RUGGED GOOD LOOKS

MORE THAN ONCE have I fallen in love in the Kofa Mountains of Western Arizona. I don't mean metaphorically, or just with the place itself. I mean the real thing, where eyes meet, hands touch and chemistry instantly brews. It was not at the Grand Canyon or the sensual swell of sandstone in the northern part of the state, but in this lone mountain range poked up through the desert. Honestly, you don't need a soft place to sit if you're kissing. But you do have to have the right place. Back in the wild-seed days of my 20s and 30s, I worked for an outdoor-travel company, which was like a dating game for people accustomed to roughing it for weeks on end. Some couples would hook up in Yosemite among waterfalls, while others eloped to the rainforest coast of the Pacific Northwest, where, I heard, they would light candles for each other on the beach. Very romantic. My spot was in the Kofas, a dramatic jumble of igneous rock where a romantic prologue was using a knife blade to gouge a catclaw barb out of someone's suntanned flesh.

The lower, drier parts of Arizona may not strike you as perfect for any sort of amorous encounter, but there's a sweetness and secrecy to this mountain range. Seen from the highway running north from Yuma, the Kofa Mountains stand like a cloud bank on the horizon. Though it looks like an impenetrable wall of high points, you get back inside the range and find a complex, hidden interior of hoodoo washes and old mine roads. Canyons and hill-peppered basins stretch away to the east, graced by jackrabbits and stately saguaros. Reaching the highest points, you look out across a landscape of crowded signal peaks: Ten Ewe Mountain, Summit Peak, Polaris Mountain, Twin Spires, Lonesome Peak and the boulder-bottomed wall of Kofa Butte.

I don't necessarily recommend you take your next date to the Kofas. It can heighten senses in a way not everyone wants. There was a woman from Point Reyes, California, a guide as well, who was a lover of sea mist and coastal woods. She joined me in this low desert, and for the first time in her life found a cholla cactus imbedded deep in the back of her thigh. She must have had 10 sewing needle-sized spines sunk into her skin. She stood stock still, yelling at me, "This thing needs to get off of me."

"Use a stick," I said, knowing she was the type who'd rather pull it off herself. A cholla you do not grab with your hand lest you find yourself pinned to your own body. I handed her a stick. She ripped the ball of needles off her leg and flung the thing at me. I barely got out of the way of the flying pincushion. That's love, Kofa style.

We'd set small and simple camps, no tents, just our sleeping bags spooned together as meteors seared the sky. In the hilly back end of the range, out toward the spur of the Little Horn Mountains, yips and howls of coyotes would arc through the sky for miles, nothing to break their manic calls. By day, we'd travel into the surprisingly intricate interior of the Kofas, finding a

boulder scribed with ancient images, lizard-men and concentric circles. If it wasn't a boulder, it was a grotto-like canyon crowded in the back with a grove of rare native palm trees. If not palms, it would be a reflective mirror of rainwater gathered in a bedrock pool where we'd lean down and touch our lips to the surface, drinking its clear water. We called them kissing pools.

Dry lips would touch like sandpaper. Holding hands with sun-weathered, cracked skin felt like gripping a rock in your palm. This is the nature of wilderness romance, especially in the Kofas, legs and forearms scabbed from scrapes and cuts. Hair was unwashed, clothes salted with sweat. You slept on hard ground, scraping away bigger rocks for your shoulder blades and hips, and kissed under sleeping-bag hoods. When you woke, dawn flowed around mountains and cliffs. You heard the churr of the cactus wren, and then the plaintive whistle of the male phainopepla as he flew over green-skinned palo verde trees. The sun broke across summits as bright as harvested wheat. How could you not fall in love?

Sometimes it would be a group of friends and a spark would start between two of us, or it would be an actual date, an offer to come out walking for a few days in a desert wonderland. I'd even come alone sometimes, it was that good. I'd drop sup-ply caches packed in 5-gallon buckets (empties retrieved at the end of the trip) and wander for weeks with a pack on my back. I remember one night eating one of those jackrabbits - killed it with a slingshot, quartered it and cooked it right on a pile of smoldering palo-verde coals. The meal was fine and smoky, marinated in a sack with its own blood mixed with salt and wild lavender (the meat was a little like chewing on rubber bands).

I didn't subject my company to this kind of eating. God, no. I brought mac and cheese, cooked it up in a blackened pot, even served it with extra chunks of cheddar on top. Once I came with a bottle of red wine. We'd both carry our own supplies. I was no hero. But I carried the wine. I uncorked it with a Swiss Army knife and poured a glug into her metal cup and then one into mine. In this case, she was a sea kayak guide based in the Pacific Northwest, and she liked the wine. Later I shared my bag of trail mix with her as moonlight poured through rock towers, truly an aphrodisiacal combination.

One fine spring day at the head of the Palomas Plain on the backside of the Kofas, two of us found a chuparosa bush radiant with hundreds of small, scarlet blossoms. Each was slender and soft as silk. We plucked them like berries, eating one after the next. Known also as hummingbird bush, the flowers tasted like little dabs of honey. We ate way too many. Like kids sitting in a pile of apples they'd been eating, we turned a bit green, laughing at our own lunacy.

So who, really, was I falling in love with, those who came traveling out here with me, or the Kofas themselves? Taking off my boots and walking carefully barefoot down a dry wash among ragweed and bony plumes of creosote, I knew the answer. I would have spent my life with this mountain range, its sharply outlined entrances to rocky, shaded alcoves irresistible. The rare, red fruits of night cactuses were like finding valentines. Soaring western palisades turned molten with every sunset. I'd found my perfect partner. I finally asked the Point Reyes woman if she'd marry me. She said no about seven times, and then yes. When we began planning the wedding, she envisioned eucalyptus trees hanging over a ceremony on freshly cut grass. I was thinking a rocky wedding with barren peaks and cactuses, maybe a backdrop of desert palms in a gnarled and catclawed canyon. Needless to say, we called the whole thing off, vowing to remain the best of friends, and I returned to my true love, the desert where she had first kissed me. АН