A PILGRIMAGE TO BASE CAMP

I was looking for a two-track. Although I wasn’t sure what a two-track was, I could guess. Tracks, of course, no doubt made by a motor vehicle. Two of them. It’s just that I’d never heard the phrase before. I’ve heard it often enough since. This first time, a U.S. Forest Service employee used the words to help me find a place I knew only from stories and maps: Merriam Base Camp.

He saw me not far from a simple road sign that read, “Little Spring,” where I’d parked my car. I hadn’t seen the sign the last time I’d been by here, a decade earlier. I surmised that anything marked on maps should be easy to find, that it would be surrounded by abundant signage and a parking lot. There would be a kiosk with maps, words and pictures, and maybe even a gift shop. I was mistaken, though, and ultimately glad that I was, even though this place is to the science of ecology what the Galápagos Islands are to evolution — what Archimedes’ bathtub was to “Eureka!”

The bathtub is long lost, but the Galápagos are the prize in a pilgrimage made by many biologists and naturalists. Little Spring, on the other hand, is humble beyond measure. There is nothing along Forest Road 151 to call attention to the place. Located on the northwest flank of the San Francisco Peaks, north of Flagstaff, and less than a mile from Hart Prairie, it calls out to a more contemplative pilgrim, someone who takes their nature and history without embellishment.
 

I missed my quarry by a mile my first time on FR 151, and I hadn’t found the historic campsite. As luck had it, this time, there was that Forest Service employee who asked if I was looking for a good place to see fall foliage. I wasn’t, but it was a reasonable question on an October day. The aspens displayed peak yellow-gold against a sky so blue and vast that pigments and pixels blush to mirror it. And there was a midday moon peeking brightly past the branches of ponderosas high overhead. Under my feet, a bronze carpet of fallen leaves decorated the road.

No, I told him, I was looking for C. Hart Merriam’s base camp. He nodded approvingly and gave me these simple instructions: Walk down this bronze-carpeted road for less than a mile, until I came to a meadow with a two-track. Follow the two-track into a stand of Douglas firs, and I would find a small plaque, on a rock, marking the spot.

After a few minutes of walking, I came to the meadow and to what looked like two parallel trails — a two-track! — that disappeared after a few yards but did seem to point a way across the meadow and into some trees. I disappeared into the same trees in pursuit. And then I walked in an enlarging spiral, looking for the plaque.
 

I HAD COME HERE HOPING to feel some kinship with the man whose biographer, Keir Sterling, called him “the last of the naturalists.” A smidge of hyperbole, that was. Merriam was not the last of the naturalists, by any means; I had been studying the lives and works of others who were more recent. Ornithologists. Ichthyologists. Herpetologists. Mammalogists, like Merriam. They are not yet extinct, even today. But Sterling was making a point about the way science was changing, and how it had already changed, in the closing decades of the 19th century.

Merriam came here in the summer of 1889 with Virginia Elizabeth Merriam, who had married him less than three years earlier. With a few hundred dollars in funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Merriams set up a camp, with the aid of hired hands from Flagstaff, and were joined not long after by Vernon Bailey, a young naturalist who was eager to prove his worth to Merriam — and to science. Later, the herpetologist Leonhard Stejneger joined them, too. Over the course of that summer, the party traveled by horseback, collecting specimens at each stop.

They passed across the northern slope of the Peaks, threading their way around abundant cinder cones, and continued eastward, across the Little Colorado River at Grand Falls; ultimately, they went as far east as Oraibi. Later in the summer, Merriam and Bailey traveled northwest to the rim of the Grand Canyon and spent two days and nights below the rim. Their travels were, on occasion, perilous. “The heat was intense,” Merriam wrote in a preface to his published report, “and much suffering was occasioned by want of water.”
 

Born before the Civil War, Merriam grew up near the well-watered Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Like many naturalists of his time, he liked to hunt. John James Audubon made observations of birds from the butt end of a shotgun. Charles Darwin’s father feared that his son’s affinity for hunting in the English countryside would lead to a life of pure leisure and indolence. Aldo Leopold was handy with firearms and with a bow and arrow. And Theodore Roosevelt, who counted Merriam as a friend, famously loved to hunt and to spend ample time on his work in natural history. Like all of them, Merriam knew how to clean a gun, was a good shot and, more importantly, had observed the behaviors of animals as a youngster. He knew how to track them and where they might appear.

The expedition to Arizona Territory was a collecting trip, and the hunting was necessary. But Merriam had a bold vision. He wanted to conduct a biological survey of the United States, creating maps of the distribution of plants and animals, primarily on the vast holdings of federal lands in the West. This would have been a herculean task, but Congress was in a bad mood about science at the time. The legislature had just clipped the wings of the U.S. Geological Survey and its ambitious director, John Wesley Powell. It was not about to fund a sequel to Powell’s ambitions with a biological inquiry on the same scale. So Merriam looked to the Department of Agriculture for the few hundred dollars he needed to take a few tentative steps toward his vision.

For its money, the department got one of the great bargains in the history of science. It was far too little money to do more than make a drop in the bucket with respect to mapping the biological resources of the West, much less the United States. But Merriam emerged from the summer expedition with something else: specimens, notes, descriptions and a comprehensive theory of the distribution of species, which we know today as the life zone concept. He was able to create what he labeled a “provisional map” of the biology of North America.
 

ONCE YOU KNOW ABOUT IT, the life zone concept tidies up a lot of the tangled web of nature. Plants and animals have needs. Some need a lot of rain; others do not. Some need sunshine; others want shade. Some thrive in warmer climes; others love cooler air and soils. This all can seem somewhat random and unimportant until you connect a few dots.

As it happens, there’s no better place to connect the dots than Arizona. On a drive along Interstate 17, you can see most of them: Sonoran desert and grassland, scrubby shrubs and junipers, ponderosa pines. On a fall day, you can see life zones etched into the southern slopes of the San Francisco Peaks — yellow aspens ascending the lower slopes, but stopping as though held back by some unseen velvet rope. Above them, Douglas firs to the tree line, if you make the effort to hike beyond the fire roads, and tundra above that.

Applying methods developed in South America and on the Tibetan Plateau by the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Merriam recorded measurements of temperature and barometric pressure, slope and ground cover, and noted the relationships between these and the organisms he and the others collected. Merriam went one step further, though, by claiming that what was true for altitude was also true for latitude — that traveling north was like traveling upslope — and, finally, that it matters which way a slope faces. From these simple insights, the Department of Agriculture derives its map of plant hardiness zones, still in use today.

As useful as the hardiness zones are to farmers, planters and gardeners, life zones also are a basis for the closely related ecological idea of the biome and for the marvelous dioramas created by artists and curators in museums of natural history around the globe.

This stand of Douglas firs with a spring nearby was no diorama. It was nature raw, with a dash of history. Other than the plaque, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. A rusted tent peg? A bit of disturbed earth where a tent once stood, or where the Merriams, Bailey, Stejneger and the cook had gathered for a meal? Hardly likely. Here’s what I found: a small metal marker with text that told me more about the people who placed the plaque there than about the small expedition to Little Spring in the summer of 1889. But it was enough. This pilgrim had found his quarry.
 

When You Go
From Flagstaff, go northwest on U.S. Route 180 for 9.5 miles to Forest Road 151 (Hart Prairie Road). Turn right (north) onto FR 151 and continue 7.5 miles to Forest Road 418B (look for the sign for Little Spring). Park here and walk a half-mile on FR 418B to the Merriam Base Camp site. FR 151 is unpaved but is suitable for most vehicles in good weather. For more information, call the Flagstaff Ranger District at 928-526-0866 or visit www.fs.usda.gov/coconino.