Trekking Adventures

Today the “I must get out of the city” bug bit me, and I began driving towards Gates Pass. Looking at the gas tank arrow sinking closer to empty, I did something that I’m rarely inclined to do: I pulled off the road where all the other cars were pulling off, at a site occupied by stone buildings built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. The buildings were constructed in an unobtrusive way, blending into the scattered rocks of the desert. I wandered up to a small structure perched on the hillside to find the local marijuana hangout of the high school crowd. On a stone was scrawled the declaration “Smoke more pot”. There was a table inside and a fireplace, and on almost every interior rock were names scrawled in bright paint. Modern pictographs. Looking at this derelict remnant of our civilization was not quite what I was going for when I set out to “get out”, so I began wandering towards the nearest high point along what sporadically was and was not a trail. The gravely bedrock took over the path in places, and where spots of dusty dirt occurred I saw a faint print of a javelin hoof. Once I reached the boulder perched on the rise I looked across the wash snaking below to the vertical lines of tanned rock mounting towards the sky. In spots the hide-colored rock turned a faint red, as though some sacrifice of a mythically large creature had occurred in that place, as though the rock itself was spilling its lifeblood. From that boulder I spied another – this one rising towards the cloudless sky like a tongue of flame. I was grasped by the urge to stand atop it, that deep-seated calling to climb to the top of the world, to see, perhaps to finally thrust the spirit towards the heavens like a falcon shooting skywards off a cliff. I scrambled to its base and beyond, reaching a point where the rocks were wedged one atop the other like ice cubes in a glass. Carefully I hoisted my body from one slanted rock to the next until I clung to the top of the flame licking towards the blue expanse above, trembling as I contemplated the hundreds of feet between the cactus below and me. The other side of the boulder was perched on a cliff, dropping into nothing but pure space. After the exhilarating bolt of terror passed I lowered myself to solid ground, having remembered fragility, having recalled how infinitely tender our tiny bodies are. Maybe that’s why some of us climb beyond comfort: that momentary transcendence of the ego. A brief shattering of the illusion of our own importance. Descending to my origin, I passed rocks of purple, and then some white as bone, the exposed skeleton of the earth. When I had almost reached the parking lot thinking that the magic of my brief foray had ended, I was caught by some lichen glowing green on the dry sun-baked rock – the same green color shared by the chlorophyll-laden palo verde. And now I sit here on a rock wall built by hands decades ago, listening to the scuffling of gambols quail beneath a jojoba, watching a curve-billed thrasher tilt its head towards the rock-strewn ground.

Brittany Keeton, Southwest Trekking Guide