traveling would be closed to all vehicular traffic. Wilderness open
only to foot travel has long been accepted in wet, mountainous regions, but in
the desert it acquires new significance; Smith told me, for example, that on a
three-day hike over the nearby Saline Range, he and his companions had each
carried 25 pounds of water. The main beneficiaries when an arid landscape is
closed to vehicles are not solitude-seeking Homo sapiens, most of whom prefer
to carry their water by car, but plants and animals. This is an entirely valid
concept, but one that society has been slow to accept
We came to a dirt spur
that led into the bush. "It's doing pretty well," Smith observed, gazing at the
tracks; but I couldn't really say that I agreed. I recognized this as the place
where, in September1984, a miner named Joe Ostrenger had illegally bulldozed a
road eight miles into a wilderness-study area in order to investigate a deposit
of rhyolitic tuff-a fine, light-colored volcanic rock. The BLM found Ostrenger
guilty of destruction of natural features and vegetation and ordered him to
restore the terrain-after which the agency allowed him to cut another road into
the same area. Ostrenger subsequently diverted surface water around the site
without permission and removed rock from a section containing Indian
petroglyphs. The BLM did not cite him for either act. This was but one of 550
such questionable operations that the BLM allowed in California desert
wilderness-study areas between 1980 and 1987. The agency maintains that these
areas will be "reclaimed" by June of 1989, when the BLM files its final
wilderness recommendations.
We continued up and over Steel Pass, a
5,042-foot saddle with a sign-book register ("Raining cats and dogs," "All our
beers blew up." etc.) similar to those found on many mountaintops. The register
was a testament to the difficulty of the route, which dropped over granite
ledges and cut through passageways barely wide enough for a car. Soon we could
see the 700-foot-high Eureka Dunes, the tallest in North America. Smith left me
alone at the dunes that night, and I mean alone. By the time I pulled out the
next morning, I'd seen only two other people in the whole valley, and this was
on a weekend. I couldn't help but wonder what sort of crowds would collect if
the area became part of Death Valley National Park.
I returned to
Saline Valley the next day. I hiked up into a canyon in the Inyo Mountains,
where I found a rope (and a cigarette butt) at the top of a beautiful
waterfall. At sunset I chased the light across the dunes, but it kept
disappearing from the next ridge as I slogged along, barefoot. Finally I gave
up, sat down, and listened to the quiet while the lowering sun turned the
distant alluvial |
fans
into giant root systems. A warm wind was blowing across the dunes, and as I sat
there, I knew the intoxication-the giddy, unfettered freedom-of the desert. I
had no plans to revisit the hot spring, but that changed when I returned to the
car and heard a hiss coming from my left front tire: the infamous roads had
exacted their toll. I drove back to the campground. which contained the only
congregation of people within three hours' drive
This time I went to the
lower spring, and as I pulled in, I encountered two older men wearing nothing
but straw hats. I announced my predicament and one of them said: "Bring your
tire over by the pool. We'll spray some water on it and find the leak." The
other went and got his truck, which came equipped with a compressor. He used
the compressor to fill the tire after a third man plugged the hole with rubber
and glue. By the time the sun set. I was relaxing in the pool with no
worries.
The scene was completely different from that at the upper spring.
There were several pools, a sink, a goldfish pond, a circle of couches, a lawn
with a sign that said BERMUDA GRASS TRIANGLE, and a paperback library divided
into sections such as "Action," "Mystery," and "Lust." The person who'd plugged
my tire turned out to be "Major Tom" Canner, the official campground host. As
an unpaid volunteer liaison for the BLM, he was permitted to live at the spring
year-round, but the agency had a six-month limit on the length of time most
people could stay.
I mentioned the Cranston bill, and he said: "If it
weren't for national parks, the dick-heads wouldn't know where to go. It's
weird in Death Valley-you pull over by the side of the road to make a pot of
coffee, and a ranger shows up with a badge and a gun and an attitude on.
There's a sense of freedom here that doesn't exist in many places anymore-and
it doesn't cost one dollar of taxpayers' money."
"They can have Death
Valley," commented the man who had filled my tire. "They should let us have our
place."
Camping is regulated in Death Valley. and the major campgrounds
there are zoos. But the park also contains some 400 miles of rugged backcountry
roads, where people with initiative can be quite alone. Most S.7 advocates I've
spoken with favor leaving the roads to Saline Valley similarly rough, and
keeping the area remote.
One such advocate, a Sierra Club activist named Jim
Dodson, later told me about something more threatening to the future of the
valley than overcrowding. The BLM has offered the hot springs-a "Known
Geothermal Resource Area" - for leasing and development. In other words, for
all the anarchistic rhetoric, the only thing standing between the unique "sense
of freedom" and a power plant is that there haven't been any
bidders-yet. |
A
power plant is something you'd never find in Death Valley National Park.
Upon leaving Saline Valley I made for the East Mojave, where the Cranston
bill proposes to form an entirely new national park. Neatly situated between
the California-Nevada state line and U.S. interstates 15 and 40. it would
roughly follow the boundaries of the existing one-and-a-half-million-acre East
Mojave National Scenic Area, one of only three such scenic areas in the nation
and the only one managed by the BLM. (The others, Mono Lake and the Columbia
River Gorge, are controlled by the U.S. Forest Service.)
Unlike the desert
to the north, the East I Mojave isn't classic basin-and-range country.
Visually. much of it is Western-movie milieu: painted buttes, fiat-topped
mesas, rolling hills of sagebrush and cacti. Actually, it's a meeting ground
for three different deserts- the Mojave, the Sonoran, and the Great Basin- and
is therefore quite diverse. Southern lowland desert plants such as smoke trees,
agave, and catclaw acacia coexist here with piñon, juniper, and white
fir. The northwestern part of the region is a moonscape containing some 32
volcanic cinder cones; then there are the limestone caverns, the singing sand
dunes, and the world's largest Joshua tree forest (yes, bigger than any in
Joshua Tree National Monument) on Cima Dome - an enormous, rounded upwelling of
earth, that, in geological terms, is unique. Mountain ranges rise from this
wide-open landscape like islands, which, in ecological terms, they are.
Reaching as high as 7,500 feet, they harbor fauna not traditionally thought to
exist in the desert: bighorn sheep, ringneck snakes, salamanders, mountain
lions.
Among these ranges, the Granite Mountains stand out like an albino in
a family of brown siblings. I went there to visit a biological preserve
maintained by the University of California. I was given a tour by its
good-humored manager, Philippe Cohen, who showed me the legendary "Bunny Club"-
the U.C. researchers' cabin, which was filled with flags, snakeskins, and
exotic beer bottles, and had a ship's smokestack in one corner and a granite
boulder coming up through the floor. Outside, Cohen pointed out the Granites'
resplendent flora, a mosaic featuring Mojave yucca, barrel cactus, and buckhorn
cholla, the graceful cactus with a built-in halo. In the shade of the granite
cliffs grew Dudleya saxosa, a succulent normally confined to the coast. Cohen
said the habitat was healthy partly because no grazing is allowed on it. He
also said the BLM had been uncooperative about restricting grazing in other
areas so that researchers can study bighorn sheep.
After camping near the
preserve that night (at a site where I found a soft-drink can, a Styrofoam
plate, and plenty of egg and shotgun shells). I visited the only |