Wilderness

A WILDERNESS PARADISE FOUND THE MAZATZALS

This is some of the roughest country on the face of the Earth. A look at the place-names within it tells you just how rough: Deadman Creek, Suicide Ridge, Hardscrabble Mesa, Dutchmans Grave, Hells Hole. There are places higher, deeper, and more desolate, but, for sheer orneriness, you can't beat the Mazatzal Mountains northeast of Phoenix. Arizona's largest designated Wilderness (252,000 acres), the area encompasses 250 miles of trails on which you are as likely to meet a bear or a rattlesnake as another person. Here box canyons confuse you, springs go dry, snowstorms swoop down suddenly, miles of impenetrable chaparral block your way, catclaw and cacti tear and scratch at you along the trails. But then comes the morning, and the crinkled hills flame up with the brilliant white shimmer of ceanothus bush. You suck the air into your nostrils, and it's rich with a heady perfume, a smell of almonds. You sit and sip your morning coffee and watch a Technicolor kestrel take off from the candelabra of an agave. And you think: some of the roughest, yes. And some of the most beautiful.

THE MOUNTAINS AND THEIR NAME

Nobody knows for certain what the name Mazatzal means or where it came from. A publication in the 1970s credited it to a Paiute Indian term meaning "empty place in between." (This is apt but strange because the nearest Paiutes in Arizona lived north of the Grand Canyon.) In the early 1980s, the Forest Service believed Mazatzal was an Apache word for "rough" or "rugged." (Apt again, but pure hogwash according to the Tonto Apache who live in the area.) The latest theory holds that it's a prehistoric Indian name meaning "area inhabited by deer."

How the mountains got their name remains pure speculation, but Mazatzals it is, and a tongue twister, to boot. Professorial types try to pronounce it more or less the way it's spelled: "Mah-zaht-sahls." Locals prefer the easier "Matt-uh-zals." They even have a story to support the way they say it: Seems a long time ago, a bragging tenderfoot came out from back East and contended he could best any man, conquer any terrain in Arizona.

"Well, what about them mountains over there?" the Payson cowboys asked him.

"Those," he said, "are as nothing compared to what I have seen and done. I have climbed the highest Alps, walked the entire length of the Sahara, penetrated the deepest jungles of the Amazon."

So they made a bet, and the dude went to spend a day and a night in the wilderness. The next morning he didn't come out. A week later there still was no sign of him. At two weeks, the cowboys gave him up for lost and done for.

But no, a few days later a rancher at Rye Creek found him in a mesquite thicket, crawling on all fours, near death from thirst and starvation.

"Well," said the rancher, "how do you feel about them mountains now?"

"Mad as hell!" the dude gasped.

And that locals say is how the mountains got their name.

THE HIGHEST PEAK

At 7,903 feet, Mazatzal Peak is the highest point in central Arizona. From its top, on a clear day, you can see the high rises of Phoenix to the southwest and the marshmallow daub of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff to the north.

In search of the perfect picture, I head out to climb Mazatzal Peak a third time. Both times before, the weather played tricks on me, and my efforts were wasted. Today looks better. Sunrise at the Barnhardt Trailhead is lambent with golden light, and the sun accompanies me all the way up the trail. But six miles later, when I reach the point where the trail crests the divide, and I leave it to bushwhack along the bouldery ridgebone of the mountain, clouds are beginning to scud in; the wind is picking up.

I reach my preselected vantage point - a rock spur jutting over a precipice on the west face of the peak just ahead of the advancing storm. The slanty little perch has barely enough room for a sleeping bag, but I hurry to get my flimsy tube tent set up and my gear inside.

By the time I crawl in, the wind is whipping and tearing at the plastic. Grainy pellets of hail begin to pepper the tent. Dejected, disappointed, I huddle in my misery. Curse another failure.

Then, into the tent comes a rosy glow. I peek outside and am astonished by the sight. The sky is soaked with blood. The mountain burns with fire color. Never has there been a richer red, a more spectral sunset. And above my head, stalled in the buffeting wind, levitating wings outstretched, is a rough-legged hawk with, of all things, a pine cone clutched in its talons!

The hawk lets the pine cone drop, swoops after it, catches it. Lets it drop, catches it again. It repeats this incredible display over and over.

Certainly it is the practical exigency of beak and claw - the need to perfect its hunting skills - that drives it, but at the moment I can't help but believe that it also is doing it for pure joy, that somewhere in its breast, too, beats the desire for delight.

I grab for my camera but am too late to photograph the hawk as it veers off down canyon. It doesn't matter. There is fire and exultation on the mountain. In me. In the hawk. In the perfect moment.

THE EVOLVING ROCKS

Rocks. Of every size, shape, and color. Gleaming gold schists, decaying basalt towers, Humpty Dumpty-type "eggs," flaky green slate, crumbling granite gruss, blood-red jasper, and milky dolomite. They're all here in bewildering profusion. Most splendid of all, though, is the rock named for the mountains themselves: the Mazatzal quartzite. A particularly hard metamorphosed sandstone, it ranges in colordepending on its locality - from buff white to a richly royal purple. The Mazatzal quartzite feels as a rock should: hefty and smooth and solid. Drop it on itself and it makes a sharp metallic clink.

Due to its hardness, it is the Mazatzal quartzite that's mainly responsible for the sheer eastern face of the central massif of the mountains, that keeps up, so to speak, the heads of the highest peaks. But the present Mazatzals are, geologically speaking, a relatively new phenomenon. Up blocked by Basin and Range tectonics, they came into being a mere eight to 15 million years ago.

A more telling and spectacular story of the Mazatzal's past is locked within the rocks themselves. It can be read in the bowels of the canyons: Slate and West Sycamore creeks, McFarland and Barnhardt.

One late afternoon in August, I was completing a hike on the Barnhardt Trail and stopped to rest at one of my favorite spots, a sharp curve only a mile from the trailhead. A young couple came up the trail. They stopped, and we chatted. It was their first trip into the Wilderness. They had a guidebook that erroneously told them there was an old fire road to the top of Mazatzal Peak. They intended to make it up there in time for sunset. I quickly disavowed them of the notion.

"Well, if we can't go to the top today, what else is there to see?" they asked.

"Look behind you," I said.

They turned, and their jaws dropped open. For there, on the canyon wall opposite, spread big as a drive-in movie screen, is the signature of God. A jagged scrawl of quartz and shale compressed and twisted in one of the greatest upheavals in the Earth's history. Long before living creatures appeared, the Earth's greatest mountains existed in this place.

Uplifted nearly 2 billion years ago in what is known as the Mazatzal Orogeny, the earlier Mazatzals were at least as high as the present Himalayas and ran trans-versely to the current range. Because the continents were joined at the time, they extended well into what now is Finland. And this day, what the awestruck young couple were seeing was the exposed roots of those mountains.

I left without telling them the story. It was enough that they could feel and appreciate the raw and tremendous power manifested in the rocks themselves.

As for me, while I ambled down the last mile of trail, my thoughts turned to the Indians who roamed these mountains. What surmise had leapt into their minds when they saw the great God wall? I couldn't guess. I only knew that when it came time to make peace with the white man, they promised to keep their word "for as long as the rocks shall stand." To them nothing was more enduring.

We, of a more sophisticated age, think we know better. In our scientific cosmology, continents move, plates buckle, and mountains drown. Even the rocks themselves, we now know, are not solid stuff, but matrixes of dancing atoms. So that, it turns out, nothing is forever. Not even the enduring rock. As the trail rounded a scree-filled side canyon, I picked up a chunk of the Mazatzal quartzite. Held it in my hand, felt its smoothness and its hardness, and then pitched it up the slope. It still made a satisfactory clunk.

LAZY AFTERNOON

In midsummer, when the sun is a white roar in the incandescent sky, and the trails are choked with dust, it is time to seek out the hidden narrow canyons, to find a place to sit and laze and do nothing.

Deep in the twisting folds of Barnhardt Creek, I come to a plunge pool large enough to swim in. A rivulet of water tinkles into and out of the pool, which was formed when a 20-ton boulder dropped into the canyon.

From the shaded rock I select for my backrest, I hear the electric whirr of hummingbird wings above my head. The buzzing mites operate with the precision of surgeons on the fire-red penstemons perched on the lip of the canyon wall. At my feet, a golden columbine nods its fragile rearward horns in the canyon breeze.

As I sit in the heat, reading, a tiny head pops up over a rock at the water's edge. "Well, hello there, Slim," I greet my visitor. Slim's a pencil-thin black-necked garter snake. Not four feet away from me, he rests his head upon the rock, staring intently at me. He reminds me of my dog, waiting to be petted. But when I move, Slim whips back into the pool.

Later, he returns. Again I move. Again he whips away.

"Slim," I say, "we're just going to have to learn to coexist." I climb a boulder and jump into the pool. Waves of water spill over the sides, rocking Slim into a corner. He gives me a dirty look. "Sorry, Slim," I say, "I needed to cool off."

While I sit in the sun drying off, Slim hunts. From a ledge, he watches the flotsam drifting down the pool. When the flotsam is a bug, Slim pounces. Skimming the water with frenetic tail lashings, he chomps the bug and draws it into his mouth.

"Atta boy, Slim," I say. "Good for you!" After stuffing himself on several mouthfuls, Slim goes back to the sunning rock. I take a circuitous route around him back to my shade. When I sit, Slim stays. We have obviously reached some sort of accord here.

As I sit eating my lunch, I watch Slim, and Slim watches me. Sometime during the afternoon, when I go back to reading, Slim disappears. And so the day passes. Nothing of moment. No conclusions. And no revelations.

La dolce far niente.

"How sweet to do nothing."

WHEN YOU GO

TO GET TO THE BARNHARDT TRAILHEAD, TAKE STATE ROUTE 87 (COUNTRY CLUB DRIVE) IN MESA AND DRIVE NORTH APPROXIMATELY 65 MILES TO THE SIGNED TRAILHEAD TURNOFF (JUST SOUTH OF THE RYE CREEK BRIDGE); TURN WEST ONTO THE DIRT ROAD, FOREST SERVICE ROUTE 419 (OKAY FOR PASSENGER VEHICLES IN GOOD WEATHER), AND PROCEED 4.7 MILES TO THE PARKING AREA. THERE ARE NO FACILITIES AT THE TRAILHEAD, SO TAKE PLENTY OF WATER, A MINIMUM OF ONE QUART PER PERSON FOR EACH DAY, A GALLON IN HOT WEATHER. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, TELEPHONE THE TONTO NATIONAL FOREST, PAYSON RANGER DISTRICT, (602) 474-7900.

LOST EDEN

The Verde River winds cool and verdant along the gently sloping western flank of the Mazatzals, flowing with a lover's caress through the burning body of the desert. From Childs to Fossil Creek there's no easy trail along the river, and I am happy to be forced to wade the waistto kneedeep stream. Golden carp erupt in muddy slow-motion explosions in front of my water-cleaving boots. Coiled diamondback rattlers eye me sleepily from the banks. Below Fossil, the trail begins, and, more surefooted now, I briskly tramp through the noonday sun, surrounded by spiny cholla. This is not nearly as much fun. The day is hot 110° F. in the shade and long, and I must periodically jump into the river to cool off.

With evening comes relief. Camped below a cliff, I sit in the cooling dusk and sip hot chocolate, hearing the river cours-ing along. Gentle and becalming, its flow is nevertheless incessant. There is a smoothness to it, like music. Something in motion distracts me from my reverie. Across the backdrop of the opposite wall of cliffs a solitary bald eagle imperturbably flaps its way downstream. Head down, eyes glaring, it scans the river for an evening meal. It glides for a while, planes around a bend, and is gone. There is a timelessness to the moment, as if the entire scene rock, river, eagle, and I had been transported to some beatific paradise, into a peace quieter than silence, deeper than sleep.

There are so few truly wild places left, I think. And yet, deep within us, we all long for a lost Eden, a primal innocence. I roll into my sleeping bag, cock my arms behind my head, and watch the stars pop out. Somewhere down the river there's a thunderous beavertail splash. Then silence. The night is calm. The river continues flowing. And as I fall asleep, the deer come down to the river's edge and lap stars from the pools. Lost Eden? No, this one still exists.