SEARCH FOR THE WILD PALMS OF THE KOFAS

HUNTING THE WILD A 21-DAY TREK IN THE KOFA MOUNTAINS P A L M HUNTING THE WILD PALM A 21 DAY TREK IN THE KOFA MOUNTAINS

Chromatic scales from a canyon wren drifted down, finding their way through shadows and narrow stone clefts. The bird's warning rained on me at the bottom of the chasm. I found another handhold and pulled myself to the next ledge. This marked the beginning, before I had been drained of food and water, before muscles were torn against the inclines of the Kofa Mountains. I had begun a 21-day walk through the range. A friend, Irvin Fernandez, had joined me to grow hard by the desert and to imbed cactus spines in his skin like tattoos. A biologist with the intrepid sense of a young shaman, he carried with him the odd tools of his profession: the syringe and the alcohol vials, the book in which he could press leaves and cactus fruit pulp, and the empty film canisters waiting to be filled with who knows what. Together we would eat plants that would make us sick, and we would hunker around animal tracks for hours. I'd come to the Kofas because I had driven the isolated highways above Mexico, my elbow out the open window, not seeing another car for 10 or 20 miles. Imprudent jackrabbits hurled themselves at my tires, unplanned suicides from the quiet of the desert. I knew every moment that I should be on the ground, not on the road. The horizon was built of upturned mesas striking out of needle peaks and hot, sharp buttes, all the front pieces of an incognito wilderness. I had strolled up Palm Canyon in these mountains many times, admiring the stately California fan palms that crowded in the high, dark corners. Some books on the Sonoran Desert assert this is the only grove of native palms in Arizona. I resolved to sniff out this rumor.

gets the highest percentage and most hours of sunlight in a year, the largest amount of daily solar radiation, the highest daily maximum temperatures, and it is the largest area on the continent to receive less than 12 inches of rain a year. Scattered in this place of heat and dryness are relict climates kept cool by the shade of cliffs. Two palms 40 feet tall, Washingtonia filifera, and one only a season old stood against black walls. A toppled trunk bridged down the canyon, spanning a long dryfall. When I reached the first palm, I ran my hands along its corrugated surface. The tree had taken the impact of floods and was scarred the way you would expect the hide of a fighting animal to be. The enclosure, composed of smooth rhyolite, developed from volcanic eruptions. The mountain range and its entire province was flung from the interior of the planet

HUNTING THE WILD PALM A 21-DAY TREK IN THE KOFA MOUNTAINS

19 million years ago. Silica invaded the molten rock, causing lava not to ooze but to make megaton explosions that darkened the skies with hot matter. The volcanoes appeared one after the other hardly giving time for one to solidify before another broke through. It would quiet for a spell, the land tilting with the tectonics of moving continents, then another wave of volcanoes would burst through like a potter smashing an unfinished piece to start the clay again. All of the soft, ashy material has now eroded. Only the cores, the twisted skeletons of these volcanoes, and hardened magma tubs the size of Rhode Island remain, weathering against the sun. This is not an inadvertent landscape at all. It means everything it says.

of volcanoes would burst through like a potter smashing an unfinished piece to start the clay again. All of the soft, ashy material has now eroded. Only the cores, the twisted skeletons of these volcanoes, and hardened magma tubs the size of Rhode Island remain, weathering against the sun. This is not an inadvertent landscape at all. It means everything it says.

A few times the ocean came upon it, turning these mountains to islands as recently as a million and a half years ago, opening even farther the crotch of the Sea of Cortes between Baja and the mainland. The remains of that ocean, all of the displaced rocks, have been poured into basins and left in rings around the mountains. It would have been a sight, the ocean creeping up on the last volcanoes, taking molten rock in great violent gulps, scalding the sky.

Sitting there in the remains of ancient volcanoes and a dried-out ice age, I heard Irvin scraping his way through the plants below. When he looked up and saw me and the palms, he smiled. Struggling up the rocks, he used the same fallen palm as a bridge. He, too, felt the skin of the first palms, running his fingers into the cracks as if looking for words. Then he sat beside me, and together we gathered the cool of the shade.

Twenty days passed. In that time we ran out of food between caches. We had eaten the fruits of the fishhook cactus and the red flowers of the chuparosa, which taste sweet like cucumbers. We ate the tangy leaves of the sow plant and a portion of a rare and brilliant fruit belonging to the night-blooming cereus cactus (thus far the westernmost identification of the species), spitting the seeds back into the shade of a creosote bush. Over a paloverde fire, we cooked a black-tailed jackrabbit and ate it slowly into the night.

We also had walked far beyond the Kofas. We discovered water in small holes and at other times found no water at all. After the palms of our first day, we had seen nothing more than ironwoods, mesquites, and acacias.

We came to a final canyon on our route, one that offered no promise, no clues. It presented only high walls and a swift rise off the bajada. Shade gave birth to lush oak trees. There also came every shape of spiked, spiny, and clawed plant. Bubbles of sweet blood appeared on my hands, arms, legs. We climbed over water holes, took difficult handholds, and helped each other into the darkening chambers of the canyon.

Irvin ascended a ledge over a deep water hole, trying to get up by his hands alone. At the last second, losing strength, he unharnessed his pack and let it slip. It hit a rock 15 feet below and bounced the wrong way, into the water. I moved to grab it before it sank. His fingers uncoupled from his handhold, and he fell. We both landed at the water, he in a crumpled pile.

There we sat for a bit, feeling our wounds as if testing fruit in a market. After all these days, we had to look at each other, bleeding Ten thousand years deep in a relict climate held safe in the desert. We were the last people. Or the first people.

and broken at the water. He grinned and said to me, "We have lived." He said it not to imply mere survival but that we were indeed alive. Following a trail of fallen flood-driven palm fronds, we came to a toppled debris-washed palm trunk that had rolled down the canyon. A hundred yards farther, we found the slender stalks of five palms. The canyon closed resolutely around them, and when we arrived we could see all of them. We counted 21 palms. They stood one against the next, packed so tightly between walls their fronds rasped on rock with each breeze. A thatch of discarded fronds cov-ered the ground, and the beams of dead palms overlapped 10 feet deep. The state of California claims this palm, the California fan palm, as its own. This assertion dates to the type locality, the re-gion where the species was first collect-ed. Although the longitude and latitude of this spot, documented in 1876, situ-ates the palms near Prescott, Arizona, this was thought to have been a recording error. It has long been believed that the location was actually in California because, as a researcher noted at the turn of the century, the original calculations would Put "the parent trees in the neighborhood of Prescott, Arizona, a region rather of pines than of palms.' These original seeds had been gathered in the 1870s, grown in Belgium, and the palms were named Washingtonia filifera by a German botanist. The name was selected due to the grand nature of the tree, iden-tifying it with the endemically American fondness for George Washington. It was then believed to be solely a California species. Shedding light on the origin of these palm seeds in Belgium, Victor Miller, a Ph.D. at Arizona State University, calculated the type locality as being, indeed, near Prescott. And behold, a grove of California fan palms was found about 40 miles from Prescott at Castle Creek. Also, at the time of the seed collection, the main transportation in the area, the California and Arizona Stage Line, ran very near the Castle Creek grove. So it is likely the seeds were gathered exactly where the 1876 document put them: in Arizona. In 1927 the first official botanist to encounter the Palm Canyon palms offered to rename them Washingtonia arizonica, but went nowhere with that. Thus far it remains the California fan palm and will likely continue to do so. But at least the botanically inclined in Arizona can snicker to them-selves about having the type locality on home soil. The tallest of these 21 palms appeared to be a couple hundred years old. They all stood closely, as if whispering to one another. The lavishly green leaves, accordi-oned like great Japanese fans, chattered and rattled in the breeze. Springs broke out of the cliffs. Their drops smacked to mist as they hit my face. We were then as deep in the canyon as a person could be. A place humans could touch only with great concern, spattered with blood and water. Ten thousand years deep in a relict climate held safe in the desert. We were the last people. Or the first people. When we walked out of the canyon, the sunset sky opened the way a sheet will snap in the wind. Stalks of clouds boiled from the desert. Rain came to another range across the basin. I could read the words written there, in the fine strands of rain, as if they were a dialect set down on very old parchment. I stared at the mountain ranges beyond, the Chocolates and then the Trigos, and wondered for that moment how many canyons held in their inaccessible shade a clutch of palms.

WHEN YOU GO Those not up to the rigorous cross-country hiking required for Fishtail and Four Palms canyons, where our author trekked, can still get a look at the relict palms if they're in pretty good shape and go prepared. There's a rough but improved trail in Palm Canyon, located in the west end of the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge about 18 miles south of Quartzsite via north-south U.S. Route 95. Watch for the Palm Canyon sign at a dirt road heading east. Follow this road (it's rough, but a passenger car can make it) for nine miles to the parking lot. A steep half-mile hiking trail into the canyon begins here and leads to an excellent view of the palms. If you're reasonably fit, the round-trip takes about an hour. The climb to the palms and back down is rougher and takes about 45 minutes. Watch for the hollylike leaves of Kofa mountain barberry bushes, which grow only in this area, and wildlife such as bighorn sheep, coyotes, and a variety of birds. There are no facilities or drinking water on the refuge, so bring your own. For more information and to inquire about camping, contact the refuge, 356 W. First St., Yuma, AZ 85364-6290; (520) 783-7861.