As I've grown older I've come to dislike hiking trails -- one of the reasons I've grown to love the American Southwest. Here, you can find vast stretches of public land that extend to the horizon and beyond, so sparsely vegetated that you can strike out in any direction you wish. When one canyon or another piques your fancy, there is nothing to prevent you from simply parking your car and climbing in, taking as much gear and food as you need to explore for an hour, a day or a week.
What you find may disappoint as well as please, but the scenery is so compelling that "disappointment" is a relative term. For wherever you venture, the terrain will be challenging and interesting, and the worst that can happen is that the way becomes impassable sooner than planned, or the drama that unfolds is not quite as dramatic as hoped. When this happens (which it does when you're hiking off the beaten track), what you do encounter will still be fresh and unexpected. And you'll never see a soul along the way.
A trail, in contrast, provides the predictable – invariably with company. You probably know in advance how far you will walk (to the tenth of a mile), what the vertical rise will be, and even the degree of difficulty, presented on a helpful numerical scale. You can also assume that the rough places will have been made smoother, and that the steep places will have been tamed with switchbacks. And you'll also know what the "attractions" will be (e.g., a waterfall) along the way, as well as the reward you'll enjoy if you reach the end – perhaps a mountaintop view that will let you see four states (four!) at once, as if the transposition of political boundaries over geography will make natural wonders more wonderful. You'll also almost certainly see other hikers, unless you're hiking early in the morning (always a good idea for many reasons), or on a weekday in the off-season. The footprints of those that came before, of course, will still be everywhere.
At night, the animal life of the desert comes out of hiding. And along the Mexican border, so do the illegal immigrants and the drug runners. The result is a National Monument "under siege."
Organ Pipe National Monument is legally remote (on this unusual distinction, more below), which makes it the kind of place I like to visit -- big, empty, lightly visited and beautiful. It is 142 miles by two-lane road from Tucson and about the same distance from Phoenix, and is surrounded on all sides by areas that do not draw a crowd: the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation to the East, and the vast Barry Goldwater Air Force testing range to the North and West. To the South is the Sonora State of Mexico. And once you get there, it has nothing to offer besides a unique species of cactus, a few hiking trails, and average Arizona scenery (much of it gorgeous), making it one of the least frequented parts of the American Southwest.
When I arrived for a few days of hiking and camping to start my trip, I found that it was both more and less used than before, as well as even less easy to get around in than in the past.
Once upon a time, rivers ran in Arizona and Native Americans lived along their banks. Now the water is drawn off to send to distant cities and to water broad fields of alfalfa and cotton, leaving only dry washes as evidence of what used to be.
I began driving my rented four-wheel drive car about a half hour before dawn today with the objective of reaching a small area of public land that I had selected using a topographic map. What made this particular area of interest was the fact that it lay between a certain river (dry now, but flowing before modern farmers commandeered it to water their fields)and adjacent highlands. Equally important was the likelihood that existing jeep tracks would allow me to get reasonably close to my desired destination (I don't believe in creating new ones, especially in arid regions, where the damage takes many years to heal).
As the sun was nudging over the horizon, I was turning off the paved road and onto a jeep track that was headed, more or less, in the right direction. Shooting the straights to gather enough momentum to carry through the occasional stretches of deep sand and braking sharply into the turns and gullies that crossed the track to keep the vehicle both moving and in one piece, I navigated by sight for the next half hour, switching tracks and gradually working my way closer to where I wished to go.
Time off for a different type of behavior.
I'm currently in Southwest Arizona, and will be hiking and camping through the 21st. As a result, I'll be neither able (nor inclined) to blog on the technology news of the day until then.
I will, however, be recharging my laptop from my car, and doing a different type of writing that I enjoy even more - especially the research. You can see prior examples at the index category at left called "Not Here but There: a Wilderness Journal," or by clicking here.
See ya.
Last Friday meant leaving the out of doors behind and returning home, but it also meant being reunited after two full weeks with the New York Times at Reno/Tahoe International Airport, which softened the transition. As I sat on the plane home, I saw an article on page that provides an appropriate theme upon which to end this series blog of entries.
The article is entitled Top Official Urged Changes In How parks Are Managed, and reports that a deputy assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior (and also a political appointee of the current administration) named Paul Hoffman has submitted 194 pages of suggested revisions to the policy document that governs the operation of the Nation’s national parks.
One night this trip, I camped on a high plateau about a quarter mile from a generous spring that maintains its flow throughout the summer. The plateau is riddled with horse trails, so I decided to walk down to the spring early the next morning to see if I could find them drinking at the break of day.
There are tens of thousands of wild horses in Nevada (not to mention a smaller number of wild burros), the descendants of stock that escaped from Spanish explorers and settlers in the 1600s. Like antelope and deer, they compete for the grass that cattle eat. But unlike antelope and deer, they are not game animals, and thus are seen by many as a nuisance that competes with more desirable animals for available forage. Others, both local and from away, admire their beauty and spirit.
If you spend any amount of time hiking in the Southwest, you will inevitably happen upon a scatter of lovely, multicolored stone flakes lying in the dust. In some areas, obsidian will predominate, and in others yellow jasper, but most often you will see a beautiful mix of red and yellow jasper, various colors of chalcedony and quartzite, light colored cherts, black obsidian and red petrified wood. What you are looking at are the remains of prehistoric tool manufacture.
Native Americans roamed the entire Southwest for at least 12,000 years, and perhaps longer. They were skillful at utilizing the materials at hand, superbly talented at creating flaked implements, and had a love for using the most attractive materials available in the process. One assumes that as they roamed throughout the landscape, they not only went out of their way to visit those places where suitable material was abundant, but also kept an eye out at all times for good quality material when it appeared wherever they went.
Cheatgrass is an innocuous looking grass up to 18 inches foot high that is omnipresent in the Great Basin, in particular, and in the Southwest in general. At higher elevations, it is a wispy occasional presence, while in the wide valleys between the mountain ranges it predominates, either filling in between the sagebrush, or forming wide homogenous meadows, often commanding all available space as far as the eye can see.
Yesterday, I drove the 118 miles from Battle Mountain south to Austin (both in Nevada), which prides itself on being the most isolated town in the lower forty-eight, with 100 miles, more or less, separating it from the closest towns at each of the cardinal points of the compass. Most of the time, I saw an endless carpet of golden cheatgrass, sweeping up to, and over, the mountains to either side. From the inside of a car, it looked attractive. But in fact, cheatgrass sucks the moisture from the soil, wiping out all other species, and forming vast, sterile monocultural deserts where little native wildlife can thrive. These vast savannahs of dried grass also become a fire hazard that ignites like a match upon any random lighting strike. Today, I drove through a modest thunderstorm that touched off five fires within sight that spewed huge clouds of opalescent smoke into the sky.
One of the great appeals to me of the Southwest is the ability to see, appreciate and think about each individual element of the natural surroundings as I encounter it. Water and nutrients are scarce, so plants are typically at a distance from each other (some even have natural poisons to prevent other plants from establishing themselves within the reach of their roots). Hence, it is very easy to see each tree (or flower, or shrub) as it stands proud of other distractions. And without a thick covering of vegetation, rocks and other aspects of the terrain can also command attention.
I once designed and built quite a large stained glass window of a Japanese garden when making stained glass was what I was doing for a living. Before going to work on the design, I spent the better part of a week in the library learning about the aesthetics of Japanese gardens. I’ve forgotten most of it now, but recall that there were a limited number of stone shapes, miniature stone pagodas, plants, and sand and stone patterns, each of which had its own symbolism. Thus, for one wise in the ways of Japanese gardens, deeper meanings could be appreciated when meditating in such a place beyond the mere visual appeal of the garden, which in itself is considerable. Happily, anyone can appreciate the exquisite beauty of each element of a Japanese garden, as well as the serenity and appeal of the whole, even if they are ignorant of the symbolic meanings that lie behind the design.
Had I the power to snap my fingers and transport myself to a favorite place at will, I am not able to think of a destination more desirable than almost anywhere isolated in the Southwest at sunset.
Each night of this trip I have picked up a book as twilight began to gather after a day of hiking, thinking that I would relax and read for an hour. And each time, I have invariably put the book down in my lap, and simply watched and listened as the colors of the setting sun took control of the sky and metamorphosed through infinite changes, the birds flew and called, the breeze faded, the insects hummed and buzzed, the light faded, the planets and then the stars emerged, and finally the moon asserted its cool, white dominance over sky and earth alike. It is a performance that cannot be equaled by anything else in the world, until the same time the next day.