WILDERNESS BUSHWHACKING AT FOSSIL SPRINGS

BEYOND FOSSIL SPRINGS Taming Arizona's Roughset Wilderness

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 22 AND 23) Innocence Falls, so named because it has remained in pristine condition, flows into a series of pools in upper Sandrock Canyon. (LEFT) Numerous springs gush from seeps and cracks in the Redwall limestone of Fossil Creek, creating a perfect environment for moss and maidenhair ferns. (RIGHT) Fed by springs that pour out more than a million gallons an hour, Fossil Creek nourishes a half-mile-long oasis in the bottom of precipitous Fossil Creek Canyon.

This wilderness was always ours. Before we even were, it lay and waited for us.

and each about a thousand feet deep. If you soared like a hawk high above.

And so we make our way to two rugged and remote canyons, each about five miles long you'd see them as the split forks of a tree one straight, one bent and crooked.

And where they join to form the trunk, the third and major canyon. But our eyes are on the forks.

In time, men called the straight one Calfpen, the bent one Sandrock, and the trunk was Fossil.

And, in the naming, thought they took them.

AT FIRST WE SAW THEM ONLY AS A BAR-rier. Gouged as the canyons are below the edge of the Mogollon Rim, at exactly the point where the 1,600-foot-high curtain of stone sloughs off its monolithic face, early explorers found them exasperatingly inconvenient.

On one of the first major forays into the area, Prescott rancher King S. Woolsey led a large group of volunteer militiamen intent on finding gold and wiping out Yavapai and Western Apache strongholds in the Tonto Basin. On April 9, 1864, they approached the canyons from the north - and promptly decided to detour around them.

Seven years later, Gen. George Crook blazed what would become the famous Crook Trail westward across the Rim. Riding out onto the final isolated promontory (now called Nash Point), Crook and his troops got a hawk's-eye view of the three canyons blocking their way below. Crook, too, decided to go around.

In time, pioneering settlers did find an Indian trail down to Fossil Creek - and the added wonder of gushing springs, springs so bountiful, numerous, and large they created a lush Edenlike oasis for a half mile in the bottom of the canyon.

Two towns sprang up over the hill not far away: Pine and Strawberry. The Indian trail became a horseback mail route to Camp Verde. And, in a prodigious feat of early 20thcentury engineering, the water below the springs was dammed and flumed 10 miles to a remote spot on the Verde River. There they drive the turbines of Arizona's first hydroelectric plant, still in operation to this day. But Sandrock and Calfpen waited. Too wild and steep and tangled to be of use to anyone.

In 1984 the two canyons were declared the Fossil Springs Wilderness, an 11,550acre preserve, most of which (above the springs) remained entirely without trails and extremely difficult to get into. Just small enough to escape notice and rough enough to discourage it.

The springs themselves, though, began to enjoy a high and therefore, unfortunately, destructive popularity. Everything beyond remained unvisited and unknown. Untamed. Untaken.

Until the two of us heard the call.

THROUGHOUT A RELATIVELY MILD WINter, wildlife photographer William E. "Bill" Barcus and I prodded and poked around the periphery of Calfpen and Sandrock canyons, seeking a route down, a way to get into the steepest parts. In our four-wheel drives, we trundled along the malpais-bouldered ranch roads, tearing up our tires, then fighting on foot through what seemed like miles of nearly impenetrable manzanita thickets to reach the rim of the canyons. Once there, what we saw were steep slopes in Calfpen; sheer vertical walls of stone in narrow Sandrock. And the task of getting down them became an all-consuming puzzle. On a string of day hikes, we tried out the likeliest routes. Rocky hogback ridges that wound up leading nowhere. Brush-choked drainages that turned into one-way elevator chutes. Climbing partway down, we were stopped each time by blocks of stone hanging out over the abyss. One day, having just dropped over the side, we found ourselves looking straight down on the glossy back of a huge black bear browsing in the foliage of a cliff-hugging canyon oak. Frozen in fascinated silence, we watched the bear methodically strip the acorns from its leafy perch. How private and self-contained it seemed, unconcernedly bending and swaying the fragile limbs, as if it were some shaggy John Muir communing with the breeze. In more than two-dozen trips, we feinted and jostled with the canyons and came back each time lacerated by catclaw and broken manzanita and stuck full of thorns and cactus needles. On one descent, I took a 15-foot fall and wound up sporting an eggplantlike subdural hematoma which left a permanent six-inch scar on my thigh.

In spring the rattlesnakes came out in droves. From then on, we had an adrenalin-pumping encounter with at least one on every trip. This was all fine with us. This was what we were after. Each time we went, the world blossomed fresh and new, ready to pounce, to surprise us at any moment. Each time we tasted what only our genes remember: the deliciousness of what it is like to freely take, but to remain untaken.

Eventually WE WOUND UP BUSHwhacking three trails down into the canyons. Not really trails, but more like tunnels hacked through the head-high shrub oak and manzanita.

We were now ready to try what we'd intended all along: a single backpacking trip across the wilderness, going down one canyon and up the other.

On a bright May morning, we started in upper Sandrock. Hiking out to the edge, there was the same heart-stopping moment as always. The world fell away at our feet and opened into a vast and turbulent panorama. This is all raw and young geology here, as three superbly steep drainages meet in jagged fragmentation to form the headwaters of the canyon.

As we descended, buttresses of orange stone loomed above us, some as smooth as pterodactyl wings, others festooned with gargoyles, minarets, and turrets.

In a couple of sweat-soaked hours, we had reached the bottom, where we were enveloped by a hush of green. Beneath a spring-fresh canopy of maples, sycamores, and alders, we rock-hopped down the in-termittent stream. We felt sealed in, shut off in our own private domain.

And fairly soon the rock-clogged creek broke through the angular Coconino sandstone and started cutting into softer Supai, the same rich-colored layer that forms the red rocks of Sedona.

With each bend, each twisting of the canyon, we discovered new enchantments: sinuously scooped walls and sculpted alcoves, deep plunge pools. And, now and then, a brilliantly sparkling waterfall. When we came to the first really deep pool, we began to worry. Our topo maps showed us the entire Sandrock box could not be too long at most half a mile but. we'd brought no flotation gear along, and this pool ran in a steep-walled alley for almost a hundred yards. We did, however, manage a time-consuming traverse around it.

But then there was another pool and another. We traversed them all, but finally we came to a deep-shaded gate of rock, the water behind it black as ebony. Entirely cliffbound, the pool was impossible to climb around with our heavy packs.

"Wow!" Bill said. "We're the first to ever see this."

Of course we both knew better. But as I looked at the rapt expression on Bill's face, I was reminded of what Keats thought the early Spaniards must have felt upon first seeing the Pacific. Their look of "wild surmise" at being taken, but not by what they thought to take.

Topped BY THE LARGE POOL IN Sandrock, we had decided to give up the hike and retraced our steps into the heart of the box. For two luxurious days, we lolled around the sunshine pools and waterfalls, jumping into the icy water for quick dips, exploring side canyons.

Now I am doing a solo. Bill is on an assignment in another part of the state, and I'm attempting the trans-wilderness hike going the other way.

It takes me three grueling days to fight down Calfpen and up Sandrock until I'm within half a mile of the box. The lower ends of both canyons are choked with boulders, brush, and snagging grapevine lianas. With 70 pounds of gear on my back, it's torture to try to break my way through the welter of vegetation. A lot of the time I'm forced to resort to inching along on my knees, thinking, “This is a ridiculous way to hike.” But by noon of the third day, I make it to the cleft in the canyon wall in Sandrock that I've been anticipating. It's a little side canyon, an angled cut sliced sharply but not too deep from top to bottom of the 1,200-foot-high cliff.

I walk across and put my hand on top of a woodpile. The blanched wood is stacked neatly between the trunks of two trees. How strange, I think, that I know the exact date this wood was last used and that was more than 60 years ago. No, we are not the first. I have seen the evidence, held in my hands the faded newspaper clipping relating the capture of “one of the largest illicit distilleries ever operated in the state.” “On the morning of June 10, 1929,” the report read, “after an all-night stalk of near ly 12 miles up Fossil Creek Canyon, federal agents arrested the operator and two of his helpers.” The inventory of the massive amount of equipment confiscated at the site included three stills, 1,800 gallons of mash, 745 gallons of whiskey, and several tons each of barley, corn, lime, and sulfur.

I wander over to the grassy bench below the pretty little spring burbling out of the side canyon. There's not much left. The oval pits of the two rock “fireboxes” used to heat the mash, some twisted copper-green tubing, a few odds and ends of rusted metal.

I sit on one of the fireboxes and think of the man who ran the still. And remember his grandson (a grandfather himself now and a prominent leader in Strawberry) telling me in a deep baritone, “Times were hard, the time of the Depression. Most everybody had a still up one of these canyons. He was just trying to do the best for his family.” I look around me now at the sequestered little side canyon. So far away, so hard to get to. So peaceful and remote. And think: Maybe that wasn't the only reason. Maybe he was another taker who was taken, but in another way than being caught.

BILL AND I GO IN ONE LAST TIME TOgether in late autumn. The maple leaves in Sandrock that were so soft and green in the spring are now a riot of carnival colors: scarlet reds, carmine purples, salmon oranges. We do a high traverse over the entire box so Bill can see the still, but come back that day and camp by our favorite waterfall, the one we call Innocence. There's little water left this time of year, and only a single mineral-clouded skein tinkles softly into the pool like a mouse dancing on piano keys. We eat dinner by a driftwood fire and settle back to enjoy the quiet of the darkening canyon. There's a sense of accomplishment at being the only people down here. This special place always was here for the taking, but we were the ones who learned it, fought for it, and won it.

As our fire smolders out, sending a long, thin column of smoke up into the blackness, the stars begin popping out one by one. In a while, there are so many the firmament is a smear of jewels. So vast, so infinite. And yet, I think, without us, without our eyes and hearts to see it, the scene would be nothing. So yes, this wilderness is ours. We took it. But only by knowing that to truly take, we must always be taken.