Desert Rims to Mountains High

Richard F. Fleck

Description

Inspired by his ranger days in Rocky Mountain National Park more than forty five years ago as well as more recent rambles, Richard Fleck has created these descriptive essays that take readers from shimmering desert heat to snowy summits. Fleck has expanded his acclaimed book Breaking Through the Clouds (2004) to create a new book that concentrates on the intermountain American West. This edition includes counterpoint experiences in the desert, canyon lands, and dry prairie far below the summits of the lofty peaks, such as Death Valley, Grand Gulch, Grand Canyon, and the Great Sand Dunes. His literary model was Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and his intent is to involve readers with an equally potent but different kind of natural reality. Fleck says, “After all, do not mountains rise out of deserts and dry lands? Mountains and surrounding deserts should not be separated.” The mountains are a constant source of spiritual renewal for this author, enabling him to become more aware and whole.

Sujets

• Déserts
• Desert
• Hiking
• Mountain
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: West Margin Press
• Date de parution: 04 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780871089823
• Langue: English

Extrait

DESERT RIMS to MOUNTAINS HIGH
DESERT RIMS to MOUNTAINS HIGH
Richard Francis Fleck
Text 2004, 2013 by Richard Francis Fleck
Some of the essays in Desert Rims to Mountains High were originally published in Breaking Through the Clouds by Pruett Publishing, 2004.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fleck, Richard F., 1937-
Desert rims to mountains high / Richard Francis Fleck.
pages cm - (Pruett series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87108-968-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-87108-982-3 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-87108-986-1 (hardbound)
1. Mountaineering-West (U.S.) 2. Natural history-West (U.S.) 3. West (U.S.)-Description and travel. 4. Fleck, Richard F., 1937-Travel-West (U.S.) I. Title.
GV199.42.W39F55 2013
796.5220978-dc23
2013017957
Cover photo: iStockphoto.com/David Parsons
Interior Design: Jean Andrews
Cover Design: Vicki Knapton
WestWinds Press
An imprint of

P.O. Box 56118
Portland, Oregon 97238-6118
503-254-5591
www.graphicartsbooks.com
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Death Valley
Chapter 1: Descent into History at Grand Gulch, Utah
Chapter 2: Adventures Beneath Desert Rims
Chapter 3: Descent into the Grand Canyon
Chapter 4: An Alluring, Icy Longs Peak
Chapter 5: Steep Trails in Rocky Mountain National Park
Chapter 6: High, Wide, and Windy: The Prairies of Laramie
Chapter 7: Where Land Is Mostly Sky
Chapter 8: A Scramble Up Tabeguache
Chapter 9: Four-Corner High
Chapter 10: A Windy Ascent of Guadalupe Peak, Texas
Chapter 11: Sand Dunes of the High Desert
Chapter 12: Climbing High in the Pecos and San Juan Mountains
Chapter 13: A Close Call on Mount Princeton
Chapter 14: The Solace of Dinosaur Ridge
Chapter 15: Rambles Along the Mosquito Range
Chapter 16: Multiple Ascents of Mount Evans and Pikes Peak
Chapter 17: Paha Sapa Wakan (Sacred Black Hills)
Chapter 18: Mountains Over the Desert
Epilogue: A Rock on My Desk

A Selective Reading List of Informative Mountain and Desert Books
About the Author
A Note on This Edition
Index
For my wife, Maura, our children Rich, Michelle, Maureen, and their families, who shared many a trail with me .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to acknowledge Pruett Publishing Company (now incorporated by Graphic Arts Books), the original publisher of a smaller version of this book entitled Breaking Through the Clouds (2004).
Additional chapters including the earlier versions of the Prologue, Descent into History at Grand Gulch, Adventures Below Desert Rims, Descent into the Grand Canyon, Climbing Windy Guadalupe Peak, Particles of Desert Sand, and the Epilogue originally appeared in an earlier out-of-print book Where Land Is Mostly Sky (Passeggiata Press, 1997), in the journals Trail and Timberline, Colorado Outdoors , and online sites www.suite101.com and www.hubpages.com .
Two publishers have anthologized sections of the book:
The Solace of Dinosaur Ridge, in The Landscape of Home , ed. Jeff Lee. Boulder: Johnson Books, 2006.
The Pefect Kiva, in Stories and Stone , ed. Reuben Ellis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.
PROLOGUE: DEATH VALLEY
What s Stove Pipe Wells going to look like? The map didn t do much for me in a Denver sporting goods store months before our planned visit. Would there be diamondback rattlers, tarantulas, and scorpions? Not in March, I supposed. And yet I well remembered a diamondback rattler one late spring day in New Mexico. My friends called him The General. He pretty much had his way until that day when he climbed the screen door of their house out in the desert near Pena Blanca. That was too much, but they didn t want to kill him, they just shouted and screamed at him till he slid down to the ground and slithered off toward a field of yuccas.
My whole family including my wife, Maura, our children, and their spouses met in Las Vegas, Nevada, from all the corners of America. Why Las Vegas? I had to give a paper there at a convention but promised we would leave (after playing a few slots) for Death Valley, California, to the northwest to a place called Stove Pipe Wells. Would this be a hole-in-the-wall on flat, hot sand? Would there be any vegetation at all? I had read about desert bighorn sheep and wondered if we would see any there. Why Stove Pipe Wells? Well, back in that sporting goods store in Denver, I read a brief description of Mosaic Canyon just outside of Stove Pipe Wells-that consists of a serpentine marble, smooth slickrock, dry waterfalls, bighorn sheep and, generally, cobalt blue skies.
As we raced northward beneath Mount Charleston outside of Las Vegas, a disturbing desert-brown floater suddenly appeared in the corner of my left eye. A year earlier my retina had detached, but my operation to repair it was successful. Was my eye falling apart again as we approached the Valley of Death? I let no one know of my discomfiture-didn t want to spoil the trip. (Later I found out my retina was fine, but a harmless tiny brown floater-a little piece of the desert-had begun to float around in my vitreous humor.) Finally, Beatty, Nevada, came into sight, and our turnoff for Death Valley, the continent s deepest geologic fault line. We climbed up to a pass at 4,000 feet, and there was Death Valley, a narrow, winding, white valley with wrinkled, elephant-skinned mounds rising here and there- hills like white elephants as Hemingway wrote about the landscape of Spain. On the downsloping hillsides sprouted occasional pinyons, junipers, yuccas, desert poppies, and cotton-top cactus amid an array of colorful stones gleaming in the sun. We stood in the Funeral Range and across from us rose the Panamints, and above them the high and snowy Sierra. I couldn t help but think of Frank Norris s character McTeague floundering around with his bird cage in the middle of Death Valley.
I told my family to chin up even though we had no rod or staff to comfort us. Down, down we went until we reached the five-mile-wide valley fault line to witness landscapes as poetically barren as those of Georgia O Keeffe. Ravens circled overhead in a cloudless sky. Waves of sand spread northward and rugged canyons loomed westward like pieces of Mars. We had become giddy with energy and laughed and giggled constantly-so much the better for me as my worries and concern over my eye dissipated like clouds over the desert. Well, I ll be . . . said I as we approached the green oasis of Stove Pipe Wells nestled in the shade of willows and cottonwoods, a cute little town that blended into Death Valley as though it really wasn t there.
Lunch eaten, we drove up a gravel road to the trailhead of Mosaic Canyon. A desert fox trotted across the road ahead of us into mesquite bushes in pursuit of water or small game or both, his tongue dangling. The sandy entrance to Mosaic Canyon rose above beckoning us to experience lands unknown. Shouldering our packs, eight of us hoofed across sands into the serpentine canyon with a steady cool wind blowing into our faces. Bright yellow desert poppies fluttered in the wind along the trail that narrowed down to single-file width. We twisted and turned through smooth slickrock impregnated with occasional bands of sandstone conglomerates. Reds, browns, grays of rock bore down on us the deeper we ventured. Green mesquite bushes, yellow and white poppies, pickle-green pickleweed, and arrowroot tried to bloom in this very arid desert that had received lower than normal rainfall last winter.
Once atop a series of ledges, we peered across to the distant Mesquite Dunes, white against the blueness of sky. Later we would frolic on these rippled piles of sand surrounded by dark and wrinkled canyon-lands rising abruptly to the west and east. In the spirit of fun, we all bounded up a parallel trail, my son Rich leading the way, until we came to a knife-edge dirt ridge. Soon the drop-off down into Mosaic Canyon became so severe that my daughters Michelle and Maureen became frightened. I suggested they turn around slowly and backtrack to the main trail to rejoin my wife, Maura. Easier said than done! With trepidation, each turned slowly to get down on their haunches and slide the rest of the way down to the lower trail. Nerves recovered, they quickly joined the rest of us at the trail junction after we had descended a steeper, more difficult route.
Arriving at a dried-up waterfall, my wife and youngest daughter, Maureen, decided to rest with a supply of water and snacks while the six of us (including my son, oldest daughter, sons-n-law and daughter-in-law) continued upward through chimneys and chutes until we reached the top of the dry falls to see more of Mosaic Canyon rising forever above reds and browns and layers of conglomerates looking like some giant, grooved brain petrified by desert winds. On another day in the future we hoped to complete the twenty-six mile trail up into one of these grooves. We swilled some cool canteen water and looked and looked for bighorn sheep-nary a one was to be seen-just circling ravens above and gray lizards scampering on the rocks at our feet, but one of them stretched itself to sunbathe. No small coincidence that the French verb to sunbathe is lezarder. Each of us sat on a chosen perch and peered into the desert lands of Death Valley for who knows how long. Though we kept our silence, we remained very much a family unit, flecks