666 on the Devil’s Golf Course

“What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone.”

Edward Abbey

“Minerals crystallize out of solution as they reach their individual solubilities.”

                                                Pamphlet about the geology of Death Valley

First we walked on sand. Lots of animal tracks up into the dunes. After that, texture after texture as the salts changed. Salt like snow, like the Arctic without cold. Then medallions—giant brittle plates that lifted at the edges, six or eight inches off the ground, and threatened to break my ankles if they cracked. Then, closer to the center, big structures, knobs and jagged crystalline outcroppings. The main saltpan was sludge, muddy under the crusted surface and so white in the relentless sun that my eyes hurt even behind sunglasses. It was like walking on another planet. I had to keep reminding myself: this is Earth. Out the other side of the saltpan, the salt rings began again, stretching across The Devil’s Golf Course towards the Black Mountains that divide the Amargosa Valley from Death Valley itself. We walked nearly twenty miles, but I scarcely felt it, and I’m not super fit by any stretch of the imagination. The surroundings simply soaked up all my attention. The silence took me out of my body, out of the world, and gave me utter calm.

The next day, after we’d broken our camp in Hanaupah Canyon and were leaving the valley through Furnace Creek, I glanced at the odometer that we’d set to zero at the start  of our trip. It said 666. 

Canyonlands

We were on a dizzying, roughly hewn trail that winds down into Labyrinth Canyon, at the heart of Canyonlands. I was learning the names of the rock strata: Navajo sandstone, Kenyata foundation, Wingate sandstone, Chilne formation. I recited them as we crawled down the tortuous trail because it kept me from being scared to death. In the valley below, quiet as the valley of death (before the six hundred), we found a single signpost. Moab, 21 miles to the east. Hanksville, 34 miles west. Pinned to the signpost was a sun-bleached flier: “Lost dog. Answers to Max.” The mystery of how you could mislay a dog in that empty echoing wasteland has never been satisfactorily cleared up for me. Max must have really despised his owners.

I sat on a rock in the silence and thought of the explorer John Wesley Powell and his boatmen, sliding down the Colorado river in the summer of 1869. Powell had a habit of scrambling up the canyon walls wherever he could.  From the top, he would catch a glimpse of the surface of the country through which his boats travelled in crevices sometimes a mile deep. “By now,” wrote Wallace Stegner, chronicler of the journey in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, “they had left behind them all familiarity; the country was such as none of them had ever seen. On the broken plains stretching away from rimrock there was no vegetation, only worn rock and sand and the bizarre forms of desert erosion; in the distance, the Roan Cliffs were pale azure, the flat and tabular outlines of mesas and buttes were evenly bedded, colored like the rainbow. It looked like unknown country…They named it Labyrinth Canyon.”

Great Basin

Waxing lyrical is hard to avoid when you sleep under the stars in the Great Basin desert. You want everyone else to have the experience too, and yet, paradoxically, you want nobody else to have the experience because being out there alone is the experience. After a day without any outside human contact, you begin to jealously guard the solitude. A column of dust from a car five miles away begins to seem like an outrageous intrusion. I’ve sat looking out over a vast empty landscape and wondered was I still the same person who loves the London Underground and thrives on the excitement of international airports. All those people, when there’s all this space. If, like Abbey said, the desert will always be there, I think it’s possible to have the best of both worlds. 

Desert Wildflowers

If the name of the game is survival, Skeletonweed gets the gold. When the rain is over and there’s no more moisture to be found, Skeletonweed turns into a brittle brown bush that breaks off and blows away. It’s a small cousin of the more famous Tumbleweed, which, interestingly, is not indigenous to the western states at all, but was introduced in the last century from the Russian steppes. Some fleeing revolutionary must have got a seed stuck to his dagger. Wildflower season in the desert is brief and not as dramatically colourful as the flower books lead you to believe. There are splashes of colour: red Desert Paintbush, tall yellow feathery Golden Prince’s Plumes, the yellow knob heads of Basin Rayless Daisies. But the sand, rock, and shale are all-pervading. It would take a flower population a thousand times denser to make any visible impression on the landscape. The joy is in close observation. The slower you walk, the more the colours show themselves. The cacti flowers are my favourites. Prickly pear, yellow and pink, waxlike petals; scarlet Claret Cup cactus. And receiving my personal Medal of Honor for survival against the odds is the Joshua tree. Fertilized only by the yucca moth, whose only source of food is pollen from Joshua flowers, tree and moth lock each other in perfect symbiosis. Sex in nature: so simple, so safe.

Inside the Moment

Long distance runners and short sharp-shooters like racquetball players are always talking about endorphin highs, so I’m going to wheel out my wilderness camping equivalent. My endorphin rush is that feeling that wells up in me as I put the miles between my car and the highway, and the desert closes quietly around me. It’s the warm gritty wind on my skin, the comfortable dustiness of old shorts and a singlet, and what I like to think of as the desert state of mind. Time slows. There are no plans, you live inside the moment. An ant crossing your foot as you sit drinking coffee is an event. And places like Lunar Lake, Nevada, exist just for you to discover, spend an astonishing couple of days in, and leave as you found them.

On Lunar Lake there are no wildflowers. No trees, no shrubs, not even any grass. I found a single dead bush hanging on in the middle of the dried lake bed when I ran out there, the ground a consistency of soft dry mud, crumbling like curry powder, perfectly kind to my bare feet. I could run with my eyes closed. I ran backwards for a while, trying to override the internal conditioning to check over my shoulder for obstacles. There were no obstacles. Back at camp, lying out on my air mattress with a cold beer, I watched the playa turn purple first, before sunset, then dark pink. After the sun set, it turned dark silver. We took photos, but it could not be captured. That night there was a full moon. Lunar Lake shimmered like a bridal veil. It was bittersweet breaking camp the next morning to return to civilization. We saw a coyote, clearly identifiable through the glasses, loping and stopping to forage and loping on. Then, as we drove out past the Easy Chair volcanic crater, a badger scrambled awkwardly up the bank at the side of the road, unmistakable when he looked back at us, with the white stripe down his forehead. He waddled off into the sagebrush where I saw his white stripe flash for a second, then he was gone.

Coming home from the desert along Interstate 80 through the ugly Sacramento valley, there is always a reluctant shift back to “real” life. Soon, it will matter again where the house key is, whether your clothes are clean, which friends you haven’t called in a while. Life crowds back in where there was space, and life is too fast. The best thing about the wilderness is how it reminds you that nothing, nothing, nothing on earth matters enough to be miserable or anxious over. Lying in a tent with the stars out around me and the immense silence behind the small sounds of the wind in the creosote bushes, or the squeak of dry twigs, or the scuttle of something, I know there is always the wilderness, where life is levelled. The difficulty is remembering during the in-between parts what it’s like to be out there; what the canyon walls look like with the sun setting on them; the whorls of dead juniper; the feel of walking on slickrock; the quiet, filled with all the noises that belong there. How the tables turn: everything that looks worthless at home becomes valuable. A waterbottle, a small camping stove, a flashlight. And things that seem important back in our lives (a wallet full of green notes and cards) are worthless, get stuffed down the bottom of the bag, of no use, no value because they can’t dig or light or wash or warm.

“Wilderness is not a luxury,” wrote Edward Abbey, laureate of the desert, in Desert Solitaire, “but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little is left of the wild, the spare, the original is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

I remember an April afternoon years ago, scrambling out over slickrock and sandstone boulders to Panorama Point, some forty miles along red sand road from Highway 24 in central Utah. I stood up there in the whipping wind, looking at the 360-degree view. Below me was the Maze, a labyrinth of switchback canyons falling away in layers. To the north, the La Sal mountains; to the south, the Henrys; to the east, the Abajos. Mountain range after mountain range, canyon upon canyon. It felt like the end of the world, and at the same time, like the origin, an original landscape without trace of human presence. I stayed there a long time just looking, and the rest of the world slowly receded, unimportant. I knew I would revisit that place in memory, and that the memory would fade and grow indistinct. But I was there, in that moment, and it was worth everything.