The Cave Creek Journals:
Follow along with outdoor journalist John Luthens as he shares a cross-country camping pilgrimage in the slowly revitalizing landscape of the United States. His journey takes him to multiple venues in South Dakota, Kansas and New Mexico, capped off with 5 days of backcountry survival in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. Assuming he isn’t killed outright by marauders, rattlesnakes or mountain lions, the colorful characters, camping lore and stories that he discovers along the way will be shared through photographs and articles on the On Wisconsin Outdoors website
The Cave Creek Journals:
Writing this journal entry from the scrub-cactus trappings of the La Mesa motel on Route 66 in Santa Rosa New Mexico may seem contrary to a cross country expedition dedicated to camping and exploring the outdoor expanses of the country. My room is air conditioned, with internet connection for my word processor and, most importantly, a hot shower which I am sorely in need of. Sitting inside, closing my eyes, I can almost picture myself in anyplace USA, hesitantly travelling on business, hustling to make ends meet, worrying about production and sales quotas and the quickness of time.
But stepping outside, I sense the slow burn of adventure, and it is anything but ordinary. Jim, the night clerk at the La Mesa, is sitting in a lawn chair and wistfully watching a dust-covered kid with a backpack lean down the road into the setting sun. Jim, himself, is wild-eyed and covered in road scars. He proudly relates the tale of his wandering path from California some years back, and how he has been holed up at the La Mesa ever since in in exchange for room and board. We watch the desert wind whipping the sand gullies into dust devils and listen to the rattle of peeled stucco on abandoned tourist shacks along the street, talking of rattlesnake hunters, nomads, and other colorful scoundrels who have trekked this fabled 66 road and sought a night’s shelter at the La Mesa.
Sights and sounds and stories of the road are notoriously difficult to put down in writing, but as the stars pop out in the high-desert brilliance of New Mexico and the open road rolls into the magic dusk of the country, I shake Jim’s road- worn hand, and he makes me promise to tell of him and the La Mesa motel when I return to Wisconsin. Assuring him that I will do my best, I crawl back into my room to recount the steps of my journey thus far.
Our routine has consisted of driving for a half-day and setting up shop for the afternoon's adventures My travelling partners are Nan and Scott Wisherd, from Waino, Wisconsin, which is a pine-clad, state of-mind-hamlet in northwestern Wisconsin. Nan is my book publisher, and an expert on historical writings and lore. Scott is an expert on animals, cast-iron cooking, and also a historical enthusiast. Both are bird experts and a little bit crazy around the edges. I fit right in like a well-oiled wagon wheel
I’m camping and thinking and writing solo when I set up shop for the night along the unfolding expanses of the country. The Wisherds drop me off at a prearranged location in the afternoon with my backpack in tow, offering helpful advice on the local terrain before going their merry way. Thus far, they have always returned in the morning to pluck me from my night’s adventures, and it has managed to elevate the pilgrimage into the perfect gypsy caravan.
As for the mundane details of survival, I’m packing a portable stove, a small cooking pot, and a wet bag full of easy-to-prepare meals, but I’ll admit that for the first few days I was too focused on remembering how to pitch camp and stow my gear properly to eat much of anything but beef jerky and crackers. My tent is compact and portable, easy enough to pitch, awesome for keeping in body heat in the night, and simple to repack, but the slightest wind still manages to play havoc with the set-up and take-down. I look the part of an incompetent sailor wrestling with a sail that is about to escape into the wild when I am laying it out and taking it down.
Out of an abundance of caution, I’ve been tying my food into a tree for the night. I’m not worried about bears or mountain lions, but skunks and raccoons are another matter entirely. Rodents may be fun loving and cute, but I don’t particularly want them crawling into my tent with me. My travelling companions are doing their best to smuggle me continental-breakfast food from the motels they have been frequenting, but I reckon that I’ll be hungry for the bulk of the food when my beef jerky and cracker supply runs dry.
Embarking west from Superior, Wisconsin, I cut my camping teeth in South Dakota, starting in Watertown in the eastern half of the state, where I spent a lonely night beneath the cold stars with no other campers in sight and only a pair of wild geese nested in the marsh outside my tent to keep me company. I witnessed picture-postcard sunrises over nameless lakes before moving into the southern outskirts of Mitchell where I crawled in the rain for two miles over muddy trails and streets on a fanatical pilgrimage to see the famed Corn Palace.
Somewhere in between, and easily the most energetic, South Dakota moment, was a sun swept morning spent exploring the central prairie and pothole region of the state. The scenery was rolling and desolate with droves of waterfowl and blackbirds migrating overhead. And as luck would have it, our tour guide for the day was none other than the infamous Brad Danielson, known in more exotic corners of the globe as plain old Olaf. I’ll need a few paragraphs to explain, but I guarantee they won’t come close to giving the campaign proper justice.
Olaf holds the American Birding Association record for the most North American Birds documented by an individual in the span of a year which, to put it bluntly, eventually degenerated into flying or driving across the country at a moment’s notice in hopes of sighting a single bird. He’s fished for monster pike across the world, written volumes of books, and owned surgical practices, oilwells and storage units – doing all of it with the same, driven mindset that makes one exhausted just to peek inside his personality for mere seconds. He relates a nonstop barrage of wild endeavors and, and if these tales were coming from anyone else’s mouth but his – they would doubtless be written off as fiction or downright fantasy.
Olaf bought 900 acres of foreclosed, auctioned ranchland in the central part of the South Dakota to build a sanctuary for a near-extinct species of butterfly. He only wanted 40 acres, but he said a rancher who was bidding against him ticked him off so he bought the whole farm out of pure spite. No one has sighted the butterfly in 9 years, but that doesn’t faze him in the least. “I’m hoping to be the first to spot it again and reintroduce the species, Olaf said with certainty as we bumped over ditches and ruts in his pickup truck, screeching to halt at regular intervals and sending up clouds of dust to scope out flocks of birds, potholes, fenceposts, or the four wheelers of neighboring farmers whom he swore were “up to no good!”
When we parted ways with Olaf to continue our journey to the southwest, he was stoically pondering the merits of a dirt road that was closed due to washouts. “You would be out of your mind to attempt this road, but it’s got classic, South Dakota character, he shouted. The wind was still howling and shaking his truck like a ragdoll as we drove Southwest to continue exploring the country, but we’d managed to grab a glimpse of wild scenery from the South Dakota gusts that may have been better than Mount Rushmore and the Badlands combined. “If you don’t feel the wind when you’re travelling through here, you’re probably dead,” was Olafs parting words. Peculiar and a tad eccentric, but sage advice, nonetheless!
Down into Kansas and the Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area outside of Great Bend. I pitched camp for two nights in a labyrinth of pools and marshland that was ringed with wheat fields and oil derricks, and happens to host more migratory shorebirds, ducks and geese than many states combined. The bottoms are also home to one of the largest concentrations of Western massasauga rattlesnakes in the country. The snakes hunt small birds, mice and frogs in the bogs at night and sun themselves during the day on the gravel dikes that crisscross the marsh.
Coyotes howled at night and turkeys called themselves into the wheat fields in the morning. Ducks were everywhere, and if I ever developed the duck-hunter instinct to write an identification guide for all the different species, Cheyenne Bottoms would be the place to write it. If there was any downside to the endeavor, it was that the bizarre mixture of water and wheat fields created a phenomenal dew in the morning. My tent fly was dripping like a rainforest and even my sleeping bag was uncomfortably damp. I also struck out on a massasauga rattlesnake photoshoot but I guess that wasn’t much of a downside at all.
Skirting Oklahoma, traversing the panhandle of Texas and sliding into New Mexico, I lived on freshly picked chili peppers and tortillas mixed with peanut butter and granola which, believe it or not, sounds worse than it was. My esteemed traveling companions, the Wisherds, bartered at local roadhouse for a bottle of peanut butter whiskey but decided to leave it sealed and save it for a souvenir. Probably the right choice – Don't think it would have mixed right with the granola.
Now, there is only the road -worn oasis of the La Mesa. I’m checking my gear. I’m checking it twice. One last respite with a roof above my head before I venture tomorrow into the backcountry of the Chiricahua Mountain range in southeastern Arizona. I’ll be camping a mile high, some 30 kilometers from the Mexican border in a place known as Cave Creek Canyon. Five days surviving for the most part on the food and water that I will be bringing along. One last shower, and I must remember to use the bathroom, too. I’m headed into the wild, and such luxuries simply don’t exist there.
John Luthens is a freelance writer and photographer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, along with a nonfiction collection of his stories, Writing Wild: The Tales and Trails of a Wisconsin Outdoor Journalist, are available from Cable Publishing at www.cablepublishing.com