by Walt Emann, of Oberlin College
March 16. Outside the old schoolhouse museum at Ruby Ghost Town.
While standing in the blistering afternoon sun-heat, my hands soaking in a washbin filled with suds and dust, a refreshing breeze picked up as I rinsed my last sock semi-clean. With it, the cool wind carried a certain unforgettable scent to my nose. It blew in from up the hill at Morton house, as did the sudden sounds of my screaming classmates. It could only mean one thing: that the others had finally built up the guts and done the unthinkable, performing an act of such relentless bravery that our gang of desert travelers would not soon forget. Morton, our well-known and well-feared resident striped skunk, had finally been caught for good. I scrambled to strap my last sock up to dry and hightailed it up to our cozy home, where I could see the crowd of Round River students and leaders on the verge of losing their lunch. Half were huddled in the doorway looking on in an interesting mixture of amazement and repulsion; the others hauled possibly the most high-tech improvised trapping device any of us had ever seen.
Evidently Morton was not a happy camper inside his carefully engineered cage, judging by the foul yellow spray continually accumulating on the inside of the overturned bucket that had been duct-taped to a slab of scrap plywood. The air stank, we stank, the house stank, the truck bed we tossed the skunk into stank—but after a short drive down Ruby Road our uninvited guest found himself a new home, roaming free in the woods far, far away from Ruby. Some of us miss Morton’s invigorating presence, some are more than glad that he and his stink are not around any longer, but we all know the little guy is safely in charge of his own destiny now. Now that we did not have to worry about a skunk living under our house, we brought our attention back to the task at hand – in two days, we would be hoofing it into the Santa Teresa and Galiuro Mountains to backpack and survey spring habitats for eleven days. We had a whole lot of prep ahead of us.
March 18. A rag-tag trailhead camping site at the edge of the Santa Teresas.
Nothing about arriving in this mountain range could have been more awe-inspiring or rewarding than being greeted by such a spectacular Arizona sunset. After an hour and a half of skidding and bouncing up steep rocky roads in the backseats of our ever-reliable Ballena and tough-as-a-tank Tiburon, we stretched our legs on the fresh mountain soil and bathed our faces in the glow of the amber and cotton-candy horizon.
We laughed, reveled, and photographed our memories up on top of that ridge, and the feeling of joy in the air around us was almost as thick as the smell of potatoes and onions frying away in the cast iron.
But soon enough the sun hunkered down, the stars and familiar constellations –the Big Dipper, Orion, Leo—began to emerge from dark blue deep space, and delicious dinner disappeared into our hungry bellies. We were full and fueled for the next few days of intense trekking. The morning found us packing our tents and loading up water, food, and research gear for the group as the sun and its warmth crested over another ridge to the east. With packs on backs we set out into the canyon washes, dense desert thornscrub, and vast juniper-oak forest, excitedly photographing and identifying every plant and trace of animal around us- from hawks to javelinas, cacti to trees, lizards, bees, and all walks of life in between.
I had never gazed upwards into the canopy of a ponderosa pine before, never tasted the sweet flesh of ripened manzanita berries, and never placed my own two feet next to the fresh tracks of a mountain lion. I had also never been as sweat-drenched as I was after that hike, but after eight hours of knee-aching bushpushing our group welcomed Holdout Creek’s cold flowing refreshment with open arms, scrubbing our feet and soothing our suntanned bodies. A long day’s journey came to yet another gorgeous end, as the sun once again hid behind the mountains and desert dusk cooled the rocky canyon where we spent the next few nights.
March 19. Four weary travelers under the relaxing shade of Sycamore Spring.
Ben had led Olivia, Bethany and me here as we pushed and scraped through thick acacia, mimosa, and mesquite. Cut up and battered, we gladly took our cheese-and-tortilla lunch break while surveying the wildlife and vegetation inhabiting the ecosystem around us– kneeling into the leaf litter to scour for bugs, steadily eyeing the canopy for birds, and traipsing around between trees to identify every shrub, flower, and tree. Only in the Sky Islands could I have dreamt of seeing agave, cholla and prickly pear growing next to stagnant spring-fed pools under dense oak and sycamore woodland. Mourning cloak butterflies danced between moist soil patches and freshly bloomed flowers, Bridled Titmice chirped from the branches above our heads, and ornate tree lizards darted through leaf litter and across fallen limbs. Meanwhile, five miles away and up another wash, Benjamin, Wren, and Perrin were doing some spring scouting of their own– in between discovering crystal-clear swimming holes and collections of ancient-looking ceramic fragments among the rocks.
March 23. A few days later, up the rocky slopes of the Galiuro Mountains.
As the late afternoon sky turned from clear and sunny to gray overcast, and as our bodies welcomed the sudden coolness of the air, we found ourselves at a fork in the trail at Mud spring. Dropping our packs, we set out in teams to scout out a place to set up camp for the night. Tomorrow we would be faced with what we had quickly come to know as “the big up,” and a good night’s sleep was going to be crucial for our nearly half-mile climb to the top of the saddle near Kennedy Peak. A quarter mile off, scout team one reported back that they had found a wonderful patch of flat grass-much more comfortable than the jagged rocks and angled earth everywhere else around us. The one problem were the cows (at least, their left-behind poop strewn everywhere) but after nearly two months of dealing with fields of cowpies, we felt right at home. Heavier, foreboding clouds began to roll in from the west as we unpacked our tents, collected pots for dinner, and wondered if everyone still had enough water to stay hydrated. Little did we know that drinking water would be the least of our worries at Mud spring. Making a quick scan of the valley below from our hillside vantage, we spotted a livestock drinking tank: full to the brim, clean(ish), and delightfully refreshing-looking; but there was more water -not the drinking kind- headed in our direction, and just ten minutes after we staked our rainflies it began to flake down from the foggy cloud cover. Looking around us in excited disbelief, we watched snowflakes gently land on and cover the spiked tops of cholla arms and prickly pear pads. The next half hour was full of hugging each other, whooping and jumping around our camp, and taking photos as the ground around us turned frozen white. Snow, in the desert!
It felt like we were living in a miracle dream- at least, until that half hour of magical precipitation turned into an hour and a half, which would eventually drag on through the night until the next afternoon. Our clothes and down jackets had been soaked within an hour, our bones frozen to the core, and we finally remembered that snow makes things very cold and very wet. Our euphoria had turned into bitter annoyance, but we pushed on. As Eli fired up the Whisperlite stoves for dinner, Wren captained the construction of a bright blue tarp snow shelter, strapped between two rocks over top of Eli’s simmering lentil soup. “Tight fit” might be an understatement, but somehow all 8 of us squeezed under that small refuge from the cold.
As the weather went from bad to worse over the night –heavy flakes of snow became freezing raindrops, became pea-sized hail, and back again to waves of thin snowfall— Ben and Eli decided that tomorrow would not be the day for climbing “the big up.” The next morning, we were looking at a day full of sitting in tents, attempting to stay warm, and discussing our conservation and extinction class during breaks in the weather.
March 25. Early morning sun, snow-capped peaks, and two thousand feet of elevation ahead of us.
Come six in the morning, the snow had stopped. The sky was clear, the sun began its rise behind peaks on the horizon, and a couple of us dared to peek our heads out from our tents and into the dawn’s cold air.
I shouted to the rest of the gang to bundle up and come out of hibernation—the sun would be cresting those mountains any second, and it didn’t seem right for them to miss that morning’s golden reward after nearly two days of being frozen like desert popsicles. We ran to the cliffside to revel in the beauty of it all, feeling the sun-heat thaw our bones and rekindle our spirits. From the south, Kennedy Peak looked down upon us, its coniferous forest blanketed in thick white– the big up. We were ready this time, and marched off into the morning.
Come back to read Olivia’s blog post for more about our adventures in the Galiuros and beyond!