Miserly Travel

 

Yesterday I rambled about my trek up to Juniper Basin where I camped in the Rincon Mountains of Saguaro National Park.  Today, I give you the rest of the story.

It was a cold night in my little tent with ice on the drinking water, and as you know, winter nights are long.  Maybe I’m getting too old for this.  It’s a place I can never forget if only because I didn’t sleep much, having brought the lighter of my two sleeping bags and spent most of the night wishing I’d brought the heavy, bulky one.

I camped high above the desert at about six thousand feet, among pinion pines, junipers and live oaks, without a single call of bird—the quietest place I have ever camped. 

Starting up the trail at sunrise, I was soon warm and ready for the summit of Tanque Verde Peak, walking with less than half of the thirty-five pounds I had carried the day before; I left all the camping gear at my campsite to which I would return before dark.

There had been just a trickle of water in the dry wash near my camp.  It carried the melt from a snowstorm two weeks ago, and allowed me to fill my canteens after filtering out any giardia.

Soon I began to see my destination—Tanque Verde Peak at seven thousand feet.  It stands there now to guide me, and I become impatient.  But as Merwin says, “What is hard to see is the mortal hurry.”  So I slow down and enjoy the last few miles of a long arduous climb, a cold night, and the anticipation of visual reward at the top.

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 Many times I have driven past arid mountain ranges like this one, looking at them as backdrops to life as I knew it.  Now I am on the top of a forested mountain island, surrounded by a sea of desert.  But when the valley finally fills with sediment carried down from this mountain, then a requiem should be sung for this now grand peak, just as it should be sung for the now buried mountains under the Sonora Desert.

Night in the Woods

I put on the backpack Saturday morning and headed up a ridge called Tanque Verde in the Rincon Mountains in Saguaro National Park.  I would camp for two nights in the same place and on the middle day climb to a peak far above the desert.  Today, I’ll only report on that first day of uphill backpacking to Juniper Basin.

Winter

with its birds

nesting in holes

in saguaros

its morning sun

finding them yellow

with bent light

its rays pretend

not to move

since sunset

peek around

the other side

and the birds laugh

 

Lifelike arms of the dead

protest my coming

they hiss

like a cornered possum

with no escape

A cairn of stacked rocks marks the trail of man.

A cairn of weathered rock marks the trail of god.

Higher up the ridge saguaros fade away.

Pinion pines, junipers, and live oaks replace them.

At 6,000 feet elevation, large trees and patches of snow, with a trickle of water, make a good campsite. 

The tree is dead and mammoth, a good four feet in diameter.  Maybe it choked on that stone it was eating.

Sunset over the ridge I’d be climbing on Sunday.

I could have walked all night in full moon light.

I have many more pictures of this secluded and peaceful place.

Pecans in the Desert

I rode the bike south today to see how pecans fare in the desert.  

 

Along the way I passed a power pole with nails and tacks from years of electioneering.  All the signs have blown or rotted away, as will the ones to come in October-November.

Thousands of big pecan trees, all looking dry and dead, have dropped their leaves, 

and some have dropped all their nuts.

It’s harvest time south of Tucson, and the first thing to do is get the nuts into rows.  A tractor pulls them in from the sides with big rotating brushes, while on its tail, a blower moves the ones too close to the trees to reach, blows them into the next aisle.

Then a huge vacuum cleaner lifts the nuts, separates out the leaves and sprays them into its trailer.

But it makes a dust storm in all its blowing.  A very big dust storm.  And they do it every year.  Dust to dust.










For the next three days  I will be backpacking in Saguaro National Park.  I will see you on Monday.

French Joe Canyon

I attended a poetry group last evening where we read and received comments.  They’re an attentive group, listeners, and their reactions gave no offense.

I followed Wyatt Earp today into the Whetstone Mountains, where after deciding he could not rely on civil justice, took matters into his own hands and hunted down the outlaws in these remote and rugged mountains.  The above picture is not from the poetry meeting, but from a mile of private land I had to cross getting to what is now the Forest Service boundary and French Joe Canyon.  It has nothing to do with the poetry group.

Today, the literature of Coronado National Forest calls the Whetstone Mountains “One of the least accessible areas in our jurisdiction.  The dirt roads have not been maintained in years, and the trails have all but disappeared.”

I started toward the mountains on the shortest road by map, but soon found that my Toyota Tacoma was no match for it.  This road is for jeeps or macho pickups.  So I parked and walked toward the mouth of French Joe Canyon.

The road petered out, and a trail was still traceable for awhile, but soon I was simply going up the canyon, climbing over boulders and trying to avoid sharp agave and yucca spears.

A spring feeds the residents here, so the cactus had to go, leaving cottonwoods, Arizona live oaks, and various green shrubs in a small enclave within a cactus land.

Mesquite, you unlovely tree

nothing about you inspires poems

just when we want you lovely most

when times are dry like now

you drop your leaves as if to die

What about you can we find to love?

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Three voices singing

Chain fruit cholla

Finger Rock

“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out til sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”  John Muir 1913

The city of Tucson sprawls on flatland that’s surrounded by individual ranges of mountains.  They poke up like islands floating on a desert sea.  Geologists say the mountains once rose higher and the desert was much lower; but erosion wore the rock away and placed it on the lowland, so today the reduced mountains appear to float.

High above Tucson to its north, a fist rises skyward, and on the fist, a finger points straight up.  A trail heads toward it, and today I walked a steep canyon for a closer look.

 Many saguaros line the way but far fewer than are shown in old pictures taken before 1940, and scientists used to wonder why.  They suspected it had to do with a cold snap in 1939 when the temperature remained below freezing for at least twenty-four hours, something saguaros die from.  Or maybe it was from some activity of people that conservationists insisted must change.  So they launched a study with lots of post-war money.

I find it a credit to the dignity of those researchers that they did not rubber-stamp the reasons handed to them for verification.  Instead, they concluded that the saguaros died for an entirely different reason, a reason that is now widely accepted and applicable to a host of similar situations.  While it is true that more than twenty hours of freezing temperature can kill a weak saguaro, it is also true that such a cold spell had not occurred for several decades prior to 1939.  The old pictures showed that most of the saguaros were in their old age and would have died anyway within a few years.  The cold simply culled the old and weak individuals in a natural event of weather.

We call them acts of God, these natural disasters, but they are not agents of death and destruction; rather they facilitate removal of the old and unwise, and make way for renewal and favor the more adapted individuals.  Cold, disease, earthquakes, hurricanes and other events remove weak individuals.  These events are part of a longer period of time than we humans can appreciate.
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I live, unwisely, in earthquake country, where bridges are made strong.  We have strong medicine against cancer, and strong science to preserve the saguaros.  Our defenses are indeed strong; but time and nature win in the long run.  Geology teaches patience and inevitability; I love its theories.  But I think even geology is ready for upheaval.  It is like physics was before Einstien—ready for a better theory.  I will deal with this in a later post.

Few flowers bloom in the winter.  But it has been so unseasonably warm the last few days that I think the flowers are confused.

Island in the South Desert Sea

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An apron of sediment slopes out from the mountain, and they call it bajada.  Sometimes a solitary rock pokes up through bajada, and they call it inselberg.  Isolated mountain ranges, much larger than inselbergs, rise high above like ships on a desert sea.  Sediment between them is often eight thousand feet deep.  They have drilled many holes for water in this arid land to determine this.  When I have a better feel for it, I’ll deal with the strange theory of how the land stretched, cracked, and became the basin-and-range physiographic province.  For now, I am falling in love with arid desert and rocky crags, with plants and animals that make do with little water.  Bear with me a few days and maybe I’ll get practical.

A coyote high-tails away