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.