RUINS OF THE MOGOLLON

THREE OF US WAITED IN THE CANYON AT DAWN. CLIMBING ROPE LAY strung out, thick with frost after a cold, wet night. We were attempting to dry it. We (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 4 AND 5) Cloaked by the past in layers of mystery, long-abandoned Salado ruins cling to the rock walls of a remote side canyon (in the shadowed area, upper right) in the Sierra Ancha Wilderness below the Mogollon Rim. (ABOVE) Rugged and inhospitable terrain provides a formidable barrier for visitors to the ancient canyon dwellers' hidden homes. (OPPOSITE PAGE) The Sierra Ancha Wilderness encompasses 20,000 acres of canyon and precipice, pine forest and high desert chaparral. Lonely and remote, it holds its secrets closely.

6 September 1998 had been in the backcountry for several days and now had spent a night without gear on a day hike gone awry. Torrential rains and a rugged topography had driven our bodies to ruin. Now we nursed wounds: two torn muscles and a barrage of small cuts from falls and vegetation on what would be a seven-day foot trek. Living like this, having spent a night breathing one another's breath, we were unambiguous to each other. Our conversations no longer required adjectives.

We knew whose gear was whose. Irvin Fernandez's sat mindfully organized within a two-foot radius of his pack, prepared for sudden rain. Laura Slavik's had been removed entirely from camp, surreptitiously stashed in mountain mahoganies. Mine lay scattered between the two, lazily strewn as if I had just moved in and made myself comfortable.

We camped on a ledge, a long forested shelf midway down the canyon, suspended over an impressive fall as if a network of invisible wires kept the whole thing from crashing down. If anyone spoke too loudly, echoes came up, and we had to wait for them to play out. Laura and I sat at the edge whispering so we wouldn't get the canyon into an uproar. We could hear water down there, tumbling through the boulders. She'd come from Portland, Oregon, where she managed a battered women's shelter. She'd been bled upon, cried upon, thrown up on. Each year she found me, coming down to join any trek, anywhere. She had to touch her hands to someplace wild. I watched her through the years, seeing her grow more turbulent, her profession weighing on her, causing her eyes to narrow.

I had been with her in precarious scenes, scrambling to get out of a Utah slot canyon as a flood burst down from Sinbad Country, and knocking rocks on each other to pack to the top of an embankment in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. She would risk almost anything to seek refuge. But Portland showed on her most. The city and the job tightened her senses. She was living through vast human carnage and visceral emotion. In turn her appetite for wilderness increased, her need for something that showed no remorse, no anguish, a place where it does not matter if you die.

But she still laughed uncontrollably. She had quirky human flaws that showed like stains. It was good to know this, that I sat at the edge of a canyon with a living woman.

Irvin remained back there somewhere tinkering with gear, eating plant leaves as he worked. He also eats live insects. Irvin is the scientist among us. He and I had worked the Colorado River together for a few years as guides and teachers. A rancher who doubles as a deputy sheriff had given us a lift in his truck across the first large creek five days ago. He had

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stationed another truck across the creek for when the flood came.

"Flood?" I had asked.

He had taken a full second to stare at me. "It's going to rain," he said.

And then it rained. Two days of steady downpour. Every possible waterfall and stream had been awakened. We couldn't move until it stopped, and now the skies were clear. This topography is designed solely for the transport of water. Forests of cypress, juniper, oak, sycamore, and pine clung to the edges. Water danced hysterically down every possible possible space.

We sat to our breakfast at a very small fire of oak twigs, looking outward, hundreds of miles out. The Mogollon Rim is a perfect tilt almost cracking Arizona in half, an ever-evolving, 25to 30-millionyear-old monocline that stands over the desert in a 310-mile-long scarp from the Grand Wash Cliffs in the northwest to the White Mountains in the east. This escarpment, the region of the state known as "Rim Country," ranges from Pine to Christopher Creek.

Sitting below its edge here in the Sierra Ancha range, we continued yesterday's discussion, mainly about the ruin we saw only a mile from here. We had been coming through near sunset, already dizzy from the rising lines of the chasm. The ruin sat between towers on a sheer cliff face. A couple hundred feet from the closest ledge, the nearest handhold was a cave. Inset into its mouth was a hand-built wall, a stone-andmortar building.

Certainly it could not have been I'VE WALKED THIS LAND FOR MONTHS. IT IS A PLACE THAT WILL NOT BEND.

climbed by hand. The occupants were likely the Salado people, absent for 700 years. You find their traces out here, possibly the last occupied cliff dwellings in the Western Hemisphere, only in the most desperate, startling of reaches.

Irvin spoke mainly of approaches, befuddling himself with the idea of anyone ever reaching the ruin. "But they had to," he said. "They built the thing."

Laura seemed pleased with its inaccessibility. "All the better," she said and she rested her back on the ground where the frost was already melting. "But it is odd."

After breakfast we did our usual walk-ing, cutting ourselves on the acacias that had grown up from the high desert. There is a way of walking here that is not treacherous. I watch a bull ride and I'm reminded of how to move under the Mogollon Rim. Not the young bulls, but the older, erudite bulls who appear to be jerking and spinning and head-popping by chance, but are actually throwing riders with exact thought-out motions.

There is a meticulous order to these canyons, but if you're watching from the corner of your eye, it will look like nothing more than untidiness. I've walked this land for weeks and months on end. It is a place that will not bend. Follow certain rims, come down when there's a break, down

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Out. No wonder these were the last occupied. Whatever haunted these people had difficulty tracking them to here.

The structure stood about 27 feet high, cautious stonework mortared exactly into a crack. We sat beneath it for some time. To enter the ruin would require care. The walls appeared sound enough, but the 700-year-old architecture needed no more worries than the usual fare of water and wind. From here we could see inside. Multiple levels hid behind the frontispiece; we saw interior hatchways in the ceilings and a single ladder still in place.

We rigged the rope to the parent rock, stringing it across the face of the ruin. From there we could clip in and work our way to the suspended entrance. Irvin was the first in, and I pestered him for a report. "It's a big room," he called out. "Goes on a ways. There are a lot of walls built in here, smaller rooms. Inside, distracted sunlight worked from rock to rock, then turned mostly to shad-ow. Spider webs clung to the fire-blackened timbers. Ceilings hung just high enough for us to stand.

Using the rope, I came up through the hatchway on the second floor and at eye level saw the wooden beams crossed with flagstones, then mortared and repeated so the ceiling was more than a foot thick. The room above was divided by a plastered wall and doorway. The perimeter of the door was rounded as if planned for crouched bodies coming in and out; no sharp corners to scrape against. There must have been a hundred fingerprints on the wall, remind-ers of the hands that once squeezed mortar into place. Some were merely dimples and others showed precisely each line of a thumbprint or the lines on a palm. I held my hand up to them.

IF YOU WANTED NEVER TO BE SEEN, TO TUCK BACK YOUR CLIFF DWELLINGS, YOU WOULD LIVE HERE.

the stiff cracks in boulders, rope off if you need to. Put weight on the inside of your foot, toward the face of the slope. Take to scoured rims on the dry south faces where the manzanita and mountain mahogany are so tightly overgrown. Bench into the tall canyons, going deep. Drink water when you're inside. Stop there and listen to the sound, the mumbling of water that leaks from the Earth, the waterfalls in the tun-nels of boulders and sycamores 600 feet above your head. It is as crucial to stop as it is to move.

We saw what appeared to be a second ruin, so concealed by overlapping rock walls that only a second glance weeded it The air inside did not move, making each sound excessive. Moving like thieves, we stepped around heaps of corncobs.

Laura's voice came from ahead, on the third level. She sounded far off. Irvin and I climbed the rock and inched to the top floor. She was invisible, somewhere in the dark. We followed her voice, our headlamp beams swinging through the rooms. The passage gradually became a cave, losing the trappings of mortar and carved stones. The cave turned a corner, and there we saw sunlight. Laura's body was outlined in blinding light, and behind her was the opening of the "first" ruin, the unapproach-able wall stuffed in the cave's mouth. The passage led from what we'd thought of as a second and separate ruin through the core of the cliff and came out here.

Laura, all of her a shadow, called, “This is the route.” Around her were other walls, parts of complexes adhered to the rock. We turned our headlamps off. I walked to the structure where it had been inserted into the mouth of the cave. It was short enough to peer over, a balcony rim surveying the canyon and the land beyond. No one said anything - just looked across the land and a perfect view off the Mogollon Rim.

The Spanish, coming through in the 1500s, described the region as tierra incognita y despoblado. The Mogollon Rim and the ragged land beneath stymied their exploration. If you wanted never to be seen, to tuck back your cliff dwellings, you would live here. If your people were haunted by anything, this landscape would take you in, concealing your tracks behind you. Just as the mountain lion has been sent back across the continent to live here, or as pieces of truly wild, untroubled ground have been left to certain canyons and isolated mountain ranges, this place has been sanctuary to people.

The Southwest now hosts more land owned by indigenous groups than anywhere in the country. It is the most defensible topography, the hardest to capture. From this turret, I looked down on mostly the Fort Apache and San Carlos Apache reservations. Tribes here have held their cultures against the rolling thunder of assimilation better than any, as if they have been shielded by the land.

I walked out of the ruin at the end of the day. We dragged down our cradle of climbing rope. From there, I looked off the southwest spread of the Mogollon Rim and saw the world, the layout of drainages moving south and west. Irvin and I would travel south from here. Laura would return to the streets and the midnight calls and the women with broken bones pleading for help. From looking at this wild place, it was clear to me why Laura had come. To touch sanctuary, to root her hands into it, to use it for a hold when climbing, and to drink its water. Once done, she knew she was safe.

Editor's Note: To help minimize the impact on archaeological sites, observe the following guidelines: Avoid climbing, sitting, or standing on walls or other archaeological features. Leave all artifacts where they lie; digging or removing artifacts is illegal. Stay on trails to protect fragile desert plants and prevent erosion. Refrain from touching rock art; oils from your hands can cause deterioration of prehistoric drawings.

Craig Childs is a field researcher in desert water ecology, working in southern Arizona. He spent 30 days on foot following the archaeological expedition routes of Emil Haury below the Mogollon Rim. His most recent book is Crossing Paths: Uncommon Encounters with Animals in the Wild, published by Sasquatch Press.

For Pine-based Nick Berezenko, each assignment into the remote corners of the Mogollon Rim country surprises him with startling revelations.