Backpacks Filled with Courage: Rick Fisher's Wilderness Treks for the Handicapped

STORY BY SAM NEGRI PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICK FISHER BACKPACKS FILLED WITH COURAGE: Rick Fisher's Wilderness Treks for the Handicapped

The best explorers are seldom as brilliant as they appear years after their death. In the earthly excursions that established their fame, they often stumbled, miscalculated distances, encountered unheard of diseases, and sometimes suffered the ridicule of those who had stayed at home with the dog, the pipe, and the afghan. But for most of these adventurous souls, there were other rewards, the deepest of which remains vague to this day: it is the joy of discovery. It is not only the discovery of the palpable world, but the invisible hand that stands beyond it, beckoning the traveler from the beaten path to the trackless wild. Rick Fisher, a guide to Arizona's Mogollon Rim Country, might put it this way: a man may stumble upon an ancient cliff dwelling, iridescent in its accumulated silence, and marvel at the engineering and the hints of a daily existence remote from technological turbulence, but only when he turns from the dwelling and looks down the canyon will he experience the force that compels the explorer: given a choice, the explorer will take the extremes of nature over the extremes of humankind.It is, perhaps, a surrealist's explanation for Fisher's success. He has seen and he has told. He went to the canyons of the Mogollon Rim, climbed, forded, swam, and scraped, visiting terrain where even the oblivious cows were halted in their wanderings, and he came back and told the others: come with me.

Does he sound like a prophet, an evangelist in Vibram soles? He is none of the above. He is, if anything, inarticulate, but only because the vocabulary for his experiences pales beside the reality. And so he says, come with me, but with a different twist. He doesn't seek out the brawniestof our species, the peak conquerors and Marine trainees; instead, he invites the middle-aged and the aged, the blind and the deaf. Good health cannot be ignored on Fisher's trips, but his invitations do not presuppose the body of an Olympic gymnast. To paraphrase Whitman, Fisher invites the soul. It is noteworthy that he is at present developing a rafting expedition specifically aimed at those who have lost the use of their legs.

Fisher is 31 years old, a graduate of the University of Arizona, and a resident of Tucson. In 1978 he formed the nonprofit Wilderness Expeditions Ltd., with a community-based board of eight citizens. The focus of the organization was to provide an educational and esthetic experience to anyone who had the yearning. The majority of the work has been with handicapped children. "We've dealt with every level of blindness, with deaf kids, juvenile delinquents, and the emotionally handicapped," he says. His formal education prepared him for this work, but his training for forays into the vast wildernesses of Arizona was another matter entirely.

From 1978 to 1982, he explored some of the most inaccessible regions of Arizona's vast canyonlands. "It took a good two years to figure out paths that normally healthy people could handle. Even the U.S. Geological Survey maps of the area were not a great help. They were made from the air so they didn't even know that most of the springs I found existed. Even local cowboys didn't know about them because they would go as far as the cows could go, or as far as they could get on horseback, and these were areas where cows and horses couldn't get into." Such factors made his excursions all the more enticing.

But how does one persuade his peers and the general public that he is qualified to lead the unknowing into the unknown? Fisher has his answer ready. He flashes a slide on to a screen. It is an icy and for-bidding mountain peak.

"I got my training right here on Aconcagua Peak. It's 23,000 feet high, on the Chilean-Argentine border, the third highest peak in the Western Hemisphere. I climbed it solo on January 14, 1982. How do you prove you have the level of skill you say you have? The way you do it is to go off and climb a real big international mountain solo, and if you survive it, they know your level of skill. But really I'm not a mountaineer; I'm a canyoneer. I got all of my training in the canyons of Arizona. I'm not really into conquering peaks. I did Aconcagua so that when people say, 'What makes you such an expert?' I can have something to point to."

However, his explorations of the canyons of the Mogollon Rim are no less However, his explorations of the canyons of the Mogollon Rim are no less impressive. He rattles off the canyons he has hiked like an eagle reviewing its airspace: Sycamore Canyon and the canyons of Oak Creek, Wet Beaver, West Clear Creek, Fossil Creek, Tonto Creek, Salome Creek, Cherry Creek, Canyon Creek, Cibicue Creek, Carrizo Creek, Eagle Creek, Black River, White River, and Blue River-and the location of his first tour with blind children, a 10-mile trek to the turquoise waterfalls in Havasu Canyon.

Hiking with the blind was in many respects an enlightening experience for Fisher, proving, among other things, that the blind and the inexperienced sighted hiker have much in common. Listen to Fisher's narrative: "The key to hiking with blind kids is to get a place where the footing is good. The blind hike with a sighted guide. The blind kid puts his hand on the back of the pack of the other guy. Havasu Canyon was a good challenge, but they could carry their packs the entire distance.

"These kids had never been camping in their lives, much less backpacking. From Havasu Falls we went down to Mooney Falls, and we found that, even though you have to use a rope, blind youngsters climb better than sighted people because they can't see. The majority of sighted people are inhibited because of a fear of height, but with blind kids, they'll just feel it, and if it's a good hold they'll go with it. They believe in their touch whereas we believe in our eyes."

Preparations for backpacking do not come naturally to either the blind or the inexperienced outdoorsman, so Fisher begins the educational portion of his trips with orientation sessions.

"The first few hours we talked about camping and all the gear. The first couple of days it's teach, teach, teach; but by the time we were making the trip out of the canyon, the kids and their staff people from their school had learned so much about camping procedures, that I had plenty of time to spend with individual children. I spent a lot of time with a totally blind 14-year-old boy. It was his first camping experience, and he had tears in his eyes constantly after the first three days because he was so happy."

In the beginning, most participants, whether or not they are blind, share an apprehensiveness that comes from the newness of their experiences in a remote and rugged terrain.

"Everybody is that way," Fisher maintains, "until they realize that, hey, I learned all the things I need to know, and nothing bizarre is going to happen to me. Then they relax."

More than a hundred years ago, William Cullen Bryant expressed the rewards that evolve. From Thanatopsis: To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy....

The language sounds stilted today, but Fisher is first to confirm the credibility of the sentiments expressed. He talks the vivid language-not of the Victorian dilettante-but of one who has descended West Clear Creek Canyon in the dark.

"I found these white rock pools at West Clear Creek. I came right down near a travertine spring. It was pitch dark, and I knew I was in the middle of something, and I was praying it wasn't poison ivy. In the morning I discovered it was elephant grass...so then we headed down canyon farther and found one of the longest pools on the Mogollon Rim.

B A C K P A C K E R S

"It makes you feel like it's several hun-dred yards long; it's only about a hundred yards long, but the creek turns several times in that distance. When you're swimming through there, you're not counting distance. You look up, and the rock is just corrugated with all kinds of crevices, trees hanging over, logs jammed in everywhere. There are so many sights to see like that, it's hard to put it in words."

Frustrated with his unyielding lexicon, Fisher drops his hands in his lap and con-cludes that this lure of the canyons is attributable to the interplay of water, light, and stone. A painting would be easier to understand, he implies, and suddenly an obscure journal notation is recalled. The author had seen a painting by Tubac art-ist Hugh Cabot which triggered extraordinary feelings about the light found in Arizona's backcountry. The journal read: (BELOW) "This canyon section shows no sign of human intrusion," says Fisher. "It took hours to work through the last mile. Wet shoes made climbing and descending 40-foot boulders a tricky task. Each boulder was followed by a swim to a short falls, to a cliff traverse, and back to a dunking."

Cabot was an artist who had seen and felt the same light that has made me pause, countless times, in foothills and mountains. Sometimes it is a peculiar gold, almost magenta.... His paintings

captured a momentary magic; they stopped where I had stopped. They spoke of places that were solitary and windy, but otherwise peaceful. I can remember a few times, coming out of the mountains in terrible heat, when I had lost my sense of direction, allowed my mind to wander while watching my feet, trying to avoid the omnipresent sun, and suddenly realizing that I'd gone off the trail. Suddenly I was in the middle of a hillside covered with shin-daggers and the remnants of old juniper trees, and no place to sit too many small rocks with orange veins, rocks undoubtedly shading a family of scorpions at siesta. At such times I have to stop, listen to my heart thumping, and count off the seconds. What's it like to die of dehydration? I may never find my way out of this mess, I think. In the distance, I can see the outline of familiar mountains, familiar grasses, all the predictable steep drainages, but in this light they all look the same, simultaneously very peaceful and damned frightening. I hear fies and darting lizards, and then I see barbed wire, then an old cow pie. I'm not the first one here. Think. Watch the light and wait. And think. All of the intangible, amorphous sensations that threaten and enticestrange contradictions were there in the light.

Does this approach the feelings that Fisher has experienced exploring those canyons that slice the Mogollon Rim across a 100 mile stretch of Central Arizona? Fisher smiles, leaning on Saint Francis: "Blessed is God as He hath created both thirst and water." Fortunately, he doesn't stop there: "The qualities, the textures of those three different elements, is really what inspired me to do these canyons and the photography. Every stone, every different geological type, has a different feel to your hand. It reacts differently when you climb on it, it reacts differently when the water touches it, depending upon its molecular makeup, its origins-whether it's volcanic or metamorphic or whatever-and the way the light shines through the water and flashes little geometrical patterns on the rocks; well, the light just makes the water have a life of its own...."

Is it any wonder that Fisher has dropped himself into a terrain that today is nearly as uncharted as the regions surveyed by the indomitable John Wesley Powell between 1869 and 1872? Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who mapped the Grand Canyon and later was named head of the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote in his journal: The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself.... The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse.... Besides the elements of form, there are elements of color, for here the colors of the heavens are rivaled by the colors of the rocks. The rainbow is not more replete with hues.... It is still possible to find solitude in the Grand Canyon, but most of its secrets are known, and a new explorer must make his mark. Fisher chose the canyons of the Mogollon Rim, "the most rugged terrain north of the Mexican border," a country protected by shear basaltic cliffs and tangles of thornbrush chaparral. It is a place that is almost magical: in a single day, traveling on foot, Fisher can guide you from true desert to emerald pools and cascading waterfalls. It is a country of bobcats, bears, mountain lions, bald eagles, golden eagles, black hawks, whitetail and mule deer, and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. Fisher, in his boyish enthusiasm, wants to share it with everyone and-as if convenced of the transmutability of the experience-has started his sharing with those who can neither see nor hear.

Editors' note: The pristine canyons featured here are within Arizona's national forests and the White Mountain Apache Indian reservation. Sycamore Canyon is protected as a designated U.S. Forest Service Wilderness Area, and the Forest Service is currently studying parts of Oak Creek, Wet Beaver Creek, West Clear Creek, Fossil Creek, Tonto Creek, Salome Creek, Cherry Creek, and Blue River canyons for inclusion as designated Wildernesses.

Sam Negri, a newspaper feature writer in Tucson, has published articles and essays in The New York Times, The New York Quarterly, and the Yale Alumni Magazine.

Additional Reading Hiking the Southwest: Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas, by Dave Ganci, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, California, 1983. Oak Creek Canyon and the Red Rock Country of Arizona, by Stewart Aitchison, Stillwater Canyon Press, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1978. A Sampler of 108 Sedona Westerner Trail Walks, Arranged and edited by Lorraine Jaquith and Dixon Fagerberg, Jr., The Pronto Press, Sedona, Arizona, 1979.