Cabeza Prieta

BY: Charles Bowden

Roger Di Rosa arcs his flashlight across the night dunes. The moon still sleeps as he searches for sign of kangaroo rats and sidewinder snakes. He strolls the Pinta Sands in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. He is the assistant manager and this is his workplace. The dunes are penetrated by 20,000-year-old volcanic flows from the Pinacate Mountains to the south in Mexico, and Di Rosa sees fine sand and fingers of black rock and the tiny prints of the rats and the long traces of their tails. He stands on the edge of 2.2 million acres that lack people, houses, paved roads, running water, machines, noise. To the south stretches Mexican Highway 2. But the night winds are not up, so no engine sounds spill into this place.

Several things have made possible this sanctuary: a hard desert that kills people; the United States Air Force and its need for a place to plink away at targets; the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and its mandate to protect bighorn sheep in the area; and the Boy Scouts of America.

It happened this way.

The hard dry desert killed hundreds (maybe thousands) of people during the gold rush that began in 1849. Their route, El Camino del Diablo, (the Highway of the Devil).

Since World War II the Air Force has commandeered the surrounding land and almost all of the airspace for a gunnery range. The possibility of zinging bullets and rockets discourages traffic. In the 1930s an Ajo, Arizona, Boy Scout troop, led the fight for preserving the area for vanishing bighorn sheep. And in 1939, it was done.

Today, maybe 75 sheep and some endangered Sonoran pronghorns-roam the 860,000-acre refuge. But preserved in the main here are not rare animals or plants. They are peace and quiet and space. This ground harbors silence. These valleys teach the eye the look of a world where a road can barely be seen, where there are no power lines, and where the towns have not come to sprawl.

El Camino del Diablo still snakes across this desert, and tonight Roger prowls for kangaroo rats and sidewinders within 50 yards of the fabled trail. But now human deaths have stopped; the country is no longer some horror to flee across.

The names on this land roll off the tongue like a litany. Mountains called Childs, Growler, Granite, Agua Dulce, Bryan, Sierra Pinta, Cabeza Prieta, Sierra Arida, Sierra Tuseral. The Tule Desert. The Lechuguilla Desert. The Drift Hills.

Roger comes back to camp and snaps off his light.

Dark rocks form a circle on the brown earth. Six, seven, 10 centuries past, flames danced from campfires here in the Growler Valley. This is a Hohokam site, a place visited by Indians who vanished around 1450. Roger scans for pottery fragments. He does not dig. In this desert much litters the surface, and human history rests right on top. To the north, in a mountain pass, petroglyphs dance on the rocks. The patterns wander from natural forms to abstractions. Twenty-five yards away stones outline a 1920 prospector's camp. And just beyond beckons the cool pool of Charley Bell Well, under a giant mesquite tree. Ten centuries can be seen at a glance.

Roger finds a 20-millimeter shell casing in the road and a .50-caliber bullet. A hundred yards farther on, he pokes the coals of a campfire dead before Columbus set sail.

No clouds mar the sky; blue drips from it like paint. The desert here on the valleyfloor runs to creosote; ironwood struggles in the faint depressions of the drainage. Everywhere quiet reigns: no birdsong, no machine sound, no insect whirring. Silence. Sound died of thirst, and days slide back with few breaks in the quiet. No coyote howls in the night.

Archeologists call this place Lost City. Pottery suggests the Hohokam used the site for maybe 500 years. They came to this valley around A.D. 900; they stopped visiting around 1400. These ancient people gathered seashells at Adair Bay, on the Gulf of California, 70 miles to the south. They stopped at this camp in the Growler Valley to work the shells into necklaces. Then they marched north 30 miles to the Gila River to trade. Roger picks up a seashell resting on the surface. His fingers rub a bit of merchandise mislaid half a millenium ago. He pitches it.

To the east the cliffs of the Growler Mountains rise. Prairie falcons nest there. To the north, a faint rumble rolls down the valley from the gunnery range. In the distance, a spent aluminum target flashes in the noon light. At Lost City, two or three dozen hearths pock the surface where people bustled making trade items. The volcanic rock, the Hohokam pottery, the flight of the prairie falcon, and the .50One of 414 refuges in the National Wildlife Refuge system - the Cabeza Prieta (Dark Head) is a unique slice of one of the hottest and driest parcels of real estate in North America. Jack Dykinga photo

Once the hunting ground of the seminomadic Sand Papago Indians, the Cabeza Prieta Refuge is also scribed by ancient trade routes running from the Gulf of California to Arizona's interior. El Camino del Diablo, or de Muerte (Highway of the Devil, or of Death) above, was created in 1774 by Anza who led colonists from Tubac to found San Francisco. From that day to this more than 400 perished on the trail from exhaustion and thirst. Peter Kresan photoscaliber bullets of modern war wait together in the same plane of blinding light. Roger sits back in the Chevy Blazer, fires the motor. The door shuts with a heavy clunk, and the machine slowly moves through centuries lying side by side.

At camp in the Pinta Sands Roger speaks of his great dream. He has worked in the Cabeza four years. Now he thinks he will move on to find an assignment near waterlakes full of water, oceans of water. The Cabeza's rainfall starts at nine inches on the east and tapers to three in the west. And there are places where a year goes by and no rain falls at all. Roger stands in the late afternoon light and talks about skin diving, sea-going kayaks, wind surfing. He can taste the salt spray, feel the paddle slice, delight in the fish flashing by his mask. He blathers on while around him waits a 2 million acre tract with one dot of running water, a tiny seep in the Agua Dulce Mountains, at the eastern edge. To the north the Sierra Pintas bake in the sun, dunes splayed at their base. Saguaro and cholla and ocotillo search for solid ground among the sands. Lava beds blacken the horizon. A rock cairn stands on a distant hill, its frontier purpose long forgotten. This campsite marks a border within the dryness of the Cabeza. To the east deer sometimes manage to exist. To the west the land repels them. Roger is beyond such thoughts. Water, he can feel the energy of the water, the freedom of the waves. He talks surfing dreams, diving dreams, and remembers paddling his kayak on the Gulf, bartering with the trawlers for shrimp. He rummages through years spent in Oregon. Ah, he sighs, the Cabeza would be perfect if it just had a lake. Why, with the westerlies that sweep across it, he thinks the wind surfing would be terrific. The wind blows on at times without hope of an end. The first European in the Cabeza found cairns made from sheep horns. Indians built them to stop the wind, the endless, hot, dry wind. The sun slowly sinks. Two ravens caw into the red blaze. Roger swims on in his water-dreams as day ends in the Cabeza, and the sand sea laps around the campsite.Here the crossing has always been hard. Today, a four-wheel drive vehicle is recommended, and travel must be limited to winter months. Each year Roger and his boss, Jim Fisher, issue travel permits for 100 motorists who journey through the Camino's emptiness (when the way isn't closed by the Air Force). A permit is always required from Refuge headquarters.

Cabeza Pieta

This place is not for everyone to visit, but it is for everyone to think about. Like the Grand Canyon and the San Francisco Peaks, it can live in the minds even of those who may never visit, whispering of a world not of straight streets. The first visit by a European went badly. Melchor Díaz trekked the Cabeza in 1540. His goal: a rendezvous with Coronado's supply ship on the Colorado River. Díaz missed the sailing of the ship. While hunting game he accidentally fell on his lance. The wound killed him before he escaped the deserts of Sonora. One hundred and fifty-nine years later Father Eusebio Francisco Kino entered the area. He brought Christianity to the Indians,(Far left) Hot and dry, yet the Cabeza Prieta is home to bighorn sheep, Sonoran antelope, and 12 other rare and threatened birds and animals. Peter Kresan photo (Far left, bottom) Refuge Assistant Manager Roger De Rosa inspecting Tule Well Tank, one of a trickle of water sources in this otherwise arid preserve. Jack Dykinga photo (Right) Along water hole trails are still seen signs of ancient man: sleeping circles outlined with rocks, stone shelters, and petroglyphs. Jack Dykinga photo (Below) Some things in this sandy world remain from later eras, like this prospector's shack with parts of its corrugated roof still in place. Jack Dykinga photo and deduced that California was not an island. The Jesuit named many of the current water holes of the Cabeza and probably passed within a mile of Roger's camp in the Pinta Sands. And then for seven decades the Cabeza fell out of history. More Spaniards came through in the 1770s and 1780s, leading parties to California, moving colonists to Yuma. And then moving back the survivors from Yuma, when the Indians rebelled against their new neighbors. The millions of acres were just an obstacle between more hospitable places and other dreams. Water holes got named, trails marked. No one stayed except those who died on the trail.

SYLVESTER: Remains to be Seen

To some people, Sylvester is so bad, he's awful. To others, Sylvester is so awful, he's wonderful. Sylvester is a genuine organic mummy produced by Mother Nature in that simple old-fashioned way by dehydration. After decades of travel throughout the United States, Sylvester has found a more or less permanent home in Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, on Seattle, Washington's Pier 51. "Our greatest single attraction," says proprietor Joe James. Almost nothing is known about Sylvester, the living person. But his second "life" as a curio has been filled with raw adventure, wry humor, and wrenching pathos. Not many among the living have matched the exciting experiences of Sylvester, the mummy. In 1895 Sylvester was discovered by two cowboys riding across the dry alkali sands of the desert west of Gila Bend, Arizona, near or within what is now the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Death apparently was from a bullet wound in the left side. Scientists, including a modern-day Maricopa County medical examiner, have concluded the victim was about 45 years old, was tall and fat, and was slain on a day of great heat and low humidity. Total dehydration likely was completed in 24 hours, leaving Sylvester preserved in every detail: hair, blue eyes, mustache, teeth, and nails even the stains of his fatal wound. In the process, his weight dropped from an estimated 235 pounds to 135. His complexion took on a rich mahogany hue. Sylvester first was packed off to Yuma, where all efforts at identification failed. For a while he was propped up in a secondhand storeas a conversation piece, but Sylvester was too big for Yuma. Yellowed clippings tell of Sylvester in a carnival in Texas; Sylvester on display in a Midwestern sideshow; Sylvester astonishing a museum curator in the East. Sylvester amazed the throngs at Seattle's Alaska Yukon Exposition in 1909 and San Francisco's PanamaPacific Exposition in 1915. Sylvester's most bizarre episode spanned the Great Depression, when Americans had few nickelsto squander on freak shows. Sylvester landed all but unwanted in Texas, until purchased, for $35, by a San Jose, California, physician. The doctor had a false bottom built into his living room sofa, placed Sylvester in the compartment, and covered the space with heavy plate glass, strong enough to support cushions and guests. When entertaining, the doctor thought it great fun to ask his guests to move their cushions and see what they had been sitting on. A few shrieks. Lots of laughs. When the physician himself passed on to a more dignified resting place, his heirs hired out Sylvester to carnivals and sideshows. All sorts of exaggerations were concocted by carny barkers Sylvester was an alien smuggled into the United States and murdered by his guides; Sylvester was in reality the remains of John Wilkes Booth; and Sylvester wasn't murdered...he was an Arizona cowboy who got drunk and passed out in the sun, where he just died and dried. The curiosity shop in Seattle acquired Sylvester in 1955. Since then, Sylvester has stood in a glasscovered nook. Visitors give Joe James plenty of advice. Some folks think it's cruel to keep Sylvester on display. Others think he is a fake. Some years ago there was a feeble attempt by Arizonans to reopen the Sylvester murder case, for, obviously, Sylvester didn't shoot himself, dig a hole, and pull the sand in on top. Joe James shrugs off all suggestions. It's a matter of relativity, says Joe. Standing around causing double takes in a Seattle curiosity shop may not be the best of afterlife, but it's better than lying inside a sofa waiting for people to move the cushions.

Gold at Sutter's Mill, in 1849, put the Cabeza Prieta on new maps. Thousands tried the crossing from Sonoita, Sonora, Mexico, to Yuma, Arizona. To the north sure water could be found on the Gila River. But so could hostile Indians.

So began the vast folk movement that added dread to the Camino's name. Graves dotted banks of water holes; bones gleamed in the sun; and people spoke of the emptiness and the silence and the sand and the rock shifting color in the bright light. Spoke of these things as horrors. Here they felt the face of death brushing against their lives. There were many agonies. But the pain fell mostly into the sands, without leaving records. Rocks heard the last words.

Now the light fails slowly, and the ground shifts from white to yellow to red. To the south Pinacate Peak rises in Sonora. Kino stood on this volcanic cone almost 300 years ago, scanning the Gulf for a land connection to California. He met Papagos on the dunes below. The women wore rabbit skins and were frightened by the sight of a white man. Their first. Pinacate Peak lords it over this country. It does not husband a drop of living water.

Roger fires up the stove for dinner, and the gas jets hiss.

California no longer is considered an island. The rush for the gold is over. Soon night will fall on the Cabeza, and nothing will move by the hand of man. History has left this place again.

A tiny animal jaw stares up from the dune like a white chip. Four worn teeth remember meals. A finger rubs against them and barely feels a cutting edge. A five-inch femur stands out from the black rock. The death is forgotten, and now the bone is white against black. Near the road, the jawbone of a javelina still has two worn teeth intact. This is not prime country for such animals; they are on the rim of their world here. The deer world ends miles to the east, one of many frontiers within the Cabeza.

Night falls on the country, the mountains go away, and stars return to the sky. The temperature sinks, and the sleeping bag feels good. Above, satellites sweep over the heavens, bouncing messages and attending to their spy errands. Three pass in 15 minutes. The Cabeza sleeps, an island in a wired world.

Buckhorn Canyon wears granite weathered into a sandstone texture. The gap cuts into the Cabeza Prieta range, namesake of the Refuge. It is noon, and the stone walls throw white light on the saguaro, cholla, and ironwood.

A natural rock reservoir looks down from halfway up the canyon side. It catches the rains and for a few months of the year promises water for the sheep. The Refuge is studded with such secret waters tucked away in the stone mountains. Sometimes people do not, and they wander and perish in the 120-degree Fahrenheit summers.

(Right) A monument to our times. A crippled aerial dart (target), planted nose-first in the sands of the Cabeza Prieta, shares space with spent ammunition and other curios which drifted over from the Luke Air Force Gunnery Range bordering the refuge on the north. Jack Dykinga photo (Below) In Arizona's Southwest corner: historic routes of Padre Francisco Tomás Garcés, Arizona's greatest missionary after Father Kino, and Juan Bautista de Anza, military commander at Tubac and explorer of the land west of the Colorado River. Anza's track through and beyond the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge was dreaded later as El Camino del Diablo.

Cabeza Prieta

Molina, a palm-like agave, clings to the rocky slopes and splashes a tropical screen on the brown world. Paloverde grows near the reservoir. The canyon shelters some elephant trees, Bursera microphylla. The bark peels, and the color goes from paper white to green to red. The crushed leaf smells pungent. Some call this plant pepper tree. The ele-phant tree cannot stand the frost, and this is almost the northern edge of its reach.

Down below is a blind where men from the Refuge hide in the torrid days of late June and early July, when the rain has not fallen for months, and the desert sheep must go to the rock reservoir to drink. This is the annual census. A man sits in the blind and waits for the animals from dawn to dusk while the sweat rolls off his body. They know he is there, but the blind is a necessary courtesy.

The bighorn have been driven from muchof their historic range. Now the bands cling to a caution learned in the years of the great slaughter. Even though the Refuge is a sanctuary with only one or two hunters permitted a year, the sheep still stay up high. They retreat to the hard country. For three years no hunter has brought down a ram.

Beyond the rock wall of Buckhorn Canyon sprawls the Lechuguilla Desert. On the eastern edge, wild flowers explode from the sand. Farther west, the year has been so fierce even the creosote bush is brown with thirst. The Lechuguilla stopped many early travelers permanently. On its west side waited Tinajas Altas (High Tanks), with its rock reservoirs full of slimy green water. Some died at the foot of the holes in the rocks, too weak to climb. Graves once surrounded the place. Now the dead have melted back into the earth.

For us, a perfect day. There are no clouds, and the sun bounces off a carpet of yellow flowers. This afternoon, the Lechuguilla does not threaten. Now it is abloom underfoot. At the Tinajas Altas rock pours into shapes and textures like giant bones. Drink has waited for survivors since thirst came to this country.

The Cabeza is not a place that can be taken or bagged or conquered. Always the trip must end, and the Cabeza endures in its own way. No one can make a trophy of this place. It keeps sliding off the maps with their clear lines and precision.

Last year, Roger says, the Fish and Wild-life Service found a new water hole in the Growler Mountains. They had suspected one was out there because the sheep did not always come to known water. The summer heat would arrive and the air be torched empty of moisture, and still the sheep would stay out in the rock of the mountain. Forty-two years after the refuge was created they found the water hole up a canyon. Like many places in this desert, others had been here before.

Down canyon, they came upon a rock blind where once a man waited with a bow for a sheep to pass, perhaps waited for the kill at a time when no human being in Europe knew the Western Hemisphere existed. Waited for a fine ram under the blue sky and white sun, while the silence of the Cabeza was broken by nothing but the beat of his anxious heart.

Treat the Refuge with care. America has about run out of such places.