I was recently set to make the mountain-closing trek over the ridge with fellow desert rats Cheryll and Steve, when the night before the hike an early season storm descended, blanketing the desert with low clouds and bringing a hammering rain that sent water coursing through the forking network of gullies that branches through this open desert like veins. Concerned that winter might beat us to the summit, we decided to try our mountain transect despite the ominous weather.
We set out early, trudging through the driving rain, carrying oversized day packs stuffed with extra clothes and food. Three miles into the muddy slog we reached the soggy, wildfire-scorched bitterbrush flats at the base of the mountain, and from there began an 1,800-foot ascent into the chilling fog. By the time we reached the small spring halfway up the mountain we were thoroughly soaked, and had already pulled on gloves, hats, and every piece of spare clothing we had. Looking homeward across the Great Basin through the drifting fog, we caught occasional glimpses of the broken hills and sagebrush-dotted sand flats rolling east to the gray horizon. Above us to the west wound a faint game trail, rising through copses of bitter cherry and coyote willow as it skirted between slick granite cliffs that gleamed in the rain.
By midafternoon we crested the summit ridge and entered a sweeping valley that is slung gracefully between two rocky peaks and is graced with groves of gnarled aspens and surrounded by the green domes of snowberry bushes. I tried to imagine this same spot in July, when the magnificent expanse of this hanging valley would be covered in an undulating, yellow blanket of flowering tower butterweed. But now the situation was more threatening than pastoral. The valley appeared ominous as the fog lowered, the freezing rain turned to snow, and a cutting wind rose from the western flank of the mountain.
“Looks like big weather,” Steve observed, squinting.
“Way too exposed,” Cheryll added. “Time to skedaddle.”
Shivering, I nodded my agreement. I had already begun to lose sensation in my toes, and it was obvious that we needed to head for lower country, and that without delay.
The three of us now set to hiking with intense concentration, knowing that even a short pause would be an invitation to hypothermia. We soon reached the far side of the summit valley, from which we hoped our descent of the mountain’s western slope would begin. Instead, we found ourselves staring down a precipitous, brush-choked ravine that was far too thick to bushwhack. Our only alternative was to ascend a steep boulder field to a secondary ridge from which it appeared that a route down the mountain might be possible. The numbness in my feet had now overtaken my legs, and my fingers also began to deaden. It was far too late to turn back and still arrive home before dark, and so we began to pick our way up and over boulders slick with rime. Moving with silent urgency, I suspect we were all thinking the same thing: under these dangerous conditions, even a minor injury would quickly become a major emergency.
After another hour of climbing I was out of breath and dangerously wet and cold, but I could now make out the crest of the boulder field etching the horizon above me. At last reaching its top I clambered out onto an exposed ridge, where I noticed among the first flakes of sticking snow the scat of pronghorn antelope and that of black bear within a few feet of each other—a reminder that the keystone species of the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada overlap on this ecotonal range. If my home mountain is sacred, as it seems to me to be, that is because it is the enchanted place where the magisterial worlds of mountain and desert abide together.
Emerging onto the ridge, I first looked back across Nevada. Somewhere out among those endless, fog-shrouded ridges was a small hill, atop which sat the warm sanctuary of our home, where I pictured my beautiful daughters reading by the woodstove. And then I turned west, gazing out over rain-drenched California, spectacular in the lowering storm. Beneath the ceiling of dark clouds I now saw the ridge descend before me, narrow and sinuous as a dragon’s back but clear and passable, even as steep canyons dropped precipitously away from it on either side. Beyond the serpent’s curving spine lay a broad valley through which ran the gleaming asphalt trail of the highway. Only about four miles away, but nearly 3,000 feet below me, the ribbon of asphalt looked as peaceful as a miniature stream, with insect cars floating along it, and occasionally the tiny box of an eighteen-wheeler passing through the shining, black artery like a rectangular bubble. I tried to imagine the folks inside those cars and trucks. How warm they must be. How sweet must be the sound of the music pouring out of their radios. What lives they might be escaping from or returning to. Whether they turned their heads far enough to notice the desolate beauty of my home mountain rising above them into the freezing fog.
The rest of that stormy afternoon we ran the winding ridge toward the highway below, warming quickly as we dropped in elevation, descending to safety and leaving behind us a wilderness of peaks and ridges that would soon be buried beneath the season’s first snow. Glancing over my shoulder occasionally as I hiked, I felt winter nipping at my heels, closing my home mountain behind me as I strode for the lowlands.
Reaching the sage flats, we bushwhacked through open desert scrub for several miles, our boots thawing out and then caking with mud. In a short time, we reached Hallelujah Junction, an isolated roadside outpost that certainly lived up to its name on that freezing afternoon. As I pushed open the swinging door of the little store I smelled warm buttered popcorn and heard men talking idly of weather, of the miles of highway behind them or that still lay ahead. The sound of a football game crackled from a small television that sat on the checkout counter between a rack of keychains and a Plexiglas container of smoked jerky.
Steve and Cheryll and I circled the small, warm space, and then stepped to the counter carrying the kinds of things Hallelujah specializes in. I bought a box of strawberry frosted pop tarts and a small bottle of whiskey, which I emptied into a large cup of inkblack coffee. Hallelujah! We have closed the consecrated mountain. Our ritual transect-ambulation has brought this season to an end, even as another has already silently begun.
Whenever I drive the Hallelujah stretch of highway, my memory triggers the aromatic smell of that bone-warming, bourbon-laced coffee. And that causes me to look up into my home mountain’s towering canyons and imagine granite and lichen, bitterbrush and aspen, willow and chokecherry, pronghorn and bear. And three shivering hikers, huddled on a windy ridge in the swirling snow, looking down with relief on the gleaming, ribboned black snake of a distant highway.
IN A CO-WRITTEN ARTICLE published in a major scientific journal, a small herd of perfectly respectable conservation biologists proposed a bold ecological restoration project they call “Pleistocene Rewilding.” The concept itself is outrageously wild. “Rewilding” is the process of reintroducing species to ecosystems from which they have been extirpated—often by that big bully, Homo notsosapiens. Think of wolves being brought back to Yellowstone, or Ted Turner replacing cattle with bison on his ranches (which total 2 million acres) in the Rockies and on the Great Plains. Pleistocene rewilding, by contrast, is the incredible idea that we humans can enhance an ecosystem’s health by reintroducing many of the large mammals that were driven to extinction between ten thousand and thirteen thousand years ago.
The so-called “pre-Columbian benchmark” of 1492 has been the commonly used target for ecosystem restoration efforts. To achieve this benchmark, scientists simply figure out how the world looked on the day that Señor Columbus made landfall—say, at about cocktail hour—and then restore North American ecosystems to that condition by extirpating exotic species, reintroducing natives, and restoring habitat. It isn’t easy to do, but at least it’s easy to understand. Then, along come these provocative Pleistocene Rewildatators, who ask why we are stuck on 1492 when the real trouble started thirteen millennia ago. They point out that the mass extinction of megafauna during the Pleistocene—along with a secondary wave of extinctions resulting from the disappearance of those keystone species—caused severe damage to t
he fabric of North American ecosystems, which some say have been slowly fraying and unraveling ever since. Since the fossil record gives us a good idea of what beasts roamed here before the arrival of human hunters from Asia (our Native Americans), why not leave Columbus out of it and select an ecological restoration benchmark that is closer to Pleistocene cocktail hour? Why not acknowledge that North American ecosystems are full of holes—ecological niches that have gone unoccupied for at least ten thousand years—and then do our best to fill those holes by reintroducing large mammals?
Now here is the fun part. It turns out that, by the time Columbus showed up, much of the cool stuff was long gone, and in this sense the usual pre-Columbian benchmark for restoration actually describes a world in which biodiversity was already radically impoverished. Pleistocene North America was home to a living bestiary of outrageous creatures, including various species of horses, donkeys, camels, muskoxen, sloths, tapirs, peccaries, cheetahs, lions, and Proboscideans (mammoths and mastodons), not to mention giant short-faced bears, ferocious saber-toothed cats, fierce dire wolves, and, to depart from mammals, the nine-foot-long sabertooth salmon and the ten-foot-tall terror bird as well. Among the charismatic megafauna that made it through the bottleneck of Pleistocene extinctions are animals we know to be equally fantastic: coyote and wolf, bison and grizzly, cougar and pronghorn antelope, to name just a few.
But these survivors are not the same without their lost neighbors. Take pronghorn, for example, a remarkable animal that can run up to sixty miles per hour. Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, and all other predators in North America are so incredibly slow compared to pronghorn that predation by these animals simply cannot have provided the selection pressure necessary to create the pronghorn’s incredible speed. Where, then, did this amazing speed come from? From the extinct American cheetah, which, although it has been absent from North American ecosystems for at least ten thousand years, chased the hell out of pronghorn for almost twenty million years before that.
Although the American cheetah and many other Pleistocene megafauna are long gone, advocates of Pleistocene Rewilding believe we can use “extant conspecifics and related taxa” (read: kinfolk) to represent extinct species in North American ecosystems. While the several species of Pleistocene tapirs are extinct, for example, they could be represented by the mountain tapir, which survives today in South America. The extinct North American camel could be replaced by the dromedary out here in the Great Basin Desert and by the vicuña or guanaco in more mountainous parts of the West.
Pleistocene North America was also home to mammoths and mastodons, megaherbivores that played an important role as keystone species. If it sounds crazy to suggest that modern elephants might be used to fill this empty ecological niche, consider this: Asian elephants are more closely related to extinct North American mammoths than they are to surviving African elephants. For the vanished American cheetah and American lion, we could simply use their African cousins. Finding big cats to reintroduce would not be difficult, since more than one thousand cheetahs are currently kept in the United States, and more lions live on private Texas ranches than in all American zoos combined.
Rewilding has already begun in North America, if we count several successfully reintroduced species. After the peregrine falcon was driven to the brink of extinction as a result of exposure to the pesticide DDT during the 1950s and ’60s, populations were recovered through the introduction of seven subspecies from the United States, Europe, South America, and Australia—subspecies that served effectively as “proxy taxa” for the vanished midwestern peregrine falcon. Or consider the California condor, which was widely distributed in North America during the Pleistocene but afterward survived only along the West Coast. After successful reintroduction in California, the condor was subsequently reintroduced to the Southwest, where the species had enjoyed no prolonged residency for ten millennia.
Or, take that iconic animal of the American West, the wild mustang. Horses, which are native to North America but went extinct here twelve thousand years ago, were reintroduced by Spaniards during the late fifteenth century. The wild mustangs I sometimes see out here in Silver Hills are descendants of the conquistadores’ steeds and, consequently, are generally considered non-native. But if we adjust our timescale from the pre-Columbian benchmark to the Pleistocene—if we wind the clock back from five centuries ago to 125 centuries ago—we might say that Señor Columbus and his compadres were innovators in Pleistocene Rewilding. In Nevada, we have intense controversy over BLM “gathers,” roundups of non-native wild mustangs from public lands. Seen in the long view, though, the problem is not that the horses are non-native but, rather, that they decimate the range because the predators with which they coevolved have been absent for millennia. We do not have too many horses; we have too few lions.
I get it that sticking a bunch of lions and tigers and bears (Oh, my!) in Nevada might have complications. But I see no reason why legitimate scientific counterarguments should stand in the way of the imagination. What would it be like to hike Silver Hills and see not only pronghorn, as I often do, but pronghorn using every fiber of their evolutionary speed to outrun a cheetah in hot pursuit? What if a visit to our spring in the nearby foothills meant not dodging fly-encrusted cow pies but instead witnessing elephants spraying spring water on their leathery, weathered backs? What if a resident herd of camels gnawed up some of these invasive woody shrubs and restored open grasslands where cattle have left little besides thistle and cheat grass? What if it became a Fourth of July tradition to drink white Russians made with camel’s milk and smoke juicy peccary sausages and tasty tapir steaks on the barbeque?
I hold no truck with the argument that we should not introduce these megafauna because they are dangerous. Already I must keep rattlers from striking my goofy dog, coyotes from attacking our lazy cat, and cougars from pouncing on the children. I think we would all be energized and invigorated by making the salutary transition from Couch Potato to Potential Prey. While I would not wish misfortune on any of my neighbors—because I have so few that I can’t afford to lose too many—I would welcome the use of lions to purge Silver Hills of folks who do not do their fair share of work on our dirt road. And, maybe, the guy who talks too much down at the mailboxes. And, for sure, the lady who misdelivers the mail.
But enough rhapsodizing on the utility of lions. What I really mean to say is that to inhabit a landscape fully—especially one as remote and inhospitable as the one that is our home—requires sustained experiential contact punctuated by sudden leaps of imagination. If the Great Basin Desert impresses us with the sheer, incomprehensible vastness of its space, it is also important to triangulate this place within the vastness of time. To envision Silver Hills as it was thirteen thousand years ago is also to imagine what it might look like thirteen thousand years from now. Why only think long and hard about our place when we might also think deep about it?
I am not saying that Pleistocene Rewilding will work right away. I realize it might take ten or twelve millennia, and that a few of the neighbors—perhaps even me—will have to be sacrificed for the good of the megafauna. But think of it conceptually rather than literally. Rewilding: to become wild again after having lost wildness. That is a form of restoration we all need, and the first step in rewilding must be to reintroduce the possibility of the marvelous to our imagination of the land.
FOR A SOLID YEAR NOW, since last Christmas, Caroline has been pleading with us to get her a pet hedgehog. No one in the family can figure out where she got this idea in the first place. “Hedgehog” has certainly never crossed my mind, let alone my lips, but it is deep within Caroline’s nature to grasp an idea and refuse to let it go. Like a weasel or gator with jaws clenched, she is incapable of giving up, a quality that makes her difficult to live with and also, in some small, important way, my hero.
As this Christmas approached, Caroline redoubled her efforts to get me to relent on the hedgehog, which meant that the hedgehog
“discussion,” as Eryn still insisted civilly upon calling it, had devolved into a Neanderthal battle between two of the most stubborn people ever to walk these bare, snowy hills. Tenacious little Caroline tried every angle; I was equally unyielding.
“Dad, hedgehogs are the coolest animals ever to be on Earth. Wait until you see how cool. It’s going to blow it out your mind!”
“Honey,” I replied, “we have hens that don’t lay eggs, a cat that won’t chase mice, and a dog that drools in gallons rather than ounces. The last thing we need is another useless pet to take care of.”
“Well, Daddy, I’m not sure I care for your attitude,” she observed coolly, turning one of my own pet locutions against me.
“Why can’t you just want a bike, like a normal kid?” I asked.
“Because normal kids want bikes, like you said. But I’m unique! And a hedgehog is unique, so it’s definitely the thing for me,” she answered.
“Where did you learn the word unique?” I asked.
“Yeah, most kids my age don’t know it. That’s part of what makes me unique,” she insisted proudly.
This standoff continued well into December, when Caroline came to us with what was billed as an important family announcement. She hated to have to go against our wishes, she explained, but she had decided it was necessary to skirt our opposition and instead ask Santa Claus to bring her the long-desired hedgehog. As evidence of her determination she displayed the letter she had written to Santa, which included the following appeal: “plese plese plese even though my mom says it is vary vary vary unlikely and my dad says did you bonk your head? PLESE PLESE PLESE get me a H E G H O G ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !” (Yes, exactly ten exclamation points.)
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