Vision Quest 2016: The Sheltering Desert
Monday, June 13th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
The Friendliest Place to Camp
The Sheltering Desert is the astonishing memoir, long out of print, of two German geologists who escaped internment during World War II, living off the land for two years in the remote desert of South Africa. It also hints at one of the main reasons why I fell in love with the California desert: despite its reputation as a harsh land of extremes, it’s the most comfortable natural environment I know of for living outdoors.
Luxury With Less
My dad introduced me and my brother to camping in the bourgeois tradition, as a gear-dominated activity beginning at the sporting goods store, followed by lengthy rituals of packing, unpacking, assembling and disassembling expensive equipment that he believed was essential for our comfort and safety, and had to be laboriously maintained. He loved nature, but warned that it was a potentially dangerous place that you had to prepare for and protect yourself from, and we only camped in official campgrounds with restrooms and showers and lots of neighbors.
I was burdened by his legacy of habits, fears, and inhibitions for decades. But by the time I finished grad school, in my mid-20s, I’d started to break free, as one of a tribe of hippie bohemians who were as much at home outdoors as in. I explored the country as a hobo for a couple of years, sleeping rolled up in a wool blanket in boxcars, or on the ground, in jungles near a railroad yard. My friends and I slept in bedrolls under bushes in small-town parks, in hammocks strung between cottonwoods in the bottom of canyons, and in rockshelters in the open desert. I discovered less stress, and paradoxically more comfort, with less gear and less effort, and I gained a more intimate and complete experience of nature. Finally, I attended a Paiute skills class and learned how to make everything you need by hand, from local materials, and got a taste of total liberation from Western technology.
I’ve camped without a tent now for almost 40 years, both alone and with friends and girlfriends, in cloud forest, on the beach, in deep snow, and on top of a volcano in Guatemala. When bothered by mosquitoes, I set up one of my sleep screens, domes of netting that can accommodate one or two people without blocking our view of the sky.
Exploring Without Trails or Compass
Apart from a few small areas within national parks, there are no trails in the desert. But because the rock-dominated landscape has plenty of landmarks and unimpeded vistas, it’s virtually impossible to get lost. By requiring you to read the landscape, the desert teaches you better orienteering skills.
Hiking off-trail in a landscape of stone, particularly jointed granite or metamorphic rock, isn’t just walking – it often requires all four limbs and bouldering technique as you scale or lower yourself down small cliffs, or look for ways over, under, or around house-size boulders that obstruct slopes hundreds of feet tall. You need to climb or cross broad slopes of loose rock, including boulders that look solid but begin to slide or tumble when you step on them. It requires you to understand the landscape far more intimately, to observe more closely and pick your route carefully in order to reduce risk and effort and avoid fragile soil scrusts, obstacles, and backtracking. It’s hugely more challenging than trail hiking, it engages more of your body, senses, and mind, and requires you to be totally present, at risk of serious injury or death. In other words, it’s one of the healthiest things we can do as human animals.
Hiking Under the Moon and Stars
While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I once set out to hike off-trail alone through a dense redwood forest, up a steep mountainside, planning to build my own primitive shelter at the top from branches and bark, and spend the night. I didn’t have a compass, but there was a half moon and I thought I’d be fine.
Instead, it got colder up there than I expected, I hadn’t brought enough warm clothes, even a fire failed to warm up my little shelter of tree limbs, and sometime after midnight, unable to sleep, I decided to head back down.
That turned into the adventure of a lifetime, since the canopy and cloud cover mostly blocked my view of the moon and left the forest pitch-dark, so I had to go by feel, running into fallen tree trunks as big around as I was tall, and falling into the deep pits left when their trunks had been uprooted. I got hopelessly lost, but I hoped that if I just kept following gravity downhill, I’d hit a stream that I might be able to follow to the road.
Surviving that experience just made me want to explore more of the world after dark, and my desert turned out to be the perfect place to do it. Our granite mountains, and the gravel and sand that erode from them into canyon bottoms and arroyos, mostly consist of quartz crystals that reflect moonlight and even starlight, so that under a full moon in the middle of the night, you can imagine that you’re seeing colors.
Of course, the best place to hike is across fairly level ground: the alluvial fan, the bajada, big dry washes and canyon bottoms. I draw the line at scaling cliffs by starlight or in shadow, but I’ve done it under a full moon.
I’ve done several night hikes with friends in familiar locations, but my favorite was a solo exploration of an unfamiliar basin near the southeast end of my mountains, about ten years ago. There was a three-quarter moon rising, so there would be plenty of that cool, mysterious reflected light shining across the mountains and the vast openness to the east. Taking nothing but the clothes on my back, I walked from camp, a mile or so down an abandoned mine road, and around the foot of an outlying ridge, into the new basin on the other side. From there, I started up the first good-sized wash I came to, as it meandered down from the dark mountain wall in the west. As I got closer to the western wall, the moonlit sand led me around the foot of another ridge, south into a hidden valley. After I had gone about four miles, I came to the base of a pouroff or dry waterfall, a cliff that was only about fifteen feet tall and probably had plenty of good climbing holds. But it was in deep shadow, so I called it a night and headed back to camp.
Like the forest, the desert wilderness is a totally different place at night, and it has valuable lessons and skills to teach us, to make us more complete and functional as human animals.
Meteorites Every Night
During my month-long vision quest, I occasionally had to spend the night in town, in a motel room. And every time I visited friends, they were anxious to offer me a comfortable bed. But every night I spent inside, I missed sleeping out under the stars.
Our eyes need the desert. Endless vistas, with fascinating landforms a hundred miles or more away, help restore our vision from the abuse of constantly focusing at short range on screens. My first night out, lying on my back watching the moon and stars, I saw them all doubled as usual. But by the second night, only the moon and the brightest stars were faintly doubled – I was able to focus the myriad others into single points of light, without straining.
I see meteorites every cloudless night I spend sleeping out. Falling stars, every single night. Some before falling asleep, and some upon waking before dawn. Most of them brief, thin scratches like lighting a match, but sometimes miraculous living bodies of fire throwing off sparks and trailing an incandescent wake. Three days into this trip, I woke two hours before dawn to see the second biggest I’ve ever seen, streaking just above the western horizon, sputtering yellow, green and blue sparks.
Some nights I sleep straight through, but I prefer to wake briefly throughout the night to check the progress of the heavens, watching the moon set and the fainter stars emerging, until the constellations themselves, both familiar and forgotten, merge into an extravagance of heavenly lights. Watching Naugupoh, the dusty trail of spirits, finally rise in the east, a mysterious glowing cloud, forked and split in the middle, embracing the whole world, from the faraway north to the faraway south.