MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS
[Sidenote: Flat steps of the desert.]
The word mesa (table), by local usage in Mexico and in the western
United States, is applied to any flat tract of ground that lies above
an arroyo or valley, as well as to the flat top of a mountain. In a
broad, if somewhat strained use of the word, it also means the great
table-lands and elevated plains lying between a river-valley and the
mountain confines on either side of it. The mesas are the steps or
benches that lead upward from the river to the mountain, though the
resemblance to benches is not always apparent because of the cuttings
and washings of intermittent streams, and the breakings and crossings
of mountain-spurs.
[Sidenote: Across Southern Arizona.]
As you rise up from the Colorado Desert, crossing the river to the
east, you meet with a great plain or so-called mesa that extends far
across Southern Arizona and Sonora almost up to the Continental Divide.
It is broken by short ranges of barren mountains, that have the
general trend of the main Sierra Madre, and it looks so much like the
country to the west of the river that it is usually recognized as a
part of the desert, or at the least “desert country.”
[Sidenote: Rising up from the desert.]
[Sidenote: The great mesas.]
It is, however, somewhat different from the Bottom of the Bowl or even
the valleys of the Mojave. The elevation, for one thing, gives it
another character. The rise from bench to bench is very gradual, and
to the ordinary observer hardly perceptible; but nevertheless when the
foot-hills of the Santa Rita Mountains are reached, the altitude is
four thousand feet or more. There is a difference in light, sky, color,
air; even some change in the surface of the earth. The fine sands of
the lower desert and the sea-bed silts are missing; the mesas lie close
up to the mountains and receive the first coarse wash from the sides;
the barrancas on the mountain-sides are choked with great masses of
fallen rock, with bowlders of granite, with blocks of blackened lava.
The arroyos that carry the wash from the mountains--mere ditches and
trenches cut through the mesas--are filled with rounded stones, coarse
sands, glittering scales of mica, bits of quartz, breaks of agate
and carnelian. The mesas themselves are made up of sand and gravel,
sometimes long shelvings of horizontal rocks, sometimes patches of
terra-cotta, rifts of copper shale, or beds of parti-colored clay.
[Sidenote: “Grease wood” plains.]
[Sidenote: Upland vegetation.]
There is more rain in this upland country and consequently more
vegetation than down below. Grease wood grows everywhere and is
the principal green thing in sight. So predominant is it that the
term “grease wood plains” is not inappropriate to the whole region.
Groves of sahuaro stand in the valleys and reach up and over the
mountain-tops, chollas and nopals are on the flats; the mesquite grows
in miniature forests. But besides these there are bushes and trees not
seen in the basin. Palo fierro, palo blanco, cottonwood live along the
dry river-beds, white and black sage on the mesas, white and black
oaks in the foot-hills. Then, too, there are patches of pale yellow
sun-dried grass covering many acres, great beds of evening primrose,
and fields covered with the purple salt-bush. It is quite another
country when you come to examine it piece by piece.
[Sidenote: Grass plains.]
As you rise higher and higher to the Continental Divide the whole face
of the mesa undergoes a further change. It slips imperceptibly into a
grass plain, stretching flat as far as the eye can see, covered with
whitened grass, and marked by clumps of yuccas slowly growing into
yucca palms. No rocks, trees, cacti, or grease wood; no primrose, wild
gourd, or verbena. Nothing but yucca palms, bleached grass, blue sky,
and lilac mountains. It is still in kind a desert country, and it is
still called a mesa or table-land; but its character is changed into
something like the great flat lands of Nebraska or the broken plateau
country of Montana.
[Sidenote: Spring and summer on the plains.]
[Sidenote: Home of the antelope.]
In the spring, when the snows have melted and the rains have fallen,
these plains turn green with young grass and are spattered with great
patches of wild-flowers; but the drouth and heat of early summer
soon fade the grasses to a bright yellow, and in the fall the yellow
bleaches to a dead white. There is little wild life left upon these
plains. The bush-birds need more cover than is to be found here, while
the ground-birds need more open roadway. In the spring, when the
prairie pools are filled with water, there are geese and cranes in
abundance; but they soon pass on north. These great grass tracts were
once the home of countless bands of antelope, for it is just such an
open country as the antelope loves; but they have passed on, too. In
their place roam herds of cattle, and the gray wolf, the coyote, and
the buzzard follow the herds.
[Sidenote: Beds of soda and gypsum.]
[Sidenote: Riding into the unexpected.]
The grease wood and the grass plains of Arizona and New Mexico are
typical of all the flat countries lying up from the deserts; and yet
there are many tracts of small acreage in this same region that show
distinctly different features. Sometimes there are small beds of flat
alkali dust, sometimes beds of soda and gypsum, sometimes beds of salt.
Then occasionally there is a broad plain sown broadcast far and wide
with blocks of lava--the remnants of a great lava-stream sent forth
many centuries ago; and again flat reaches strewn thick with blocks of
porphyry that have been washed down from the mountains no one knows
just when or how. You are always riding into the unexpected in these
barren countries, stumbling upon strange phenomena, seeing strange
sights.
[Sidenote: The Grand Canyon country.]
[Sidenote: Hills covered with juniper.]
[Sidenote: The Painted Desert.]
And yet as you ascend from the valley of the Colorado moving to the
northeast, the lands and the sights become even stranger. For now you
are rising to the Great Plateau and the Grand Canyon country--the
region of the butte, the vast escarpment, the dome, the cliff, the
gorge. It is a more mountainous land than that lying to the south,
and it is deeper cut with river-beds and canyons. Yet still you have
no trouble in finding even here the flat spaces peculiar to all the
desert-bordering territory. There are grease wood plains as at the
south and great bare benches that seem endless in their sweep. There
are, too, spaces covered with lava-blocks and beds of soda and salt.
More rain falls here than at the south or west; and in certain sections
the grass grows rank, the yuccas become trees, and higher up toward Ash
Fork the hills are covered with a growth of juniper. Flowers and shrubs
are more abundant, birds and animals come and go across your pathway,
and there are green valleys with water running upon the surface of
the ground. And yet not twenty miles from the green valley you may
enter upon the most barren plain imaginable--a place like the Painted
Desert, perhaps, where in spots not a living thing of any kind is seen,
where there is nothing but dry rock in the mountains and dry dust in
the valley. These areas of utter desolation are of frequent enough
occurrence in all the regions lying immediately to the north and the
east of the Mojave to remind you that you are still in a desert land,
and that the bench and the arid plain are really a part of the great
waste itself.
[Sidenote: Riding on the mesas.]
[Sidenote: The reversion to savagery.]
Nature never designed more fascinating country to ride over than these
plains and mesas lying up and back from the desert basin. You may be
alone without necessarily being lonesome. And everyone rides here
with the feeling that he is the first one that ever broke into this
unknown land, that he is the original discoverer; and that this new
world belongs to him by right of original exploration and conquest.
Life becomes simplified from necessity. It begins all over again,
starting at the primitive stage. There is a reversion to the savage.
Civilization, the race, history, philosophy, art--how very far away and
how very useless, even contemptible, they seem. What have they to do
with the air and the sunlight and the vastness of the plateau! Nature
and her gift of buoyant life are overpowering. The joy of mere animal
existence, the feeling that it is good to be alive and face to face
with Nature’s self, drives everything else into the background.
[Sidenote: The thin air again.]
And what air one breathes on these plains--what wonderful air! It is
exhilarating to the whole body; it brightens the senses and sweetens
the mind and quiets the nerves. And how clear it is! Leagues away
needle and spine and mountain-ridge still come out clear cut against
the sky. Is it the air alone that makes possible such far-away
visions, or has the light somewhat to do with it? What penetrating,
all-pervading, wide-spread light! How silently it falls and how like a
great mirror the plain reflects it back to heaven!
[Sidenote: The light and its deceptions.]
[Sidenote: Distorted proportions.]
[Sidenote: Changed colors.]
Light and air--what means wherewith to conjure up illusions and deceive
the senses! We think we see far away a range of low hills, but, as we
ride on, buttes and lomas seem to detach and come toward us. There is
no range ahead of us; there are only scattered groups of hills many
miles apart. Far away to the left on a little rise of ground is a wild
horse watching us, his head high in air, his nostrils sniffing for our
scent upon the breeze. How colossal he seems! Doubtless he is the last
of some upland band, the leader of the troop who through great size and
strength was best fitted to survive. But no; he is only a common little
Indian pony distorted to huge proportions by the heated atmosphere. We
are riding into the sunset. Ahead of us every notch in the hills, every
little valley has a shaft of golden light streaming through it. But
turn in your saddle and look to the east, and the hills we have left
behind us are surrounded by veilings of lilac. Again the omnipresent
desert air! We see the western hills as through an amber glass, but
looking to the east the glass is changed to pale amethyst.
[Sidenote: The little hills.]
[Sidenote: Painting the desert.]
How delicately beautiful are the hills that seem to gather in little
groups along the waste! They are not sharp-edged in their ridges
like the higher mountains. Wind, rain, and sand have done their work
upon them until there is hardly a rough feature left to them. All
their lines are smooth and flow from one into another; and all the
parti-colors of their rocks and soils are blended into one tone by the
light and the air. With surfaces that catch and reflect light, and
little depressions that hold shadows, how very picturesque they are!
Indeed as you watch them breaking the horizon-line you are surprised
to see how easily they compose into pictures. If you tried to put them
upon canvas your surprise would probably be greater to find how very
little you could make of them. The desert is not more paintable than
the Alps. Both are too big.
[Sidenote: Worn-down mountains.]
These hills--they are usually called lomas--that one meets with in
the plateau region are not of the same make-up as the clay buttes of
Wyoming or the gravel hills of New England. They have a core of rock
within them and are nothing less than washed-down foot-hills. You will
often see a chain of them receding from the range toward the plain,
and growing smaller as they recede, until the last one is a mound only
a few feet in height. They are flattening down to the level of the
plain--sinking into the sandy sea.
[Sidenote: The mountain wash and its effect.]
[Sidenote: Flattening down to the plain.]
[Sidenote: Mountain-making.]
Usually the lomas are seen against a background of dark mountains of
which they are or have been at one time a constituent part. For the
lomas are the outliers from the foot-hills as the foot-hills from the
mountains proper. They are the most worn because they are the lowest
down in the valley--in fact the bottom steps which receive not only
their own wash but that of all the other steps besides. The mountains
pour their waters and loose stones upon the foot-hills, the foot-hills
cast them off upon the lomas, and the lomas in turn thrust them upon
the plains. But the casting off effort becomes weaker at each step
as the sides of the hill become less of a declivity. When the little
hill is reached the sand-wash settles about the base, and in time the
whole mass rises on its sides and sinks somewhat in the centre, until
a mere rise of ground is all that remains. So perish the hills that
we are accustomed to speak of as “everlasting.” It is merely another
illustration of Nature’s method in the universe. She is as careless of
the individual hill or mountain as of the individual man, animal, or
flower. All are beaten into dust. But the species is more enduring,
better preserved. Year by year Nature is tearing down, washing down,
pulling to pieces range after range; but year by year she is also
heaving up stupendous mountains like the Alps, and crackling with a
mighty squeeze the earth’s crust into the ridges of the Rockies and the
Andes.
[Sidenote: The foot-hills.]
[Sidenote: Forms of the foot-hills.]
The foot-hills are just what their name indicates--the hills that
lie at the foot of the mountains. They are not usually detached from
the main range like so many of the lomas, but are a part of it; and
while not exactly the buttresses of the mountains, yet they remind one
of those architectural supports of cathedral walls. The foot-hills
themselves are perhaps as firmly supported as the mountains for very
often they stretch down from the mountains in a long ridge like
a spine, and from the spine are thrown out supporting ribs that
trail away into the valleys. In a granite country these foot-hills
are usually very smooth, and are made up largely, as regards their
surfaces, of the grit and grind of the rocks. The rocks themselves are
usually wind worn, rounded by rain and sand, and sometimes fantastic
in shape. Often the soft granite wears through in seams and leaves
lozenge-like blocks linked together like beads upon a string; often
the whole rock-crown of the hill is honey-combed by the wind until it
looks as soft as a sponge. The foot-hills of porphyry are more jagged
and rough in every way. The stone is much harder and while it splits
like granite and falls along the mountain-side in a talus it does not
readily disintegrate. The last bit of it remains a hard kernel, and the
porphyry foot-hill is usually a keen-edged mountain in miniature.
[Sidenote: Mountain-plants.]
[Sidenote: Bare mountains.]
The hills have a desert vegetation of grease wood, cactus, and sage,
with occasional trees like the palo verde and the lluvia d’oro; but
their general appearance is not very different from the mesas. Where
the altitude is high--say five thousand feet and over--there may be a
more radical change in vegetation; for now the oak begins to appear,
and if it is open country the grasses and flowers show everywhere.
Sometimes the foot-hills are covered with a dense chaparral made up
of many low trees and bushes; but this growth is more peculiar to the
Californian hills west of the Coast Range than to Arizona. Many of
the ranges in the Canyon country are almost as bare of vegetation as
an ancient lake-bed. And sometimes altitude seems to have little to
do with the kinds of growths. Cacti and the salt-bush flourish at six
thousand feet as readily as down in the Salton Basin three hundred feet
below sea-level. The most dangerous and difficult thing to set up about
anything in this desert world is the general law or common rule. The
exception--the thing that is perhaps uncommon--comes up at every turn
to your undoing.
[Sidenote: The southern exposures.]
[Sidenote: Gray lichens.]
Even the mountains of Arizona that have an elevation of from five to
eight thousand feet are often quite bare of timber. The sahuaro, the
nopal, the palo verde may grow to their very peaks and still make
only a scanty covering. Seen from a distance the southern exposure of
the mountain looks perfectly bare; but if you travel around it to the
north side where the sunlight does not fall except for a few hours
of the day, you will find a growth of bushes, small trees, vines, and
grasses that, taken together, form something of a thicket--that is for
a desert. And here, too, on the northern exposure you will find the
abrupt walls of the peak stained with great fields of orange and gray
lichens that lend a color quality to the whole top.
[Sidenote: Still in the desert region.]
[Sidenote: Arida zona.]
But through the bushes and grasses and lichens the wine-red of the
porphyry comes cropping out to tell you that the mountain is a mass of
rock, that it holds little or no soil on its sides, that it has not
a suspicion of water; and that whatever grows upon it, does so, not
by favor of circumstance, but through sheer desert stubbornness. The
vegetation is a thin disguise that is penetrated in a few moments. The
arid character of the mountain says plainly enough that we are not yet
out of the region of sands and burning winds and fiery sun-shafts. The
whole of the Arizona country as far east as the Continental Divide, in
spite of its occasional green valleys and few high mountain-ranges with
timbered tops, is a slope leading up and out from the desert by gradual
if broken steps which we have called mesas or benches. It is a bare,
dry land. Its name would imply that the early Spaniards had found it
that and called it _arida zona_ for cause.[8]
[Sidenote: Cloud-bursts on the mesas.]
[Sidenote: The wash of rains.]
[Sidenote: Gorge cutting.]
Yet at times it is a land of heavy cloud-bursts and wash-outs. In the
summer months it frequently rains on the mesas in torrents. The bare
surface of the country drains this water almost like the roof of a
house because there are no grasses or bushes of consequence to check
the water and allow it to soak into the ground. The descent from the
Divide to the Colorado River is quite steep. The flood of waters rushes
down the steps of the mesas and over the bare ground with terrific
force. It quickly cuts channels in the low places down which are hurled
sand, gravel, and bowlders. The cutting of the channel during the heavy
rains is something extraordinary, partly because the stream has great
volume and fall, and partly because the channel-bed is usually of soft
rock and easily cut. In a few dozen years the arroyo of a mesa that
carries off the water from the mountain-range has cut a river-bed many
feet deep; in a few hundred years the valley-bed changes into a gorge
with five hundred feet of sheer rock-wall; in a few thousand years
perhaps the restless wearing water of the great river has sunk its bed
five thousand feet below the surface and made the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado.
[Sidenote: In the canyons.]
[Sidenote: Upright walls of rock.]
The Canyon country is well named, for it has plenty of wash-outs
and gorges. Almost anywhere among the mountain-ranges you can find
them--not Grand Canyons, to be sure, but ones of size sufficient to
be impressive without being stupendous. Walls of upright rock several
hundred feet in height have enough bulk and body about them to impress
anyone. The mass is really overpowering. It is but the crust of the
earth exposed to view; but the gorge at Niagara and the looming shaft
of the Matterhorn are not more. The imagination strains at such
magnitude. And all the accessories of the gorge and canyon have a might
to them that adds to the general effect. The sheer precipices, the
leaning towers, the pinnacles and shafts, the recesses and caves, the
huge basins rounded out of rock by the waterfalls are all touched by
the majesty of the sublime.
[Sidenote: Color in canyon shadows.]
[Sidenote: The blue sky seen from the canyon depths.]
And what could be more beautiful than the deep shadow of the canyon!
You may have had doubts about those colored shadows which painters of
the _plein-air_ school talked so much about a few years ago. You may
have thought that it was all talk and no reality; but now that you are
in the canyon, and in a shadow, look about you and see if there is not
plenty of color there, too. The walls are dyed with it, the stones are
stained with it--all sorts of colors from strata of rock, from clays
and slates, from minerals, from lichens, from mosses. The stones under
your feet have not turned black or brown because out of the sunlight.
If you were on the upper rim of the canyon looking down, the whole body
of air in shadow would look blue. And that strange light coming from
above! You may have had doubts, too, about the intense luminosity of
the blue sky; but look up at it along the walls of rock to where it
spreads in a thin strip above the jaws of the canyon. Did you ever see
such light coming out of the blue before! See how it flashes from the
long line of tumbling water that pitches over the rocks! White as an
avalanche, the water slips through the air down to its basin of stone;
and white, again, as the snow are the foam and froth of the pool.
[Sidenote: Desert landscape.]
[Sidenote: The former knowledge of Nature.]
Stones and water in a gorge, wastes of rock thrust upward into
mountains, long vistas of plain and mesa glaring in the sunlight--what
things are these for a human being to fall in love with? Doctor
Johnson, who occasionally went into the country to see his friends, but
never to see the country, who thought a man demented who enjoyed living
out of town; and who cared for a tree only as firewood or lumber, what
would he have had to say about the desert and its confines? In his
classic time, and in all the long time before him, the earth and the
beauty thereof remained comparatively unnoticed and unknown. Scott,
Byron, Hugo,--not one of the old romanticists ever knew Nature except
as in some strained way symbolic of human happiness or misery. Even
when the naturalists of the last half of the nineteenth century took
up the study they were impressed at first only with the large and more
apparent beauties of the world--the Alps, the Niagaras, the Grand
Canyons, the panoramic views from mountain-tops. They never would have
tolerated the desert for a moment.
[Sidenote: The Nature-lover of the present.]
But the Nature-lover of the present, who has taken so kindly to the
minor beauties of the world, has perhaps a little wider horizon than
his predecessors. Not that his positive knowledge is so much greater,
but rather where he lacks in knowledge he declines to condemn. He knows
now that Nature did not give all her energy to the large things and all
her weakness to the small things; he knows now that she works by law
and labors alike for all; he knows now that back of everything is a
purpose, and if he can discover the purpose he cannot choose but admire
the product.
[Sidenote: Human limitations.]
That is something of an advance no doubt--a grasp at human limitations
at least--but there is no reason to think that it will lead to any
lofty heights. Nature never intended that we should fully understand.
That we have stumbled upon some knowledge of her laws was more accident
than design. We have by some strange chance groped our way to the Gate
of the Garden, and there we stand, staring through the closed bars,
with the wonder of little children. Alas! we shall always grope! And
shall we ever cease to wonder?
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The late Dr. Elliot Coues and others reject the obvious _arida
zona_ of the Spanish in favor of some strained etymologies from the
Indian dialects, about which no two of them agree. Why should the name
not have come from the Spanish, and why should it not mean just simply
arid zone or belt?