Letter from the desert: The Lucy Grays
Posted by Chris Clarke on September 10, 2008
In the last few days the weather has shifted, the days’ highs under 100 degrees consistently for the first time since early July. The shift was sudden. On Saturday The Raven and I braved temperatures of 115 degrees along the Colorado; by Sunday evening it was cool enough that a little breeze raised goosebumps. Monday brought rain at the north end of the valley, and I tossed sleeping bag and pillow into the Jeep at half past midnight and headed for Wee Thump, where I shivered in the mid-70s night air.
Tuesday morning I woke, dressed, started Zheep and drove toward the coffee pot in my kitchen here. A hundred yards from my house a desert tortoise stood mid-lane, torpid and slow in the morning cool, traffic bearing down on her. It’s against good practice to move them. They store up to a year’s supply of water in a bladder which they will often void in response to the stress of handling, endangering their lives. But the only other tortoise I’d seen on this road was roadkill. I came up to the tortoise as non-threateningly and non-abruptly as possible, speaking softly, and waving away a speeding car which nearly hit both of us nonetheless.
The tortoise seemed to decide I wasn’t a threat. I slid fingers beneath her plastron on either side, midway between front and back legs, and hefted. She didn’t even pull her head in, and I set her down a little ways off the road under some creosote. I went to get the coffee going and get my camera, and five minutes later when I returned she was nowhere to be seen.
Wednesday’s forecast called for a high in the mid-90s. I walked out the back door with a few crackers and 100 ounces of water on my back. My first real hike since early August, and I was determined to make it to the Lucy Grays, the little range of mountains behind my house. I call it a “little range” with some amusement: though the Lucy Grays aren’t nearly as expansive as their neighboring ranges, they do run nearly 13 miles end to end with about 3,000 feet of relief.
It took me about two hours to reach the southern end of the Lucy Grays, passing red-spined barrel cacti that were more columns than barrels, some of them reaching five feet in height. Coyote sign was everywhere, and the jackrabbits were skittish. The road would have posed some challenge even to my good Jeep, crossing foot-high curbs on either side of deep sandy washes with some regularity. Walking was probably faster.
I hiked down into a little canyon of sorts between the range and a distinct peak to its southwest, part of the range but separated from it by an expanse of gravel. The geologists call such peaks inselbergs, connected beneath the surface, the bedrock connection between it and the parent range buried in erosional debris. The bottom of the canyon opened out onto a broad view of Ivanpah Dry Lake. Dust devils marched across the playa in single file, two of them, then three, then four.
On my way back up the sandy, washed out road I found a footprint square-planted in the center of one I’d made on the way down. Bighorn.
There are times like those that followed, the rest of the long and increasingly thirsty walk home, hair on the back of my neck still standing ill at ease, when I remember why I do all this. Blisters the size of quarters loom on my unhiked heels. The water in my pack is blood-warm. No desert hike a success unless the last mile or so is trudging: otherwise, I could have gone farther. Still. There is no sound in that part of the Ivanpah Valley save the wind, my increasingly tired boots kicking up clinkers, the buzzing of flies and thoughts, the thrum of my blood in my ears, a cactus wren in the far distance.
Red barrel cacti against black-varnished rock and Mojave yucca the size of houses, water shapes unsullied by wind in the bone-dry wash, desert swallowtails wafting from bloom to improbable bloom. The creosote has set seed, feathered seed pods like dandelion fluff, and the ants collect them. They discard the fluff at the edges of their hills. The desert floor is pocked with circles of gray down. Two miles from town there are tire tracks a few weeks old, and coyote prints atop them heading in both directions at once. I live here: I live here.
