Picture-taking Rides in the Superstitions

When TRAIL RIDES and PHOTOGRAPHY Combine in the SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS

We stood around awkwardly in clumps, greenhorns festooned with camera bags, eyeing one another with friendly uncertainty. The smell of horses hung in the air, and the jagged outline of the famed Superstition Mountains stood as backdrop while we exchanged small talk, self-consciously adjusted the brims of our brand new uncreased cowboy hats, and scuffed our polished cowboy boots. Ostensibly, we had been attracted to this three-day trail ride to pick up photographic techniques from Arizona Highways freelance photographer Gary Johnson. In truth, we shared an unspoken yearning to escape our own century into the mythic West, already worn smooth in the retelling. "You're going to have a great time,"

boomed Johnson, a towering bearded bear of a man with a weathered cowboy hat, a zest for a good story, and an affection for bad jokes. "That's right," interjected Terry Grinstead, a cowboy, bull rider, and head wrangler for our upcoming journey. "We hardly ever lose anyone." Johnson guffawed. The greenhorns exchanged weak smiles. Someone's beeper went off. Smiling apologetically, a young fellow who was built like a running back turned off the beeper, checked the number, pulled a cellular telephone out of his pack, and dialed a number. I stared toward the Superstitions, past the power lines, beyond the end of the blacktop, beneath parallel jet contrails, and wondered whether we could ever escape the coils of the 20th century.

A 20-minute drive later, we found our hors-es waiting at the edge of the 124,000-acre Superstition Wilderness, a barbed, blistered, splintered expanse of glorious desolation haunted by legends, massacres, treasures lost, and bodies never found.

Formed in an unimaginable volcanic contortion some 30 million years ago, the Superstitions harbored lost civilizations, sheltered renegade Apache raiders, and provided the setting for some of the West's most fabled treasure hunts and blood feuds. Our packs loaded with film and camera lenses, we hoped to brush up against the ghosts of the Superstitions and to somehow ride far enough from the pavement's end to at least imagine ourselves stumbling across the Lost Dutchman.

We rode all day, gradually discovering whole new complexes of muscles. We trot-ted into our base camp late in the after-noon, sore, loose-jointed, and drunk with the scenery.

We could nearly imagine ourselves veterans of the cavalry's long and mostly fruitless pursuit of the Apaches through these same mountains, so stark and angular and unsoftened by water's caress. But the illusion was largely dispelled by the discovery of camp: rows of tautly staked tents, a huge cook trailer, and even a shower trailer with warm pump-squirted water.

We washed up, walked the kinks out of our legs, then assembled for photographic discourse on the qualities of late light. Meanwhile, cooks Jim Siefert and Chuck Aldrich labored over an elaborate dinner. Siefert attended a nationally ranked culinary school and now specializes in Dutch-oven cooking, providing yet another disconcerting blending of centuries.

The sunset proved disappointing, a cloudless flash of metallic yellow light behind the stark vanes of a windmill pump-ing water for a stock tank.

Darkness descended rapidly, and we assembled in weary contentment around the campfire, where a guitar-strumming Roger Young regaled us with a seemingly endless succession of cowboy songs. We drifted on his roiling stream of ballads: the plucky cowboy trampled in the stampede, the wordless Arizona Ranger with the big iron on his hip, the lonesome rider singing his restless cattle to sleep.

Young spent about 25 years on the road with bands playing rugged rock and rowdy country music, somehow surviving all the excesses of that life. He'd just about burned himself out when he discovered cowboy music. Now he's a happy fanatic, ceaselessly researching old cowboy tunes, begging songs from every old-time rancher and cowpuncher he encounters, and searching through tapes in archives for long-forgotten songs.

Surrendering myself to his enthusiasm, I could feel the chains of my century loosening their grip ever so slightly, as the stars formed a brightening band overhead. Light lingered on the horizon, although it was hours past sunset.

"I can't believe it's still light over there," I whispered to Johnson.

He glanced toward the horizon, looked back at me, and shook his head pityingly. "That's Phoenix," he said.

"Oh," said I, jerked unceremoniously into my own time. "Of course."

The next day, I rode mostly alongside Marion Perkin, a native-born cowboy who'd

SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS

Except Perkin was the real thing, a quiet, unassuming man who'd survived rattlers and thunderstorms and everything a horse could think to do. I kept at him until I broke down his enormous reserves of modesty. So he told me about the time his horse fell at a run and rolled over him while he lay on the ground, watching that enormous bulk blot out the sky like a slow-motion avalanche. He told me about the times he'd been kicked in the ribs, thrown into boulders, and otherwise broken in a dozen places.

He told these stories on himself since it would never occur to him to blame a horse for deviltry or malice. He built up ranches, lost them, signed on as a cattle hand, built up spreads, and lost them again all the while watching the hypnotic line of the horizon until the distance had been burned into his face.

He quit ranching a while back after a stint with an investment rancher determined to experiment with the artificial insemination of cattle. The rancher hired a bunch of specialists to mix eggs and sperm in test tubes in hopes of breeding super cattle and cattle-buffalo hybrids. Perkin didn't object to the technology in fact he spoke with nonchalant technical detail. But the cattle weren't in good enough shape, and the hybrids sometimes came out stillborn and mutated. Somehow the experience made him feel out of place on a cattle ranch, so he decided to herd greenhorns instead.

We returned to the base camp as the shadows lengthened, surprised to find ourselves less saddle sore than at the end of the first day. We'd broken through the barriers by then a New York photographer, a Michigan florist, a Phoenix psychologist, a photography student, a repairer of Xerox machines, a social worker and her gentle eye-rolling teenage son all for the moment redefined by our relationships to horses, our supply of film, and our immersion in the scenery.

We gathered for sunset, eager to take advantage of what happens to light when it passes through several thousand miles of dusty atmosphere before flooding the foreground of our composition. We prevailed upon Young, the singer, to don his authentic cowboy clothes, climb into the saddle, and pose on a hilltop, silhouetted by the setting sun. We burned through film with great sighs and gasps, glimpsing in our viewfinders the illusion we so earnestly sought.

Then we piled into a truck and raced up the road to a mountaintop with a stunning view to the south, ridge lines marching into spent most of the past 50 years on horseback. He'd ridden in rodeos, worked cattle drives, and run his own ranch. Now he'd bought his own string of horses for trail rides in the Verde Valley and the Williams area. He'd come along on this ride for the scenery and a chance to watch Don Donnelly's crew in action.

Perkin seemed fused to his horse, an extension of the saddle horn at an age when other men might be looking to nursing home insurance policies. He laughed easily with a shy self-deprecating chuckle. Courtly and soft-spoken, he personified that endearing mixture of deference and tough self-reliance Jimmy Stewart captured whenever he donned chaps in front of a movie camera.

SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS

the dim distance immolated by the setting sun. We photographed in a kind of frenzy, thinking that if we only took enough pictures, used enough filters, and bracketed enough exposures, we'd end up with at least one image that felt a little like the actual moment the orange orb of the sun sank into its own gaudy glow.

We woke on that last day with a sense of impending loss. I felt dogged by a feeling of failure. I'd never quite trapped the moment I'd sought, deflected always by the glow of the city, ranching by artificial insemination, or the beep of the cellular phone. I felt like a butterfly collector with just a dusting of wing powder on his clumsy fingers.

We rode through the day toward Roger's Canyon in the heart of the Superstitions. I've spent years wandering about on the margins of the Superstitions, climbing peaks an easy walk from the road, surprising javelinas in prickly pear decorated canyons, or scrambling over boulders for a glimpse of an agile herd of bighorns. The mountains have always turned to me a rugged, desolate face, albeit graced by great bursts of yellow, red, and purple wildflowers in the spring.

But after we survived a harrowing descent down a sheer rocky trail, we discovered a lush meadow and a burbling stream lined with lofty green cottonwoods and sinuous bone-white sycamores.

A thousand years ago, the cliff-dwelling, Irrigation-ditching, corn-growing Salado lived in this Wilderness canyon and farmed this clearing. Outriders of a sprawling civilization, the Salado built a complex, resourceful, wide-ranging culture on the efficient use of desert plants, irrigated agriculture, and hoarded stores of food in solidly constructed multistory pueblos. They traded beautifully decorated pottery in networks that imported turquoise from present-day New Mexico, seashells from California, and parrots from the depths of Mexico. But they dispersed to other lands in the 1400s, leaving only shattered pots and empty ruins.

We halted for lunch just up the stream from the meadow. Grinstead secured the horses and lifted the ice chest full of sodas off the pack horse. He caught my eye and gestured with a nod of his head toward a gigantic alcove eroded in the canyon wall. "There's a ruin up there," he said.

I looked up the slope and noticed the stone walls built across nooks in the eroded overhang. "Thanks," I said. "I'll take a look." I clambered up the canyon to the cliff dwelling.

Inside the giant cave, invisible from the canyon floor, I discovered a ruin in astonishingly good condition. The main building consisted of an outer roofless chamber with a mortared, smoothly curving wall, and a single outer door so small you had to stoop sharply to enter. The inner chamber still had most of its roof, mud-plastered reeds in a framework of sticks last patched perhaps 600 years ago. Hushed by the sudden rush of centuries, I sat in the fine dust by the back wall. Light filtered in through the doorway and a tiny window in one wall, a silent benediction. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the dim interior. Studying the adobe-plastered rock wall beside me, I discovered the distinct hand and fingerprints of its makers. I placed my index finger in one print. It fit perfectly.

I sat a long while in the dark, listening to the whispers of ghosts, lost, finally, somewhere in time.

Author's Note: Begin your trip at Lost Dutchman State Park outside of Apache Junction. The state park has a visitors center to introduce you to these storied mountains, an easily accessible Nature hike, covered picnic tables and fresh water, campsites, and trails into the rugged desert hills. For more information on horseback riding and visiting Lost Dutchman State Park, call (602) 982-4485.

Editor's Note: To find out more about Photo Workshops and other trips sponsored by the Friends of Arizona Highways, see page 45.