West Clear Creek

THE VISION STARTS IN A DREAM.

In images of brilliant water, sun-spangled cascades, and rushing moonlit waterfalls.

Twisting corridors of rock and meandering jet-black pools. Orange-glowing cliffs that dazzle and towers that soar. Cloud, sky, sun, and green leaves rustling in the wind.

That's West Clear Creek. Dream canyon.

Beautiful as only in a dream.

DREAM CANYON T FOLIO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK BEREZENKO

MOUNTAIN TROUT STREAM

The reality starts in mountains and ends in desert. And in between, it runs the gamut from the fantastic to the terrifying.

Today West Clear Creek is primarily known as a ruggedly inaccessible trout fisherman's paradise. Only those hardy enough to work their way down its steep walls can sample the rewards of pulling wary two-pound lunkers from its shaded pools.

The creek runs in an incredibly wild canyon that twists and cuts its way down the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in north-central Arizona.

From its origin high up on the Mogollon Rim near Clints Well to its surrender to the Verde River below the town of Camp Verde, West Clear Creek completes a journey nearly 40 miles long. The upper 28 miles - the part designated as Wilderness and ending at Bullpenis entirely canyon-bound, offering only a few and, for the most part, extremely difficult points of access.

When in 1871 Gen. George Crook was pioneering a wagon route across the Mogollon Rim, a member of the expedition, Lt. John Bourke, recorded: "We got into the Clear Creek canyon, which is one of the deepest and most beautiful to look upon in all the Southwest, but one very hard upon all who must descend and ascend.

"When we descended," Bourke wrote, "we found plenty of cold, clear water, and the banks of the stream lined with wild hop, which loaded the atmosphere with a heavy perfume of lupulin."

Not only the wild hop, but the similarly pungent hop tree, which resembles the ash, and a host of other deciduous trees box elder, willow, alder, black walnut, and, farther downstream, sycamore and cottonwood - all create a lush streamside environment exceptional for Arizona.

In its first three miles from the confluence of its two main tributaries, Willow and Clover creeks, West Clear Creek is a mountain brook, burbling along bunchgrass-lined gravel bars and riffling over little rapids. Occasionally it fills a knee-to-hip-deep pool tucked against a 600-foot-high cliff.

But as the creek descends in elevation, the pools gradually grow deeper and more frequent. Backpackers are forced to wade, sometimes in water up to their chests, across the wall-to-wall pools.

Shortly before Mile 12, West Clear Creek becomes a swimmer's canyon. The walls of cream-colored Coconino sandstone pinch in to form the White Boxes, encompassing pools too deep to wade and impossible to climb around.

Indian Maiden Falls in the Red Boxes cascades a dozen feet into a deep pool perfect for swimming.

WHITE BOXES

I am peering down a tunnel, a corridor of stone, the walls of which rise hundreds of feet above a narrow alley filled with water so deep it's black and shiny like obsidian.

Friends who have trekked this area have told me so many terror stories - how some suffered hypothermia, some were forced to turn back, and some drowned in these pools that for my first time I have to do it alone just to prove that I can.

So here I am, lugging a 65-pound pack with inflated boat attached, perched on the lip of what appears to be the longest pool in the White Boxes. It doesn't seem to end.

No help for it, I guess. I lower the pack cum raft down onto the water and plunge in up to my neck. My boots flail over nothing. I can't touch bottom. Bone-chilling cold closes around me like a steel vise.I clutch the raft and paddle and kick for all I am worth. Paddle, kick. Paddle, kick. Slowly I move away from the roar of the creek's cascade into the pool. Silence descends on the canyon. In the gloomy stillness, my gasps and splashings are audible as gunshots.

In slow-motion, I pass rounded corners, sinuous alcoves, and, high above my head, massive logs jammed into crevices in the rock at heights of 40, 50, 60 feet, reminders of the creek's awesome power during flash floods.

Will this pool never end? I've already covered at least a hundred yards, and still the pool continues, disappearing into a 20-foot-wide jagged gate of rock ahead. I'm beginning to feel really chilled now, and a tingle of fear crawls up my spine.

Suddenly I'm distracted by a tiny black lizard skittering down the flat immensity of the wall. It stops inches above the water and does a series of jerky pushups, challenging my intrusion into its watering hole.

Hard to believe that what the lizard's splayed fingers cling to are the remains of 270-million-year-old sand dunes, where its ancient ancestors must have basked under a dry Saharan sun. But as the cross-bedded patterning in the rock shows, that's exactly what the Coconino sandstone is: quartz grains blown from a beach by prehistoric winds, now frozen in a stone eternity. Fascinated by the undulating sweeps within the stone and lost in thoughts of time, I'm suddenly through the pool and scraping up on the pebbly bottom of its far shore.

I let out a joyous yell that echoes off the walls.

HANGING GARDENS

Hanging Gardens is the green jewel in West Clear Creek's tiara. Set midway between the White and the Red boxes, the mushroom-shaped mound of calcium carbonate built up by driblets of spring water and undercut by the creek provides a welcome respite, a refreshing world of green between the high drama of the boxes. It's an idyllic place to camp. To splash and frolic in the emerald pool beneath the cascading waterfall.

But as there is "no beauty that hath no imperfection in it," no paradise without its serpents, so too is it with West Clear Creek.

In more than 40 forays into the canyon, I have encountered at least a dozen timber, blacktail, and Mohave rattlesnakes along the creek and on the trails. There are portions of the gorge so choked with poison ivy that it's impossible to proceed without brushing against it. Among the deadliest of plants, water hemlock grows at streamside, its lacy white flowers vying in profusion with the ubiquitous cutleaf coneflowers. Feisty black bears periodically surprise hikers in the depths of the canyon.

Add to this the usual assortment of creepy crawlies scorpions, centipedes, black widows, and swarms of biting gnats in early summer - and it is no wonder hikers emerge from West Clear Creek looking haggard and covered with all sorts of welts, lumps, cuts, and bruises.

As a fellow canyoneer once pointed out: "Look, it's just not fun, not real wilderness, unless it can kill you."

RED BOXES

All day long we have been swimming and playing through the Red Boxes. There are five of us on this trip, and we've allowed ourselves four days to do the lower 15 miles of the canyon. Just enough time, we think, to enjoy it properly.A mile and a half below Hanging Gardens, the creek has dropped to 1,200 feet below the rim, and the canyon itself has widened to nearly a mile. Here the Red Boxes begin building an interior canyon, as the creek slices into a new layer of rock: Supai siltstone, the same wonderland formation as the red rocks of Sedona.

As we float through the red-chambered vaults, we marvel at the fluted curves and spirals in the walls, at the colors glowing pink and rust and salmon.

In between the boxes, we have to traverse long open valleys filled with jumbles of gray basalt boulders. After exiting a cold pool, we're slammed by a wall of heat in these open areas. The boulders, baking in the sun, give off a gunpowdery smell. They're smooth and slippery, making for dangerous footing, especially with our wet boots.

So it's hop from rock to rock as best you can, step down into the water, do a deep knee-bend to spring up to the next rock. When we reach a stretch too deep to wade, it's off with the pack, float the boat across, and on with the pack again. Alternating between fire and ice, it seems we repeat these operations a hundred times during the course of the day.

Our progress is excruciatingly slow. But we don't mind. We loiter at waterfalls, arches, spires, miniature cascades and cataracts, with each moment, each bend, surprising us with something unique.

In the next two days our rock-hopping improves to the point of friskiness. We bound and careen down the canyon with the agility of mountain goats. We float and revel through countless pools how many we can't count. They blend and weave into an endlessly unrolling reel of images.Our dreams at night are a glorious patchwork of leaps of faith, of dives into pools of ice, of lava rocks as hot as fire, of a canyon we wish will never end.

IONS

We are camped at Ions, the last of the Red Boxes. We're all a little wistful that tonight's our last night in the canyon. The focus of this place is a spectacular waterfall that reverberates 40 feet below us. In the cooling shade of evening, we loll on the flat-topped ledge above it, letting our bodies absorb the sensual heat retained in the stone. Occasionally a drift of spray floats an energizing whiff of ozone up to our noses. Hence, Ions. "Hey, look there," says Pete Ensenberger. "What?" we ask. "Look, there's a cloud being born." We look where Pete points, and, sure enough, out of the dusky blue sky a vapory mote of white is coalescing into a rag of cloud. Just as quickly as it appears, it starts to disappear, melting into the great blue blank screen again. There is a quiet magic in the moment, as if a miracle had occurred. This is another gift Wilderness gives us, the gift of time. Time to feel unhurried and undistracted. Time to pause and see a miracle in a cloud being born. The cloud will become water and the water will run. The water will press and rock will resist. And in the rock's refusal and the water's continuing insistence is the story. The story of West Clear Creek. It begins as water and becomes a dream.

WHEN YOU GO

For your first trip into the West Clear Creek Wilderness, the Forest Service recommends either the Maxwell Trail in the upper portion of the canyon or Trail No. 17 from Bullpen in the lower end. May to September is the best time to visit West Clear Creek. Be prepared to wade and be alert to the danger of flash floods. Contact the Beaver Creek Ranger Station, Coconino National Forest, (602) 567-4501, for weather conditions and information about the canyon itself.

Getting there: To reach the Maxwell Trailhead from Phoenix, take State Route 87 north to Clints Well. Turn left onto Forest Highway 3 (Lake Mary Road) and drive approximately seven miles. Turn left onto FR 81. At the fork, stay to the left on FR 81E. Proceed seven miles, take the left fork for one-half mile, then the right for two miles to the trailhead. The last two miles of road may require a high-clearance vehicle.

To reach Bullpen, take State Route 260 (General Crook Highway) east from Camp Verde. After approximately five miles, turn left onto FR 618. Drive two miles, turn right onto FR 215, and follow it four miles to its terminus at Bullpen.