The Cave Creek Journals
Follow along with outdoor journalist John Luthens as he finishes the last leg of his cross-country camping pilgrimage across the revitalizing landscape of the United States. The final chapter in his three-part series for On Wisconsin Outdoors chronicles his five-day, solo camping adventure in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona.
The Cave Creek Journals: Final Destination
The Chihuahuan Desert drifts up from Mexico and into southeastern Arizona like a sandspit of fire. Mesquite and cactus break the hot wind on the flats, and mountain ranges shimmer along the horizon like mirages. There are dust storm warnings posted along the roadsides and every dwelling of adobe and stucco looks like it was erected in a blast furnace and polished with an ancient grinder.
The Spanish named it Desierto de Chihuahua – which translates into the home for a small, cute dog if one uses the word as a noun, but changes into the damned desert if Chihuahua is used as a modifier. There is not a dog in sight, and only the occasional roadrunner and javelina pig leering between the prickly pear and shin dagger cacti. It is rattlesnake dry and hot as hell. I know which Spanish word definition I would choose.
Swerving through tumbleweeds, the winds pick up and the sun begins to disappear into a towering range of mountains rising in the distance. It grows cooler and dust devils play across the sand. Pushing to cross the desert before nightfall, the mountain range transforms with the passing miles, growing from mirage status into stunning reality. The setting sun turns the rocks red and gold as a canyon of green opens in the rising walls to pluck us from the desert and into the shelter of the peaks.
It had taken nearly a week stealing through the expanses of the country from Wisconsin to this remote corner of southeastern Arizona. I’d stretched my adventuring legs in camps where help was available and now the ultimate test awaited: The raw, isolated labyrinth of Cave Creek Canyon winding 10,000 feet into the sky islands of the Chiricahua Mountains before dropping into Mexico on the other side. There are magical places in life that can only be experienced by pushing the envelope of one’s resolve to the brink. I lived for five wild days and nights wrapped in the untamed reaches of a land that time forgot and it still seems like a dream. This is how it was:
My esteemed travelling companions, Scot and Nan Wisherd, smashed their vehicle over boulders and gravel to shuttle me a mile high into the mountains. We’d grown quite fond of each other’s company over the past week and I was touched to see a tiny hint of trepidation in their eyes when they deposited me on the fringes of two million acres of mountain wilderness before turning around and heading six miles back down the canyon to set up their own camp at the base of the mountains in the havens of Cave Creek Ranch, which is a wildlife mecca for southwestern mammals and a bird sanctuary for rare, Mexican migratory species that is arguably unequaled anywhere in the country.
It was nearly dark when I disembarked, and my supplies looked pitifully small in the falling mountain light. Backpack, tent, sleeping bag, five gallons of water and hopefully enough high-calorie food to last me for an extended foray of dispersed camping, which essentially means that one picks a spot and sets up shop. The upside to this type of camping is that there are no fees, no other campers, no smelly restrooms, and you get the pick of the prime real estate. The downside, depending on one’s viewpoint of camping, is that you are essentially isolated and off the grid. No cellular phone reception, nobody to bail you out if conditions turn harsh, and no restrooms, smelly or otherwise. It’s human versus nature at its finest, and all one can prepare for is an amicable treaty with the wilderness environment instead of a bloodbath.
I set up camp by the light of a headlamp. The sound of a gurgling creek was close by in the darkness and there was the whisper of a thousand ponderosa pines coming from an unseen ridge line. I picked a spot beneath a giant tree where there were ample fallen leaves for a cushion beneath my tent. I was anxious to be up early to start exploring my surroundings and was just crawling into my sleeping bag when the darkness of the wilderness was wiped away.
A full moon rose over the mountains and it lit up my glade with the intensity of a high-powered searchlight. My camping tree shone bone white like the finger of a gigantic skeleton rising into the shadows, and there were leaves drifting down in the moonlight and pattering like rain on the tent roof. I was surrounded by glowing mountain peaks on all sides. It felt like I was the first person to be dropped into an unexplored world.
I didn’t fancy getting crushed by a fallen limb, and I nearly moved my tent, thinking the tree above was dead. Leaves continued falling down from its bony branches, and although I’d jumped a few time zones coming into Arizona, I didn’t think I’d jumped a few seasons and landed in the middle of autumn. It was only in the following days that I’d come to discover that the tree was a mighty Sycamore which drops its leaves twice a year. The stark, white sycamores were everywhere in the mountain bottoms of the Chiricahua, and along with the ponderosa pines, Douglas firs and live oaks, the forested canyons turned into flowing waves of color and smell that were like nothing I’d ever experienced in my outdoor career.
Moonlight shining on the mountains, constellations of stars that were nearly close enough to touch, leaves falling like rain; I didn’t think mornings in the Chiricahua wilderness could top the nights. But I was mistaken.
I awoke to the sight of Coues deer strolling along the creek bottom bordering my camp. They looked like stunted white tail and could climb like mountain goats. Birds of every shape and color sang and flitted through the trees in search of bug as the sun rose golden on the mountain peaks surrounding my newfound home. It was a rainbow of sight and sound.
One morning, I was sitting on a mountain boulder and warming in the sunrise like a gecko lizard. I had finished boiling my coffee and was drinking it from an instant macaroni and cheese container that I had repurposed from dinner the night before when an oversized Rivoli’s hummingbird shot down and hit my orange and red coffee cup for a drink right out of my hand. The hummingbird was festive and noisy and fresh up from Mexico to vacation in the mountains for the summer. He was hyperactive enough. I didn’t think coffee was going to calm him down any.
Then there was the dawn when I was jarred awake to a whipping ruckus that was like canvas being unfurled in the wind. The sound echoed up the canyon and bounced into my tent like an alarm clock. I thought I might be getting some eccentric interlopers who had chosen to start snapping their camp riggings into place like battle standards before the sun had even crested the peaks. The fluttering cracks went on and on, and I finally crawled from my sleeping bag to see if I was under threat of attack.
I discovered in short order that the trespasser into my solitary domain was a massive tom turkey who was none too pleased that my tent was blocking his view of a flock of hens who were escaping across the creek bottom on the other side. He was smashing his wings into the gravel and fanning bits of stick and rock into the air like a furious overseer. We were locked in a stalemate for several minutes before I admitted that I was the one trespassing into his domain. He accepted my apology with decided indifference and strolled away in search of his harem.
As for my days, they became lost in a blur of hidden valleys and mountain winds. I had a basic set of maps and a compass, but I came to discover that what measured a mile on paper had no relevance in the Chiricahua. The trail routes I navigated to get into the sky-island peaks were confusing networks of creek beds and waterfall crossings on the bottom and rough paths with thousand-foot drops along the upper reaches. I climbed straight into the clouds, where it went from 80 degrees to snowing in the span of 1000 feet. I carried ample water, food and extra clothes in a day pack, and I used it all on my excursions, usually returning to my darkened camp by wing-and-prayer shortcuts that would have stuck me for a wild night in the outback if they hadn’t worked out. In short, it was paradise.
Mountain squirrels perched along the trails to watch me pass and rare warblers serenaded me. I’d been briefed about the potential for mountain lions and bears, and the southernmost reaches I explored were once home to jaguars and Mexican wolves. The Chiricahua also boasted seven different species of rattlesnakes, centipedes that approached a foot in length, and scorpions the size of small birds. I tread through the brushy switchbacks and along the rock faces with care, but never encountered anything more ominous than a hooded skunk that was the size of a small dog and a seven-foot-long gopher snake who was sunbathing across a rocky trail.
My only contact with another person took place in the dead of night when I met up with a local guide and followed him into a scrub-brush canyon where he called an elf owl out of a cave. The owl was scant inches high and rare enough to draw bird nuts from across the world for a chance at a sighting. We were also lucky enough to shine a ringtail fox who was feeding beneath the pines, which makes for an even pair of wildlife encounters that I will never witness again in my lifetime.
It was over too soon. My travelling crew, the Wisherds, showed up one morning and took me back to Wisconsin which, in retrospect, was probably a wise move. My water supply had nearly run dry, I was out of coffee and tortillas, and my camera battery was exhausted from taking endless photos of the landscape. I’d also to begun muttering to myself in first-person tense about undertaking a far-going mountain escape across the Mexican border, which would have resulted in the tragic circumstance of no one ever seeing me again.
I was ready to be reindoctrinated into reality, but it would be a long while before my mind came back down from the canyons of the Chiricahua Mountains. Maybe it never will. Maybe, that was the whole point of the journey.
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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