ranges and high passes between here and home.
During the drive, I was starting to process the trip, and the ceremony. It had resurrected feelings buried for a generation, reopened wounds that had never healed. I’d been forced to bare my heart and soul like never before. Katie’s family had praised and thanked me, but I was feeling depleted, inadequate, guilty. Someone who had spent decades failing those who deserved his best. I longed for the comfort of loved ones, someone to share my turmoil and help me find clarity. But after briefly becoming one with the group at the cave, I was now more alone than ever.
And in the evening, there I was, being served a delicious meal while the resident elk herd shared grazing outside the window with a large band of mule deer. My body was sore all over from last Saturday’s epic hike, from driving 1,500 miles, from the emotional drain of the ceremony. My knee in particular was so bad I could barely handle a few stair steps at a time.
Day Nine: Pilgrimages
From there, it was only three hours to home, on another lonely, winding road through a series of mountain ranges. The shape of the trip was becoming clear, if not its meaning.
It had been a triple pilgrimage, triggered by the ceremony at its center. Going to the cave, I had to visit my land nearby, and make that hike to the crest – the divide between east and west. And after the ceremony, I had to visit my friend, elder of the people who had established that ceremony in that place for generations before us. As the singer of the old songs, he’d set the example for me when I sang for our group. I’d anticipated none of this in advance – I had to discover it out there, one day at a time.
What a path to find myself on! Never have I felt so much like an exile, an eternal explorer, infinitely far from my birthplace and my ancestors, irretrievably lost in an abandoned wilderness.
Children
I arrived home late in the week and spent the next few days icing my joints, resting, and editing my photos. And in the process, I finally discovered a meaning and a purpose for our ceremony.
To some extent, most of us expect to live on in the memories of others. People who seek fame and influence expect to be remembered by their colleagues and followers. Parents expect to live on in the memories of their children. I don’t know about other artists, but for me – otherwise childless – my creative works are my children.
As I learned in the desert, Katie will live on in the memories of her nieces and nephews. But for the rest of us, her legacy, her only children, are the creative works I’ve been able to preserve. Sharing and establishing those works will remain my responsibility and my inspiration for the rest of my life.
Recent struggles and traumas have discouraged me and set me back in my own work, but these memories of Katie should inspire me to recover from the setbacks and renew both our legacies. In the words of a song I wrote when I first met her, I’ll be “building for future generations”.
Monday, May 20th, 2024: Hikes, Pinos Altos Range, Southwest New Mexico.
I hadn’t hiked in two weeks, since my epic hike in the desert did some sort of damage to my right knee. Despite daily icing, it was recovering very slowly, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. So I decided to try it out on a nearby trail with moderate distance and elevation.
This is a ridge trail that climbs the east end and follows the ridge west for 6-1/4 miles to an abandoned stock pond, at an average elevation of 8,400 feet. Much of the forest had burned in June 2020, and I’d hiked the full length afterward, in September of that year. But by the following September, regrowth of annuals and shrubs had made the trail virtually impassable.
Because it’s close to town, I figured it would be a high priority for the new trail crews, and I was right. It had been cleared last October, but since it traverses the steep north slope, it accumulates and holds deep snow, and the lack of tracks showed that I was the first hiker on this trail since the snow finally melted a month ago. A bear had preceded me, probably late yesterday.
The temperature started out in the 60s and climbed into the 80s by afternoon. The flowers and pollinators were outstanding, and I was surrounded by birdsong the whole way, but could seldom find the singers. I did spot a brown creeper but it was moving too fast to photograph.
I didn’t really expect to make it all the way. My knee seemed to be doing okay but as usual there were too many steep sections. There’s a rock outcrop with a nice view about a mile from the pond, and that’s where I turned around, strapping on my knee brace for the return.
With my knee stiffened by the brace it was much harder to walk, and the pressure of the brace meant I couldn’t tell how my knee was doing. I found out when I got back to the vehicle – not well. I’ve been lucky with my knees in the past, but those days are probably over.
Monday, June 17th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Gila, Hikes, Middle Fork, Mogollon Mountains, Regions, Road Trips, Southwest New Mexico.
The paired wilderness areas north of my hometown, the first established in the U. S., encompass almost 1,200 square miles of mountainous terrain. After I moved here 18 years ago, it was another 12 years before I found the time to begin exploring them on foot.
There’s a challenging dirt road, closed in winter, that runs north between them, but apart from that, this vast block of wilderness creates a roadless barrier between us and the rest of the state. I’ve long been curious about the north end of the wilderness, but until now I’d never ventured up there, because it requires a three-hour drive around the perimeter, most of that on rough dirt roads.
But with travel and joint pain forcing me to give up hiking since early May, I was going stir crazy. It’s been hot here, and I found myself longing for the cool shade of our high-elevation mixed-conifer forests. I could find that near home, but the highest point I can drive to is up on that northern edge of the wilderness – the legendary road, also closed in winter, that traverses the entire northern edge.
I’d driven up there from the west a few times to hike the crest trail, but past the trailhead, the road continues into terrain I’d never seen, terrain that’s got to be among the most remote in the lower 48 states. Although it’s crisscrossed with dirt forest roads and ranch roads, there are no paved roads anywhere near it. It’s a two-hour drive on rough dirt tracks from the nearest paved road or cell phone signal. It’s a three-and-a-half hour drive from the nearest small towns, and a five-hour drive from the nearest city.
The mountains rise to almost 11,000 feet, and the lowest points, the canyon bottoms, are nearly 7,000 feet in elevation. Once I reached the end of the paved road in the tiny ghost town, I entered the cool forest of pines, firs, spruce and aspen, and began climbing over 2,000 vertical feet on a rocky and deeply eroded dirt road that in many places was only wide enough for one vehicle. For the rest of the day, I would approach every blind curve not knowing whether a big truck would come barreling around it toward me, and if we didn’t collide, one or the other of us would have to yield and back up to the nearest wide spot.
The road tops out at 9,000 feet and begins traversing the north slope of the high mountains, winding in and out of deep drainages, with a long view to your left across a 3,000-foot-deep canyon to another big mountain in the north. I needed a break from the dangerous driving so I turned off as soon as I reached the traverse.
These slopes burned patchily but at high intensity in the 2012 mega-wildfire. My turnout remained forested, but a dirt track led upward into the burn scar, to a small cleared plateau which had probably been used to land firefighting choppers, and I hiked up there, about a third of a mile, to get a view north. This scar had filled in with dense New Mexico locust, which was in bloom.
Not a cloud in the sky as far as the eye could see, but a thin haze hung in the canyons and lowlands. Breezy and cool up here, but the day was obviously going to be warm.
That high traverse is only a little over five miles long, but takes about twenty minutes to drive. I soon came upon a Ford Escort – you can’t drive a car up here, but city SUVs will just about handle it. The little SUV was backing toward me, so I waited to see what he was up to. He pulled to the left for some reason and let me past – a retired couple out sightseeing.
I passed the trailhead that was the farthest I’d driven before. From now on, everything felt more and more remote. I encountered a couple of widely-separated trucks, but the traverse has plenty of wide spots for passing. In and out of dark forest, locust-choked burn scars, and black volcanic talus slopes. Finally I reached the end of the traverse and descended onto a long, narrow east-trending ridge, with a steep dropoff at my right to the deep canyon of a major creek. From studying maps, I knew the road would eventually descend to the creek, where there would be a campground.
The landscape ahead of me to the east was rolling terrain, averaging 8,000 feet, burn scars and grassland punctuated in places by higher forested mountains with gentle slopes. It reminded me somewhat of my beloved White Mountains of eastern Arizona, although nowhere near as spectacular. The best thing about this area was its remoteness.
The heights had been dry, like most of our region for the past three months. So it was a relief to see the creek running through dense willows and lush grasses beneath tall pines and firs. However, the road soon turned away and entered the harshest burn scar I’d ever seen in this region. Apparently the soil and its seed bank had been scorched and sterilized, so as far as the eye could see the low slopes were lined with nothing but dry grasses and annuals beneath the snags of burned tree trunks.
After climbing to a plateau at 8,000 feet, the road stretched out due east, almost perfectly straight for seven miles. I passed a little Jeep SUV, and came upon a big truck with a huge fifth-wheel trailer, parked in the road, which was fortunately wide enough to pass. A beautiful young girl wearing hippie garb sat on an ATV in front of the truck, and I waved as I slowed to pass.
A mile farther, nearing the end of the plateau, I came upon a Forest Service truck that stopped next to me. The driver said to be careful because a truck was broken down up ahead. He said the RV I’d passed was part of the same group, waiting for help. It was Sunday and I figured the nearest operating tow service would be four or five hours away.
I passed the disabled truck and descended into a shallow, grassy valley where the road turned south, and spotted a little lake below forested hills at the far end.
This was the reservoir of a creek that been dammed – maybe for ranching originally, but now for recreation. The road had been skirting the northern boundary of the wilderness the whole way, and the reservoir lay at the center of the northern boundary. It was hard to imagine a more remote place, but it looked well-maintained.
It’d taken me four hours to get here, and by chance it was noon. The big parking lot was empty, and I could see only two or three vehicles in the campground that sprawled back in the forested hills above the lake. I drove up to a scattering of unoccupied picnic tables overlooking the lake and found one in the shade where I started on the snacks I’d brought, and made the unusual decision to have a daytime beer.
Sitting there with that idyllic scene laid out before me, featuring ponderosa pine, the west’s iconic tree, I couldn’t help thinking of my dad. He’d love this place, once all the chores were done and he could relax. So many of us – Calvinists, WASPs, northern Europeans – both benefit and suffer from the compulsion to put work before pleasure, and the beer was helping me self-medicate.
Too much of the day remained for me to even consider driving home, and I wanted to try an easy hike. But this area was too exposed for such a cloudless day. I decided to drive back to the creek crossing and check out a trailhead I’d passed on the way here.
I pulled into the small dirt lot at the trailhead alongside a big truck, and a short man jumped out holding an even shorter fishing rod. “You fishin’?” he asked with a smile. I said no but wished him luck.
The trail entered the big trees where a smaller tributary joined the main creek. I saw the fisherman scrambling over rocks and stopping to cast a fly on a long line upstream. I’d never seen such a short rod used for fly casting.
The narrow valley was beautiful, lined with dark volcanic bluffs, the trail winding through shady groves and sunny meadows, the creek always near, murmuring over rocks. Birds and butterflies were everywhere – swallowtails, woodpeckers, flickers, bluebirds. I made it more than a mile and a half – my knee complaining every time I had to step over a log or boulder – finally emerging into a wide, shady “pine park” where the creek flowed wide and shallow and I watched native trout hatchlings shimmy their way upstream.
On the hike, I’d felt a lot of pent-up energy rising to the surface – my body really missed being put to work. I felt like I could’ve walked all day, but would’ve ended up in serious pain. Still, I was happy, and temporarily at peace, just being there.
As I mentioned before, the traverse along the crest is pretty nerve-wracking, never knowing when or what you’re going to meet coming around those blind turns. But I was plenty calmed down. I did encounter one truck that was coming faster than was safe, but I had enough space to pull over and wait for him to react. I actually ended up passing the sightseeing retirees again toward the end of the traverse.
The descent to the ghost town is the most dangerous part, because it includes really long blind, narrow stretches where backing up safely would be almost impossible. But I made it to the bottom without meeting anyone, only to reach the abandoned cabin – the most remote of all the cabins in the forest above the ghost town – to find a truck pulled over and people standing in the road.
I stopped next to them, and a tall man introduced himself as the new owner of the abandoned cabin. A young girl leaned out the driver’s window of the truck, and another man squatted outside, sharpening a chainsaw. They all seemed really excited. Having a cabin in the forest like that would feel like a dream come true until the next wildfire and the ensuing flash floods tearing down the canyon, destroying your access if not the cabin itself.
From there, it was a short drive to the paved road and the ghost town, the next scary stretch of twisting one-lane descending to the mesa, and finally rejoining the lonely north-south highway. I could more or less take the highway home on autopilot, until when approaching the gate of our biggest ranch, I spotted what looked like a small mammal ahead in the middle of my lane.
I was going 65 but had enough road left to carefully slow down. The thing wasn’t moving, but when I was close enough to focus on it, it looked exactly like a porcupine, facing me with all its quills erect. Porcupines supposedly live around here, but I’d never seen one. This one wasn’t yielding right of way, but another vehicle was coming fast behind me, and I suddenly realized that what looked exactly like a porcupine was actually the top of a narrow-leaf yucca that had rolled onto the highway! So I swerved around it and stepped on the gas.
By the time I returned home, I had driven over 200 miles, ascending and descending nearly 20,000 feet of accumulated elevation. And I’d still only driven about a third of the way around the perimeter of our wilderness!
Friday, June 21st, 2024: Hikes, San Francisco Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
For over twenty years I faithfully performed a personal ritual on the winter and summer solstices, inspired by the sweat lodge ceremony at the end of my 1990 field course in aboriginal skills. Then, health issues and family obligations began to interfere.
But I still try to be mindful of the solstices, wherever I happen to be, whatever else I have to do on those days and nights.
This year, I had a commitment the night before, preventing me from rising before dawn and traveling to a place where I could observe the sunrise. After a long hiatus from hiking, I’d found a hinged knee brace in my closet from an injury many years ago, and wanted to see if it would enable me to start hiking again. I really wanted to get out in the wilderness, but all of our nearby wilderness areas are mountainous, and I needed to minimize the elevation gain on this trial run.
I finally decided to try a secret trail over near the Arizona border. I’d discovered this trail on the Forest Service’s website last year, while looking up another trail in the same area. The secret trail is shown nowhere else, and when I tried to retrieve the Forest Service map on this solstice eve, I discovered that they’ve removed the map feature from their website. The only map I could find that shows this trail is in an obscure internal Forest Service study that I dug up online in PDF form.
The trail starts at a pair of electric power transmission towers, in a remote, unpopulated spot a mile off a lonely highway. Despite being omitted from public maps, it has an old trailhead kiosk, literally on the wilderness boundary. But this is a relatively small wilderness area, so remote and obscure that even the published parts of it see very little visitation.
Except for cattle. I’d first checked out the trailhead last winter during a rainstorm, and discovered that because the trail is a secret, the only current users are cattle – which should theoretically not even be in a wilderness area.
Not far past the kiosk is a fence and a gate – I guess it keeps the cattle in the wilderness from mixing with the cattle outside.
And in all fairness, the habitat inside the wilderness area looks really healthy.
The transmission towers stand on a low peak with a view west over the entire wilderness area, which encompasses an expanse of mid-elevation ridges and canyons ending at a high mountain on the state line. The canyon bottoms dip as low as 5,500 feet, and the ridges rise to 8,000 feet on the west side.
Big cumulus clouds were forming and shifting around in the blue sky, high winds were forecast, and I expected the temperature in the canyon bottoms to approach 90 in late afternoon. The hard-to-find map shows the trail leading over a series of ridges, down and up and finally down into a northwest-trending canyon, where it follows the canyon bottom for a couple miles before joining a much longer trail. I was dreading the heat and was hoping the canyon bottom would feature a canopy of shade trees.
By the time I reached the far side of the ridges and could glimpse the canyon I was heading for, it appeared that the knee brace was useless. The secret trail turned out to be in really good shape – because of heavy cattle use over the years – but the grades were steep and rocky and I had to take short steps to protect my knee.
Cattle sign was actually pretty sparse, and thankfully at least a month old.
Finally I reached the canyon bottom, where I was surprised to find both big sycamores and a few big ponderosa pines, which are normally found at much higher elevations. But the canyon bottom turned out to be wide and sandy, with virtually no shade.
Despite being kept a secret by the Forest Service, the trail was well marked with big cairns. As the canyon twisted back and forth like a snake, the trail continued upstream, crossing and recrossing the wide dry wash, keeping mostly up on the bank in the sandy floodplain. It was bright and hot in that canyon, but the farther I went, the more the floodplain filled in with trees – oaks, willows, walnuts, two species of junipers, pinyon pine, sycamores, and a few ponderosas – so I eventually got some patches of shade.
Farther up, some pools of stagnant water remained in the creekbed. And on the now-shady floodplain, I finally emerged in a clearing, noticed a crude wire fence at my right, and turned to see an old log corral tucked back in a dense grove of trees. And when I turned forward again and walked across the clearing to study where the trail led from here, I saw the bull.
He almost looked like a brahma, but was probably some kind of Angus, and was hornless like most of the bulls in this region. Standing in the shade below trees at the edge of the bank, he was staring at me, so I started talking to him. After a while he turned away and resumed grazing. What to do?
The last bull I’d seen had let me walk past him, but that was in an area with frequent campers and hikers. This bull had probably seldom, if ever, seen humans. The canyon is really wide at this point – another big canyon joins it from the west, so I couldn’t easily detour to my left. I decided to try climbing the right slope and traversing above the bull, because there was a wall of dense vegetation between him and that slope.
Bad idea. I made an effort to be really quiet, but he either heard or saw me through the trees, and began bellowing angrily, again and again, while crashing directly up through the forest toward me.
I immediately turned around and began traversing back across the slope, hoping to get the fence and corral between me and him. The bellowing and crashing stopped, but dense vegetation still separated us, and he could’ve been crossing the clearing toward me, so I kept escaping as quickly and quietly as I could, re-entering the riparian forest downstream from the corral. It was like an obstacle course, but I was motivated.
About a half mile down the canyon, as I was rejoining the trail on the bank above the big dry wash, a terrifying, angry noise exploded out of the canopy on the other side. It was much louder than the first bull and sounded like some legendary monster out of the time of the gods in a Greek myth. It had to be another bull, but I’d never heard anything like it. I couldn’t see him, but he must’ve seen me.
The only thing I could do was keep fleeing down the canyon and hope that would satisfy the invisible monster. I skipped the crossings and stuck to my side, and before I knew it I was at the base of the trail up the slope.
Now it was sweltering, there was no shade, my knee was hurting, and the trail was really steep. So I took it slow, with short steps and frequent stops, and as I climbed, the wind blew stronger – that was the only thing that saved me. Somehow I made it back to the peak with the transmission towers.
I guess this is payback for failing to perform the solstice ritual…
