wind coming to cool us, but it turned out to be a cattle outfit cutting
across the mesa to our road. The dust cloud looked near, yet it was
fully two hours before we met the cattlemen. The sight of the big herd
of cattle on the desert was stranger than the yellow and blue birds
or the fabulous wild ducks had been. They were being driven over this
awful country to a spring feeding-ground in Wild Rose Canyon, and they
were white with dust, limping on sore, cut feet. Two men and a boy in
big hats and with pistols at their belts rode small shaggy horses,
galloping through the brush and shouting when the tired cattle tried
to stop or scatter at meeting us. Wild Rose Canyon was cold at this
season, the men said, and there was plenty of fine water in it. "A
river runs down the middle," the boy volunteered. We looked out over
the shimmering mesa stretching hopelessly in all directions. A canyon
called Wild Rose where a river flowed between the mountains!
We inquired further into the fairy tale. The Canyon was about forty
miles away by the route which we would have to take with the wagon.
It led up into the high Panamints. There was a spring by some old
charcoal-kilns right under Mt. Baldy. The cattlemen knew nothing of
Telescope Peak. They had never heard of any one climbing the mountains.
They supposed it was easy enough when the snow was gone. No doubt
prospectors had been up, but there was nothing there, it was no good.
We saw them eying the Worrier curiously, evidently wondering what
manner of creatures he had managed to pick up.
After a mile or two they left us, turning off by an ancient signboard
pointing vaguely toward the long, red spur of Tucki Mountain with the
legend: "Water Eight Miles," and in the opposite direction across the
trackless, torn-up waste: "Water Fifteen Miles." What are eight miles
or fifteen miles to the modern man accustomed to leap over distance?
To the primitive traveler with horses and mules, and until now all
travelers throughout the ages have been thus primitive, a mile is a
formidable reality. Mojave teaches the truth about it. At the end of
those two days, that "Water Eight Miles" was as inaccessible to us as
though it had been fifty. Even if we had been full of vigor we probably
could not have reached it with the wagon over that rough ground. The
cattlemen, however, on their tough little horses, went to it. We did
not attempt to leave the two dim streaks that occasionally marked our
road, but at dusk stopped and made camp beside them.
[Illustration: THE DESERT]
That was our first genuine dry camp, though it was the third time
we had depended on the water carried from Furnace Creek. Water is
the commonest of all commodities, so common that we fail to realize
its meaning until we are without it. All the camps thus far had been
resting-places, homes. We had come to feel that any spot where we built
our fire could be home, for the essentials of home are very simple; a
little water, something to eat, a bit of fire, and good friends. In the
mess at Keane Wonder, in the forbidding inhospitality of Salt Creek,
we had had them all and been at home; but that night, when the Worrier
began to unload the wagon in the stark middle of the solitary waste, we
were not at home. Nor could we make it home, however brightly we urged
up the fire or cheerfully we talked. One of the essentials was missing
and the gasoline cans could not take its place. No water, not even bad
water, not a drop! That mesa was not a human resting-place; we were
aliens in it, transients, one-night-standers. The Worrier laughed at
our restless forlornness. On subsequent travels we have learned to make
dry camps almost as nonchalantly as he does, but they are never home.
In the hot miles between Furnace Creek Ranch and the mountain-spring
we learned the meaning for our little lives of the commonest of
commodities. We had never been so thirsty, no amount of water could
satisfy us, and the supply was limited. We had enough for all our
needs, yet we never could forget that there was an end to it. When the
jolting of the wagon slopped some out around one of the corks we could
have wept. Using any for cooking or washing dishes, and pouring out ten
gallons for Molly and Bill at the dry camp seemed terrible. Until then
we had thoughtlessly turned on a faucet, or drawn a bucket from a well,
or dipped water out of a stream. Now there was no water. The miles were
not only hot, they were dry miles. The diminishing supply of warm,
unattractive liquid in the dented gasoline-cans was our most precious
possession. We would have parted with everything we had, rather than
lose it.
From the camping place the red promontory looked as far away as it had
been at noon; we seemed to have made no impression on our goal. Below
us the Mesquite Valley spread out, immense and still, with the green
thread of Salt Creek crossing it. On the far side rose the Grapevine
Range, of which Corkscrew Mountain is the southern end. The evening air
was so clear that we could see the spiral cliff and the opening of the
canyon that leads to Daylight Pass. It looked very near, yet how many
days'-journeys we had come from there! Heat and thirst and weariness
lay between. The grimness of Death Valley, cool now in the shadow of
the Panamints, was hidden by the buttresses of Tucki. The long line of
sultry red rock that had smoldered and smoked all day slowly turned
blue in the twilight. It seemed as though you might saunter over there
and lay your hands upon it, yet the signboard pointing to the water at
its base had read eight miles. We had long lost sight of the cattlemen.
Suddenly, in the dusky blueness under the mountain, their camp fire
bloomed like a crimson cactus flower.
Evening smoothed the whole mesa into a blue and yellow floor rounding
gently the mountains. It was impossible to believe that it was
everywhere cut into hills and canyons by washes fifteen or twenty feet
deep as it was around our camp. In the bottoms of the declivities large
greasewoods and cacti grew, and occasional tufts of dried grass; but
the wind-swept ridges were bare and every particle of sand was blown
away from among the stones. On one of the beaten-down mosaics near
our camp something gleamed dimly. We went to it and found large white
stones laid in the form of a cross pointing toward the east. Another
traveler, then, had stopped here. Perhaps he had looked at the red
promontory and the spiral cliff and lost hope; perhaps he had prayed
for water; or perhaps he had made it as a thank-offering for the
blessed coming of cool night.
IX
_The Mountain Spring_
The next day's climb was easier, for by the time the sun had asserted
its full vigor we were at an altitude where the air was cool,
tinglingly crisp, and so clear that it seemed not to exist at all. The
earth sparkled with laughter and shouted her joy in the glory of light.
For several hours the red promontory continued to recede, then suddenly
we were rounding it, and soon afterwards entered a gorge whose sides
steadily became higher and higher. The bottom of the gorge was a wide,
sandy wash much cut up by rains, full of boulders and grown over with
brush. The vegetation became ever greener and more luxuriant. The wash
looked like a wind-tossed green river between crumbly, precipitous
mountains of many colors. Some were a dull red, some sage-green, some
buff, some dark yellow, while an occasional purple crag gave the canyon
a savage appearance. These mountains had the velvet texture which we
had seen at Saratoga Springs, especially the sage-green ones. The
colors were not an atmospheric illusion for the mountains were actually
made of different colored rock. We investigated them with great
interest. Though the velvet-textured hills had often been all around
us, they were always too far away or the sun was too fiercely hot for
us to get near enough to touch them. Now we walked along the edge of
the wash picking up the colored rocks while the Worrier led Molly and
Bill up the middle. It was so steep that he often had to rest them.
About three o'clock we came unexpectedly upon a little spring. It
was in a green cleft between a red and a yellow hill where the water
trickled over the rock into a charming basin. Eagerly we dipped in
our cups. It was true! Here at last was a real mountain spring, very
cold, tasteless, a miraculous gift from Heaven. We drank and drank. The
Worrier unhitched Molly and Bill and they broke away from him to rush
at the water. They did not stop drinking until the last drop was gone.
This bit of Paradise was a complete surprise. The map did not show the
little spring, nor did the Worrier know of its existence. It was so
tiny that doubtless it is often dry. Emigrant Springs itself, with a
much more plentiful flow of water, was about a mile further on. There
the canyon narrowed with steep, high sides broken into some beautifully
shaped summits. The spring is only a few miles from a big abandoned
mining camp called Skidoo and used to be an important one for desert
travelers. Someone once built a shack, and nearby was a cave with a
fireplace inside, also a corral, part of whose fence had since been
used for firewood. Like all desert watering places the surroundings
were littered with tin cans, old shoes and rusty iron. We know now
what becomes of all the old shoes in the world; they are spirited
away to the desert. An ancient government pamphlet that we had found
blowing about in one of the shacks at Keane Wonder and carefully
preserved describes very scientifically how to locate water, then
throws science to the winds and says that the tin can is the best of
all methods. When you find a pile of tin cans stop and search. It
is surprising how quickly you cease to see the litter, provided it
is sufficiently ancient not to be actively dirty. The desert has no
foreground; you soon stop looking much for things near at hand and get
the horizon-gazing habit. If a flower or a shining stone is at your
feet you see it joyfully, but if it is a tin can it does not exist.
There are too many far-off, enchanting things to look at. You are never
unaware of the sky, nor the beautiful curves of the mountains; no
forests nor roofs conceal them from you, and your eyes pass untroubled
over small uglinesses.
We made our camp in the shelter of an immense rock that stood alone
in the middle of the wash, and settled down for a long resting space.
The desert was exhibiting her variety in monotony. Between the burning
sands and this mountain coolness what a difference, and yet what an
essential sameness! Here is the same glittering sand, the same colorful
rocks, the same plants, the same bare, crumbling hills. The sun blazes
with the same brightness, turning every projecting edge of rock and
little leaf into a spot of light. The all-enveloping silence is the
same. The distances shine with the same illusion.
All around Emigrant Springs are mountains from five to seven thousand
feet high. One day was devoted to a stiff climb up to the abandoned
mines at Skidoo, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. A trail started
up from Emigrant Springs, but it looked very steep, so we went a longer
way around intending to come down it. Part of the route lay over high
ridges from which we saw the splendid mass of the snowy Panamints,
now close at hand. We passed little patches of snow in the shadows of
the rocks. The sky was a deep blue all day and the air cold with the
mountain sting in it.
The town of Skidoo lay in a high valley shut off from a view by the
surrounding hills. They were barren and made of crumbly yellow rock.
The long narrow basin itself was covered with sagebrush like a blue
carpet. The town had consisted of one wide street along which several
buildings were still standing. An incredible number of stoves, broken
chairs and cooking utensils were strewn about. The most imposing
building had been the saloon, behind which a neatly piled wall of
bottles, five feet high and several feet wide, testified to past good
cheer. The Worrier said that four thousand people once had lived here.
They had brought water twenty-eight miles in a pipe-line from a spring
near Telescope Peak. During the war the pipe was taken out and sold
to the government, but we could see the trench plainly, perfectly
straight, leading off toward Mt. Baldy across high ridges. With the
taking out of the water Skidoo died.
The place was littered with paper-covered books and old magazines. In
one house we found a pile of copies of a work entitled "Mysterious
Scotty, or the Monte Cristo of Death Valley." Needless to say we stole
one, which became a treasure to be brought out in idle hours by the
camp-fire. "Scotty" was a boon to the Worrier who did not hold much
with the sort of literature that we carried around. Early in the
expedition he had glanced over our library and preferred meditation. We
had a few slim volumes of verse, "Leaves of Grass," some wild tales of
Lord Dunsany's and a learned treatise on how to paint. This last helped
us to keep up the fiction of artistic greatness.
From Skidoo we traversed the top of a long ridge from the precipitous
end of which we had a superb view over Death Valley. We owed this
to "Old Johnnie" who had told us to go there, for among the tumbled
peaks of the Panamint Range around Skidoo you could wander a long time
without getting a commanding view of the valley. The point from which
we saw it that day was opposite Furnace Creek Ranch, but even with
the glass we could not distinguish the green patch of the ranch, nor
could we see the Eagle Borax Works lower down. The bottom looked like
a white plain with brown streaks around and across it. Death Valley is
always different. That afternoon there was no play of color, no magical
mirage. From there, looking straight down seven thousand feet, it was
ghastly, utterly unlike anything on the earth as most of us know her.
It was like the valleys on the dead, bright moon when you look at them
through a powerful telescope.
We stayed too long watching the shadow of the Panamints, as sharp and
stark as a shadow on the moon, encroach on the white floor. Twilight
had begun by the time we reached Skidoo again to hunt the trail down
to Emigrant Springs. We tramped around the rough hills searching for
it until darkness made it impossible to distinguish it even if we had
found it. There below lay our camp. Could we have gone down a ridge or
a canyon to it we would have defied the trail, but it was necessary to
go crosswise over several of the ridges that buttress the mountain, and
up and down their steep dividing canyons. Even the Worrier hesitated
to attempt this in the dark. Getting lost is one of the easiest things
you can do in desert mountains for they are very broken, flung down
seemingly without plan, cut by deep, often precipitous gorges. The same
old, tattered pamphlet that gives advice about tin cans also advises
about getting lost. It says that persons not blessed with a good sense
of locality had better find some other place than the desert for the
"exercise of their talents." Standing on top of a mountain you think
you know very well where to go, but when you get into those clefts
among those hills that look all alike you find you do not know. Any
moment you may meet a barrier to be climbed over with great labor or
gone around at the risk of getting involved in little canyons leading
off in the wrong direction.
There was nothing to do but skirt around the mountain and try to get
back onto the path by which we had come. During the quest we had our
reward and were glad. Just as night was closing in a shadow rose like a
curtain beyond the mountain-tops that shut Death Valley from us. It was
a blue shadow and a rose-colored shadow. It was both those colors and
yet they were not merged to a purple. It seemed to rise straight up, a
live thing, as though the spirit of the valley were greeting the stars.
The beautiful apparition remained less than a minute; always after that
we looked toward deep valleys at evening hoping to see it again, but we
never saw it, though night made wonderful shadows and blue pools of
darkness in them. Death Valley is a thing apart. It is a white terror
whose soul is a miracle of rose and blue.
About an hour later we came upon the cabin of "Old Tom Adams," another
old-timer guarding his own mine and Skidoo. He came out and made a
great fuss about finding "ladies." He had heard of us before. He
offered to make coffee, but a deep craving for more substantial food
forbade any delay. He talked incessantly and would hardly let us go; no
doubt we were the most exciting event for a long time. He described a
way to get down the mountain by following the tracks of his burros. He
swore we could not miss it, you just "fell down" right into Emigrant
Springs. He went a little way with us to be sure we started down the
right ridge; after that we "fell down" in about two hours and a half.
It was the worst, the rockiest, the steepest series of hills and
gullies we ever encountered. Presently the deceitful moon turned the
bushes into white ghosts and fooled us about the angle of ledges.
From time to time we saw burro tracks in the sand, but we suspect that
a herd of wild burros pastures around there. The Worrier's opinion of
"the old fool" was unmentionable, nor did it soothe him to suggest that
the old man had tried to do his best.
Next day Old Tom appeared at Emigrant Springs wanting to know if we had
seen a white burro and a black burro. We had that very morning.
"They're mine," he said, "but I can't keep 'em home."
Hunting burros seemed to be his life work. Two weeks later we heard of
him twenty miles away still hunting his burros. The Worrier opined that
he had no burros, but our guide was prejudiced.
We learned to appreciate what it meant to hunt burros, for though our
burros were horses, the Worrier spent most of the days in camp looking
for them. It was amazing how far they could travel with hobbles on.
They were clever at hiding, too, but we were assured that they were
dull compared to burros. Everybody on the desert seems to have burros
somewhere that he expects to use some day. They are all delightfully
casual about them:
"Did you happen to see a bunch of burros in the gulch youse come
through?"
"No. Have you lost yours?"
"Yes. Gone about a week. I thought maybe they was over there."
The hope seems to be that they will come back for water. Generally they
do, but sometimes they go to some other water hole and leave you to
guess which one. At Silver Lake the brigand called French Pete had come
from thirty miles off looking for his burros.
"You ought to put a bell on them," our hostess had told him.
"I did, but it's no use. You can't find 'em, anyway. They're too smart."
"Do they hide?"
"Hide! The one with the bell gets behind a rock and holds his neck
perfectly still while the others bring him food!"
[Illustration: A PACK-TRAIN CROSSING A DRY LAKE]
Another day at Emigrant Springs was spent in climbing Pinto Peak, 7,450
feet high. We chose it because it was the highest point anywhere
around, and we hoped for a good look at Mt. Baldy and Telescope Peak
in order to lay out a route by which to climb them. Pinto Peak is on
the west side of Emigrant Pass, overlooking the Panamint Valley and all
the region to the foot of Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. The peak
is not visible from the spring and we had to guess at a possible way
up. We began by ascending a steep ridge leading in the right direction,
over and among several little summits. The ridge brought us to a large,
high plateau set round with little peaks and cut at the sides by deep
canyons. The top of the ridge and the plateau were dotted over with
cedar trees, for on the desert, where everything is different, you do
not climb above the timber, you climb up to it. Between six and seven
thousand feet the trees begin, and sometimes in sheltered corners
become twenty or thirty feet high. They are not large nor numerous
on Pinto, but there are enough of them to give the ridge a speckled
appearance from below. The plateau sloped gradually up toward the
west and we selected the furthest little rounded rise as probably
Pinto Peak. For two miles we walked toward it over comparatively
level ground. From that side Pinto is not especially interesting as
a mountain, being only a higher point in a big table-land, but its
western side is a precipice falling two thousand feet into a terribly
rocky and desolate canyon. Not until we reached the extreme edge of the
plateau did the view open. It appeared suddenly, black mass after black
mass of harsh mountains leading over to Mt. Whitney, serene and white
on the wall of the Sierras. The Sierra Nevada are the barriers of the
desert. Beyond that glistening wall lie the lovely and fertile valleys
of California. Over there at that season the fruit trees were beginning
to bloom, on this side was only bareness, black rocks, and deep pits of
sand.
Mt. Whitney is toward the southern end of the high peaks of the
Sierras. That day they bit into the sky like jagged white teeth.
Southward the range is lower, rising again in Southern California to
the peaks of San Bernadino and San Jacinto. We could vaguely see San
Bernadino Mountain, mistily white, mixed up with the clouds. Below us
lay the Panamint Valley under the western wall of the steep Panamints
which separate it from Death Valley. This basin is neither so low nor
so large as the famous one east of it, but is of the same character.
At its edge, pressed against the mountain, we could make out with the
glass the once prosperous mining town of Ballarat, the Ballarat that we
had so gayly started to drive to from Johannesburg. With the Worrier's
help we traced the route we would have come over. He pointed out the
red mountain on which the three mining towns are perched, then came
a line of low hills, then an immense dry lake where the Trona Borax
Works are located, then a range of ugly-looking black mountains, then
a long mesa which he said is almost as rough and difficult as the one
we had recently come over, then the Panamint Valley, shimmering hot,
glistening white, first cousin to Death Valley itself. It would have
been a magnificent drive, but suppose we had undertaken it in the
sublime innocence that was ours at the time! We had never crossed a
dry lake, never wrestled with a mesa, never in our wildest imaginings
pictured such a place as the Panamint Valley,--and at the end we would
have found the town deserted!
"You wouldn't have made it," the Worrier teased us, "you would have
turned back before you got to Trona."
"We would not!" But in our hearts we knew how we would have been weak
from pure fear of the ugly-looking black mountains. The terrifying
approach to Silver Lake was nothing compared to them, nor would we have
had a friendly little Ford chugging along ahead.
As we had hoped, the top of Pinto commands a fine view of Telescope
Peak and Mt. Baldy joined by the beautiful, long ridge which reposes so
splendidly above Death Valley. From this side they looked higher and
snowier. We studied them carefully with the glass. The great mass of
snow was discouraging, but it seemed to be blown off the sharp ridges
which showed black. We planned to move the outfit as far as possible up
Wild Rose Canyon which branches off from Emigrant Canyon about twenty
miles above Emigrant Springs and leads up to the far, high peaks. From
there we thought we could climb the rounded summit of Mt. Baldy and
walk along the splendid curve to the slender pyramid of Telescope. No
lover of mountains could look at those pure, smooth lines as long as we
had looked at them and from as many aspects without being filled with
the desire to set his feet upon them.
It is not the height of a mountain nor its difficulty which makes it
desirable, but something in the mountain's own self. The Panamints are
neither very high nor very difficult, but they are dramatic and alone.
Besides the contrast of their snow with the burning sands beneath,
we wanted the feel of a truly lonely mountain top. The Panamints are
truly lonely. They are not objects of solicitude to any mountain club;
no tourist keen for adventure, nor boy scout outfit, nor earnest-eyed
mountaineer who carves the record of his conquests on his pipe-bowl
or his walking-stick, have left their names up there. No trail leads
up the Panamints, nor are their summits splashed over with paint like
the stately, desecrated summit of Mt. Whitney. We would not be forced
to know in letters a foot high that on August 27th, John Doe made the
ascent. We do not hate John Doe, but we prefer to meet him under roofs.
If he loved the mountain, rather than so disfigure it, he would throw
ink at his most cherished possession; and only lovers of mountains have
the right to invade their loneliness. The Panamints, with their feet in
the burning heat of Death Valley and their heads in the snow, almost
unknown to any save a few prospectors, guarded on all sides by the
solitudes of the desert, seemed utterly desirable to us.