Moving through the desert, reflections & gratitudes (Day going home tomorrow)

 

Today I concluded 500 miles of bicycling in Arizona. I didn't mean for 500 miles to be a goal, but last week I noticed I'd gone over 400, so decided post-hoc that 500 would sound nice for the March month that normally doesn't get much action. I also need to offer an apology to the urban area of Phoenix: I had misjudged you and indeed your bicycle infrastructure is fabulous. You just can't bike to Saguaro National Park like you can in Tucson. But you can bicycle to Tonto National Forest, which is what I did as my final ride this morning.

 

Today was mercifully cloudy, and not the shroudy-cloudy either, but dynamic stretches of cloud that were like colored scarves as the dawn light lifted into them. I flattened down in cruise control, eager to move past the mega-churches, Chinese food, and marijuana dispensaries that make up the shopping plazas in the urban asphalt between Tempe and the mountains. 

 

Plaza life, Mesa

 

 

Morning clouds heading east

 

Eventually more cacti and yellow blooming puffy asters took over, and I climbed up steadily. And then the Superstition and Mazatzal Mountains were there and I pulled off the road because I couldn't even look at them enough unless I was still and focusing. I looked and saw and sketched these mountains into my brain, wishing I could save up how glorious I felt while seeing them, to bring back to the sleeting grey north and all the forthcoming computer work.

 

I rode into the Tonto National Forest, enjoying the looming rock faces beside me, wishing I could say goodbye to each sentinel saguaro, until the bike lane unapologetically disappeared. Trailers, RVs, and hyperactive jeeps were on the road, and I wanted to preserve bicycling for the rest of my life, so I turned around while it was still safe. 

 

I would ride 500 miles

Taking in the mountains, the shapely little teeth of "Four Peaks" visible in the distance

 

During this ride I was reflecting about living life--as cliché as that is--about how being not in a car I could smell the orange blossoms in a roadside grove, how I had a loving fiance to fly home to in Ithaca even though I didn't want to end my trip, how my Dad is so tenaciously moving forward after Mom died. I thought about how the night before I had unnecessarily agonized over what my Best Last Ride would be, reading maps, making test routes, whining to my beloved Matthew over the phone. And when I woke up this morning I just set out east towards the Tonto Forest, realizing that the Best Last Ride didn't exist, I had to make it exist. And if I'd gone north around Camelback instead, it very likely could also have been the Best Last Ride.

 

Yesterday was The Last Best Hike; Adorable Ann and Ritwick and I packed sandwiches and left at an early 6am to hike the "most popular trail" in the Superstition Mountains, Peralta trail. In the car, Adorable Ann described feeling extra special care and excitement making those sandwiches, and I was thrilled to find her putting words around the experience of Preparing for some great outdoor adventure. Filling your water bottles, making a sandwich, picking out the most comfortable pair of socks, these benign tasks get an extra little zing.

 

A dirt road took us from the highway to the trailhead. Dusty, washboard rhythmic thudding under the car, nothing but clumps of wirey shrubs and cacti dotting the landscape with mountains behind. Along the road, campsites of RVs, tents, and various lean-to structures were like little gold rush towns of the modern age, set strangely in this barren sea of cacti and scrub. I am so interested in how I will react to being underneath trees again, when I head back east. You feel bald out here in Arizona.

 

Like the most popular trail in Tucson, the most popular trail here was also in a canyon. I wonder if canyons in Arizona are like waterfalls in New York, they're just the most enticing natural features available and people make trails to them. This canyon on the Peralta trail must have had enough water (though not actually flowing) that there were insects. I never thought I'd be struck by the presence of insects, but a number of weeks without them sensitized me. The small trees were noisy with bees and flies. And the plants! Although rangy, they were green, and I could actually smell them. The smell of green. Conversations from other hikers bounced magnified off the canyon walls, personal lives revealed.

 

 

Peralta Trail

Peralta Trail

 

Everywhere we looked there were beguiling rocks. Huge boulders playing Jenga. Steep flat rock faces, holes making real faces in them if you wanted. All the brown and grey and dusky red and dust, and if you see a flower blooming on one of the hedgehog cacti, it hollers at you, this single blaring magenta event.

 

 

Blaring bloom, hedgehog cacti

 

Halfway up the trail, the rocks looked like an extra large box of Crayons, all vertical and cylindrical. "The rocks have assembled for the Council of Rock!" exclaimed Adorable Ann. It was so obvious why this was the most popular trail in the area, just glorious. The zenith of the hike was a view of a formation called Weaver's Needle, and I cannot even describe or share photos, because nothing will suffice. You just feel so expansive and inspired and capable and awestruck when you see something like that, that something like that exists on our earth, untouched and untouchable by humanity. 

 

The assembled Council of Rock

I cannot do justice to Weaver's Needle so instead I shall do injustice with an empanada comparison

 

If Chapter One of the hike was ascending the most popular trail in easy pleasant glory, Chapter Two--the return to the parking lot--was entirely different; we decided to follow a different line on the map down. If we'd told the ranger, sitting all sun-protected at the parking lot, what we were going to do, he would have counseled us not.

 

Three minutes along the down trail, an older hiker man with a good sunhat and a camelback came upon us. Unpretentiously he announced that we should walk with him because the trail was hard to follow and he knew it well. His manner was kind and we had no argument to refuse his offer, so we fell in step behind him. We all walked along quietly, just random humans weaving around spikey agave plants and stepping over rocking rocks. Then he began pointing out the names of different formations, "this one is Geronimo's Cave", "you can see mine tailings over there if you look carefully". By a half hour into our down trek, we sounded pretty much like an NPR interview as I asked him whatever questions came into my head: "how many times have you seen rattle snakes out here?", "what's the hardest hike you've ever been on?", "how many times have you done this trail?" We learned he was 65, had lived in Phoenix for 11 years, loved hiking and how close the city was to all this great recreation, how when he first came to the desert he finally felt like he was coming home. He hiked with an impressive lightness given a rather formidable girth, floating over the trail.

 

Geronimo's Cave

"Would you like a cookie?" we asked, which you do out of politeness and then people refuse, because that's what happens, but he said "yes please!" and then raved about my unabashedly hippy chia oat butter-free chocolate chip wads. At this point we all finally introduced ourselves, and his name was Ray, and so we called him Guiding Ray of Light Ray.

 

Now the trail was not a trail, it was Ray checking to the left and to the right, leading us up over rock stacks, through dense thickets of dusty green shrubs, around bends that yielded views of rocks shaped like huge donut holes. Then we reached the Devil's Slide. Imagine yourself the size of an ant, needing to crawl down a milk jug, that's what this was like. "Time to do the Boot Scoot Boogie" said Ray with delight and a silly mock-Texas accent, and he demonstrated a crab-walk to go down, keeping your center of gravity low. You also need to just trust your shoes. They know what to do. 

 

Devil's Slide

 

 

No blazes, signs, arrows, or even a path marked this trail. Only occasionally were there little rock cairns along the way, confirming that other humans had passed here before. But we would have been completely lost without Guiding Ray; "there's cairns where you don't need them and no cairns where you do need them" he said.

 

It was now 12 noon and blistering hot, shadeless, just us exposed making our way down rock. But we finally reached the parking lot, which felt like an impossibility when I looked back behind me and just saw piles of mountain. It was exhilarating and exciting and exhausting, and a gift to have met a guide. Thank you, Ray, for your patience and trail wisdom. 

 

 

Happy endings with Guiding Ray