Memories of Salome Creek

MEMOIRS OF Salome Creek

THEY ENTERED THE COVE THROUGH A long, narrow channel, with the boat's motor barely creating a wake that fanned out slowly behind them, then quietly slurped and died against the rock walls on each side. As the sun broke over the horizon, the constricting walls fell away revealing an immense, gleaming shield, a mile-wide oval of flaming gold spread before them.

"Sally May Cove" his father called it, using the local jargon. He, himself, preferred the more exotic Salome, pronounced SAL-o-may. (He was young then a boy of 12 - and a dreamer.) They raced across the liquid-gold surface, making a beeline toward the stickups that marked the shallows where the bass and crappie spawned. There, at the mouth of Salome Creek, they dropped anchor and settled in for what he now remembers as a slow unraveling of exquisite moments.

They sat there silently or speaking only in whispers, watching their rods for linetwitch, for the telltale tap-tap of the bass taking the plastic worm. Suddenly the hush of the morning would be broken by the clarinet notes of a birdsong or the shock of the tail-slap of a beaver or even the faint, distant report of honks and whispering wings and there it would be, high overhead, the undulating "V" of migrating Canada geese. He would look over and see his father with a dreamy smile that he never wore in the city. The boy thought, These are the best timeslike no other.

Occasionally he would allow his gaze to follow idly the intertwining braid of Salome Creek as it meandered across the desert plain, backtracking to where it emerged from the chasms of the hooded Sierra Anchas in the central part of the state. The beautiful mountains, rugged and austere, held within their craggy folds, he was sure, worlds of solitude and splendor.

ONE DAY DURING HIS LATE TEEN years, the boy rambled on his own near the saguaro-studded skirts of Dutchwoman Butte. Hot and thirsty, he wanted to get down to Salome Creek for a drink. After an hour's scramble through mesquite and catclaw thickets, he emerged on the brink of a precipice. There, to his surprise, the creek no longer flowed on the surface, but at the bottom of a 100-foot-deep rock-bound cleft. The fissure looked nearly narrow enough to jump across, but ribbed as it was with smooth, polished rock, he could see no way down it. Scouting along the edge, he finally spotted a ramp of tiered ledges. After slithering down the rock cascade, the boy fell into a pool of clear, bracingly cold water, which on a 105-degree day - felt like paradise found.

Proceeding down the canyon without hesitation, he slid down slide after watery slide, jumping over little waterfalls, swimming through crystal-clear pools. At times, enfolded in shadow, all the teen could see was a sliver of blue sky overhead. The seamless rock funneled him in and out of alcoves, through dark passageways and long, sinuous alleys. It was always the same kind of rock - a pearly white, or roseor salmon-tinged granite (its color actually depended on how the light struck it) - and as smooth to the touch as flesh. In the sun it radiated heat like a hot plate, and he would periodically lie down on it to warm up after becoming chilled in the pools.

In the middle of the afternoon he turned a corner into a soaring, beautifully twisted grotto - and found himself perched on top of a 30-foot waterfall. Partially hidden by the slant of the falls, the pinched-in, dark pool below seemed inaccessible. The sheer walls overhanging it presented no footholds, no handholds.

However, he spied a rusted metal ring bolted to a rock off to one side. A 3-foot length of frayed rope hung uselessly from it. Gingerly he slid his wet sneakers step by step across the sloping ledge that intervened. A slip there, and he would toboggan down rock protuberances all the way to the pool. At last, he reached the rope. He leaned out on it to get a better view of the pool. Four feet below him there was a ledge from which he could jump directly into the pool, but what lay beyond, he did not know. He slid down to the rock and jumped.

Exhilaration buoyed him up from the icecold depths of the pool. He popped out like a cork, splashing the walls with water, shouting, "What an awesome place this is!" Beyond a few more alcoves, the canyon ended abruptly. Between towering pillars, Salome Creek ran out onto the desert plain where he had watched it as a child.

All told, the journey had taken him the better part of a day, though he estimated he had barely covered a mile. So entranced had he been by each immediate moment that time in the canyon had ceased to exist.

He went back many times to visit this rare jewel in the desert and found that others knew of it, too. Sporadically, he encountered parties of two or three or five - some of them experienced in what was then the fledgling art of "canyoneering." They brought ropes with them to rappel down the ringbolt falls. Others, as unprepared as he had been, were forced to make the scary jump.

They called the box canyon "The Jug.' Most assumed it was so named because of the bottleneck at the falls. But maybe it was an old cowboy expression, like "hoosegow," for jail, because once you were imprisoned in its stone walls, it was pretty much a oneway trip.

Over the years that he frequented The Jug, he witnessed much that was wonderful - and saw some things that disturbed him. A 5-year-old girl, crying uncontrollably in fear of the jump, was taken by the arm by her father, who flung her like a Raggedy Ann doll into the pool. He met another father coming up the trail with his son, their bloody feet wrapped in shreds of their shirts, their bodies covered with welts and contusions.

Text continued on page 31

Continued from page 26 They told him they had taken off their boots just above the falls, and the boy's feet had slipped out from under him on the wet rock. The father grabbed for him, and they had both gone cartwheeling into the pool. Dazed, they continued barefoot out of the canyon and had lost their way on the ascent. They'd spent the rainy night huddling for warmth in a patch of prickly pear cacti. As more and more people came to The Jug, it began to feel to him like a crowded amusement park. It was time, once again, to follow Salome farther into the hills.

REMOTE AND TUCKED AWAY BENEATH impossible cliffs, guarded by miles of nearly impenetrable shrub and manzanita chaparral, "The Secret Box" seemed as magical a find as The Jug if not more so. But it proved a hard-won prize. It took months of grueling backpacks into the creek's ravaged upper reaches for him to discover the place. And when he did, he found it too severe to explore all the way on his own. He went back with five other canyoneers, all as hardened and skilled as he was by then in doing serious canyons. One of the two women on the trip was a little slip of a thing, hardly bigger than her backpack, but she proved as strong as the men. On the 5-mile bushwhack in, as they blindly fought through dense, prickly tangles of head-high scrub, she had nearly stepped on a giant blacktail rattler. Although shaken, she had not panicked. She stood stock-still and backed away slowly from the furiously rattling snake. And when they reached a natural amphitheater that harbors The Secret Box's initial set of deep falls, she went first doffed her pack and sailed it out into the pool, and immediately jumped after, shouting with glee and abandon.

They spent three days negotiating The Secret Box. Several of the 50-foot-and-taller waterfalls required technical rigging. They wrapped lengths of inch-wide, flat “webbing” around boulders or trees and secured the rappel rope to it with carabiners. Determined not to leave webbing behind, they decided the last person would break down the rig and jump into the pool. He made two 50-foot jumps and, from that height, hitting the water felt like being jackhammered into concrete. But mostly the days consisted of indolence and sunshine. Of lolling around on rocks, paddling through winding pools. Of dreamily noting the architectural miracle of a fragile-wand columbine. Of seeing, as if for the first time, the “emeraldness” of moss beneath the spray of a waterfall. The days passed lingering and long, like the days of childhood, and he wished they would never end.

ALL THIS HE REMEMBERS WHILE behind the steering wheel of a pickup truck parked high up in the Sierra Anchas. He sits at the source now, at the very headwaters of Salome Creek. The red embers of a fiery sunset burn on the Salado Indian ruins dotting the huge mesa below him. Looking down into the dark canyon, he can still pick out the silvery thread of the creek on its 20-mile descent to Salome Cove and Roosevelt Lake.

He is an old man now. The skin of the hands on the steering wheel appears parchment-thin and liver-spotted, and his life, he knows, like that of the creek flowing out to the lake, will soon run out.

It has been a good life. Maybe, like for all of us, not perfect, but not without its joys and special moments.

Salome, for one, had lured him. Taken him in, and shown him a world of wonders. In its very roughness, in the reality of water, thorn and stone, given him beauty, challenge, hope. Across the lake, the jagged facade of Four Peaks begins to hide the westering sun. In a few hours its ruddy glow will be replaced by that of metropolitan Phoenix, 60 miles distant but lighting up the night sky like a slow-burning explosion.

He turns the key in the ignition, and thinks: Will all those yet to come be lucky enough to find a burning, wild country to love? AH EDITOR'S NOTE: For information on the 18,530-acre Salome Wilderness, contact the Tonto Basin Ranger District of Tonto National Forest at (928) 467-3200.