PAI PAI INDIANS OF BAJA
CALIFORNIATrudie Hunt
Do you realize that within three days round trip from LA are people who still bake pottery, braid rope out of horse hair, practice, mutilation because of grief, rope and sell wild horses for $3.00 each, and learn Spanish only as a second language? For an easy easy trip to a "foreign land" accessible to conventional cars (with skilled drivers), we recommend the traverse from Ensenada to San Felipe. This should be done from west to east because of the bad grade into the Valle de Trinidad, a cooperative, agricultural colony. You can visit the ghost town of EL Alamo where gold was once the pursuit of 5000 inhabitants. One can visit Santa Catarina whose mission ruins testify to the individuality of the Pai Pai Indians whose descendants still cultivate the pomegranates, fig and corn of their dispossessed padres. Before joining the paved road one travels across ocotillo-rich desert in the shadow of mighty San Pedro Martir, culminating in elusive, and most worthy desert peak, El Picacho del Diablo.
Thanksgiving the San Diego Chapter had a trip of over 100 people in 30 cars down the Laguna Salada west of Mexicali to La Palmita Canyon again to visit the Pai Pai Indians. We had all manner of vehicles from "bugs" to amphibious "ducks". Three vehicles had to be abandoned, and most passenger cars had to be towed through sand to reach our campsite in a beautiful desert canyon with palms. A ten mile canyon hike brought us to the lower Pai Pai village where the few inhabitants allowed us to use a 'dobi' hut as a dressing room before we bathed in the hot spring pool. Shards, chippings, choppers, manos were much in evidence, but we could not be sure that they were not contemporary, such is the primitiveness of the village.
The Baja desert this year is lush and green with carpets of flowers, flowering ocotillo, lupine, rabbit bush, due to the October, Thanksgiving and Christmas rains, which seem even heavier when heard through plastic tubing.
MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS
Two new members joined us last month: FRANKLIN MEYERS, 229 Clydepark Aye., Hawthorn, and GORDON MACLEOD, 10617 Kinnard Ave., Los Angeles 24.
HARRY and SIINA MELTS have just completed an interesting motoring trip through Mexico and into Guatemala.
VERN JONES is back climbing with the section after a two year lay-off. He has agreed to lead CERRO DE LA ENCANTADA (Big Picacho) next Thanksgiving.
The supply of DPS Emblems has now been replenished. Those qualifying send list of peaks and $2.00 to the Secretary-Treasurer.