The Gila

Back from the Gila, a brief trip to the heart of the Miller Fire of 2011, downstream of 297,845 acres in the Whitewater Baldy complex of 2012. The sky was finally blue, rinsed by the rain of the night before. The first rain of the season. It was gentle and hard at the same time. It was building again as we drove home to Tucson.

Xochi was bitten by another dog really hard at the dog park on Thursday, hence the reason I am home. She is recovering but making me believe in resilience. She is a strong dog with a terrible wound on her side that had to be surgically repaired. The parallels at seeing the resilience in the headwaters of the Gila and seeing Xochi delicately hop for joy with stitches in her side, helps me believe in resilience.

The long field season, part I

I laughed to myself looking at the date and the last sentence of my last post...May 14th, "I'm going to get some more time in the garden between field work stints." Right. Instead it has been trip after trip after trip after trip...there was that month in July where I stayed home, then that head injury in Mexico thing...and then back in the field. Again. Again. Again. Got to see a lot of territory and a lot of beautiful plants and landscapes, some recovering immediately from fire, some dry in a three-year drought, and even some with rain. Here are some of the panoramas I've been working on, I'll work backward from the present so you can see where I've been.

Big Bend National Park, Texas:
I got asked to go with the Chihuhuan Desert Network crew to sample some tinajas (persistent pools of water in stone basins) for eight days in early November. The trip was into an area in the extreme western portion of the park called Mesa de Anguilla. We had a pack train that carried a lot of our gear in, which made for a pretty luxurious backcountry trip, and got to hike about 25-30 miles around this really beautiful place. Here are some highlights:

Morning of our first day in Big Bend, sunrise lighting the Chisos Mountains. Wow.

This is our campsite. We didn't see anyone for six days outside of a group of border patrol agents on the first day right near the trailhead.
This is Joseph and our mules making my back feel so so much better.

This is a view of Bruja Canyon, if you move right to left upcanyon...in the distance the mountains on the right are the Chisos Mountains about fifteen air miles away. We hiked from the middle of the image all the way out to the left.

This is looking down Bruja Canyon, in the photo above, this is the portion of the canyon that is on the right half, this is what it looks like from the rim of the canyon.

This is the way to get from the top photo to the bottom photo in Bruja Canyon. No, there are not really trails, and yes that is my co-worker in the photo...

Hiking in upper Bruja we ran across this full Nautilus fossil, which is about eight inches across and like 120 million years old.

A couple days later we hiked to a place called Tinaja Rana, this is a photo stitch of about seven photos, but it gives you a sense of how shear the limestone cliffs and how sketchy all the climbs down to check out the tinajas actually were...needless to say we didn't get into this one...
The last full day in the backcountry a really rare low front went right over us. Rare because it has not really rained in West Texas in something like three years. We didn't get much beyond slick rock that was treacherous to walk on and a beautiful smell of parched desert rain.
The storm as it rolled in...

Then we woke to the most crystalline blue sky.

Our last evening we came out of the backcountry and went to a campsite that was directly north of the Chisos Mountains where the sun setting was really that red.

Big Bend is way out there. The nearest major city is El Paso, 360+ miles away. It is in a county the size of Maryland (Brewster) and there are about 9,000 people in the entire county. The nearest town of any size is Alpine with like 6,000? You look out into Chihuahua to the south and there is nothing there either. You are way out there. It is like the Grand Canyon in its vistas but it is just so far out there. The last night we were there I could see the Crab Nebula with the naked eye, along with so so many meteors from the Leonids. There were huge ones and even the most delicate wisps of green and red light, so minor you would never see them if you weren't in Big Bend. So dark and so clear. Beautiful. And then there are the plants.

Like Hechtia texensis, in the Pineapple family. There were a few beautiful plants blooming, eight flowers in total over the entire time. It is a little dry out there. But I was reminded of how magnificent the planet is and how remarkable all these evolutionary wonders are and how much I really really like botany.

Ariocarpus fissuratus, known as living rock because it looks like a rock. The plant is three inches across and disappears under the ground when there is a drought. This is the only flower we saw of it, which always blooms in November. The flower is about 1.5 inches across. You usually step on the plant before you see it is there...

More to come...

The Garden a year on.

It is generally curious to me that the seasonality of growing food in the desert is so terribly off from everywhere else I've grown. By that, I mean the ability to more or less continually maintain a garden throughout the year with appropriate crop selection. It makes for a really enjoyable winter season when everything else is dead. It really throws you off, especially when you have essentially three growing seasons a year. You plant in early spring, the monsoons, and late fall. And if you don't have a deep freeze you start harvesting in February from the late fall, late May from the early spring, and then October from the monsoon planting, a rolling bounty. Now that the soil is finally getting repaired and I've had a chance to cover crop and get a lot of organic matter in the soil it is beginning to show signs of life. Growing without any pesticides or herbicides requires patience, it is a really slow process of building up the system's resilience.

But as I discovered this year, the deep freezes happen in La Nina years, and not only do they hit the sensitive annual crops, they hammer the trees too. The toll from this year: both Mexican limes died, the Tangelo is now less than a foot tall and resprouting, the entire eleven foot lemon dropped its leaves and is now struggling at four feet but resprouting throughout and I saw flower buds on it today. The grapefruit/blood orange is also a foot tall, but resprouting. The pomegranate? Totally fine. Going to plant a lot more of those, easy to deal with. Citrus is a weenie tree: at least the lemons and limes are. Even lost a mesquite in the center of the garden. Guess it's time to replace that one too. Here's a simple annual shot comparison to show where the garden has come in a year. Here's the link to the original post of pictures from the beginning to August last year for reference. The first is one of my first panoramas taken on May 7, 2010. The second is taken on May 11, 2011. And so it grows...

May 7, 2010

May 11, 2011

Roster of what's in the ground for this year:
Tomatoes: San Marzano romas, Oaxacan Pink, Thai Pink Egg, Punta Banda
Carrots: Scarlet and Belgian White
Tohono O'odham yellow meated watermelon
Satsuki Midori cucumbers
Tepary beans
Uncle Joe's basil
Mrs. Burns lemon basil
Fordhook zucchini
Hopi Melon
Lacinato kale
Hopi white posole corn
fennel
I'itoi onions
parsley
chiltipines
Yankee Red Bell peppers
Nambe green chile
Texas Hill country red okra
celosia
Mexican saffron: Azufran
Pima brown lentils (admittedly struggling this late)
Pulpa de Milpa tomatillo
potato (single volunteer)
dill
San Juan dipper gourd

So we'll see how this goes...Stay tuned, now that schools out and I'm getting the ability to breathe back after my pneumonia, I'm going to get some more time in the garden between field work stints.

The Rarity of Ruins

One of the great things about my work in the Park Service has been to visit some of the more remarkable archaeological sites in the US. Whether it has been mapping the vegetation at Casa Grande NM and running across piles of pottery shards, or visiting sites in the backcountry of Tonto NM that are not open to the public, I've always been keen to value these unique opportunities. This past week I had the utmost of rare opportunities to visit and participate in the botanical and archaeological assessment of what will no doubt remain for me one of the most incredible sites I'll probably ever be able to visit: the Cold Spring ruins in the Sierra Ancha Wilderness in central Arizona. These sites are on National Forest land, but because of the unique skills and resources of the Park Service in preservation and stabilization of archaeological resources we have been making an effort to collaborate with the Forest Service to preserve and protect these unique sites. Difficult to get to and difficult to find, but amazing.

Hematite House

This ruin was the first we visited and was incredible in its own right.

An interior shot at Hematite House of Duane the chief of resources at Tonto working on the stabilization assessment. And then the next day we spent hiking into Cold Spring Canyon and the ruins there. This ruin is the best preserved and most unique ruin I have ever seen. It is three stories tall and built into a crack in the rock.


Can you find the Ruin? Look along the base of the upper cliff face...This is the approach to the ruin and yes, those are cliffs that drop off a couple hundred feet below. The archaeologist that was with us referred to this as the single most defensive site he has ever seen. The photo below is of the ruin front and is what you are looking for in the image above:

The Ruin's front door.

To get inside we carefully went up the logs and gingerly entered the site. The floors are intact which is crazy considering the visitation and even raiding of the site over the years. The lower window is actually the second floor that was built over fill.

This is Roger another NPS archaeologist climbing up to the second floor.

Once on the second floor this is the approach to the third floor. Note the doorway, which actually went into a series of caves below the upper floor. I freaked out a little with my claustrophobia but was able to get some photos of the roof before I had to leave.

You could see the fingerprints in the mortar that the beams were sitting on. This was a well built place. If you went up on top of this roof there was the largest room, which went back into a cave and then took a sharp turn to left. This is the view from that spot.

It was hard to get the right balance because it was so bright outside. And in case you were wondering what was out that window?

Looking directly down along the face of the wall, in the immediate foreground is the constructed portion of the wall. Another view...


And not to worry, I just hung the camera out the opening and started shooting photos looking down. Talk about vertigo... For a bit of perspective, I climbed down and walked away from the site to the cliff edge on the left of the photograph above. It offered a nice perspective and an added, wow.

Can you see the ruin in the photo? All you are looking for is the parapet opening the previous photo was taken from. I'm still a little stunned by the whole experience.

The Garden in fall

Alas, we've finally cut down the cover crops and have gotten our winter garden in and the coop is almost finished and ready for hens. Soon, soon. We're already pulling cucumbers and carrots out slowly and new tomatoes are teasing us along with the cold nights. Still haven't frozen and my fingers are crossed as I leave town tonight...

From Saturday November 13th

Dreaming of the Maze.

Trip Index:
1214 miles round-trip from Tucson to the end of the road in The Maze at the Dollhouse.
6 hours one-way to drive 47 miles from Hite, Utah to The Maze itself.
5 miles of hiking barefoot hiking in 500 foot deep slot canyons, less than 50 meters wide.
I learned how to rockcrawl, or as I think of it now: I can hike with a truck.
Canyonlands is way out there, I mean, WAY out there.
I've woken the last two nights with the feel of warm smooth rock underfoot. My soles appear to have muscle memory.
It is hard to explain what The Maze is...I'm completely at a loss for words.

Here are some pictures and musings from way out there.

Maze Light

River scour, barefoot walk
For reference: the top of the red wall is 375 feet above the riverbed.

Further up canyon in the Maze

From above, looking down in
And yes, those are canyons in every direction.

In the land of standing rocks

The Dollhouse

The Dollhouse sky

Camp at the end of the road, The Dollhouse

The 10/10/10 poem

Sunrise over the river
Dollhouse crack high above
the sinuous tremble of rock
splitting into infinity
the fall of water in
every direction color
endless soft drops of form
of light, of birds calling
ravens cackling, jays shouting
the morning brewing
the light rising
the day beginning.

Downstream to Cataract Canyon, on the Colorado River

Brown Betty Rapids, Cataract Canyon

Overlooking Surprise Valley, the Colorado is barely visible to the left and 1200 feet below.

Drying creek bed

Goodnight Needles, a 100 mile view north to south

Dollhouse Moonrise

Yes, that is the road.
Actually, I only broke a single leaf spring and never scraped.
Did I mention that I love having a truck?

The Jardin grows...

Gosh, procrastination is fun. I need to be studying for my WFR...Here's the progression of the garden through the summer.

For reference here are a couple photos of the yard from February 17th, the first day we visited the house.




The first picture was from the 7th of May.



The second picture is from the 19th of May.



The third picture is from the 17th of June.



The fourth picture is from 1st of July.



The fifth picture is from this morning, August 5th.