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Tag Archives: desert hiking
Just Out:
It feels like what it is, a field journal. I’m delighted with it:
https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore/p/breathing-stone
You can order it from your favorite indie bookstore; from Bookshop, the indie alternative to the big A:
or from the publisher, single copies okay:
https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore
Many miles of quiet walkabout. Illustrated.
UFO Superbloom
April 16:
May 4:
The desert was in superbloom. Our UFO is a scarlet beehive or hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus coccineus, exploiting a crack in a huge hematitic concretion. There were many concretions on the hillside, each with its resident beehive. The yellow carpet is probably Fendler’s bladder pod: Physaria fendleri.
Two Strikes
Two ponderosasr in a sandy bowl, both lightning-struck. One, a gray ghost; the other, twisted like a pretzel but still living, shelters a juniper in its embrace.
Kitsune?
Two of us and a dog were scrounging along the talus slope, looking for petroglyphs, when my companion said urgently, “Come quick!”
Peering out of a vertical crack in the cliff about ten feet up was a fox-faced ringtail cat. Huge, lemur-like sad eyes, big bat ears, a bushed-out tail that seemed to float behind it. Bold, totally silent. It crept out of the crack and down toward us, examined us thoroughly, then slipped away into the rocks and brush.
It was like an apparition but domestic, like a fox spirit. Quite unafraid of us. The dog, transfixed, did not bark.
Woodpiles
We walked in over multicolored gravels eroded from some long-lost range. Some were petrified wood, glossy and tumble-polished. Among them a second generation of trees had grown; these too had fossilized, then eroded, and now looked simply like wood chips inexplicably turned to stone. Among them the ponderosas of today stood, living wood.
Next to a dissolving petrified log, recent woodcutters had left their beer cans and pile of slash. Old woodpile, new woodpile: the two looked remarkably alike, though the ancient one was yellow and bright as new wood, and the new one was gray.
Until You Know
Scores of stone circles. I’ve written about them before. Too small to be hogan or tipi rings, wrong shape/size/place to be hunting blinds. (Though we did come upon a blind that overlooked a draw: U-shaped, right for one man to lie on his belly.)
The circles are very old. No idea what they can be if not for so-called “vision quests,” in the nature of “go out there and fast until you know your true name.” Who can tell? There was not one that didn’t have a view of Cabezón, the Ladrones, or the Sandias. All those peaks are sacred.
Shirtsleeve warm, and a restless, intermittent wind.
Still at the Ready
We walked across the scanty dump of a sheepherder’s camp: rusty tin cans, bits of glass, a watering trough tinkered out of something like an old water heater. The herder had brought his family, for in the scatter was a plastic Indian from a “cowboys and Indians” set. Quick research says the first plastic soldiers were made in 1938, but I could find no info on a Western set to which this guy might belong.
Here he lies in a handsome concretion to show him off. The sun has eaten him and given him a cracked patina, but you can still tell he is getting an arrow from his quiver.
Malpaís and Mockingbirds
Malpaís. The McCartys flow rivals anything in Hawaii. Underfoot the clink and chink, the almost metallic scraping ring of scoria where flat sheets of it have popped off the still-hot surface.
Black, black. Splits and fissures with grasses, mountain mahogany, and a few cacti clinging to their walls. As we scrambled west—wearing leather-palmed gloves, too aware of our bare legs—we climbed a pressure ridge in the lava, a standing black crest so steep we clambered up it on all fours . In its glassy crevices claret cup cacti were just beginning to bloom, the most beautiful red I’ve ever seen.
May is mockingbird month, when they return from their winter grounds. We listened to their changing carols all day.
Boots
Well, Shit.
As we hiked out of the red-rock canyon on a well-worn trail, we came upon mountain lion scat. A lion will make regular rounds through its established territory; evidently this path belonged to a particular cat. There were three enormous dumps. Lots of elk fur.
I’m careful around snakes, but mountain lions are the only animal I actively fear. The size of this scat made me feel too edible.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 