by Peter Stark
BY THE TIME I LEFT southeast Oregon, I’d seen Steens Mountain from many angles. I’d made two full circuits of the sixty-mile-long escarpment by car. I’d talked to ranchers who grazed their cattle on it, and outfitters who packed tourists on horses up it. One night, I’d tried camping below its clifflike eastern face where it dropped to the dry, dusty Alvord Desert. I hoped to gaze up that night at the intense desert stars, but it was not to be. A powerful spring storm swept over the mountain’s brow and tumbled down five thousand vertical feet onto the desert like a breaking wave of wind and spray. Even the white pelicans on pondlike Mann Lake huddled in tight clusters along the shore where I camped, heads down, as downbursts of wind splayed and frothed over the lake’s surface.
I hurriedly pitched my little mountain tent on the gumbo mud, struggling with the yellow fabric against the gusts, and climbed inside to read, sure that the storm would subside. Three hours later I was still damming the rivulets of water that the roaring downdrafts off the escarpment forced under the rain fly and up through the aging tent seams. I sat there on my shrinking island of dry sleeping bag, pondering what to do. I pictured a long, wind-roaring night in a cold, soaked bag. I’d never been daunted by leaky tents before. I’d been to so many remote and wild places in my life—the mountains of Tibet and the ice fields of Greenland, the forests of Manchuria and the rivers of Mozambique, the highlands of New Guinea and the lowlands of Sumatra. They were always worth—more than worth—the difficulty and discomfort. Why did this prospect look so unpleasant? Why was this different?
Sometimes turning back was more difficult logistically (and sometimes emotionally) than going on, and once you retreated, there was no second chance. Not this time, I realized. The car sat fifty feet away, although its tires had begun to sink into the softening desert ooze. Burns, and a warm, dry motel room, lay a hundred miles up the road. I was by myself and accountable to no one, not part of a team or trying to impress anyone, not passing on to my children the example of the need to persist. They and Amy weren’t with me, which gave this empty spot a different kind of emptiness.
I’d learned, over the years, that to be truly there in these wild places, in these blank spots, you had to earn it. Guided tours could get you into the wilds—I’d been on some of those, too, and they could be very rewarding—but, to my mind, they didn’t fully get you there. They didn’t take you to that totally on-your-own psychic place. A blank spot—a wild place—is as much a state of mind as a geographical reality. In a truly wild place you have no one to rely on but your own little party or yourself. You, personally, carry the weighty uncertainties—route, weather, unknown hazards—unlike traveling with a guide who may have visited this place dozens of times before. Uncertainty—a quality of unknowing, the “unknown”—gives wildness or blankness its special feel.
But I wasn’t there. Part of my mind was not in this place at all, but with my family. So many of the explorers over the centuries who truly threw themselves into blank spots on the map were young men, unattached, whose focus was single-mindedly forward and deeper into uncertainty. I could see little uncertainty here, only the certainty of discomfort and the knowledge that I had a simple option to escape. The car was within easy reach, the dirt road leading out of this place ran just around the lake, and two hours’ drive, partly on gravel and partly on pavement, and I’d be eating a steak dinner somewhere warm and dry.
So what was the point of lying all night in a wet bag in a leaky tent?
There wasn’t one. Or at least there wasn’t one at this point in my life.
I pulled up stakes, literally, spread my arms wide to gather up the mud-soaked tent like a flapping bedsheet on a clothesline during a gale, balled it up in a tangle of fabric and cords, stuffed it into the back of the Isuzu along with my sopping sleeping bag, and retreated to Burns.
THE NEXT MORNING, sun flitting in and out between wet clouds, I again, as I had several days earlier on my way to the Frenchglen Hotel, drove past the swampy arms of Malheur Lake and through the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. A clump of birders in khaki vests stood along the narrow highway, binoculars shoved to eyes, watching a lone white Ross’s goose and a flock of darker coots feeding in the green flooded marsh.
In a roundabout way, John Muir had helped with the preservation of the Malheur Refuge. In May 1903, he hosted Teddy Roosevelt, who was much more game for sleeping under the stars than Emerson and his fellow Bostonians, for four days of camping in Yosemite. Roosevelt, who had pledged during his campaign to fight the huge monied monopolies, hoped to get Muir’s opinion on conservation issues, in particular what to do with Yosemite Park and millions of acres of national “forest preserves” that had been designated—in considerable part due to Muir’s efforts—in the 1890s.
“It was clear weather,”51 Roosevelt later recollected, “and we lay in the open, the enormous cinnamon-colored trunks rising about us like the columns of a vaster and more beautiful cathedral than was ever conceived by human architect.”
As they lay side by side on their fern beds, Muir spoke of the natural world, of its trees and plants, of the way glaciers carved the mountains, of the lumber barons and sheep ranchers who were destroying the pristine places of the West, of the great, unifying spirit of nature.
Roosevelt, though a great talker himself, mostly listened, absorbing Muir’s point about the need to preserve forests and other lands before it was too late.
“John Muir,” he later remarked, “talked even better than he wrote.”
It was President Roosevelt who, in 1908, designated Malheur Lake as a bird refuge—only one small part of an enormous amount of federal land he set aside for conservation.
MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT CAMPING had washed out at the base of the eastern escarpment of the mountain, so, a day later, I pitched my tent on the second attempt partway up the gentle western slope of Steens in a juniper grove with a little brook trickling by. On the open hillsides below I’d seen wild horses—“painted pintos”—grazing. In the morning, I rose early, packed my tent, and drove farther up the graveled Bureau of Land Management road that loops fifty-two miles up to the 9,725-foot crest of Steens where the summit looks far down onto the Alvord Desert. That’s where I’d attempted to camp before.
It had rained again during the night. I guessed it had fallen as fresh snow up above. As my Isuzu climbed the steep section above camp, it slithered and spun in four-wheel drive through gumbo mud and lurched over boulders. At the top of the steep, the road swung around a hairpin bend to a northern slope. Here fresh snow from last night and the night before suddenly blocked my way—at first, only three or four inches deep. I stopped the car, slipped on my backpack, and started hiking up the snow-covered road toward the Steens summit, another seven miles away up a long, gentle ridge.
After a while I turned to look the way I’d come. I could now see forty or fifty miles across the valley to the west. There was not a sign of human habitation in all that country, except—maybe, maybe—a single tiny white spot, which may have been some kind of distant ranch building.
As I hiked, I felt the altitude in my shortness of breath. Soon I came to deeper, firmer drifts—winter’s old snow. The sky whipped over my head in a patchwork of sun and cloud. I sweated in the sun patches and shivered a bit in the cold. The ridge opened up, the junipers giving way to alpine terrain. Looking back, toward the northwest, I estimated I could see one hundred miles out across the sagebrush flats and rolling hills. Way out there, on that high desert, the Lost Wagon Trains got lost.
After two hours’ hiking, I stopped for lunch. Clambering over the deep snow of the ridgetop, I made my way to the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep gorge. I sat on a chunk of bare, jagged rock at the lip. Two thousand feet below me the Donner und Blitzen River tumbled, sounding like the distant rush of wind, fading and strengthening, as if ululating. Heavy snow cornices hung off the cliffs like thick, white eyebrows, and avalanche tracks spilled down toward the river. Here worked the dynamic forces of the earth. I could plain
ly see that ancient glaciers had carved this U-shaped canyon. John Muir helped us all to understand that. He would have loved this spot.
He, too, grew less intrepid with age. After his years as the wild man of Yosemite, and amusements like clinging to the slender whipsawing top of a pine tree during a blizzard (describing the ride in detail to Mrs. Carr), Muir had settled down to start a family, manage his in-laws’ fruit ranch, and, in his fifties, throw himself into writing and lobbying for the wilds. Likewise, Henry Thoreau. Except for his two years in the woods at nearby Walden Pond and his brief sojourns to Maine, he spent virtually his whole life in his peaceful village of Concord, mostly employed at the Thoreau pencil factory.
Billy Bartram showed a similar arc. After his four-year exploration through the wilds of the Southeast, he returned in his forties to the family gardens outside Philadelphia, and for the rest of his life pottered away in the soil and wrote. In his sixties, he declined invitations from Thomas Jefferson to accompany various exploring parties to the West, including perhaps the Lewis and Clark expedition. Bartram died quietly at home in 1823 at age eighty-four.
They all found—as did I—that the intensity of the truly wild experience is harder to sustain as one grows older. But that makes it no less valuable for having had those experiences, and to keep pursuing them, insofar as you’re willing. I’d heard aging Montanans hobbling around with canes say about wilderness, “I can’t go there anymore, but I feel better knowing it’s out there.”
Muir fought for the cause of wilderness to his very end, when he was too frail to experience it directly. He died of pneumonia on Christmas Eve, 1914, at age seventy-six, soon after a final climactic battle to save the Sierra’s Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed for San Francisco’s water supply. Although the battle was lost, it proved a galvanizing moment for the future of wilderness preservation. “[T]he conscience of the whole country has been aroused from sleep,” wrote Muir.
Clouds swirled off the rock-and-snow peak of Steens. A quick patch of sun was followed by a blast of cold wind and the hard splatter of graupel—hail-like pellets of snow.
I pulled on my hat and gloves. I zipped up my hood. The graupel pelted hard off the hood, like a rainstorm driving against a roof. It was still several miles’ hike to the summit up the broad, gentle ridge. I knew I wasn’t going to make it today.
PART IV
THE HIGH,
HAUNTED DESERT OF
NEW MEXICO
Coronado’s route in 1540–42 from Mexico City in search of the Seven Cities of Gold, through present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, to Kansas.
Western New Mexico showing area of hike into Gila Wilderness Area. The Very Large Array (VLA) at center. Inset shows lights of region at night.
Detail of hike through Gila River canyons in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness Area.
Flying into Phoenix at night felt like descending into a video game. Out the window to the west, a beaded, golden grid of lights extended as far as one could see, a great, flat circuit board of lights, millions of lights in long, bright perpendicular rows, and other smaller lights moving along the glowing grid as if carrying messages from one sector to another, telling the sprawling mechanism what to do, telling it how to suck in more electrons from far-off dammed desert rivers and giant furnaces of burning coal, telling it how to feed itself.
Out the airplane window to the east—nothing. Blackness—utter, total blackness.
We four—our little family: Amy, Molly, Skyler, myself—jammed our backpacks into the trunk of a rental car amid the pools of light and shadow in the Mesa airport parking lot where palm trees stood and the air felt balmy. Then we drove east, a lone light-bead arching across empty overpasses and circling along empty ramps and swinging through empty cloverleafs in the total blackness east of Phoenix and Mesa, where it was said a half million more houses were planned but didn’t yet exist.
“Where are we?” we said to one another. “This is very strange.”
An island of white light hove out of the darkness. It was a mall, standing alone, waiting for the houses that hadn’t yet come to nestle warmly around it…waiting for the houses that now might never come, lit bravely, hopefully, like a lone Christmas tree on a cold, rainy night. But this was desert and there was no rain and sadness to repel, only the infinite blackness.
We found a motel near the brave mall and rose early, driving east again, into the bright desert sun. Saguaro cacti reached their arms up from arid hills. Dry, rocky mesas glistened before us. Here and there sat a small patch of houses along the road, and then there were none. We drove a long loop southeast, on Interstate 10, to skirt southward around the millions and millions of acres of high, rugged, empty country that lies along the border between Arizona and New Mexico. On the Earth-at-night satellite photo image, three southwestern cities form a triangle defined by three nodes of light: Albuquerque to the north, Phoenix to the west, and El Paso to the east. They lie about three hundred to four hundred miles apart. In the center of this triangle, however, is a vast, shapeless, inky sprawl—one of the largest and most distinct blank spots of the Lower 48 states.
“If you start walking east from Phoenix,” I’d heard from a forester I’d met a year or two earlier who was based in Arizona, “you can travel all the way to the middle of New Mexico and cross only three paved roads.”
I’d also sat beside a white-haired grandfather at our children’s school music recital in Montana, where his grandchildren also went to school. He told me he lived just east of Phoenix.
“Behind our house sits a single row of condos. After the row of condos the Superstition Mountains begin. After that there’s nothing—just nothing—for a long, long way. I can’t tell you how far because I’ve never been back there. I don’t know anyone who has.”
Amy drove, while Molly and Skyler, ages fourteen and ten, crammed between camping gear in the backseat of our rental car, read their books. I fell asleep. When I woke we’d swung so far south that we were only fifty miles from the Mexican border. We crossed from Arizona into New Mexico, and left the Interstate, swinging north on a smaller highway, New Mexico 90, toward the heart of that sprawling region—the center of the triangle that had shown so blank on the Earth-at-night photo.
The open desert rose in long rolls, waves of balding ridges topped by scrubby piñon pine and juniper forests. A sign on the crest of one rounded ridge marked the Continental Divide, the spine of North America, where rivers to the east flow to the Atlantic and those to the west to the Pacific. We coasted downward through the Little Burro Mountains, past a large open-pit mine and long heaps of tailings, a former Phelps Dodge mine now owned by Freeport McMoRan, a global giant producing gold and copper, operating huge mines on the island of New Guinea, in the Congo Basin, and in South America. Long before Freeport, or Phelps Dodge, or its predecessors, however, Indians mined copper at this same ore deposit and shaped the soft, golden metal into spear points and ornaments.
WAS IT RUMOR—or knowledge—of this very metal deposit that prompted Cabeza de Vaca to give his stunning report in the summer of 1536 to Viceroy Mendoza of Mexico City? After wandering for years in the unknown lands north of Mexico—what’s now the southwestern United States—he had finally found his way back to Spanish civilization, or civilization in a manner of speaking. Only fifteen years earlier Mexico City had still been Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztec empire, until conquered by Cortés. Other Spaniards had conquered lands toward the south of Mexico City, in Guatemala and Honduras and the Yucatán peninsula. But they had little idea what lay to the north. No European did—no explorer had yet penetrated to the interior of the North American continent. Cabeza de Vaca, quite unintentionally, was the first.
Yes, Cabeza de Vaca reported when he reached Mexico City, there could be valuable metals.1 Yes, perhaps copper…gold…silver…in the unknown lands to the north where he wandered. And, yes, he’d heard of cities there, too—cities built of stone, many stories high.
It was all the news of
Mexico City in the summer of 1536, this arrival of Cabeza de Vaca’s, and the rumors he brought of gold and cities to the north. He had long ago been given up for dead. But in April of that year a column of mounted Spanish soldiers headed out from the northernmost villages of Mexico to capture Indians to work as slaves on the Spanish plantations. One day the slaving party—having taken few captives because the Indians had fled and hidden—came upon a stranger whose bizarre appearance and words left them literally speechless. He stood before them nearly naked and barefoot, dressed in a few tanned hides and holding a gourd rattle. He addressed them in formal Andalusian Spanish.
He’d been shipwrecked eight years ago, he told the soldiers in the slaving party. He and three others were the only survivors of the great Narváez expedition of three hundred men sent out nine years earlier from Spain by the king himself to claim mainland Florida for the crown. While anchored off the Florida coast, a hurricane had blown away their ships, leaving only bits of planking in the treetops. They didn’t give up. They carried on inland, on horses, following rumors of gold. It was said by the Indians to lie to the west—always to the west, they were told. So they kept west. They fought Indians, and they befriended Indians. They ran out of food and stole from Indians. Many men died from illness. Still they kept west, following the curve of the unknown coast. They were stopped by a great swampy delta choked with fallen logs. Starving, they killed their horses, devoured the flesh, and fashioned boats from the stretched horsehides. Still westward they traveled, now by horsehide boat, along the curving coast. After many leagues’ sailing, strong currents and powerful storms caught them, sweeping Governor Narváez’s boat out to sea, never to be seen again. Another boat overturned. Many died in the water. Others crawled through the surf to shore, naked, in November. Friendly Indians found them, built fires to warm them, and fed them. Still, many died of sickness.