 |
| Bush Mountain Trail beyond Manzanita Ridge by Drew Stuart |
Here's another blog entry from one of our Texas Mountain Trail board members, Drew Stuart, of Salt Flat. Drew is also the Editor of the Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review.
From Drew:
From Drew:
Adventures in the Guadalupes – Dog Canyon, the Bush Mountain
and Marcus trails
This is the
eighth installment in a series on hikes in Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
Other stories in the series can be found on the website, by searching
"Adventures in the Guadalupes."
A few weeks ago, at a campground in Big Bend NationalPark, I found myself listening to a Dutch artist telling me about a trip he had
taken across the West, a trip that had included visits to various national
parks and wilderness areas. He was struck, he said, by the fact that pieces of
land had been set aside, not primarily, as he saw it, for the land itself or
its non-human inhabitants, but for people. At the time I didn’t have the
language ready at hand, but I did recall that providing for human recreation
was only half of the two-fold mission of the National Park Service. (The
mission, specified in the legislation that created it, is to “conserve the
scenery and the natural and historic objects and wild life therein” and to
“provide for the enjoyment of the same” by the people. He was talking pretty
fast anyways.) I did remember the phrase “outstanding opportunities for
solitude”; he said he was stunned that such a notion could play a part in
national legislation or public policy, as it did in the Wilderness Act of 1964.
(While we were talking, I thought he found this fact merely fascinating, but
looking back I suspect he thought it was perverse, part of an American mania
for individualism.)
 |
| Horned Lizard by Drew Stuart |
Yes, at some point, a persuasive, or at least influential,
segment of the population, as well as Congress and the president of the United
States, agreed that the opportunity to be deeply lonesome, isolated in an
environment that “retain(s) its primeval character and influence,” was a
precious thing, an opportunity that needed to be preserved for Americans in
perpetuity.
Solitude in land where “man and his own works” are dwarfed
by “the earth and its community of life.” However fraught and contradictory the
Wilderness Act and its application, the intuition that access to that kind of
solitude is valuable, even needful, is certainly not confined to ardent
backpackers or environmental activists. Though the intuition may be, as my
Dutch conversationalist in Big Bend suggested, a conspicuously American one.
***
Guadalupe Mountains National Park couldn’t ever be
described as heavily trafficked – annually, Big Bend National Park sees 10
times as many visitors, and Yosemite and Yellowstone each handle 100 times as
many people as the Guadalupes every year. Even in busier periods at the park,
you can find yourself isolated pretty quickly. (Though, of course, you can also
gaze down from parts of this “wild country” on to the traffic on Hwy. 62/180.)
But Dog Canyon, where I traveled Saturday (June 8) to continue my project of
hiking the trails in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, is even more
out-of-the-way, less visited than the other parts of this seldom-visited park.
Designated as wilderness like much of the park, in terms of solitude, Dog
Canyon fits the description.
It may be “wilderness,” but signs of “man and his works”
endure here – signs of millenia of pre-European Native activity, most in
evidence around the canyon’s seep springs, and signs of ranching. And it’s no
wonder. As I follow the Bush Mountain Trail out of Dog Canyon, beginning what
will be a 16- or 17-mile loop, the trail follows a golden stream bed and then
leads up into open mountains, an ocean of yellow grass, the yellow broken here
and there by the dark green of an isolated pinon or juniper. Ponderosas below
me in the draw. Scrub oak adds green to the slopes, and the country stretched
out below and before the trail looks like a park or lawn. At couple is hiking
the Tejas Trail from Dog Canyon to Lost Peak, but I have this vast section of the
park to myself.
 |
| Bountiful Valley at Sunset by Drew Stuart |
Cresting Manzanita Ridge, 1,000 feet above the trailhead,
I look down at the valley of West Dog Canyon and see a bounteous and graceful
place. Perhaps once, not that long ago, water flowed perennially, or at least
regularly, in the draws here. Between the sea of burned desert and the ridges
and stony slopes of the Guadalupes at their height, this canyon offers itself
as the image of abundance – promising fat livestock, a small paradise, where a
person, a family could grow fat and happy.
I’ve never traveled to the Mediterranean, but I understand
there’s limestone there; looking at the stately outcroppings of exposed rock
that ornament the broad plain and the slopes, I half expect to see primordial
herdsmen, a la ancient Greece or Italy.
 |
| Marcus Trail by Drew Stuart |
I arrive at my destination for the night, the Marcus
campground, more than an hour before sunset, about three hours after setting
out. I make camp, surprisingly drained from the 3.75-mile hike. Night is
gathering, and as I lay in my tent there’s a lot of communication going on
outside – a bird working through a wild variety of sounds, the ambient hum and
drone of cicadas and, to the west, predictably, the howl and answering yaps of
coyotes, though more robust, less wary, than I hear them at home.
***
It would have been nicer to have stayed here for the
weekend, at the Marcus campground, in the bountiful valley, in the shade. But
I’m not that smart, and before 7 a.m. I drive myself out of this bucolic site.
Out, and on to the long, hard climb from the Marcus
campground, at about 6,300 feet, to the intersection of the Bush Mountain and
Blue Ridge trails, at about 8,200 feet.
Several hours later, sopping, I crest the trail, reach the
threshold of the small, circumscribed forest-mountain world. Certainly there is
a light here, a certain light. I allow myself to sit quietly and appreciate
this wooded place for a time, before I push on eastward, on the Blue Ridge
Trail. (Surprisingly, I find the trail not the same as I remember, from my
mid-March walk – there are vistas that I recall, but it’s as if I’m
seeing other parts of the trail for the first time. A reminder that hiking all
the trails in the park only will only take me so far.)
 |
| McKittrick in mists by Drew Stuart |
Looking out at the Bowl. Clouds are reaching in fingers
over the eastern front of the Guadalupes, mists swirl in McKittrick Canyon, and
puffs of cloud slip over the top of Bear Canyon, dance and evaporate there.
Then I’m descending again, and reach the Blue Ridge Trail’s junction with the
Marcus Trail, which will take me back to West Dog Canyon. Not far from the
junction I pause to each lunch.
The Marcus Trail seems to go down forever. I can’t believe
I’ve walked up this far. (Though I suspect that I will feel the ground I’ve
covered when I make the final 1,000-foot ascent over Manzanita Ridge back to
the trailhead.) From the woods, soon I’m walking again on high golden ridges.
Though the alpine model – Swiss chalets, postcards from Colorado – may set a
popular standard of natural beauty, I prefer, today, these open, grassy slopes,
with a single pine or the deep red of an agave’s blooms – the “desert candle” –
interrupting the expanse of yellow, fresh and bright.
I’m back at my campsite a little after 1. Everything is
where I left it, and I pack up for the final 4 miles to the trailhead.
Back up the ridge, in the heat of the afternoon, is indeed
a bit brutal. There are two or three trees along the trail, and I have to lay
down beneath one of them and take a short nap. When I’m almost at the point of
exasperation, I reach the top of the ridge, thankful my upward labors are over.
I’m back at the trailhead and parking lot, visiting with Rusty the park ranger,
24 hours after I set out.
***
One could travel for 50 miles in any direction from Dog
Canyon and encounter opportunities for solitude equally as outstanding as those
within the park. I value them no less – indeed the signs of “man and his works”
often make these places more impressive and appealing. The boundary can seem
absurd, even comical – an official sign thrown up arbitrarily in a sea of
solitude. Still, I am grateful to my elders that they saw fit to give this
immoderate, perhaps fanatical obsession of mine – to be alone in rough, open
places – a place in the canon of national life.
– Andrew Stuart
No comments:
Post a Comment