Stopping by Woods

Yesterday before dark I drove to my trailhead at the Virginia Lakes, just to make sure I could find it and the roads weren’t closed.  It was quiet and cold; the snow soaked up all sound.

I wasn’t in all my cold-fighting gear – I had on only a pair of Carhartts, a fleece pullover, a jacket and a baseball cap – but the cold was intimidating.  16°F, according to the truck thermometer, and I could hear the wind tearing around the camper.  I got out to find where the trail started.

The snow was ankle-deep, and the sun had already sunk behind the high hills that seal these lakes from the outside world.  In shadow, I looked for the trail under the snow.  It started by an outhouse, an odiferous long-drop facility that I hurried by.  Duke tarried at the smells left by visitors past.  He paused to add his own olfactory signature to the registry of guests.

I walked down a small hill then around a curve toward the evergreen woods.  The trail circled the lake, which lay like a serene mirror amid the formidable hillsides in which it was nestled.  My boots squeaked in the snow.  The lake reflected the light and dark world around it, brilliant white snow on level ground, dark rock where the hillsides were too steep for snow to remain.  Dark evergreens laden with snow awaited my entrance like silent sentinels of the Sierras.  Wind swept across the snow and stirred flakes from the boughs of trees.  The cold hurt my ears.  I looked back for Duke.

I saw him through some bare aspen branches, circling the outhouse with his nose to the ground.  Periodically he paused to release a stream into the snow.  As I watched, Duke completed his duties and stood near the point where I’d left the outhouse, ears perked, nose in the air.  He moved his nose side to side in the air.  Looking for me.  He took a few steps and sniffed in another direction.

I remembered when I was a child when my father and I would go walking in the woods.  Sometimes Dad hid from me, and for a few moments I was alone in the wilderness.  I didn’t know where I was, or how to get back, or how to survive out there.  I was scared.  I’d look up the trail, down the trail, into the forest around me, fast glances in building fear.  But before my fear grew to terror Dad would emerge, all smiles and hair-tousling.  He knew where we where, how to get back, and what to do.

I called Duke to me and he ran down the trail.  I scratched his head and thought, this time it’s just me.

POSTSCRIPT.  Right now, I am backpacking in the Sierras.  I will probably be gone on that backpacking trip for a week or more, so this blog entry is one that I prepared ahead of time and scheduled to post in advance.  I’ll start writing “live” posts again when I’m back to my truck and computer.  While I’m gone, there will be no new blog entries for Saturday or Sunday.

Into the Sierras

It’s time to find out if I’m as tough as I think I am.

By the time this entry posts to the blog, I will be in the Sierras.  I’m entering them from the east just north of Mono Lake, and my inbound hiking route parallels Highway 120 – also known as Tioga Pass Road – to the north.

I’m not going to hike all the way across at once, for the very practical reason that I don’t know how I’d get back.  The most direct way back to my truck would be to hitchhike along Tioga Pass Road, or find someone and pay for a ride, but that would only work if the road stays open.  Tioga Pass closes for winter, usually beginning in early November.  The Park Service lady said that they’d probably close it at the next snowstorm.  That could come any day, and while I’m alright with weathering a storm in my tent with my loyal, thickly-furred, heat-producing companion, I can’t count on the road being open when I get across the mountains.  If the road were closed, the distance I’d have to hitchhike would go from 58 miles to 273 miles.  I won’t take that gamble.

So I drove across Tioga Pass Road a few days back and left a food cache near the White Wolf Ranger Station, which is about halfway across.  I deposited days of provisions: five freeze-dried suppers stuffed under a big rock, dog food and lunch meat crammed in a metal army-surplus ammo box, and one beer buried in the dirt.  My plan is to hike west to the cache, which will be about 38 miles of bust-your-ass climbing and descending, then turn back and hike east along Tioga Pass Road, where I’ll try to catch a ride if the road is open.  The route back from the cache will be about 60 miles – a long walk, but I calculate that I can do it in four days.  Which brings the total planned route to 98 miles.  Seven to ten days, I think.

It’ll be cold, but I’ve got the clothes.  It’ll be long, but I’ve got the food.  It’ll be hilly, but I’m in shape, or close enough.  And that’s really all the planning you can do.  Now it’s time to put tracks on the trail.

An approximation of my planned route.  I'll begin in the Hoover Wilderness Area of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, then enter Yosemite National Park from the east.

The cache.

An Ugly Fight

That fraud.  The dirty, stinking fraud.

The odiferous part was my fault for not bathing him, of course, but Duke came up with the deception all on his own.  Since we left Georgia, Duke has refused to “loadup” into the passenger side of my truck.  “Loadup” is a command he knows well – if you say it to him while he’s standing behind a truck with the tailgate down, he knows to jump into the bed.  And he can catch air for a short-legged dog – Duke can loadup into a the bed of F-250 four-by-four; I’ve seen him do it.  But he won’t load up into the passenger door of my truck.  Maybe, I thought obligingly, the floorboard is different.  Although the floorboard is lower than the tailgate, there’s not as much “landing space” in the floorboard for Duke to lose the momentum from his leap.  So maybe, I thought, when I said “loadup” and he placed his front paws on the floorboard and looked at me with sorrowfully, it was because he really couldn’t make the leap.

What a sucker.

Duke and I were playing fetch by the ruins of a couple old railroad buildings.  Sagebrush had long since retaken the terrain, and all that remained of the buildings were their concrete foundation walls, standing three or four feet above the dust.  The walls were higher than the floorboard of my truck.  I threw the tennis ball into the middle of the foundation and sent Duke after it.  He sprinted for the wall and cleared the wall without touching it, front paws folded under him like a deer leaping a barbed wire fence.  Effortlessly.  On the way out he did it again.  I threw the ball in a second time.  Same result.  I threw the ball in a third time.  Tired now, Duke placed a foot on the wall as he jumped over it.  He cleared it without running so fast as to build up unmanageable momentum.  Still cleared it with no problem.

Busted.



I should have anticipated this.  Duke has a history of deception.  One frosty morning after hunting wood ducks in south Georgia, Duke and his kennelmate, Sly, were charged with picking up the downed ducks for four of five hunters.  Dad circled the pond with Sly, an energetic if unintelligent American lab who bounded into the water and crashed through briers to bring back ducks that we hunters couldn’t see.  Duke followed the circumambulation of the pond, but did not follow Sly’s brier-bucking example.  He stayed at Dad’s heels.  After rounding the pond, Dad piled the ducks that Sly had recovered under a pine tree and walked him to the water’s edge.  He sent Sly after a duck floating belly-up near the center of the pond.  Sly sprinted to the edge, leaped, bellyflopped with his front paws outstretched, and swam snorting and grunting after the duck.  Duke walked back into the woods.  As Dad and I watched Sly swim, Duke emerged at Dad’s heel with a duck.

“Good boy, Duke,” Dad said.  He showed me the duck.  “Where the hell did this come from?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I didn’t think any fell over here.”

Dad patted Duke on the head and we turned back to Sly, who had the floating duck in his mouth and was swimming back toward us.  But before Sly reached the shore, Duke arrived at Dad’s heel again, his tail wagging slowly, another duck in his mouth.  Dad took the duck from Duke and scratched his head, but now his eyes were suspicious.  Dad made a show of turning back toward the pond, but he watched Duke over his shoulder.

As Sly dutifully churned through the frigid duck pond, paws splashing, eyes blinking, wet duck in mouth, Duke trotted back into the woods.  Duke retraced our steps to the pine tree where Dad had deposited Sly’s pile of ducks.  As Sly climbed out of the water, dripping and panting, Duke picked up a duck from the pile and trotted toward us.

A damned con-artist, Dad calls him affectionately.  By the time we discovered that Duke and Sly had the wrong names, it was too late to change them.

I know that duck-pile story, have told it several times, and have heard it told several more.  Yet for this whole trip, I had been picking Duke up – all seventy-odd pounds of him – and lifting him into the front seat of my truck.  No more.  I put the tennis ball in my pocket and walked Duke back to the truck.  I opened the passenger door and pointed.  “Loadup,” I said.

Duke looked at me sorrowfully.

I patted the passenger’s floorboard.  “Loadup,” I said more forcefully.  Duke hung his head.

“Bullshit,” I said.  “Loadup!”  I took off my cap and swatted Duke across the face.  He cringed, but did not move.

“Loadup,” I said.  I grabbed Duke by the collar and dragged him toward the door, expecting him to make at least a halfhearted leap as I hauled him toward the doorframe, but he didn’t.  Dead weight.  I stopped before I banged his head into the truck.  He shrank to his stomach in the dust.

“Loadup!” I told him again.  I grabbed his collar in one hand and some loose skin over his hindquarters with the other and threw him into the truck.  He hit the glove compartment with a bang and thudded to the floor.  He stayed in the floorboard, his head turned away from me.  I shut the door and circled to my side.  When I got in and cranked the truck, Duke still wouldn’t look at me.  We drove down the dirt road, not talking.

I hate doing shit like this.  Maybe Duke didn’t know what loadup meant, or maybe he didn’t know to apply it to doors instead of tailgates, or maybe he really couldn’t make the jump.  Maybe I was berating and hitting Duke, who was unfailingly loyal and loving to me, for reasons he didn’t understand.  Or maybe for not doing something he wasn’t capable of doing.  Duke, who would never harm me in a thousand years, even if when I poked his aching feet or crammed pills down his throat or hit him for not jumping into my pickup.  It was a black guilt, the gut-gnawing guilt that makes you want to throw up then climb into a ring with Muhammed Ali to serve your penance.  But you know that even that wouldn’t make things right and you just wish, wish, wish that you had been the victim instead of the perpetrator because no amount of pain could be worse than this but you know that no amount of wishing will make it so and you’ve got to live with that.  I looked out the window and swallowed.

No, the rational side of me said.  Duke knew enough to place his front feet on the floorboard when told to loadup.  He was able to jump to higher places than the floor of my truck.  Refusing to loadup was willful disobedience, and it would only get harder to fix the longer I ignored it.  A responsible dog owner must be willing to impose discipline.  Otherwise you end up with a little yapping piece of shit that isn’t happy and makes everyone else miserable.

Let’s get it over with.

I pulled over to the side of the road next to an embankment so the passenger’s floorboard was close to the ground.  No question about Duke’s ability now.  I opened Duke’s door and looked at him.  He looked at me then looked away.  I stepped back and took a deep breath.

“Here,” I said.

Duke stayed in his seat.

“Here!”

No movement.  Duke knows this command; he’s executed it before.  I grabbed him by his collar and jerked him out of the truck.  I walked him in a circle, then back to the door.

“Loadup.”  He looked away.

“Loadup!”

I grabbed Duke and threw him to the floorboard as I spoke the command again.  He climbed into the passenger’s seat and faced the other way.  I took a few steps back from the truck.

“Here.”  Duke looked at me but didn’t move.

“Here!”  Duke looked away.

Again I jerked him down by his collar, and again I walked him in a circle, and again I told him to loadup, and again he obeyed none of the commands.  I threw him into the truck by his collar and loose skin.  I stepped back.

“Here,” I said.  No movement.

“Here!” I jerked him out by the collar.  He landed nose-first in the dirt, getting sand all over his face.  I walked him in a circle and back to the truck.  He knew what was coming.  He cowered.

“Loadup.”  He shrank from me.

“Loadup!”  He sank to his stomach.  Again I flung him into the floorboard.  I took a few steps back.

We repeated the process.  Again Duke wouldn’t leave the truck when I called; again he wouldn’t loadup.  Again I pulled him bodily off the seat; again I threw him bodily back into the truck.  Now Duke climbed the passenger’s seat and thrust his head into the pile of gear stacked in the back of the cab.  He lay down.  His flanks were trembling.  I felt like shit.  Goddam, Jeb, I thought, you had better be right.  I wanted to puke.  I took a few steps away from the truck.

“Here,” I said.

Nothing.  I reached in the truck for Duke’s collar and before I grabbed it – I had only just touched his fur – Duke turned around and put his paws on the edge of the seat as if to jump down.  I moved my hand away from him and backed up.  “Here,” I said again.  He stayed put.  “Here!” I shouted.

He didn’t move, but now I knew beyond any doubt that he got the message.  Now it was just a contest of wills, and if you’re going to keep a dog, you have got to win these.  I pinched Duke’s ear.  “We are going to do this over and over and over again,” I told him, “until we get it right.”  I pulled him out of the truck.  We did it again and again and again.  And again and again.  Painful round after painful round.

I think Duke was startled when, after he finally loaded up on his own, I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face against his shoulder.  “Good boy!” I murmured into his fur.  A part of me wanted to cry.  I patted his head and ears and face for about a full minute.  We did it flawlessly six times in a row – getting down from the seat on command, walking the circle, and loading up on command – and the last two times I gave him chunks of Oscar Meyer franks for completing each stage.  By the end Duke was wagging his tail at the easy treat-collecting.

It was over.  As we drove away I lifted the center console and let him rest his head in my lap.  His tail swished back and forth across the passenger’s seat.  If there is a god and he made dogs, then I believe in his benevolence.

The Sink

The Humboldt River did not provide the Walker Expedition with great trapping.  Nor did its banks provide much game.  So although the expedition members weren’t making money as they traveled along the Humboldt, and although they were eating into the meat supplies they’d prepared hundreds of miles back along the Bear River, the Humboldt at least provided a dependable water source to get through arid country.  The repetition with which subsequent travelers would follow the Humboldt – the California wagon trail, the transcontinental railroad, Interstate 80 – testifies to the importance of its waters.  Riding at the heads of their packstrings, alternately crashing through willows and inhaling the alkali dust raised by their companions, the men of the Walker Expedition may have remembered the forested slopes of the Rocky Mountains fondly.  But as they looked away from the Humboldt and gazed across the desiccated expanses of salt, dust, and sage on either side, they were doubtless thankful to have a river to follow.

Until it sank into the sand.

The Humboldt River never runs into another river and never runs to the ocean.  It just runs out of water.  It stops at the Humboldt Sink, just southwest of present-day Lovelock, Nevada.  In 1833, the river slowed as it neared its terminus, pooling into a series of small lakes before culminating in one large lake with no outlet.  There, in Leonard’s words, the water “becomes stagnant and very disagreeable.”  Much like the Great Salt Lake.  Since 1833, however, humans have rescripted the end of the Humboldt.  Today it is dammed into the Rye Patch Reservoir about 35 miles north of the historic sink, then flows through farming country where agriculturalists siphon from its waters.  It forms no more lakes.  Modern canals carry water in various directions, but the river’s natural course runs south from the reservoir past Lovelock, then turns west toward the historic sink.  The sink is where the large lake of “stagnant and very disagreeable water” once stood, but today the sink stays dry most of the time.  As of my visit, the historic sink was a dry, glinting expanse of sand and salt deposits.  The Humboldt dries up somewhere between Lovelock and the sink.  Along that stretch, its course is marked by broad, thick stands of tamarisk, a tough, woody plant that grows taller than me.  Tamarisks are an invasive species, however, so in Walker’s day, willows probably would have marked the river’s course.

The historic sink.

That was a good thing for Walker, because tamarisks are tough to move through.  Tougher than willows.  “They’ll poke through a six-ply tire,” said the pickup-driving local who stopped beside me on a dirt road southwest of Lovelock.  He also told me about pucker brush – “it’s got thorns in it, so when you fall in, your asshole puckers” – and sinkholes where subsurface water softens playa sediment, making the surface unpredictably soft.  “Your truck will sink in to the mirrors,” he warned.

He’d been driving the other way on the narrow dirt road, but as I slowed and pulled to the edge of the road to let him pass, he slowed to a stop.  I knew this to be the national rural symbol for “let’s palaver,” so I stopped too.  I told him I was following the Humboldt’s course and wanted to find the point between Lovelock and the historic sink where the water stopped.

“Well I’ve got some duck blinds back in there, but I ain’t going to tell you where they are.”

Out west, this isn’t rude behavior.  Hunters don’t want to give away their secret places.  Since I have a dirty pickup truck, a camper, and a Labrador retriever, and maybe because of the way I talk, people often take me for a hunter.  Which I take as a compliment – it beats being taken for a Californian, yankee, or sissy.  I appreciated this guy’s forthrightness.  Others might have given vague directions, or intentionally incorrect directions.

“No, I’m not hunting.  I don’t even have my shotgun.  I’m working on a history project,” I told him.

His eyes told me he wasn’t convinced, so I told him a little more about my book.  I asked him a few more questions about local plants and springs to give him a chance to feel me out, and he told me about the country.

“So I guess I’ll just get down in that riverbottom and hike ‘till I find where the water stops,” I said eventually.

“Well, I know there’s water as far as my duck blinds.  It’s just a trickle, but the beavers have got some water dammed up.  If you drive down this road . . .”  He gave me directions to his duck blinds, but I am bound by the Code of the Country Palaver not to repeat them here.

I drove to the man’s duck blinds, then a little further downstream.  Having used my spare tire when I changed a flat earlier in the day, and having experienced wet playa dirt at Stinking Pants Spring, I stopped well short of the watercourse.  A second blown tire or a sunk truck would seriously derail my trip.  Duke and I got out and walked into the tamarisk thicket.

A scene I didn't want to repeat.

The riverbottom was several hundred yards wide.  It offered good grass between the thickets, a detail that Leonard noted in 1833.  The grass was yellowish-brown like store-bought hay, and the tamarisk thickets consisted of dark brown trunks with reddish-brown branches.  Low grayish-brown mountain ranges stood at the horizon.  A pretty scene, if you like brown.  Trails crisscrossed through the riverbottom, so Duke and I moved easily toward the far side.  We hiked over several dry gulches running along the river’s course, and were almost to the other side of the bottom when we hit a deep gulch that held water.  Not much water – just a foot-wide rivulet scarcely visible through the grass and weeds – but enough to let us know that the Humboldt still lived.  We followed it downstream.

The tamarisk-filled riverbottom.

Within a few hundred yards, we found the end.  I had envisioned the Humboldt stretching across sand, bravely giving its last full measure to reach the Pacific, reaching its end in self-sacrificial valor.  Or dipping under a rock from which it did not emerge, mysteriously vanishing into the earth where all springs began, ending its above-ground tenure by returning to the subterranean hydrologic cycle from which it sprang.  But it did neither of those.  It ended at a cow patty.  As of 4:30 on this late October day, the Humboldt slowed to a trickle, pushed past a few more reeds, then met a giant pile of cow shit that it could not pass.  Ignominious.  I sighed.  At least, as cow patties go, this was a large one.

I went back to the truck.

The end of the valiant Humboldt River.

Sunset over the Humboldt Sink.

Black Rock Desert: A Bad Place for a Thirsty Man (Part Three)

A few stars in the west still fired enough light through the atmosphere to register on my retinas, but by the time I awoke one star in the east outshone the rest.  Though it remained tucked behind the Jackson Range, it lightened the eastern sky and refracted orange through the clouds above the mountains.  A coyote barked before bed.

Dawn.  A fine time to lie in your sleeping bag and observe the development of day, in my opinion, but Duke disagrees.  He stood over my sleeping bag, tail wagging, looking down at the small hole through which my face was visible.  “Hey buddy,” I said to him.  “Good morning.”  I thought about telling him to lie down again, but the dog has to spend all day listening to my orders as it is.  I hated to give unnecessary instructions.  I should be getting up anyway.  Duke poked his nose into the hole in my sleeping bag and I turned my face.  Duke knows not to lick me, but he dabbed his wet, cold nose against my cheek instead.  “Get back,” I said and rolled over on my side.  A few minutes later I heard him sniffing.  A cold, wet dab against my ear that made me laugh.  With some difficulty, I angled a bare arm through the drawstrung hole in my bag and scratched Duke’s head.  It wasn’t as cold out as I expected.  “Alright,” I told him.

Dawn at the hot springs.

By the time I had our packs loaded, direct sunlight had worked its way from the western edge of the desert, where sunlight first struck when the sun peeked over the Jackson Mountains, to our camp at the hot springs.  I shed my long johns, jacket, gloves and fleece hat.  Duke didn’t change his attire but waited impatiently as I stuffed my clothes into my pack.  To my explanation that being hairless made temperature regulation difficult, he responded with silence.  I abandoned the explanation and tucked the hat into my pack.  I clipped on his pack and we were underway.  We’d walk west around the hill to the north of the hot springs – Alien Aspiration Hill, as I’d named it – then head north to the truck.  We found a horse trail leading away from the springs and followed it.

Knowing that I only had seven or eight miles to go, I hiked fast.  Blisters wouldn’t matter since they’d have days to heal, and the speed felt good.  My hips weren’t packsore.  Duke had learned to weave between the creosote shrubs so as to avoid banging his sidesaddle pack against them, and we made good time.  I thought about the mysterious black rocks sitting on top of the dry lakebeds – the ones that always sat on top, never buried.  Maybe there was a better explanation than alien bombardment.  I was sure the rocks wouldn’t float like pumice does – the rocks were igneous, and had empty pockets in them like swiss cheese where gases had been held captive – but they were far denser than water.  I kicked a couple, just to confirm that these porous black rocks always sat on top of the lakebed sediment.  They moved easily.  Maybe the silt that formed the lakebeds, although fine-grained, was actually denser than the black rocks.  If that were true, then when the lakebeds flooded, the silt grains might slip underneath the rocks instead of piling up around them in the same way that a small, heavy item like a AAA battery will slip past a lantern or camp stove to the bottom of a backpack.

I was mulling over my theories of lakebottom physics when something clattered up on the hillside.  I looked up and there were eight horses trotting north across the shadowy side of the hill, loosing stones as they crossed over rockslides.  They were 250 or 300 yards away and clearly moving away from Duke and me.  They acted like deer – maybe they were wild.  I had heard there were a few wild horses in Nevada.  Some paused and looked back.  Duke watched them with perked ears.  The small herd moved north along the hill until they reached a small ridge extending to the west.  Then, following what I supposed to have been the dominant mare, they trotted along the ridge into the sunlight.  Their tails and manes whisked behind them; their brown coats caught the morning sun.  They stopped.  The lead horse snorted at me, then snorted again and stomped her foot.  They were 400 or 500 yards away now.  Wild for sure.  The lead mare snorted 20 or 25 times.  Duke had lost interest, but I rested my hands on my shoulder straps and observed her fuss.  “There is something about the outside of a horse,” Winston Churchill once said, “that is good for the inside of a man.”  I watched until they moved on.

As Duke and I walked along the base of the hill, the horses kept above and ahead of us.  I looked east across the two miles of playa that separated the hill from the western edge of the Black Rock Desert and saw another group of three horses.  This explains all the horse tracks, I thought as Duke and I stopped for lunch.  I sliced salami and cheese, then rolled the slices in a tortilla.  The hillside herd had crept in close – 150 yards or so – and only fled when I looked up.  They’d gotten curious.  The horses probably had no natural predators aside from coyotes, I thought, which are likely too small to threaten a full-grown horse.  Probably no wolves left in this country.  I dribbled some Tobasco on my tortilla.  That also explained the close-cropped grass at the spring – food supply was probably the population-limiting factor.



Duke and I had left the horses and were crossing one last dry lakebed, only a couple miles from the truck, when I saw a different sort of rock lying in the playa dust.  Instead of black and porous, this rock was rouge-colored with black streaks.  It looked like it had iron in it.  Time to test my density theory.  I’d see whether this rock was sitting on top of the lakebed sediment or was partially buried – if it was partially buried, then I could conclude that these lakebed rocks were not deposited by aliens but, instead, that the black rocks just sat on top of the sediment because they were less dense than the silt.  I kicked the rock.  Then I shoved it, then pulled on it.  It wouldn’t budge.  Partially buried.

Self-satisfied, I continued back toward the truck.  To find new things, to question, to theorize, to assemble them into a pattern – such is the drive of man.  It’s the thrill of discovery; the satisfaction of knowledge.  Maybe that’s why I like wandering.  But I don’t think that makes me unique.  In fact, I can think of one band of Pacific-bound pioneers who probably shared my impulses.

Back at the truck.

Black Rock Desert: A Bad Place for a Thirsty Man (Part Two)

Feeling like the discoverer of a lost oasis, I climbed down Alien Aspiration Hill as quickly as I could go without risking turning an ankle.  Damn it was beautiful.  Rocks clattered under Duke and me as we descended.  Steam rose in the west, and as the water drained to the east, there was a fertile green patch that looked like a putting green.  It was a jewel.  We’d cross the putting green, I decided, then walk on the south side to the head of the hot springs.

The putting green was too wet to cross.  This spring had poured enough water onto the playa sediment that what had looked like a putting green from above was a marsh.  I stood on the edge and looked across the bog.  In this precious few acres, grass overmatched creosote or sagebrush, and the local animals had noticed.  The marsh was potholed with horse tracks, in which now-cooled water from the hot springs pooled.  The grass was cropped short.  I saw deer tracks, and not far from the spring, a live jackrabbit that fled silently at our approach.  Duke had thundered after it, his pack flapping noisily against his sides, but jackrabbits are famously fleet and long legged.  It was like a pack mule chasing a thoroughbred.  Duke came back wagging his tail, empty-mouthed.  I scratched his head.  The jackrabbit probably had longer legs.

After a few tentative steps across the bog, and a flashback to my lesson at Stinking Pants Spring, I decided not to test the sodden playa dirt.  Wet boots would be bad – I had to hike back to the truck tomorrow.  Duke and I retraced our steps back into the familiar creosoted flats and walked upstream.  Once we got above the marsh, we headed straight for the steam.  We walked up a small rise covered in mineral deposits, white and glittering in the setting sun.  My boots crunched through the hardened layer of minerals that covered the ground, and the sound reverberated on both sides of me – the mineral crust was so solid that when I broke through the crust in one place, the sound carried laterally and I heard the crunching noise coming not only from underfoot, but from alongside me.  The first time I heard it I thought it was an approaching truck.  I stopped, and the sound stopped with me, so I started again.

When we topped the mineral-encrusted rise, I saw the springs.  Gorgeous.  Three distinct pools shimmered in the slanting light as steam rose into the cooling air.  The clouds above, reddening for evening, preened in their waters.  A browned knob rose from the desert floor and sputtered mineralized water from the top.  The water trickled down the knob’s sides as it cooled, depositing minerals and leaving a mound about the height of a water fountain and the shape of a bosom.  Salt and dust surrounded the springs, but immediately around them, grass grew.  As Duke and I wandered through the springs, twenty-five or thirty black birds fluttered noisily from the sides of a rocky ditch where they nested above the heated water.  Downstream, a single coyote barked.  Duke perked his ears, and I squatted in the dust to listen.

The spurting mound.

Night fell.  I built a fire of creosote and made hot chocolate, even though I should have saved the water.  I leaned back in my camp chair, journal in my lap, warming my right hand by the fire when it got too cold to write.  The hot chocolate was warm against my throat.  I finished writing and doused the fire with water from the springs, which may not have been potable but made the coals sizzle and smoke into darkness.  The western horizon rolled over the moon.  I unrolled my sleeping pad on the dust, then laid my sleeping bag on top of it.  I flattened my camp chair and spread it next to my sleeping pad, then crawled inside the bag.  Duke curled up on the flattened chair beside me, resting his head on my stomach.

I lay awake, gazing at the stars.  Big Dipper, North Star, Milky Way, lots more that I couldn’t categorize.  Beyond the bounds of human cognition in number, distance, size, and intensity.  Duke lifted his head and listened to the coyotes yipping.  The desert air was cool against my cheeks.  It is wonderful to live in a world we don’t understand.  Tomorrow, I would venture into it again.

Sunrise at Pinto Hot Springs the next morning.

Black Rock Desert: A Bad Place for a Thirsty Man (Part One)

Black Rock Desert: A Bad Place for a Thirsty Man. 

It was the kind of day that makes you think about aliens.  You know, little green men in saucers that toss random crap out of their spaceships.  Commonly sighted in places like Nevada.

It was hot, dry, and still, and there wasn’t much to look at.  Duke and I left the hills on the western edge of the Black Rock Desert and strode toward its interior, intending to see whether Leonard Creek carried its waters this far into the playa or whether the water sank into the desert floor.  We started in flats of salt, dust, and sage, and as we got toward the center of the basin, we walked through flats of salt, dust, and creosote.  It was, in other words, uniformly salty and dusty.  Sometimes there was no vegetation at all: when we crossed terrain where water gathered in wet spells, there were no plants.  Just hard-caked, parched-and-split mineral flats, glaring white in the sun, dotted only with this desert’s eponymous black rocks.

Salt, dust, and creosote.

In places the earth peeled like paint chips.

I looked for signs of wildlife, but saw few.  The playa contained patches of soft dirt that caved when you stepped on it, which was ideal for preserving tracks.  I saw horse tracks and horse dung, but once I entered the playa proper, I saw no sign of deer or any other game.  Duke followed no scent trails, as he had in the Wasatch Range.  I kept alert.  I figured I’d at least find pronghorn tracks, but I didn’t.  Once I saw dried rabbit turds.  I took a picture.

I started wondering about the black rocks in the parched-white lakebottoms.  They were porous rocks, and clearly igneous, but that wasn’t what puzzled me.  They all sat on top of the sediment.  I flipped a few of them over as I passed through another cracked flat.  They were heavy, but only buried about a half-inch into the salt and dust, with the rest of the rock above ground level.  In these playas, the salt and dust gathers because it has no outlet.  That’s why the hydrologic term for this part of the country is the “Great Basin” – water doesn’t flow from here to elsewhere.  When erosion carries sediment down from the mountains, it collects in the intermontane basins such that the basin floor is always rising and the mountaintops are always eroding.  So over time, you’d expect these black rocks to get buried in sediment.  You’d expect to find some of them mostly buried in the playa floor, some half buried, and some not yet buried.  But that’s not what I found.  All of them sat on the surface.

A rock I dislodged in my investigation.

As Duke and I neared Leonard Creek, a thought that had been percolating in the back of my head since yesterday crystallized into coherent form.  It was a good thought but, as is not unusual for thoughts emerging from its source, it came too late.  This part of the desert wouldn’t be public if Leonard Creek carried water into it.  If the land was watered, some westerner would have homesteaded it, then sold it or passed it down, and it never would have remained in government hands.  I looked ahead for willows, or the red bushes I’d seen around springs, or cottonwoods to indicate water.  Nothing to rebut the homesteader theory – just salt, dust, and creosote.  And sure enough, the creekbed was dry.  Duke and I sat down in the shade of the bank to sip water from the supplies we carried.  I felt disappointed when I peed in the creekbed and the liquid sank immediately into the sand.  I guess I’d hoped for a jump-start.  So much for finding water on this hike.

We left the creekbottom and headed for the northern edge of Pinto Mountain, angling toward the basin’s western edge.  More salt, dust, and creosote.  I looked for the horses that had made the tracks and scat I kept seeing – they had probably moved elsewhere, I figured, because all of the dung was old.  My shadow stretched further from my feet.  Duke and I started a climb up an unnamed hill to the north of Pinto Mountain.  I was sweating.  Duke’s tongue was lolling.  I recounted our water supplies in my head for the fifth or sixth time.  We had enough water, but damn it was hot.  I scanned the sky again for saucers, less out apprehension than hopes to hitch a ride.  Alien Aspiration Hill, I decided to call this topographical feature.

When I looked ahead, there it was.  Prettier than any flying saucer.  I pointed, swore in excitement, and told Duke to look.  Laid out before us, only a couple miles away, was Pinto Hot Springs.  I’d expected a small hole in the ground, probably not even wet this time of year.  I foresaw something more like a harpy eagle’s dustbath than a legitimate hot spring.  But this blew my expectations out of the water.  It was big, and wide, and steaming.  It opened a tear in the dull creosote flats below and filled the space with grass, mineral mounds, and water.  Instead of brown dust and olive-drab brush, this was blue, white, and fertile green.  It steamed in the afternoon light.  It was everything a hiker could hope for.

This was where we’d camp.  With quickened steps I moved closer, anxious for a better look.

First sight of Pinto Hot Springs.

To the BRD!

My pack is drawn tight; Duke’s pack is zipped closed.  Today we will hike into the Black Rock Desert Wilderness in northwestern Nevada for a one-night hike.  We’ll head west from Leonard Creek Road toward Leonard Creek, which runs north-south through the middle of the desert.  I know that Leonard Creek holds water where it descends from the Pine Forest Range to the north because I drove over that part of the creek yesterday, but I’m not sure how far it carries that water into the desert.  These streams have a tendency to sink into the earth without much notice, so this could be a dry hike.  From the Leonard Creek watercourse, Duke and I will turn south toward Pinto Mountain and check out Pinto Hot Springs on it’s northern side, then we’ll loop around back to the truck.  If all goes according to plan – meaning, if I actually stick to my planned route – it’ll be 17 miles.

The tip of my Leatherman will be our departure point.

The Walker Expedition, of course, didn’t cross the Black Rock Desert.  Didn’t come anywhere near it, in fact.  But I can’t find a large-enough swath of public land along the Humboldt River, the expedition’s actual route, for Duke and I to hike in.  I need to hike in something comparable – I need to hike through country covered with scrub brush and dust, flat and between mountains, and that holds a solitary watercourse.  That way I can assess the name that Zenas Leonard, the expedition’s clerk, gave to what we now call the Humboldt: the “Barren River.”  Assuming that Leonard Creek holds water when it reaches the public lands south of the mountains where I’ll be hiking, this terrain should be similar.

The packs are packed, and as soon as I upload this entry to the web, I’ll drive south (out of Verizon’s data service range), stop on the western side of the desert, and put my boots to the turf.  I’m excited.  Despite the gallons of water I’m carrying, my pack seems compact.  I guess that’s because I’m comparing it to the load I carried over the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges, where I was provisioned for six nights instead of one.  Either that or I forgot a bunch of stuff.  I’ll find out in a few hours.

Packs and dog.  Hang on, Duke, I'm on the way.

POSTSCRIPT.  I departed in the early afternoon, but set this entry to auto-post at 10:00 PM PST.

Crossing Nevada

There is really only one way across Nevada.  In 1828, British trapper Peter Skene Ogden bumped into the east-west thoroughfare while heading south, and explored it in both directions.  In 1833, the Walker Expedition used the thoroughfare to cross Nevada travelling west, and in 1834 followed it again as they returned east.  In 1827, fur trapper Jedediah Smith tried to cross Nevada without using this thoroughfare.  Only Smith and one other member of his expedition made it back to the Rockies.

Indians used the Humboldt River as a path across Nevada long before trappers ever arrived, and settlers would follow the river after the trappers left.  The path along the Humboldt became known as the "California Trail" when wagon-hauling settlers and gold rushers used it in the decades after the Walker Expedition, and decades after the early settlers, the transcontinental railroad was laid along the river’s banks.  Now, in addition to the rails, Interstate 80 follows the venerable Humboldt across Nevada.

It’s easy to see why the Humboldt has remained a popular travel route.  Everything else is dry.  Mountain ranges draw themselves up from the flats below, but they offer no coursing streams or evergreen forests.  Instead their slopes are brown, stubbled with scrub brush at the bottoms and barren at the tops.  The flats below appear to have inspired the color choices of military camouflage designers – dull green brush, light brown weeds, medium brown dust, dark brown rocks.  All the plants are drought-resistant.  Gullies and washes cross the flats like the crevices of your palm, but they hold no water.  Instead, their bottoms are bare of vegetation but dustier than the flats around them, as if to mock thirsty travelers.  Tracks a traveler left in a gully would remain visible for weeks.

A basin in the basin and range.

Crossing a gully.

But over this colorless expanse, stretching from mountaintop to mountaintop, spans a brilliant blue sky.  Unobscured by trees, the sky wraps itself around a traveler like an outside-in robin’s egg.  The few clouds that hurdle the Sierra Mountains to the west and arrive over the basin and range play across the sky like colts, linking together then spreading apart in endless variations.  The sky’s lovely exuberance contrasts with the earth’s drab taciturnity, and the sun lights up the heavens with a fierce beauty that, I imagine, grew tiresome to a horse-mounted traveler.  What a horse-mounted traveler needed was not celestial grandeur, but water.

Hence the Humboldt.  I exited I-80 at a place where it diverged from the Humboldt, and I followed a dirt track that, along with the railroad, stayed with the river.  The flats stayed the same: sagebrush, scattered tufts of sere grass, dust.  But the river valley widened below me, and deepened.  It held yellows and greens.  Riparian grasses and willows grew tall, and two sets of railroad tracks wound through it.  And then the river valley disappeared from view – all I could see were basalt bluffs where the river had been a few moments ago.

Humboldt River.

I stopped the truck to investigate.  Duke and I crossed through the sagebrush and crossed a barbed-wire fence, heading toward the river.  It was a warm day, and I was wearing a tee shirt.  I scuttled into a deep rocky ravine, stepping over mottled brown and black rocks that clattered as they tumbled down the ravine ahead of me.  This was no longer the lightly compacted dust of the playa, gradually turning to sandstone – this was basalt, the igneous rock that spews from midoceanic ridges and lines the ocean bottoms.  This was hard stuff.  I got to the bottom of the ravine and glanced back for Duke, who stood at the top looking at me with his ears perked.  Duke’s instincts for self-preservation are strong, and he won’t take risky steps unless he’s sure it’s necessary.

“Come on,” I said.  “Stop wussing around.”  Duke picked his way down the slope, making less clatter than I had.  We scrambled up the other side, both of us using all fours.  I was hot by the time I reached the top, where Duke was already standing.

Across a few more sagebrushes, and there we were: the edge of a canyon, carved by the Humboldt through basalt.  Palisades Canyon, I would later learn that it was called.  Sheer cliffs, and at the bottom the river flowed peacefully, as if sawing through the basalt had taken no great effort.  The water rippled over light shoals, eddied in long pools edged by sandbars.  It was beautiful.  I reflected ruefully that I had forgotten my water bottle.  In Nevada, you can’t go far without water.

Sunset in the basin and range.

The Proof is in the Puffin: Part Two

“Jay Adams is nothing but a drunk,” the big lady said.  “And that place of his?  His old lady built most of it.  He talks like it was him, but she did most of the work.  Lost a finger doing it, she did.  I can’t remember which one.”

“Hey Dave,” she called over her shoulder.  “Which finger was it that Jay’s old lady lost?  Was it this one, or this one?”

Dave said he couldn’t hear her, and when she shouted at him again, he said he didn’t remember.  The mystery went unsolved and the lady resumed counting her money – a stack of twenties that she thumbed conspicuously at the bar.  She had just left the slot machines against the far wall and hoisted herself onto a barstool.  She had iron-gray hair and wore camouflage tee shirt the size of a tent.  The barstool disappeared beneath her.  Another woman pressed buttons on a flickering slot machine.  Next to the door, five or six people sat at a table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, talking idly.  It was 2:00 on Monday afternoon.

When I had first entered the Cowboy Bar, I had taken a seat at the bar next to an old-timer who rolled his own.  A can of tobacco sat on the bar in front of him.  “How’re you doing?” I’d said.  It was more of a statement than a question, and the guy nodded.  “Hey,” he said.  I ordered a burger and a beer, then turned to the guy, who was smoking a tightly-rolled cigarette.

“I was here a couple days ago – I think I saw you then?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “But it’s library and water day, so I’m back in town again.”  That meant, I learned, that a bookmobile was coming to Montello from Elko, and that the guy was picking up water to take back to his home, where he didn’t have running taps.  I asked him if he knew where Jay Adams lived, and told him about the directions I’d tried to follow.  I asked him about the “whoremonger’s ruins.”  The concrete ruins, he said, were the remains of a whorehouse.

“Did it get shut down?” I asked.  “I thought whorehouses were legal in Nevada.”

The legality of prostitution depended on the county, he told me.  Whoring was illegal in Montello, and in Las Vegas and Reno, for that matter.  Nowadays, you had to go to Wells or Elko to get to a legal brothel.  He started to tell me how to find them, but I said I wouldn’t need directions.  But I don’t think he believed me.  He warned me against picking up street prostitutes – the ones in brothels got checked by the doctor once a week, he said, which didn’t make them clean but it was better than nothing.  I waved my hand dismissively.  “Just in case you get the itch,” he said.  He didn’t know where Jay Adams lived, but he referred me to someone at the table behind me who did.  Then he went to catch the bookmobile.

As I waited on my burger I sipped on my beer and tried to decide whether, if I had been in the old-timer’s shoes, I would have believed me about the whorehouses.  Probably not, I decided, although in truth I had no intentions of visiting one.  Too much risk of waking up with the itchy and the scratchy.  Then the lady in the camouflage tent sat down and started talking about Jay.  She told me about how his wife had done most of the work, but she wasn’t finished.  “He’s a drunk, and he’s a mean drunk,” she added.  “And that’s not a good combination.”

I ate my burger when it came, and stood to go.  But before I left someone said that Jay might not be at home.  Check the other bar, he advised.  So I got in my truck and drove a few hundred feet to the Saddle Sore Bar, the Cowboy Bar’s competitor and the only other commercial establishment in Montello that I’ve seen.

When I walked in the door, there were four people in the place – three lined up against the bar and one bartender, a young, clean-cut guy about my age.  They all stopped talking.  “Hello,” the bartender said.

A new devotee of the Cowboy Bar, I wasn’t going to waste time in this rival establishment.  “I’m looking for Jay Adams,” I said, and I kept walking along the side of the bar.  I found Jay at the end, and sat down next to him.

“Hey, Jay,” I said.  “Remember me?”

“Yeah,” he allowed, tapping his can of Keystone Light on the bar.  “I been thinking about you, wondering if you were going to come by.”  He spoke more clearly that he had last Friday night.  Maybe because I’d caught him earlier.

He wore the same soiled hat that I remembered and a pair of coveralls so dirty that they had become shiny, but the white-fleece neck-beard had been replaced by a white neck-stubble.

“You look good all shaved-up,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“The last time I was here, you wanted to show me your place,” I said.  “The house you built yourself, and the road you cleared two miles through the sage.”

He nodded.

“Want to show it to me?”

“Yep,” he said.  He picked up his beer and nodded at the bartender, and we walked outside.

I followed Jay past the concrete ruins, out of town, into the hills, and under a handmade sign that said “End of Trail.”  The sign marked the entry into Jay’s junkyard, where his gear was spread over a space the size of a baseball field.  Rusted barrels, rotted crates, gas cans, sheds, lumber piles, old trucks, old trailers, two slide-in campers, an old tractor and an engine block sitting in the dirt.  “I hauled all this stuff from Idaho,” he said.

Jay’s house was made of patched-together pressboard and windows that someone had given him.  Inside, the first room was cluttered with old stuff – tools, mason jars, cans, and equipment; most of it dusty.  The second room had a wood-burning stove and two armchairs sitting before it.  A propane lantern occupied the table between them.  The third and last room was a slide-in camper, like I have in the back of my truck, that Jay had built into the house.  Steps led to the camper’s entrance, and the roof that covered the second room also covered the camper.  Jay slept in the camper on a pile of blankets.  A wire ran from the camper to the ceiling over the armchairs, and an automotive bulb dangled from the wire.  Jay flipped a switch, and the bulb came on.  “See, electricity,” he said.

Back outside in the sunlight, we surveyed Jay’s hilltop.  Junk for 360 degrees.  The country beyond the hilltop was dry, but there was a patch of bright green grass near the house.  “What’s this?” I asked.

“My experiment.”

“Your experiment?”

“My experiment.”

“What are you experimenting?”

“I’m experimenting to see what’ll grow,” he said.  Once he found the right type of grass for the soil, Jay said, he would plant a wider swath of it.  “Most of this soil is bad,” he said.  “But see that valley?”  He pointed to a depression the size of a football field.  The index and middle fingers of his right hand were stained brown with cigarette smoke.  “That’s good soil,” he said.  Once I figure out what’ll grow, I’ll plant that valley.”

“What’ll you do then?  Run cattle on it?”

“Cattle, or horses.  Something.  I haven’t figured that out yet.”  He drank from the can he’d brought from the bar.  “I’ll have to put up a fence.  That’s what I ought to be doing, is putting up them fenceposts.”

“You’ll have to irrigate, right?”  I looked around and saw no wells, tanks or streams.  “Will you have to haul that water in?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“How much will that cost you?”

He didn’t know.  I got a beer out of my truck and we walked around Jay’s hilltop as he told me what various pieces of equipment were.  Grain wagon, work shed, welding machine, lumber from Idaho.  “Everything out here is hand-made,” he said.  “Nothing store-bought.”  I didn’t mention the barrels, crates, trucks, trailers, stove, chairs, or campers.

“Why’d you leave Idaho?” I asked.  “Is that where your wife is?”

“Yeah, it is,” he said.  “Too much control up there.  Too much government.”  He coughed.  “Communist.  The whole damn country is communist.”

“Nevada’s pretty conservative.  You ought to like that.”

He gave a hard laugh.  “Much beer as I drink, I ain’t too conservative,” he said.  We stood at the top of the hill, silent for a minute.  I liked him for that hard laugh.  Behind the pioneer puffery was hard self awareness, bitter and distasteful, but not forgotten.  He hid it with gruffness and beer.  There are parts of all of us, I guess, that we have to hide from ourselves.  Jay waved his hand, sweeping in his hilltop.  “Welfare,” he said.  “All of it welfare.”  He looked at the ground.

“Welfare?”

“Yep.”

“How’d you swing that?”

The laugh again.  “It’s easy.  Spend all of your money.”

“Well.”

With a jerk Jay was moving again, and we toured a little more.  We talked about Jay’s dogs and his ten or twelve cats.  “Yeah, the dogs keep them damned coyotes, foxes, wolves away,” he said.  I wondered what threat coyotes, foxes or wolves posed to Jay’s junkpile.  I reached for my keys.  “Jay,” I said, “thanks for the tour.  It looks like you’ve done a good job with the place.”  I reached out to shake his hand.

“Good?” he said.  He stepped toward me and we shook hands in the bright sunlight.  Then he looked away.  “I haven’t ever done anything good.”

Jay in front of his truck and house.

The Proof is in the Puffin: Part One

“Good?” he said with a hard laugh, standing in the bright sunlight.  “I haven’t ever done anything good.”

When I met Jay Adams three days ago, he was just sober enough to stay on his barstool.  We were at the Cowboy Bar in Montello, Nevada, and it was Friday night.  The pretty girl I had been sitting next to had left, and Jay rambled through the door and into her old seat.  Jay spotted me as an easterner, which probably wasn’t hard since everyone in the bar but me knew each other.  The bartender introduced Jay and me.  “I’m a pioneer,” Jay said thickly.  “Living in the 1800s.”  I looked at him and wondered whether he was speaking in some kind of pioneer gibberish or was just drunk.  Jay said he lived in a house he’d built himself on top of a hill at end of a two-mile road he’d cleared through the sagebrush.  I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times to get the story straight.  No running water, no electricity.  “There was nothing there before I came along,” he said.  “Nothing.  Just high desert.”

A thick white beard that looked like polarfleece covered Jay’s jaws and neck.  On his head was a stained, shapeless hat.  It resembled a taco shell that had been dropped on the floor.  His lined face, 70 years old, peeked between the hat and beard.  I asked if he ran cattle or horses, and he said no.  He used to drive a truck in Idaho.  The bartender told him I was working on a book, and Jay scratched his beard.  “I read a lot of western,” he said.  “Sometimes I lie there thinkin’ about it.”  Jay had moved to Montello from Idaho three years ago.  I asked him why.  “Freedom,” he said.  I told him I’d heard they had freedom in Idaho.  He swore incomprehensibly and drank from his can of Keystone Light.

“Listen, now,” he said.  “Whip- . . . whippersnapper.  I’m new here, so I’m not an old-timer, but I’m not . . . my ears . . . I’m not . . . I don’t have webbed feet.”

Jay, I was to learn, was not a master of the idiom.  What he meant to say – I think – was “I’m not wet behind the ears,” a phrase that hearkens back to newborn cattle and describes someone who lacks experience.  Western novels use the phrase.

“Are you going to write the truth, or do you want to fuck around?” Jay asked me.  I told there was too much bullshit in print already.  He clapped me on the back and muttered something in a language peculiar to drunk pioneers.  He said that I ought to go up to his hillstop see the place he’d built.  I told him I was headed back to the Utah line, but that I’d circle around to Montello in a couple days and stop by.  Jay thought that was a good idea.  I took out a pen and wrote directions to Jay's place on a napkin.

“Alright.  You going to come up to my place?” Jay asked.

“Yeah, probably so.  But it’ll be a couple days.”  I started to stand up.

“Because I’m real,” he said.  “None of this NBC bullshit.  The proof is in the puffin.’”

I paused.  “What?" I asked.

“The proof is in the puffin."

“The proof is in the puffin?”

“The proof is in the puffin.”

“Wait a minute.”  I wrote “THE PROOF IS IN THE PUFFIN” on my napkin and showed it to him.  “Is that right?”

Jay looked and nodded his hat brim.  “The proof is in the puffin,” he announced to the whole bar.  “Jay Adams.”  I wrote his name under his slogan.  Puffing is right, I thought.  This guy wants to write himself into a Louis L'Amour novel.  I started for the door.

“Until you get up there, you’re an asshole,” he called as I walked out into the dark.

In the afternoon light three days later, I stopped by some crumbling concrete walls in Montello.  My napkin directed me to go east from the bar, then go left to the "whoremonger’s ruins," go two more roads, then right to the top of the hill.  I had already tried to follow these directions once, and had circled back to what I suspected were the whoremonger's ruins. Not much point in trying again.  I drove back to the Cowboy Bar, figuring that someone would know where Jay lived.  I parked my truck in the gravel and walked toward the door.

Basin and Range

Twelve million years ago the Earth’s mantle started stretching North America, pulling its western edge into the Pacific; splitting the western part of the continent into strips that ran north-south; creating, then widening, the cracks between those strips of continent.  The cracks became gaps and the long crustal blocks lost their equilibria.  They tipped, some dipping their western edges into the Earth’s viscous mantle and hoisting their eastern edges skyward; some tipping the opposite way.  The result was a serrated landscape.  Long-north south valleys where crustal edges sank into the mantle, then high north-south mountain ranges where crustal edges were thrust upward.  Basin and range.

The crust continues to stretch.  The cracking, splitting, and tilting moves ever eastward, having now reached what we call the Grand Tetons and the Wasatch Front.  Basin and range faulting long since passed eastern Nevada, where Duke and I sit like corks on the geologic ocean.  A traveler moving west from the Great Salt Lake crosses the Pilot Range, Pilot Creek Valley, the Toano Range, Goshute Valley, the Pequop Range, Independence Valley, the Spruce Mountian Ridge, Clover Valley, the Humboldt Range, Starr Valley.  On it goes.

Drainage is poor in North America’s basin and range, and precipitation scarce.  But over twelve million years, erosion has had its effect.  As the crustal gaps widen and the mountain ranges rise, daily winds and intermittent rainstorms flatten the mountaintops like strokes of sandpaper.  Dislodged rock and dirt move down the alpine slopes like sawdust falling to a carpenter’s floor, only to build up in the valleys because there is no river to carry the sediment away.  As the mountains rise and the valley floors fall, erosion levels the mountains and fills the valleys.  Geologists call the process "downwasting."  It is a battle that only erosion can win.

Tonight in Clover Valley, the basin and range is quiet.  Standing atop millions of years of sediment, I smell today’s sagebrush and feel tonight’s breeze, drifting cool and steady from the south.  Lights flicker at the base of the Humboldt Range.  These mountains were battling erosion well before the first of the ice ages that resculpted much of this continent, well before the Yellowstone supervolcano last spewed 600 cubic miles of rock into the atmosphere, and well before Homo sapiens sapiens evolved as a species.  In the context of these mountains, the time since man started living in sedentary communities capable of producing things like roads or fixed settlements was only a heartbeat ago.  The here and the now – the breeze, the sagebrush, the chill, the coyotes that just started yipping for the evening hunt – are ephemeral beyond comprehension.

I stuff my hands in my pockets.  The coyotes quiet down, and I listen to the distant sound of traffic along Highway 232.  The immensity of space and time dwarfs human history; overwhelms human understanding.  That could be intimidating.  But hell.  I’m just happy to be here.

Pilot Creek Valley.

Duke and me in the basin and range.  So far we have found the accomodations adequate.

 

Stinking Pants Spring

It was the last water hole of the day, and I wanted to get closer for a second picture.  This spring wasn’t on my topographical atlas, so I counted myself lucky to have found it.  Judging by the cattle use, though, it might have been a manmade, earth-walled tank.  It was hard to tell.  Water overflowed from the pool and spilled over into cattle tracks and cattle patties, then ran dirtily down the road that had led me to it.  I was standing a few yards from the edge of the pool, and already there was an inch of excrement-enriched water around my boots.  The place smelled of methane and decomposition.  I chose my next step carefully.  I aimed for a crumpled shrub, figuring that my boot wouldn’t sink in too much.

The last spring of the day.  Silver Island Range in the background.

I was right on what I believe to be the Walker Expedition’s probable path.  When the expedition passed near the Great Salt Lake, Walker was scouting for the Buenaventura River.  The Buenaventura ran, according to the best beliefs of eastern cartographers, from the Great Salt Lake to the Pacific Ocean.  In Walker’s day, it was a theoretical river, and of course that’s all it ever was.  But to scout for it, and ultimately disprove its existence, Walker had to cover a big swath of ground west of the Salt Lake.

The country west of the Salt Lake is famously dry.  Due west of the lake lies the Great Salt Lake Desert; south and west of the lake lie the Bonneville Salt Flats.  In places, therefore, the expedition would have passed through country covered only with rock, dust, and sagebrush.  In other places, there was only rock, dust, and salt.  Since neither horses nor men can survive on rock, dust, sagebrush, or salt, it was a hard place for horsemen.

Consequently, the expedition would have had to do what all subsequent explorers or wagon trains did – hop from spring to spring.  Zenas Leonard indicates that Indian trails connected the springs, and that the expedition followed the trails across the arid landscape.

So I spent today much of today springhunting.  Driving on well-maintained dirt roads, turning off of them to rutted, rocky dirt roads, stopping the truck to explore on foot, hiking along creekbeds, breaking through willows and other brush in search of flowing water.  I eventually learned to look for willows and a certain reddish shrub as indicators of water, but still, I wouldn’t have found most of the springs without my GPS.  Carrying it with me, however, I visited Rabbit Springs (no flowing water, but water stood in the deep road ruts), Governor’s Spring (barely a seepage out of the ground), Tunnel Spring No. 2 (dry), South Patterson Spring (cow trampled mudhole), Donner Spring (nice pool; too bad the Donner Party didn’t make it in time), and the final spring where I was taking a step closer to take a picture.

Duke in the only standing water we could find at Rabbit Springs.

I had only taken the road toward this last spring because it led to the salt flats, and I wanted to get up close to see what the flats looked like.  I thought maybe I could drive across them.  Only as I drove toward the salt flats did I happen to pass this waterhole, which was clearly a favorite with the local bovine population.  The place reeked of their dung, and as I drew near it, I was glad I hadn’t let Duke out of the truck.  He’d have splashed around in it and made a mess of himself.

I was determined to walk more carefully.  I chose my next footrest atop the crumpled shrub.  It gave way.  The whole plant sank.  I fought for my next foothold so I could get out of the cow-dung quagmire, but my next foothold sank too.  It was like stepping into a peat bog.  Or maybe a giant cow patty.  Liquefied cow shit poured into my left boot, cool against my ankle.  I tried to go forward again, but the ground sank under my right foot.  The right boot filled with the fertile mixture.  The whole area was unstable.    I floundered back toward my truck, spattering myself with the squishy material as I struggled.  After a few steps I reached the hard dirt of the road.  I collapsed on my butt in the dust.  My butt felt cool pressed against the earth.  And wet.  Apparently I’d splattered the liquefied shit on the backside of my pants.  So I sat in the road in the sun, covered in mud and dung, redolent of a giant bovine fart, and giving all appearances from the backside of having lost personal rectal control.

It’s the kind of thing that you might as well laugh at.

I checked my topo atlas again.  No name for this water hole.  Henceforth, it shall be known – at least for me – as Stinking Pants Spring.  I changed my Carhartts, flored my truck through the salt flats just to show ‘em, and went on into town.

Across the Salt Flats.