Desert Trip 2022: Day 6
Monday, November 7th, 2022: 2022 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
I woke up on Monday not knowing how or when my trip would end. I only knew I had to reach a hotel at the Phoenix airport by Tuesday night, to catch my flight to Indiana (and family) early Wednesday morning.
The last time I’d talked to my mom, last Wednesday morning, she’d sounded upset that I might be out of touch for almost a week while camping in the desert. Like me, she’s prone to anxiety attacks, and throughout the trip I’d been increasingly worried about her.
I’d been sending pre-recorded text messages from my GPS unit, every day, to reassure her I was okay, but hadn’t briefed her to watch for those, and wasn’t sure she’d even notice the GPS emails among the dozens of junk messages she gets each day.
In addition, during each hike so far, whenever I crested a ridge and had a line of sight for dozens of miles out of the mountains and across the open desert, I turned on my cell phone and searched for a signal to call her, but could never connect with a tower.
By Monday, I could easily imagine her having a panic attack and calling on my friends to come out and find me. So I was worried about staying another day without being able to reassure her. But I was so happy to be here, and felt like I was only just settling in and getting started – I couldn’t remember any time in the past decade when I’d felt so at home on my land. I would really hate to leave a day early.
From our campsite on the ledge above the big wash, I gazed up at the peak looming to the north, where an ambitious but failed mine perches on a dizzying precipice just below the summit. The hike to that mine, which I’ve done many times both solo and with friends, is one of the most challenging hikes in the range, but the peak above it is the only place where I was sure I could get a signal on my phone to call and reassure my mom.
My imagined need to justify staying out here another day led me to completely ignore the difficulty and danger of that climb. When I decided to do it, packed and started off on the hike, I was only thinking of a quick out-and-back that would leave my afternoon free. I was in complete denial that it would be the scariest, hardest, and longest hike of the entire trip, with the sole purpose of making a phone call that turned out to be unnecessary.
The peak stands almost 2,000′ above camp, but you can’t see it or the mine from below, since massive rock outcrops rise between. The peak itself is only a mile and a half away in horizontal distance, making for a 25% average grade – which is pretty extreme in itself, far steeper than any of the hikes I do back home.
However, the lower half of the climb is misleadingly straightforward, on a gentler grade traversing bare ground between shrubs and smaller outcrops. Back in the early 90s when I was romping all over these mountains like a bighorn sheep, I would look at a distant peak and say “It’ll take me only an hour to get there”, and I was usually correct. Now, I couldn’t remember my estimate for this peak – fanciful numbers between 45 and 90 minutes were bouncing around in my head.
One ascent with friends, about 25 years ago, had gone bad because my partner’s girlfriend, who was in good shape but was afraid of heights, was having a major meltdown by the time we reached the mine. She had to be coached all the way down, step by step, in abject terror and hating us both for taking her up there. And on one of my more recent ascents, I’d tried a different route that turned out to be even harder, and fell and cut myself pretty bad on a rock coming down.
Today, it was at that halfway point that I realized my mistake. This was going to be a long, tough one. But there was no turning back, and at least I wouldn’t be taking the same route on the way down – I planned to cross the ridge below the mine and drop into the next drainage east, to check the seep above the shade house where I’d lived back in 1992.
The upper half of the climb to the mine involves finding your way around and over ramparts of granite that block the way forward, using bouldering moves that were made more dangerous by my heavy old pack, which has no waist strap and swings back and forth, threatening to throw me off balance – another example of my bullheaded commitment to old-fashioned, low-tech gear.
Getting past those stone ramparts gets harder and harder the higher you get, until the last one, which forces you to climb to the top of the outcrop overlooking the mine works, and then downclimb the north face, using more bouldering moves. On each of those successive ramparts I’d found scat from groups of bighorn sheep – mostly rams, I’m assuming, because that’s what I’ve seen up here before – but it was all months old, at least. In fact, I’d seen lots of old sheep scat on every slope, ridge, or saddle I’d been to so far, here around the rim of our interior basin on the west side of the range.
Well below the main works of the mine I came upon a graded ledge containing bed frames and springs for 5 people – a feature I’d completely forgotten. That, in addition to the collapsed hexagonal cabin above, would’ve hosted up to 9 workers at a time, on a knife-edge ridge exposed to the most brutal winds in the range – but also with the most spectacular views.
Taking a quick look around the mine works – nothing had changed since my last visit, in 2011 – I was reminded of some recent comments by a friend who knows these mountains much better than I do. He also knows and respects my interest in native cultures and prehistoric sites, and questioned why we’d bought this property in the first place, since it’s been so torn up and abused by Anglo mine works, ruins, and trash.
My co-owner, on the other hand, has long been interested in Western (colonial) history, including mining, and views this place as an open-air museum.
My own take is that – apart from these being the only large intact parcels of private land on this side of the mountains – it’s also the perfect base and point of access for nearly 50 square miles of wild habitat, for the prehistoric cultural sites that surround our basin, and for the plateau, the heart of the range. And although I could easily do without all the mining stuff, the broader history of our species shows that these ruins and this junk can provide valuable resources for a resourceful subsistence community, sometime in the unknown future after our own culturally bankrupt society fades away and the regional climate becomes salubrious again.
I’d only been past the mine to the actual peak once before, in March 1990, and I’d completely forgotten both the route and the configuration of the peak itself, which is a quarter mile beyond the mine and 300 vertical feet above. It’s a beautiful, completely wild, grassy little plateau, tilted westward, where you can completely ignore the mining junk below and revel in the 360 degree view, blocked only in the north, across another long canyon, by the north wall of the range.
There, I got my first cell phone signal in the past 5 days, and spoke to my mom, who, as it turned out, wasn’t worried at all.
I hated to leave that place, but the 1-1/2 mile climb had taken 3 hours, and I had to start back down – both to ensure a warm shower, and because I was dreading the descent. On the last climb to the mine, I was with a friend who knew of a partial trail down the eastern slope, past the mine tailings, into the drainage that led to our seep.
Holding onto an old water pipe, I made it past the tailings, to the upper stage of the old cable tramway they used to lower ore into the side canyon beyond, but could see no clear trail from there. There was only a faint suggestion that I began to follow, but it continued only as far as the next little saddle on the outlying ridge between this and the next drainage. Below that, there might’ve been a switchback, so I kept going, but any sign of a trail completely disappeared, and I couldn’t spot anything else on the surrounding slopes. So I began picking my way down this dangerous slope of loose rock, as carefully as I possibly could, aiming for what I thought was the outcrop of metamorphic rock surrounding the seep, far below.
As expected, it was a nerve-wracking descent. I remembered making it on acid, back in the early 90s, after dosing at the mine and having a total freakout when I contemplated this slope from above. The way I prepared myself then was by imagining I was a mountain sheep, clenching the ball of my foot with each step for better traction. Whether real or imagined, it worked back then, but the boots I wear now are far too stiff for that.
Crossing back and forth over the continuously steep and narrow drainage to the seep, to avoid sheer pouroffs and rock walls – sometimes on the surrounding slopes and sometimes in the boulder-choked dry streambed itself – I slowly and carefully made it past what I’d originally thought to be the seep, and finally to the cleft of the seep, whose dammed-up tank amazingly held water – the only standing water I’d seen yet within our watershed of almost 50 square miles. But the seep itself looked completely dry, and there were no bees using it.
The descent of less than a mile had taken almost three more hours, and I could forget that warm shower, but reaching this point, from which I had a clear and relatively easy route back to camp, was a huge relief.
Following the old water pipe to the shade house, I briefly checked it out. Someone had been here and left an empty pop bottle since my last visit, moving the old box springs under the roof, but everything was otherwise intact.
I found the old road to the shade house completely undriveable without major work – a boulder weighing several hundred pounds has fallen into the lower part, and all the steep sections have additional erosion.
My last night in the mountains was bittersweet. I built a tiny fire with the last of my catclaw, ate the last of my leftovers and drank the last of my beer, but I found myself compulsively walking away from both the fire and the lantern, to let my eyes adjust and experience the land in its natural state.
The strap from my sleep screen that secures it under my bedding had torn off the night before, so I tried to do without it at first, but the mosquitos were persistent again and I had to fit the screen around me as best I could. I really wished I could keep sleeping out there under the stars for the rest of my life.
