BACK ROAD ADVENTURE

The Trip From Joseph City to Dilkon Frames the Painted Desert as It Was 100 Years Ago

The back road that connects Joseph City with the tiny Navajo community of Dilkon to the north provides an opportunity to see a portion of the Painted Desert as travelers might have experienced it 100 years ago.

On this clear summer morning, I'm accompanied by Ken Fish, a Joseph City horse rancher who has driven this road many times as a Mormon missionary. I squint in the luminescent sunlight, remembering the palette John C. Van Dyke, author of The Desert, described in 1901: "... the long pink rifts of the desert valleys and the lilac tracery of the desert ranges." I see a wasteland of knee-high shrubs against a backdrop of small hills. The nearest look black or gray, but in the distance others seem dark blue, deep yellow or violet, some banded with grays and yellows and reds the same colors Navajo artists use in sand painting and Navajo weavers frequently reproduce in their exquisite rugs.

The colors here are subtle, the landscape deceptive. Everything appears simultaneously close at hand and far removed. The terrain through which we will drive is the southern end of the Colorado Plateau, an enormous table-land in northern Arizona and New Mexico, western Colorado and eastern Utah. The weird land makes me think of the painter Maynard Dixon, who captured this world on canvas and wrote, "To me, the wind of the wastelands has color; the opalescent ranges of the desert seem to me like music, and sometimes the giant clouds of storm, piled far above the mountains, take form as of lost and forgotten gods, serene and terrible."

We leave Fish's ranch, near Exit 277 off Interstate 40, in a pickup truck, and drive 1.9 miles west along Main Street in Joseph City to Porter Avenue, where we turn right, or north. After nearly 3 miles, Porter becomes an unpaved track that meanders through flat plateau country interrupted by isolated buttes and mesas whose surface soils are streaked from the collision of wind and rain with iron compounds in the ancient rocks. The dirt road does not have a name, Fish says, and isn't used much to-day, but at one time it was the mail route between Joseph City and the Navajo villages to the north.

Fish expects this road to be rough and is pleasantly surprised to find it has recently been graded, possibly because of a gravel mining operation in the hills through which we'll soon pass.

"It looks like we'll do okay today," he says, "but if there'd been any rain we wouldn't get through some of these washes, no matter what we were driving."

We are traversing relative-ly flat terrain Fish calls it "badlands clay" which is covered by short grasses. Eight miles north of Main and Por-ter, he points to Ives Mesa, a prominent multicolored land-mark northeast of the road. It is named for Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives, an Army en-gineer who explored the areas drained by the Colorado River in 1857-58.

Another 6.5 miles along the road, we are adjacent to Black Rock, an imposing hill with sharp edges that looks exactly as its name implies. A road to the right goes to some sort of mining enterprise in the side of the hill. We continue on the main road and a mile later snake through the gravel min-ing operation and drive in the bottom of Cottonwood Wash (bear right at the fork), the major drainage in the area.

"Supposedly, there's gold hidden someplace along this wash," Fish says. "The way I heard it was that two men found gold out here, probably in the early part of this centu-ry, and they hid it somewhere and went into town. One of the men got killed, and the other went looking for the place where they'd hidden it, but he never could find the spot. There's an old man here in Joe City who spent most of his life looking for it, but he never found it, either."

As Fish knows, legends of lost gold can be heard every five blocks from one end of Arizona to the other, so we move on.

About 2 miles north, as we sit looking at the cattle gate that marks the boundary of the Navajo reservation, Fish points to a bright streak of turquoise ambling across the road. We get out for a closer look and find an elegant little beast called the collared lizard, common to the Sonoran Desert and parts of the Colorado Plateau. The creature does some

push-ups to let us know who's boss, then darts into a hole in the red embankment at the side of the road. There's a house on the reservation side of the boundary and a sign in front of its driveway that says "Detour" with an arrow pointing right. We go right and then almost immediately turn left, heading north again. The road meanders around the north end of a place with an unforgettable name; Fish says the Indians call it Banana Butte. The U.S. Geological Survey map calls it Rotten Bananas Butte. It was named by Indians who used to harvest the fruit of a yucca plant that is plentiful there and which tastes vaguely like a banana, or a rotten banana, depending on what kind of day you've been having. Ten miles north of the reservation line we come to the top of a hill from which we see the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff to the northwest and a rock called Castle Butte to the east. We are sitting above a broad valley looking down on the Navajo homes that dot the arid landscape. At the bottom of the hill we turn right onto paved Indian Route 60, turn right and drive 10 miles to Dilkon, where there are two stores, a boarding school and an old trading post. After visiting the rustic, bareshelved trading post and the school grounds, we take the easy route toward home, continuing east on Indian 15 to State Route 77, where we turn right, south, to I-40 and Holbrook. Our meandering route through the Painted Desert hadn't turned up the kind of gold prospectors hunt for, but the terrain was undoubtedly a treasure that naturalist and writer John Van Dyke would have loved. Warning: Back road travel can be hazardous if you are not prepared for the unexpected. Whether traveling in the desert or in the high country, be aware of weather and road conditions, and make sure you and your vehicle are in top shape and you have plenty of water. Don't travel alone, and let someone at home know where you're going and when you plan to return. Odometer readings in the story may vary by vehicle. Additional Information: Holbrook Chamber of Commerce, (520) 524-2459; Navajo Tourism Department, (520) 871-6436 or (520) 871-7371.

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