by Bill Walker
Fortunately, a foursome had hiked into Desert Bazaar at dark the previous evening. I had seen them before at the Saufleys and the Andersons, and they appeared to be that rare thing—a close knit foursome. Unlike most groups, they appeared to have what it took to stick together. For starters, there were two guys and two girls.
The males, Dirk and Snake Charmer, were both west-coasters in their late thirties. The two girls, Laura, a charming mid-thirtyish lady from London, and Ingrid a tall, graceful German girl in her late twenties, were both plenty attractive. No matter what somebody might try to tell you, that helps maintain group unity. I sound like I know what I’m talking about on this topic which, of course, I don’t. But in this case the results speaks for themselves. They’d been together since the Kickoff, despite having very different hiking styles and speeds.
They had been so sequestered, in fact, that I was even reluctant to broach the subject of hiking out with them this morning. Finally, I just started walking along into the Mojave with them. I was soon glad I had.
We arrived at a confusing maze of dirt roads that all looked the same. A group the previous day had missed a turn here and ended up twenty miles off course (Perhaps not so coincidentally, it was the same group that had Big Dick so stoked up about rocking his RV’s the previous night). Fortunately, one of the German girl Ingrid’s many talents was map reading, and she figured out which direction we should head.
The Mojave is basically a desert floor and utterly featureless. For mile after mile we walked in an arrestingly ugly landscape. For the most part, it was the easiest possible place to hike, despite hikers carrying up to 7 liters (15 pounds) of water. Some people had been talking for weeks about night-hiking all the way through it. However, a heavy cloud cover was to hold the entire time we were in the Mojave. Instead of burning up, I struggled to stay warm.
The sole aesthetically appealing feature I could notice was the Joshua trees (named by the early Mormon settlers after the prophet, Joshua). These sturdy green trees with sharp, spindly branches are indigenous to the Mojave and often marks its boundaries.
The only human construction in this entire milieu may have been the ugliest thing of all. I refer to the closed aqueduct piping system that runs for 223 miles through the desert. It contains the water supply for the city of Los Angeles. Quite a story lies behind it.
A long-living urban legend has it that Los Angeles stole its water. That is not true. Technically, it’s not anyway. The city stayed within legal bounds at all times. But make no mistake—through secrecy, guile, subterfuge, and all the rest, the city pulled off something akin to the world’s second oldest profession in pursuit of the I.
In the late 19th century, San Francisco was the closest thing the United States had to sophisticated European splendor. Los Angeles was far behind and chafed at its second-class status. Its population had finally begun catching up, though. In fact, L.A.’s population was doubling every five years. However, future growth of the city faced one huge roadblock—lack of water.
The fundamental problem was that most of the water in California lies in the northern part of the state. The massive amounts of precipitation off the Pacific Ocean collide with the western slopes of the Sierras. It’s not uncommon to have 100 inches of snow on one side of the mountains and less than ten inches only fifty miles away. San Francisco, but not Los Angeles, has easy access to most of these swollen rivers flowing to their Pacific outlets.
Unfortunately, on the eastern side of the mountains, the few rivers that flow are usually much less substantial. There is one exception. Let me rephrase that; there I one exception—the Owens River.
Just south of Yosemite, there is a break in the Sierra chain. The monstrous snowfalls that normally collide with the western banks of the Sierras come barreling through this gunshot pass, creating a rushing river flowing south through the Owens Valley. The lake into which the river empties—or, I should say, used to empty—was Owens Lake. It receives enough water from the Owens River to satiate the daily water needs of 2 million people.
The problem for Los Angeles was how to drain a lake 250 miles away from its city limits. The answer is that Owens Lake lay at 4,000 feet, while Los Angeles sits at almost sea level. Therefore, it was physically possible, even a century ago, for Los Angeles to move that water from the mountains to the city.
First, though, Los Angeles needed to acquire the rights to the water in the Owens Valley. The story, entertainingly told in Marc Reisner’s Desert Cadillac, is a lot like you might expect—one of high-minded vision, intermingled with greed, chicanery, exploitation, and con men. A few Los Angeles officials plotted in secrecy and conspired with a double-agent in the Owens Valley to buy up all its land. The ranchers who sold out their land consoled themselves that the Owens River was a generous enough desert river to satiate the needs of 2,000,000 people. Los Angeles would never be that big, they thought.
The rest, as they say, is history. Los Angeles built a 223 mile aqueduct from the Owens Lake to the city of Los Angeles. No city or country had ever built anything so large across such merciless terrain. Their obsession with getting their hands on this prize was such that they did it all with city money, maintaining a work force of several thousand on the city payroll. They came in under budget and finished it in six years.
This water has allowed Los Angeles to become the second largest desert city in the world, just behind Cairo, Egypt on the Nile. But, of course, Los Angeles has now grown to multiples larger than the two million people that the Owens River can satisfy. They have since built an aqueduct draining water out of the Colorado River—a project that practically led to civil war with the state of Arizona. This was billed as the final solution to Los Angeles’ water problem. Of course, it wasn’t. They have also had to go into other rivers in northern California and southern Oregon to divert water. They now speak of trying to divert water from as far away as Alaska’s Yukon River.
Water is, and will remain, an obsession here in the West. If I was from Canada, which is the Saudi Arabia of water, sharing a long border with such a water-thirsty colossus might just make me a little uneasy. Just as the 20th century was all too often the era of petroconflict, the 21st century may be the age of aqua-conflict.
Finally, the PCT diverted away from the monotony of the Los Angeles aqueduct piping. For the first time since arriving at the Mexican border, I even felt a few drops of rain. What do you do when it rains in the desert? Desert rainstorms usually only last about ten minutes, but during that time you can expect to be lashed.
We arrived at our intended destination, the Cottonwood Creek Bridge. The water was flowing, which gave me a sigh of relief. Had it not been, I might have had to turn around tomorrow and backtrack all the way to the faucet outside Big Dick’s garage. Given this particular prospect, let me say it again—I was relieved to see the water was flowing.
The foursome I was with was not of the free-flowing campsite conversation ilk. Rather, they set their tents up right next to each other, and quickly buried themselves inside.
“What, do ya’ll miss Richard or something?” I yelled at them ensconced in their tents.
“Speak for yourself,” Laura corrected me.
Of course, it was raining so maybe it just showed they had a little bit more sense than somebody like me who wanted to sit out in the rain yakking about the day’s hike.
To my great surprise, the British girl, Laura, burst away like a rocket the next morning, looking like a runaway slave fleeing from the master’s dogs. Perhaps her soft British accent and effeminate mannerisms had fooled me. Actually, though, I found Laura’s speed somewhat instructive. She was about 5’4”, and didn’t appear very athletic. But if you looked closely at her (which, of course, I assiduously did), she was solidly built in the mid-section. That’s where your speed comes from. Dirk, who was only about 5’7”, was the only one who could keep up with her. The two trailing hikers were the lanky ones, myself and Ingrid.
Ingrid was an interesting case study. She had
just completed a doctorate in English Linguistics, and was interviewing for college professorships. In fact, just since beginning the trail, she had traveled back to Germany to accept an academic award. She was more than just a European intellectual, though. During college, she had worked as a back-country ranger one season in Olympic National Park in Washington State. In a deliberate German way, she did everything by the book—continually followed her maps, hung her food at campsites, bathed in streams, and ate better than any other hiker out here. In fact, she needed two different food bags to hold all the nutritious foods she routinely bought. She also routinely carried two weighty tomes for nighttime reading in her tent, which made her backpack bulging heavy.
Her backpack wasn’t as heavy as it could have been, however. The reason was that Dirk was carrying one of her two food bags in his backpack. This had generated the predictable winks and nods amongst other hikers, to be sure. But hiking along with them, I quickly saw it wasn’t the Faustian bargain that some had hypothesized.
Best-selling novelist, Nelson DeMille, wrote in the The Gatehouse:
When women and men are friends, there’s almost always a sexual element present. Not romantic sex, perhaps, but a sort of Freudian concept of sex that acknowledges the attraction as more than platonic, but not quite rising to the level of ‘let’s screw’.
Dirk was obviously not immune to the charms of having a European girl with a bit of glamor as his steady hiking partner. Nonetheless, he admirably steeled himself several times a day to mention “my girlfriend”, referring to a woman back at his home in Washington.
The fourth person in this group was Snake Charmer, who had picked up his name when a rattlesnake had lunged at him in the early days in the desert. Snake Charmer had this horrible crush on Laura. I say horrible—what was wrong with it at all? For starters, he was following a centuries-long tradition of American males and females swooning over our more articulate, and polished British cousins (at least until we get to know them a little better!). In fact, guess who was a bit in the thrall of Laura for a short time—myself, although I wasn’t nearly in the catatonic state of Snake Charmer.
Having Snake Charmer and Dirk in the foursome shielded Ingrid and Laura from enduring the kinds of sorties from male hikers that other female hikers habitually face. And foursome, not a fivesome, is what it would remain. I never was able to crack this group’s omerta code.
That was okay, though. My hiking style had always been a bit nomadic—to bounce from one group to another, and often hike alone as well. Most importantly, though, was that my feet were finally feeling better. Given that 2,000 trail miles lay ahead, I was cautiously optimistic for the first time in a good while.
Chapter 17
Final Desert Surprises
Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.
Mark Twain
“Is THERE ANY WATER? EXCUSE ME. IS THERE ANY WATER?” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
I was hiking alone at dusk. As was always the case as night approached, I was wondering where I was going to camp and get water. The Joshua Tree Spring was listed as having water and campsites. Normally, this would have been a no-brainer. On this occasion, however, there was a strange new issue.
Yogi’s generally accurate guidebook had an odd note for Joshua Tree Spring: “2005 hikers reported that a bear lives at this spring.”
A bear living in the desert? Wouldn’t that be like seeing an alligator in Alaska or a penguin in Kansas? Granted, our water reports showed that the only water in the area was the swampy water at the Joshua Tree Spring. Did I really want to go try to spend the night where a bear might be living? I decided on yelling down there with the ostensible purpose of finding out about water. Finally, I heard a faint voice several hundred yards down a hill yell back, “Yes.” That settled it. This was my stopping point for the day, and I headed down there.
Carlos and Gabe, both members of the University of Colorado track team that I had met yesterday, were sitting there eating dinner when I arrived. But they hadn’t set up their tents yet.
“Skywalker,” Carlos said. “We wondered if that was your voice.”
“Yeah, how’s the water?” I asked expectantly.
“Well, you can take a look,” Carlos said wearily. “It’s over in that heavy grass.”
I dropped my food bag next to them, but then greed got the best out of me. I quietly walked over and found the flattest spot to pitch my tent.
“Hey, Skywalker,” Carlos called out in a conversational manner, “Look, there’s a bear.”
He wasn’t kidding. A large bear had slowly clambered up about 100 feet away, and begun drinking water out of a tub full of grotesque water. Besides the fact we were looking at a bear in the desert, the strangest thing was its color—cinnamon. Nonetheless, the people in the West routinely refer to their bears as black bears. It all made me wonder.
California once crawled with grizzlies—by some estimates 125,000. The natives maintained an uneasy truce with them. Western settlers countenanced no such accommodation, however, and fanatically hunted the grizzly. By the early twentieth century, the grizzly was completely extinct in California (although the grizzly remains on the state flag). But why was this bear more the color of a grizzly bear, as opposed to the jet-black bears found in the East? Did it have to do with the stronger sunlight in the West? Maybe. Or was it because the grizzlies had interbred with other bears, and hybrid strains of the grizzly remain in California?
Carlos and Gabe didn’t seem worried and pulled their cameras out to snap some photographs. But then the bear started slowly sauntering in their direction, which black bears aren’t supposed to do. They quickly started stuffing their food bags away into their backpacks.
“Will you grab my food bag?” I yelled to them.
“Yes, we got it.”
The bear very slowly, but very surely, kept approaching them as they went into a quick retreat. Now they and the bear were headed in the direction of my tent.
My previous record for breaking down my tent was probably about three minutes. I demolished that record right here, as I frantically stuffed various parts into my backpack. But everything didn’t fit in there when done in such grab-bag fashion.
“Hey, can you carry a couple of these parts,” I quickly said to Carlos and Gabe, handing them tent poles and water. Petrified, we all tore up the hill.
Then the strangest thing happened. The bear had now gotten within twenty feet of us and we were completely on the lam. Suddenly and inexplicably, however, it turned on a dime and tore away like a scared rabbit. I had always heard bears are good climbers, but couldn’t believe my eyes. This bear shot up a tree like a squirrel, without the slightest hesitation. At that point Carlos and Gabe began flinging rocks at it.
We raced up the hill in the dark and found our way to the intersection with the PCT. The next mile was the fastest I’d ever hiked, trying to keep up with these two athletes. I just kept my headlamp focused right on Gabe’s heels and didn’t say a word.
“Hey, what about here,” I said pointing to an open spot just off the trail.
“Do you think this is far enough?’ Carlos said.
“Yes,” I answered. “That was a neighborhood bear. He hangs out in that swampy area.”
“I’m cowboy camping,” he immediately announced. “I want to be able to hear him if he shows up again.”
Those who say you can fall in love at first sight are right, after all. I can tell you the minute I fell in love on the PCT.
It was the morning after the chilling bear encounter; Carlos and Gabe had hardly slept a wink.
“I’m not spending another night out here without my bear canister,” Carlos had announced. The two of them blasted off to hike the remaining forty miles to Kennedy Meadows, where our bear canisters were waiting.
I was hiking alone and in a fragile frame of mind, myself. Obviously, I hadn’t gotten the water I had hoped for last night at Joshua Tree Spring. Then, this morning I had passed
the first branch of Spanish Needle Creek which was soggy, but not running. I wasn’t desperately low on water, but I was worried. It was now the middle of June and boiling hot.
One of the things I found most eerie about the whole desert experience was that there were virtually no section hikers. The only people out here were PCT thru-hikers. It was almost like the only reason a person would be walking through here is because he or she had to be; anybody else would have to be crazy. However, I began to hear the murmur of human voices. It was a group of six very senior citizens heading southbound.
After swapping salutations, I quickly popped the question. “Is there any water up ahead?”
“Yes,” answered a tall, thin male who appeared to be well into his seventies. “just before the left turn in about a half-mile, you will see a steady trickle up to your right. Get all you need there because there isn’t any more for about twenty miles.”
“Just what I needed to know,” I said. “By the way, are you planning to get water at Joshua Tree Spring?”
“Yes, we’re gonna’ camp there tonight,” he said.
“Well,” I hesitated. “You might want to reconsider. A bear ran me and two other guys out of there last night at dark.”
“Last night?” a minute-sized, elderly lady confirmed. “At Joshua Tree Spring.”
“Yeah, my guidebook actually said the bear lived there, so if you camp there he’s bound to turn up again.” They looked around at each other with an odd sigh, here or there.
“Well, we’ll figure out somewhere else to camp,” the tall guy said stoically.
With that they all trudged wearily on.
The reason I immediately felt myself shot through with Cupid’s arrow probably had to do with having lived in Florida the previous two years and, before that, working in a retirement home in Columbus, Georgia. From what I had seen, the primary trend for retirees is towards passivity and hostility to the unfamiliar. It’s just human nature. This group could have been down in Florida or Arizona clipping coupons and complaining about the stock market. Instead, they had carved out a trail section that was plenty ambitious for them, and were going about it with their own brand of flair. Section hikers often get over-shadowed by flashier, more egocentric thru-hikers. But the more of them I see, the more impressed I’ve become of the equally worthy nature of their challenges.