Letters From the Desert: Old Woman Mountains

For those who don’t read all the way through: I’m raising money for the Mojave Desert Land Trust this month. I’m hiking at least 50 miles by March 31 and hoping to raise $2,000 for MDLT thereby. Check it out here: you can give any amount. I’ve plateaued the last couple days at $250.00, so every little bit to get that total climbing again is much appreciated.

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In February, 1995 my friend Mike Lerch drove his trusty Jeep along Route 66 past Amboy. I was along for the ride, as was my then-fiancee Becky and our dog Zeke. Mike was an old desert hand at that point, having spent a couple of decades as an anthropologist and archaeologist doing field work in the East Mojave. The rest of us were relative newbies, with just a couple of road trips under our belt. We’d just an hour previous gotten our first glimpse of the towns along Route 62 that have been my home the last decade. Now we were rattling along the crumbling pavement of the old road, pulling off every now and then to look at campsites Mike knew from the 1930s incarnation of the Mother Road.

Our destination was the Old Woman Mountains, about the beauty of which Mike had waxed rhapsodical. The plants, the rocks, the animals, the history and prehistory. It all sounded marvelous. Our ambitions were to be thwarted. At the intersection of 66 and Kelbaker Road, a huge orange sign warned travelers that the road between that point and the Old Woman Mountains had been closed. Bridge repairs, I seem to recall: the same reason that same road is closed now, and has been at frequent intervals in the 26 years since February 1995. Back then I hadn’t developed my current habit of looking in all four directions, then driving around the sign and detouring around the missing bridges. I should probably not say too much more about that.

So instead we headed north on Kelbaker, jagged eastward on a section of I-40 that was only about a decade old at that point, then went northward on Essex Road into the newly designated Mojave National Preserve. We saw horses in Wild Horse Canyon, passed the Cima Post Office, where I would later receive mail at PO Box 43. We gaped at the large sign in the parking lot opposing the California Desert Protection Act, which had passed just three months earlier. And then the left turn onto Cima Road, and I drank in my first glimpse of the world’s largest Joshua tree forest. “These are supposed to be a different subspecies or something from those in Joshua Tree National Park,” said Mike. Unless he actually said “National Monument.” It had only been a few weeks since the upgrade.

By such random dancing lessons are lives changed irrevocably. It would be another two and a half years before I returned to the Dome and found what became my preferred campsite, the most enduring home I’ve had in my life. It would be another 11 years after that before I got the key to PO Box 43 at the Cima Post Office. (The post office closed ten years ago. I still have the key. I probably owe somebody a deposit.)

It would also be 26 years and a couple weeks until I actually made it into the Old Woman Mountains. I finally got there yesterday.

Route 66 is closed again. I have driven the stretch between Mountain Springs Summit and Kelbaker Road many times in the intervening decades, some of those times legally. It is as much home as anywhere in this world. But I never found myself properly equipped to navigate the notoriously sandy Sunflower Springs Road south from Essex to the Old Womans. This despite the fact that I hear the road isn’t in bad shape lately.

Instead, I headed yesterday for the south end of the range, which I never hear anyone wax rhapsodical about. You can actually drive right up to the foothills of the southern end of the Old Woman Mountains in a standard passenger car, at least at this writing. Milligan, California, an old siding on the Arizona-California Railroad where sits an old workers’ graveyard and general collection of broken railroad-building machines, a discomforting juxtaposition, sits at the south end of the mountains just where Cadiz Road begins to get too sandy for two-wheel-drive vehicles to drive confidently. Milligan: population zero, ample parking.

Of my hike there is not much remarkable to relate in the way of precise details. I went up one canyon, over the divide at the head, and then out the other side, detouring only to do the same thing at the next canyon north. There were stunning rocks of pure white quartz and striated miscellany, some granitic things with fracture planes in sheets that looked for all the world like the shale in the creeks where I grew up, except with no noticeable algae covering them or minnows eating the algae.

I startled a dozen quail a mile up the first canyon. In the second canyon, as I sat eating lunch, a male black-chinned hummingbird challenged my right to be there. Several would greet me in subsequent miles, doing their slurred territorial dives out on the eastern bajada. At one point, the sun at my back, a huge shadow crossed the ground in front of me. I waited, neck craned upward. An eagle, wobbling in a dihedral, heading downhill and east.

My friends at the Native American Land Conservancy manage a preserve about 15 miles north of where I hiked, now closed for the duration of the pandemic, in which they work to repair some of the damage done by the industrial settler state to their land and their culture. The preserve overlooks Ward Valley, where tribes came together about the time Mike and Becky and Zeke and I were exploring these parts to stop a nuclear waste dump from being imposed on their lands. I was peripherally involved in the Ward Valley fight, doing what I could as an underpaid journalist 500 miles away, and it gave me some pleasure yesterday to look out at a Ward Valley that was no more radioactive than when that campaign began.

I did think about what my life might have been like had that trip in 1995 gone differently, if it had been the Old Womans rather than Cima Dome that had occupied my waking imagination for months afterward. What book might I have talked endlessly about writing and not finished yet instead of the one on Joshua trees? It’s hard to say. In the universe where Mike drove casually around the sign and tut-tutted about our concern, I might still be struggling with making an urban life in an increasingly unfamiliar and inhospitable Bay Area, feeling more and more desperate about years slipping past. Or maybe I would have fallen into a mine shaft that afternoon. Hard to say! I do like the way things turned out, aside from, you know, the last four years and the couple of decades before that, the lies and venality and Cadiz and Tr*mp (but I repeat myself), the pandemic and wars and my old Joshua Tree Saloon quaffing buddy Lance losing his fight with the ’rona a couple weeks ago, and the fact that I may have to respond in writing to this particularly execrable essay.

But those things can wait while I reflect on my joy at finally making it to the Old Womans.

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As I mentioned at the top of this Letter, yesterday’s hike was part of a fundraising pledge I made to the Mojave Desert Land Trust, to hike 50 miles and raise $2,000 in donations to help them keep their work going. As of right now, I still have 35.8 miles and $1,750 to go. The previous issue of Letter From the Desert was read, or at least opened, by almost 1,200 people. I leave the arithmetic as an exercise for the reader. These are tough times and not everyone has cash to spare. So if you’re inclined to help out, maybe toss in a couple bucks extra on behalf of those who love the desert and are only scraping by. MDLT does crucial work buying private lands for conservation. They deserve our support and more.

And I’ll have other hikes to share shortly, including one last Tuesday in Nevada in which I remembered I always hear human voices in this one spot in the desert, though no one is ever there. Please stay safe: we’re in the pandemic home stretch, assuming none of you pay any attention to the governor of Texas.

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