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THE DESERT PAGE by Bob Michael, SAGE Associate Editor In some forthcoming Pages, I'll share my impressions of Desert Peaking in some exotic parts of the West, far from our usual haunts. There's an awful lot of the Geography of Hope east of Baboquivari and north of Navajo Mountain; it's a shame it's so far away that we don't go there. There are peaks out there equal to almost anything on the List. Take Texas (to which a lot of residents of New Mexico and southern Colorado would add the word "please"). Now, I'd wager that your average Hundred, Sierra, or Desert Peaker would, if given the choice between a quick, clean suicide or spending the rest of his/her life in, say, Waco, would need some time alone to weigh the alternatives. Yet, a state that big, covering so many degrees of longitude, does actually have some tremendous desert/mountain country in "Trans-Pecos" - the western-most wedge of the state that thrusts between New Mexico and Coahuila. Several ranges here rise to over 7,000 feet, and two - the Davis and Guadalupe Mountains - top eight thousand. This little-known and (except for El Paso) almost unpopulated corner of America remains to this day a backwater, a quiet eddy past which the Twentieth Century has flowed with relatively little effect. It is a sharp contrast to the increasingly civilized Arizona and California deserts. One of the biggest reasons for this primitive quality, aside from great distance to any population centers, is a factor that is a real turnoff to explorers and climbers. Aside from national parks and some State-owned areas, the is no public land in Texas. Driving past the wildest-looking country, past areas as desolate and empty as the Nopah Range, it's very disconcerting to see both sides of the road stoutly fenced and posted against trespassing. Texas did not come into the Union as a public-land state; the Federal government acquired no land on admission, so, like the East Coast, there is no such thing as the BLM there. It makes one very grateful for the vast unfenced stretches of the West that we take for granted as our birthright. A Texas ranch is still somewhat of a feudal fiefdom; each rancher is sort of a "law west of the Pecos". Therefore, one is perhaps more apprehensive about sneaking private peaks here than elsewhere. Luckily, two of the highest and finest mountain areas - Guadalupe Mountains with 8,751' Guadalupe Peak, the state summit, and glorious Big Bend - are national parks. In this far-flung corner of the mountain West, one can begin to sense the edge of Dixie. Remember, these desert peaks once belonged to the Confederate States of America. In little towns well off Interstate 10 - Fort Davis in the Davis Mountains is my favorite - the people, the accents, the architecture and the "vibes" are a unique blend found only in Texas of the Old West and the Old South. A third cultural element is found along the Rio Grande, where towns like Presidio are parts of Mexico on the wrong side of the river. Botanically and geologically, too, this area is a crossroads where two sharply distinct parts of our continent meet. The Guadalupe Mountains support Douglas fir and ponderosa pine on top, while on 7,835' Emory Peak, highest in Big Bend, a tiny remnant aspen grove clings to a lofty niche. Familiar creosote bush carpets the lower valleys along with a species of yucca that looks much like our Mohave or Torrey yuccas. In a good year, the desert wildflowers are second to none in the spring. But up in the Davis Mountains, a cool, well-watered upland around 4 to 5 thousand feet elevation, is an outlier of the Eastern hardwood forest, a beautiful savanna-like expanse of grassland dotted with broadleaf trees. Oh, the Appalachians are Eastern, and the Rockies are Western - but, incredibly, the twain do meet in this far edge of the Western cordillera. The furthest west gasp of the Appalachian foldbelt that once rimmed the eastern and southern United States is exposed here, as a range of hills near Marathon. Imagine, an Appalachian desert peak (well, hill)! The folded Pippalachjans begin in Pennsylvania, die out in Alabama, reappear as the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas, and then disappear for a long time beneath the Coastal Plain sediments of east and central Texas. They make their last known stand in the creosote and lechuguilla of Trans-Pecos. This earlier geology has since been "overprinted" at least twice by Laramide (Rocky Mountain) uplift and deformation, and most recently by the same Basin and Range-type block faulting we know in California and Nevada. Throw in some Cenozoic volcanic activity, such as that which built the great stacks of rhyolitic flows which comprise the Davis and Chisos Mountains, and you have a heady geologic brew indeed. In the next Page, I'll write about some peaks I've done in the Chisos and Guadalupe Mountains.  |