Seeking the Water's Source

We started sawanobori with a three-word mantra buzzing in our heads. Find the source. Find the source. Find the source.

If you're not familiar with sawanobori, you might think that photographer Jack Dykinga and I were a couple of headshaved, wild-eyed mystics beginning some kind of metaphysical quest for the Godhead. Hardly. Sawanobori-even though it might sound like a meditative spiritual practiceis actually the vigorously physical sport of following streams to their point of origin, or source. Long popular in Japan but little known in this country, sawanobori, which translates roughly as "stream climbing," is a unique way to explore wild country. No trail needed. No map necessary. Just follow the water.

Jack and I had chosen the upper reaches of the East Verde River near Payson for our first taste of sawanobori adventure. After a vehicle-supported reconnaissance of lower stretches of the river, we pitched a base camp in the Tonto National Forest and set out on foot to scout the route for a backpacking foray the next day.

"Lead on, Sawanabwana," Jack barked at my back as we worked our way up a meandering watercourse flanked by firs and trimmed with clumps of vibrant-yellow monkeyflowers.

Snared by the scenery, Jack stopped to photograph East Verde water tumbling down a narrow, rocky gorge shaded by bigtooth maple trees. I pressed on upstream, inching along a slippery slope above the flow and clambering over tangles of deadfall timber.

I'd first heard of sawanobori in a book called The Hidden West by Rob Schultheis. In later research, I learned that the sport, as practiced in Japan, often involves ascending extremely steep, turbulent streams or even frozen watercourses. But, as Schultheis and others have noted, sawanobori can be adapted to any stream-and it's an excellent entree into the deep heart of canyons and mountain ranges of the Southwest.

Most of us, who have limited time and energy at our disposal, will begin a sawanobori trek a few miles to a dozen miles or so below the stream's source. Others might try a more ambitious version-such as a multiweek backpack-ing journey along the Gila River in Arizona and New Mexico. An ultimate Southwestern expression of the sport might be to follow the Colorado River from its mouth in the Sea of Cortes to its source high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Sawanobori, the sport of following streams to their origins, can be practiced wherever flowing water has carved a course. Even a dry desert wash meandering out of a minor mountain range can serve as a sawanobori venue. A vibrant, flowing creek in cool, forested high country offers the added benefits of abundant streamside vegetation and wildlife.

The East Verde, a tributary of the larger Verde River that slices down the center of the state north of Phoenix, struck us as splendid sawanobori material. Maps show it plunging off the 7,500-foot Mogollon Rim and carving a course through forests flanked by rugged canyon walls before slipping under State Route 87 and snaking west toward its confluence with the main Verde.

Like many Arizona "rivers," the East Verde, especially in the upper reaches we were exploring, is clearly a creek in everything but name. In many places, Jack and I were able to cross this alleged river with the help of only two or three stepping-stones.

It was by misjudging one of those stones that I took my first sawanobori spill and splash on my way back toward camp from the scouting mission. Nothing hurt. Just a little wet. And, happily, Jack was somewhere downstream and unavailable to question the agility of the expedition's sawanabwana.

Back in base camp, Jack and I loaded our backpacks with a minimal amount of gear for an overnight outing over the next couple of days. We sought to travel as lightly as possible because our scouting hike had revealed a fundamental sawanobori truth: Trekking along a watercourse, at least in a rugged Southwestern canyon, is rougher and slower-going than hiking along a maintained streamside trail. You're scrambling over slippery rocks, creeping along little ledges above the water and high-stepping over fallen tree trunks-all the while taking care to avoid trampling vegetation or contributing to erosion.

Adding to the need for lightweight gear was the fact that Jack was automatically laden with his large, weighty 4x5 camera gear and even heavier supplies of film. And let's not forget my 3-by-5-inch notebook and two pens, I reminded Jack as I waved my writer's burden at him. "These babies aren't exactly light, you know," I said, eliciting some words Jack clearly didn't learn from his mother.

Our pared-down equipment consisted of featherweight sleeping bags and ground pads, a light tarp doubling as ground cloth and emergency shelter, a pump-style water filter to purify East Verde water, a tiny stove, a teapot and modest food rations.

At dusk, a light rain settled the dust and contributed, however modestly, to the East Verde flow. Jack planned to turn in early, but I wanted to read for a while with water music in the background. So I walked the short distance from our campsite to the river, found a splendid (Text continued on page 27)

(Continued from page 22) rock seat under a sheltering overhang just above the stream, and knocked off a couple of chapters by the light of my climber's headlamp before retiring.

Stretched out in my sleeping bag, with only the perfume of dampened pine needles to remind me of the brief shower, I had the marvelous sawanobori pleasure of drifting off to sleep to the distant melody of tumbling mountain water in search of the sea.

The next day, burdened with the backpacks but aided by lightweight trekking poles for balance, we made steady progress up the watercourse. Late-winter snows along the Mogollon Rim had provided just the right moisture matrix at our 6,000-foot elevation to bring about a late spring and summer explosion of green.

We poled past dense gardens of shapely bracken ferns prospering in the shade of ponderosa pines, occasional Douglas firs and bigtooth maples. Mountain and streamside shrubs grew in such thick clumps along some stretches of the river as to create a slight sense of jungle. Elsewhere, early season

I hauled myself up increasingly steep slopes alongside the rocky, bone-dry ravine that would gush to life as the very upper stretch of the river after periods of heavy rain or snow.

Wildflowers splashed the banks with color. Abundant yellow monkeyflowers were the stars, accompanied by assorted daisy species, paintbrushes and penstemons. Flourishing but notyet-blooming columbine plants promised more brilliant yellow blooms to come over the course of the summer. Jack and I took our time, walked in beauty and soaked up the scenery with wide eyes and big lenses. We had chosen a relatively short sawanobori route precisely so we'd have time to stop and smell the monkeyflowers, as well as get some exercise. Our one-way trekking mileage up the river might have been only 3 or 4 miles. There's no accurate way to gauge the distance because the stream takes so many twists and turns-and because we took numerous side jaunts to explore small tributary streams and springs.

But covering some set distance wasn't the goal. Finding the source, the beginning, of the East Verde River was our mission. And we were all over it by midafternoon.

As we followed the watercourse into an ever-narrowing canyon near the foot of the Mogollon Rim, we noticed that the flow decreased steadily until we finally reached a point where the main streambed was all but dry.

Ah, but just as we were concluding that the river must be devoid of wateror perhaps hiding underground-from there on up to the Rim, we noticed a faint flow, little more than a trickle, feeding in from the northwest. We followed this wet clue up steep slopes and were surprised to encounter what turned out to be a power-line maintenance road with water seeping across it.

"Look how green it is up there," I said to Jack, pointing beyond the road toward a verdant shoulder of land at the foot of a boulder-strewn slope.

We had just discovered the source-or, more accurately, one of the sources of the East Verde River.

Spring water gurgled from the earth into a kitchen sinksized pool between a pair of gray-pink boulders splotched with patches of blue-green lichen. Watercress, bits of moss and blades of emerald-green grass trimmed the spring, which gave rise to a rivulet no larger than a man's index finger. This utterly minimalist tributary trickled downhill toward the main watercourse.

Okay, we were not exactly Lewis and Clark, but still, it appeared we had accomplished our modest mission of finding the highest source of water spawning the East Verde River.

As always in great sagas of exploration, there were some qualifications. Nature is rarely neat and tidy and predictable in her ways and means. Rather than issuing from a single source, the East Verde actually comes to life from several seeps and high springs like the one we'd found, an official of the Tonto National Forest told me in a conversation after our sawanobori journey.

And there was another consideration. Even as Jack set to work making photographs of ferns and boulders near the spring site, I found myself glancing again and again toward the lip of the Mogollon Rim at the head of our canyon. I've lived most of my life in the American West, and I've got this "water-runs-downhill" concept down to a science. It was perfectly clear to me that-while this spring might be the current high point and source of the river's flow - the ultimate source after rainstorms or during periods of snow runoff would be right there on the Rim itself.

Unfortunately for my somewhat tired legs, this realization carried with it a responsibility. It was my job, as an investigative sawanobori reporter, to make my way to the once-and-for-all-seasons, indisputable source of the East Verde River. So while Jack worked on more photos-and, I might add, took a long snooze in ponderosa pine shade - I hauled myself up increasingly steep slopes alongside the rocky, bonedry ravine that would gush to life as the very upper stretch of the river after periods of heavy rain or snow.

After perhaps an hour of uphill trudging, I topped out of the canyon and stepped onto the Rim Road (Forest Service Road 300). Not a drop of water in sight-but it apparently was the highest source of East Verde water in wet seasons.

"Sawanobori accomplished," I congratulated myself before heading downhill.

That night, lower in the canyon, at a campsite near a wellflowered, gurgling stretch of the river, Jack and I chowed down on freeze-dried rations brought to life with boiled East Verde water.

Now that we'd had a taste of sawanobori, we started talking tough. Heck, we thought, someday we might want to follow, say, the Little Colorado all the way from its mouth in the Grand Canyon to its source high in the White Mountains. Even that would be a piece of cake compared to a sort of ultrasawanobori adventure chronicled in a movie Jack described called Mountains of the Moon. The 1989 film is the gripping story of English explorers searching for the source of the Nile River in Africa.

But that night, nestled in a wooded Arizona canyon under a canopy of glowing stars, we didn't need the Little Colorado, the big Colorado, the Nile or the Amazon. It was enough to fall asleep to the melody, the lullaby, of the East Verde Riverand to know precisely from whence it came.

Birding in Truxton Canyon

Permanent water ensures a robust habitat for many species [RIGHT] Watered yearround by White Rock spring, Truxton Canyon in northwestern Arizona attracts a wide variety of birds, including the yellow warbler, a small neotropical migrant that feeds mainly on insects. TOM VEZO