Call me chickenshit if you will. The wash turned me back. It was four or five truck lengths wide, and its sand was too deep to have formed washboard. I pulled to what little side the road had, got out, walked into the wash and plunged my hand down two feet into the sand before I felt bottom. Then my finger broke through the bottom. There was more sand beneath that. I briefly considered backing up, picking up speed and plowing through. But only briefly. I’d have sand up to the floorboards, and then? I had no friend there to help me dig, to lean into the rear bumper of the truck and heave while I shouted encouragement from the nearest shade tree. In fact, I had no shade trees.
Another, larger, deeper wash down the road sealed my chickenshit decision. A week later I’d look at the satellite photos and count the washes farther down the road, some of them making the one that stalled me look like a ditch. Eight and a half miles off the pavement and nowhere to camp the whole way, not without leaving my truck annoyingly and prominently in the road, advertising my presence to those whose job it is to inform me that camping on Arizona State Lands without a permit is against the law.
Instead I walked. Not in any direction, but in widening circles, finding things one after the other that intrigued me. It was odd enough to see saguaros growing with Joshua trees. That I had expected, a metaphoric blending of disparate places, the symbol of the Sonoran Desert hard up against the symbol of the Mojave Desert. But for some reason — despite having seen the two growing together on my way to Prescott two days before — I wasn’t expecting Joshua trees and ocotillos in the same camera viewfinder. And while creosote grows in the Mojave — the northern limit of creosote is the northern limit of the Mojave — creosote in the Mojave grows at lower altitudes that the Joshua tree can generally tolerate, so I rarely see them together there.
And there were things I did not recognize growing there, and things I did recognize growing in appealing combinations. A few denizens stood still long enough for me to take photos of them:
And some were beyond my eyes, a whir and brief darkening of a piece of sky, and I tried to puzzle out their song (a far-off kestrel!) or their geometry of flight (flicker!).
My throat dried, I remembered the truck and walked toward it. I had not stopped walking since I left it. It was a hundred yards away, no more. I got in. The clock read three hours since I had stopped. It seemed unlikely.
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11 comments on "Alamo Road"Chickenshit? No, sensible — which may be even worse. Sorry. (FWIW, I’d have done the same.)
I think you’ve discovered Chris’ corollary to Relativity: Time is proportional to what’s important.
Great conclusion! I’m stealing it for my links blog.
Bicycling - let alone driving - has always been too fast for me. Now I even avoid group hikes. When you have a camera, everything seems worth a closer look.
I’m not going to call anyone chickenshit for realizing driving out into the middle of nowhere is a risky proposition.
Nothing chickenshit about that.
I’ve seen people here in New Mexico plunge their cars right into one of those washes (arroyos we call them here) when the water is running down in near torrents off of the mountains. Dummies. Sometimes they get swept away and drowned.
Years ago, I used to have to cross one of those to get to my house in Northern NM. I have raced the water coming down the wash in my truck on the dirt road running alongside so I could make it to my house or else be delayed a couple of hours. (I’ve also waited our the flash flood on the wrong side of the arroyo from my house, which is never any fun, and then you have to cross the mud.)
I have a lot of respect for those washes.
The things I learn here! I would never have known. There is a huge sand ‘desert’ in Canada, but it’s protected so one must drive about 800 miles from anywhere to get there on the only road to. Sand ‘wash’? I think here we have patches of that in the bush which we call quicksand. Or maybe that’s something else. Anyway, it’s real, and legendary.
Why yes! They did move it there to protect it. Ergggh. Its__800__miles from nowhere AND under environmental protection.
Sounds like a place I want to go.
This sand wash, Pony, is best thought of as a dry creek. Although you can find quicksand in them if you look carefully and persistently.
Thank you all for validating my trepiditious nature. The rest of the story: as I was driving out, a battered old Ford pickup truck passed me roaring westward toward the wash, and five minutes later a minivan did the same. The first I shrugged off: they may have had a winch or somesuch, or a roll of chicken wire in the bed. But the minivan made me feel like a wuss.
As Gallop On reminds us, these dry washes/creek beds represent the best and worst of one of the most creative influences on these landscapes: the power of water. A thunderstorm off in the distance, so nice to watch and observe, can manifest a healthy wall of energy powering down like a train through that lowspot; a place where it has done so for hundreds of years, if not millenia. Humans don’t realize that every six foot by six foot by one foot chunk of water is a literal ton of mass propelled by vertical dimensionally generated energy to move with a force of 700 psi over a one foot drop at 30 mph. Something had to lay down all that sand; and make for a really lousy place to ever get stuck.
I gave up on my only attempt to date to reach Carruthers Canyon from Mid-Hills several years ago after crossing several of those dry sandy washes, and being faced by one that looked pretty much identical to the one in your photo. I’ll bet there were several more larger and deeper ones beyond it, much as you’ve related.
Note to self: pick up roll of chicken wire.