This is the fourth of a seven-part series about a December 1982 trek across the Baja—enjoy! Will post Part 5 tomorrow. Part 1 is here. —Ken
The highway angled northward out of town, desert-flat with hardly a curve. It was only twenty miles to the pass, which took us a little off course, but nearer our destination.
Gazing out at Mexico through the dirty bus window, I thought about the great fun that lay ahead. We would be sleeping on the desert floor without a tent. We omitted them to save weight. Instead, we each brought a bivy sack, a rainproof shell that slips over a sleeping bag. We would have to find the ranch at Santa Clara, then water, as well as the hidden entrance to the canyon.
The sparse description in the old guidebook said there would be a small waterfall a quarter-mile up the canyon, with possibly a short rope on the left. It would provide confirmation we were in the right place. We would ascend the gorge to Campo Noche and look for the way up Picacho del Diablo.
Despite our heavy loads, we brought only a short rope and ice axes, but no crampons for our boots, hoping we could manage without. We planned to cross the escarpment near a peak called Botella de Azul, or Blue Bottle, then cruise down the other side of the mountains, like squealing kids on toboggans if things went well. None of it should be particularly difficult or technical, we thought, but the potential for adventure, particularly at the start of winter, was quite enticing.
I tuned out the noisy stillness of the bus ride, though there was hardly time to work up a good yawn before the driver let his foot off the throttle and rolled the coach to a stop. I was looking out a half-open window when I noticed the driver looking at us in the mirror.
“Aqui?” I asked. Were we there already?
“Si. Esto. El paso.”
The desert seemed almost as flat and open as before, as if we’d hardly gained any elevation on our bus ride. Looking at the map and the mountains and the road ahead, the driver seemed to have it right. We relieved the bus of our heavy gear and watched it whisk away in the bright afternoon sunshine. I imagined the driver glancing to his side mirror . . . crazy gringos.
The bus driver had been thoughtful enough to drop us at the start of a two-track dirt road that trailed leftward, more or less in the direction we were going. We had barely begun walking when two young men in a pick-up truck appeared out of nowhere and pulled up behind us.
“Que pasan?” They were curious what the blazes we were up to.
“Somos alpinistas,” I repeated. “Vamos a la sierra.”
They thought that was pretty funny—that we would walk there and not drive, or at least take a horse.
“Muy lejos!”
“Si.”
Dennis knew about as much Spanish as I did and together we cobbled up a short conversation. The men laughed and insisted we hop in the back. They’d drive us the first couple of miles. We jumped in. There was no need to be overly purist now about walking across the desert. We’d let go of our sea-to-sea thing, so the main quest now was just navigating a dozen miles of desert and getting ourselves up the canyon and over the mountains, a considerable adventure in itself. We’ll come back again and do it right, I pledged.
The rough ride in the truck ended not soon enough. To our new campesino friends we donated two warm beers for their return trip. The truck receded into the dust and all was quiet again.
It seemed we’d finally reached the true point of departure. Moments like these sometimes pass unnoticed, until much later when you realize they actually meant something. So on December 18th, 1982, we commenced our trekking across the Sonoran Desert, or at least the dozen or so miles of it that still lay ahead.
We strolled among prickly pear, creosote bush and my own favorite, the ocotillo. O-ko-TEE-yo. It was a fun word to pronounce and I enjoyed uttering something fluently in Spanish besides “Where’s the speedy toilet?” or “How much for the naked chicken?” which surely approximates some of the phrases I mumbled during our conversations with the locals. In any event, the ocotillo’s tall spreading wands of desert glory were fascinating to behold, like little bombs a-bursting and celebrating our trek.
Well into dusk, we stopped at a broad patch of smooth gravel, the start of the dry lake perhaps, and laid out our bedrolls. Dinner would have been cheese and bread. Laying there in the cloudless desert, twenty miles or more from the nearest city lights of San Felipe, not a human artifact was in sight, other than our own bodily intrusion into this arid wilderness. We ogled the desert stars and I said to Dennis that I could not see one sign of humanity in this remote place, not a single light on the horizon other than a rising star—at which point a satellite, a single speck of faint light, sailed across the universe like a particle of space litter. Several more orbital intruders sailed past before I drifted off to sleep.
Having grown up, for a few years anyway, in the boondocks of Utah’s South Salt Lake Valley, I often slept out under the stars. I was usually in the company of my older brother, Skip. He would be the one to chase away anything threatening (though nothing ever threatened us) and I learned not to be afraid of sleeping out under the cosmos. Whatever it was that was out there in the shadows or among the stars had no interest in us, and even if it did and moved menacingly toward us, my big brother would smash it to bits. The protective veil of my brother imparted a kind of fearlessness of the dark. We weren’t like other kids whose parents made them stay inside most nights. We had free rein to sleep out whenever we liked, so long as it wasn't too stormy. I should have thanked my parents for that.
Sometimes we took a little too much free rein and snuck away from our usual bedding place to engineer a bit of havoc in the neighborhood. I think it was the Myric’s place that introduced me to the business of midnight home-decorating. I believe it took two rolls.
I once spit, inexplicably, on a distant cousin’s kitchen window and I thought she was going to pound me. I had to clean it up. She was the first girl I ever kissed. I think I was eleven, so I’m not sure it counts. She and my brother and I were riding in the back of my parents’ slate-blue VW pick-up truck, Dad driving, Mom also up front sipping a Coors. I think we were headed for a camp-out.
Before I leave you with the impression that my folks were habitual drivin’ drunkards, it was really more of an occasional thing on the road, back in the day when your own social circle was slightly more tolerant of bad behavior than most of us are today. Mom had also been a heavy smoker much of her adult life. We all remember the day she went cold turkey, giving up beer and cigarettes on the same day. She never looked back. Pretty awesome.
In the looser times of the mid-Sixties, however, the beer cooler was in the back of the VW with us. Mom or Dad would motion for a beer through the back window and we’d open the cooler, grab one and hand it through the passenger side door. Once we grabbed two. It would have been my older brother’s doing, of course. As the greasy-haired, high-school football star of the family, he was much better than I at getting away with mischief. We slunk down below the cab window and shared the can of beer three ways. It tasted like crap, of course. But with this girl there squished up against me, the peer pressure was thermonuclear.
Out of the blue, my brother insisted that I needed to kiss her. We both roundly rejected that gross idea. He may have compared us to the caged chickens we were sharing the truck with because we soon relented. Somehow, after a third of a beer, I drew up the unfathomable courage to look at her face, move a little closer, and trying not to think about how this girl who was slightly older than me, say twelve or so, but way taller, and who liked to wrestle me to the ground, sit on me and tickle me in the ribs till I turned green (like the time in my step-uncle’s haystack where she shoved me down between bales of hay and groped my ribs with her curly thin fingers, while her silky hair rained down on me, almost hiding her giggling pretty face, which a year earlier would have been completely unkissable), and now that same silky hair and pretty face were in the back of a VW pick-up truck daring me to try. So I did. It lasted for about two nanoseconds and I thought I was going to die from some weird form of electric shock. Whoa!
“How was it?” my brother asked.
“Ah, it was okay,” I said.
Dennis and I rose early in the morning and joked about the rattlesnakes, tarantulas, gila monsters and rabid coyotes that must have checked us out during the night. They probably ran off terrified after getting a whiff of the two sweaty larvae in their nylon cocoons.
We picked up our bulging packs and continued the walk across the desert. El Diablo and the San Pedro Mártir looked far more imposing now, lit up nicely in the low-angled sun.
Next up: Part 5—Cañon del Diablo