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Article Excerpt
If it weren't for crazy Hal Coss, (1) I would have missed falling in love with the Pinacate. Even today I get goose bumps just thinking about the place. The Pinacate shaped my life. When I came back from Vietnam, where I had been wounded by shrapnel, I was having physical difficulties, plus I had to redo my junior year because I had been drafted in mid-semester. Fresh out of the Army and veteran's hospitals, I was only able to take two classes, sometimes three. When I returned to the University of Arizona that spring of 1969, my father pushed me around in a wheelchair to get me registered. I couldn't write with my right hand, and I hadn't learned to write with my left--I took my class notes with a tape recorder. Have you ever taken organic chemistry by tape recorder? I made it through and did okay, but it was hard.
Soon I left the wheelchair behind. To pay my way through school and support my wife, Susan, who was also attending the university, I went to work out at Saguaro National Monument (now Park) as a seasonal ranger, starting out working for Hal. (2) I really enjoyed working with him, usually on weekends, some nights, and all holidays. In the library at Saguaro I would devour every book on plants, animals, geology, history, you name it. I read practically the whole library out there. The rest of my time was dedicated to university studies.
Two books in particular caught my attention. One was Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava. Another was New Trails in Mexico. Hal loaned me his personal copies so I could read them at home. I read them and reread them completely. They were like fishhooks, and I swallowed them right down to the sinker, both of them. Then I tried to find information on the areas that Lumholtz and Hornaday described in their early journeys into that country, but I couldn't find very much. Ronald Ives had some good articles, and Julian Hayden was starting to fill the blanks of archaeology. William Bull, geomorphologist, and Joseph Schreiber, another geologist at the U of A, steered me to other material, including work by graduate students Jim Gutmann and Charles Wood, and to the classic The Changing Mile, by Hastings and Turner. That material just whetted my desire to go to see that desert country for myself. In seeking empty and relatively little known places, I happily found one fairly close to Tucson. That led to my first trip to the Pinacate.
My first was a five-day trip into the Pinacate without any good maps, only verbal guidance from Hal. A ranger friend, Rich Slonaker, came with me. Through trial and error we somehow found our way to MacDougal and Molina craters, down to Moon Crater, and into the sands just below it. The trip was rough for a beginner in the Pinacate, but that desert landscape enchanted me with its magnificent shield volcano, lava flows, and stark mantle of shifting dunes. I remember stopping and finding water in Papago Tanks and seeing a few of the craters for my first time. Oh! I've got goose bumps again! Right then I decided that I would go to on to graduate school but I would start researching the region non,, in my junior year, to get a head start. So I began exploring and mapping every track and trail--every single one of them.
I followed woodcutter trails and looked for a way to circumnavigate the mountain, if there was one. In some cases there had been maybe just a vehicle or two partway on a route. I confess to punching some the rest of the way through. It's terribly rough country, very hard on vehicles. On my second trip down another friend came with me, Robert L. Heald. He and I had been high school buddies. We went right after a rain, and my Land Cruiser had those smooth-tread, high-flotation aircraft tires that were popular in the late 1960s. We got off the highway and almost reached the Grijalva ranch house when we bogged down in mud up to the flame. Oh, we dug and we dug and we dug. I didn't have a winch, but I did have four homemade sand ladders, or skid boards. They were quarter-inch thick expanded metal, ten inches wide and four feet long, with a solid steel rod down each side of them. We raised the vehicle with a high-lift handyman jack, packed vegetation and any sort of rock we could gather under the tires, put the skid boards down, lowered the vehicle on top of them, and then shot forward with all four wheels kicking up rooster tails of mud. Finally, we got through. Over the years that scene was repeated many times in mud and sand, so I got pretty good at digging out.
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I set up a small network of weather stations, each with wet/dry bulb psychrometers, maximum/minimum thermometers, and a rain gauge. The shelters and instruments were provided by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. My weather station in the Sierra del Rosario was an absolutely fascinating place to go, simply because there was less diversity there than in other "nearby" mountains. On various trips, I would pair up with either Hal, one of my brothers (Tom or Robert), and once with my brother-in-law, Fred Deon, and we'd climb a new peak to examine the vegetation, scout for bighorn or their sign, and revel in the view. These were hard trips but worth it! The Rosario dunes are four hundred to six hundred feet high. They are some of the most magnificent dunes in North America. On foot I would slog to the crests and look to the east, south, and west, knowing that there wasn't another soul within sixty miles. And I loved it. It made me feel at peace. Plus, I had bottles of mescal buried at various locations and always had a small reward after a hard day whenever I was near what I called "my nurse tree (or bush)."
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Julian Hayden would come with me if I had something archeological that he should see, especially down in the Adair Bay area. There we'd come across lots of shell middens, and in the Pinacate east of Moon Crater there were trails, sleeping circles, rock alignments, and caves to be examined. Julian liked to stop at my "nurse tree" places, too: He enjoyed a tot of "medicinal" mescal or tequila with me every now and then. It turned out he and I had been neighbors when I was in grade school, and his son Steve and I had played together when we were kids. What a small world....
When forceful winds rose, you could watch the dunes "work." The sand streamed off the crests of the dunes in spectacular Lawrence-of-Arabia-like plumes. The "singing sands" of the Rub al Khali or the Kelso Dunes would come to mind. I never heard the dunes sing or rumble, but I wanted to so badly. Another thing that we looked for was an atmospheric phenomenon called the "green flash" at sunset. We've seen it from the beaches of Adair Bay and Libertad. Not many people even know about the green flash, it's such a rarity. Another thing that we used to see and photograph was cold air mirages--buttes like you'd expect to see in Monument Valley hanging on the horizon, but they really were distorted refractions of land beyond the horizon, resulting in castles and buttes that seemed to rise up from the dunes. I'm getting homesick just thinking about that country.
My approach to research in the Pinacate was eclectic and synoptic. It took the form of a detailed "reconnaissance." Julian once described me as a Victorian naturalist, meaning that I was interested in everything: plants, animals, geology, hydrology, archaeology, history, climatology, and land use. I was interested in it all. You name it and I looked into it. If you go through my thesis, "Resource Reconnaissance of the Gran Desierto Region," (3) you'll see that I was interested in the broader picture. I didn't have time to do more detailed, comparative, or predictive analyses that would be required for a PhD.
When I explained my master's proposal to Dr. Stan Brickler, he took me on as one of his first graduate students. Hr recognized that I'd already done two years of rather intensive fieldwork. And every week I grew stronger as I recovered from my wounds. Because I didn't have use of my right hand, I had to do many things in my own unorthodox way. For example, when stuck in sand or mud, I used a "D"-handled shovel. I held the D in my left hand, braced the blade of the shovel over my right forearm, and gained further support by using my knees as fulcrums, too. Better yet, sometimes I got my companion for the day to do the really hard digging!
I spent a lot of time in the Gran Desierto. During my last four years of study I logged 120 trips, for a total of 378 days in the field. Hal Coss came along about one-third of the time. Various others came on an additional third, whereas and the rest I did alone. Once a week I circumnavigated the Pinacate and scrambled down to a weather station I had hauled in to the bottom of Sykes Crater. It was a repository for a wet/dry bulb psychrometer, a maximum/minimum thermometer, and a rain gauge. A few ounces of 10W-30 motor oil in the gauge prevented evaporation of any precipitation from the gauge until I got there to take measurements. Climbing in and out of that crater was a big job.
I had another weather station southeast of Papago Tanks and one up by Badilla Crater, just south of Los Vidrios. Another was at the southern end of the Rosario, and one more on desert pavement just north of Tule Tank. Then I'd drive all the way through the lava fields...
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