Rain Dogs and the Butterfly-Bigelow

Saturday, June 28, 2007


In need of a good long hike, M~ and I decided to take Lucas up to the Butterfly trail in the Santa Catalina mountains north of Tucson. We planned to finish the path that we started the week before. Short on time on that last visit, we only made about a three mile trip out of it, turning around and retracing our steps when time grew short. This trip, however, we were prepared. Plenty of food and water, and ample daylight to finish the roughly ten mile loop. Setting out from the trail head, M~ had the clever idea to take a digital snapshot of the trail map, clearly displayed on a large metal sign at the edge of the parking area. We could then use the in-camera zoom function to take a closer look at our course and track our progress. Good. I also penciled in a rough map on the little waterproof notebook that Carrie and Elic Bramlett gave me because they think I am some sort of amalgam of John Muir and MacGyver. I fail to see the resemblance, at least in terms of hair style. In light of our recent Mountain Lion encounter (see M~'s blog, "Thanks for nothing, Hummingbirds!"), I also decided that from now on I would keep my big knife close at hand. I'm not trying to be Crocodile Dundee. The knife isn't even all that big. What I really want is a good Roman sword anyway, but I imagine the park service might give me some trouble if they saw me brandishing that kind of steel. Trouble, eh? Just the stuff I am usually looking for... but I digress.

The logic behind the possession of a pointy thing, as discovered about twelve thousand generations ago, is of course to give one a slight advantage over Nature's guile. Be it a sharpened stick or a well shaped chunk of chalcedony, it might just be the thing that makes the difference between having a nice walk in the woods and being a nice walking buffet. With keen eye and patience we enviously watch the birds enjoy their freedom, but these same senses do not reveal the complete picture of life in the forest. Wherever one goes, if there are animals present they almost always know you are there long before you know they are there - if you ever do. In general, they prefer to keep it that way. Sneaking about in the attempt to come upon a bear or a mountain lion unawares is categorically futile. If you are deft enough to accomplish the feat, the most probable outcome is a mortally close observation of teeth, claws, fur, and mostly your own blood. I say 'mostly' because I do carry a knife, after all. The thing about bears though, is that they are so damn thick. And lions so damn quick. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but they suck against enraged carnivores. I realize the near uselessness of my big knife, yet I cling to that outside chance that it will save a life, if only by harming another.

The first two hours of the hike were pleasant, to say the least. The views of the northern slope of the Santa Catalina mountains and San Pedro valley are grand. For about two and a half miles the trail descends a thousand feet from it's starting altitude of 7,500 feet. The next three miles ascends roughly 2,000 feet to a saddle pass just below the summit of Mount Bigelow, where a service road meanders back to the trail head. We never saw this service road - but I am getting ahead of myself. The hike took us through a mile or so of dense undergrowth plants; ferns, tall grasses, brambles of all sorts that have overtaken the area after a devastating forest fire four years ago. To our delight, however, we saw that many new young Pine trees were growing through the choking thicket, not to be stopped on their journey towards the sun. With any luck we'll be able to come back here in about a century, then we shall see what a good healthy Ponderosa Pine forest looks like. By then the standing char and ashes that are here will be long gone, recycled through the course of things. By then maybe some of my own ashes can be scattered here.

A few miles along, Lucas suddenly perked up. He was keenly interested in something just out of sight. The walls of a steep canyon were gradually closing in, and something was moving down below us and around a slight bend. Normally Lucas fixes his intentions on squirrels or rabbits, but this time he behaved in a different way. He was more tentative, more alert (if that's possible) to whatever was down there. We took a momentary pause and fell silent, reading the dog's body language. Then we began talking again, to make a little noise. Suddenly a loud bugle call blurted through the woods, as if the devil himself was blowing on a rusty old horn, and a White-tailed deer went crashing through the bushes about sixty feet to our right. It was large female, fast but graceless as it bounced away.

Approximately two and a half hours in, we began heading up the canyon through which runs Novio Spring. A jaunty little creek, it babbled along over rocks and roots, forming clear pools here and there that invited Lucas to submerge his face and drink heartily. As inviting as the fresh stream water was, Melissa and I drank only from our pack bladders, full of cool water safe for human consumption. We spoke for a while about what has changed since the days when native peoples and pioneer explorers would not hesitate to quaff their thirst from even brackish pools, and how such a clean flowing brook would have been a very happy find indeed. Were people just stronger in those days? Were they better suited with a disease fighting bacterial soup in their G.I. systems, or were they just as susceptible to Giardiasis, Schistosomiasis, intestinal cysts, and who knows what else that swam unseen in that water? Of course the dog was fine.

Following the path upstream, we came to a well trodden area that seemed to diverge from the main path, though it was hard to say for sure where the main path went at this point. We continued along the waterway, and shortly came upon an unexpected sight indeed. Strewn about on the ground were large chunks of metal - pieces of an airplane engine, which later we learned were from a jet fighter that crashed there in the mid 70's. The wreckage seemed otherworldly, and there was a feeling that something was still functional about it all. We quickly determined that this was not the trail, just a well trampled area of great curiosity. Backtracking for a few minutes we found the proper path, and proceeded up a series of steep switchbacks.

Now the path kept climbing, gaining 2000 feet over a distance of a couple miles. Somewhere into the first mile, rain began to gently fall. It had been lingering in dark clouds over the ridge line northeast of us, with low rumbles threatening to dampen our spirits, but until now there had not been a drop. I paused and shucked off my pack, digging for my rain shell. At first M~ said she didn't need hers, but within a minute the rain intensified, and she changed her mind. Lucas just gave us a look as if to say, "What did you expect?" It had rained on our drive up the mountain, but the few hours of reprieve gave us the false impression that there would be no more, in spite of all those dark clouds. We trekked on up the path.

Ah, the path. Soon it was less a path, and more a stream bed. It was, after all, the only bare section of the mountain side, everything else overgrown with raspberry brambles and pine trees. The only other place that plants did not grow was on the sheer rock walls that surrounded us. Since the path itself was the way of least resistance for the water, gravity guided the flow directly down the way we were walking up. Within minutes our water proof shoes were full, demonstrating remarkable water retention abilities. Sock and toe soup was on the menu for the duration of our hike. The higher we climbed, the heavier the rain fell, and the wetter we got. I recognized a seldom seem expression on M~'s face. It was something between irritation and endurance, with a dash of exasperation that was kept in check by the simple knowledge of no alternative but to keep on walking. I felt something similar in my own cheeks and teeth, tightly clenched around that ever-present tooth pick. Lucas paused to shake off the rain, and like a wrung out sponge he immediately absorbed as much again.

Now more or less careless about the wetness, I concluded two things; First, we had plenty of daylight, and second, less than half the hike lay before us. We would certainly walk out of these woods before dark, and had no reason to suspect otherwise. Even should some calamity befall us, we were prepared to suffer through a miserable night. As hard as the rain may fall, it could not seriously injure us. As far as objective hazards go, rain is very low on the list. It is the secondary hazards that rain might bring about which began to play in my mind. Loosened rock tumbling from above. That enraged carnivore I mentioned before, now much more easily surprised since our progress was muffled by the sound of the rain. And most dire, the increasing frequency and proximity of lightning. I told M~ not to walk too close to me, reasoning that if one of us was struck, the other was less likely to be hit at the same time. I tried to remember my CPR training, telling myself again that I need to take a wilderness survival course. We pressed on, each soggy step bringing us closer to the radio towers at the end of the trail. We paused briefly along this penultimate stretch to snack on fresh sweet raspberries that grew in great abundance along the path.

A little over five hours into the hike we came to the high point, passing a very pleasant meadow and an impressive heap of giant boulders. This would, on a dry day, be the perfect spot for a picnic and a nap. This day, however, we made a mental note and kept trudging along our trail/stream. The rain kept falling, as hard as ever. We had already been in it for well over an hour. Here, near the top of the mountain, there was little ground above us for the rain to wash down from. Below us lay over six thousand vertical feet of catchment area for this flood to wash into. Anything that fell to the south of our position would end up, eventually, in the Tucson basin by way of ravine and creek, pretty little water falls maturing into massive and destructive torrents of debris-laden water. These floods are more like wet cement than water, full of sand, plants, boulders, all churning and mashing their way to the lowest possible point. This is how our desert landscape is formed, in violent burst of earth moving power, separated by long spells of dry calm.

We came to a trail sign marking an intersection of four pathways. An odd hum filled the air here, audible over the steady rain. It came from the direction of one of the paths. The sign indicated that this was the last short leg up to the Mount Bigelow watch tower, which was surrounded by a large array of communication antennae. I had been there once before, in high school. Under the circumstances, it was the last place I wanted to be now. Our proximity to so much tall metal only eased our minds a little, in so much as that any lightning strikes that hit in this area would likely be drawn to the towers, and not us as we quickly passed over the summit of our trek and began down the path towards the Catalina Highway. Our intended course would have taken us to the base of those very towers, where the dirt service road offered an easy four mile stroll back to the Butterfly trail head. Our plan now was to descend from here to the Catalina Highway, and take the less attractive but somewhat safer paved route back to our truck, that rolling island of comfort and safety.

It was a good choice. I was suddenly and involuntarily brought to my knees by a mighty crack and blinding flash, as the fabric of space was rent asunder by lightning. The world was momentarily an overexposed picture of white hot pink and orange, as the simultaneous sound ripped through my body. From far away thunder is foreboding, deliberate, mysterious. This close it is no longer thunder, but the shrieking agony of billions of atoms instantaneously charred into oblivion. Way too close for mortal flesh. Lucas looked back at me, still on my knees in the watery path. His wet dog glare seemed to ask, "What the fuck is wrong with you?!" I turned around to check on my wife, a similar look on her face. We walked much faster for a while, hunched slightly over. That was the second closest I've ever been to a lightning strike.

The path down towards the highway was like something out of "Lord of the Rings." Huge blue-gray boulders interspersed with giant old growth pine trees and a clear under story littered with a bed of fallen red needles. The broken stone path was at times a gurgling runoff, and at times just bare slabs of weather worn granite. We practically skipped along on our way down, happy to be more or less out of harm's way. The path gave way to the highway, which we crossed. On the other side we took momentary shelter under the eaves of the visitor's center, near a sign which proudly declared the center "NOW OPEN." We decided against bringing our wet selves within, and took some time to wring out our socks and dump out the shoe soup. A hummingbird idled at a nearby feeder, seemingly indifferent to the rain. I wondered if any hummingbirds had ever been hit by lightning. It seems highly unlikely. M~ and I began laughing at ourselves, our general state, as a forest ranger poked her head out the door and asked us where we had parked. She had a look of bafflement about her. We explained where we had come from, and now she seemed both baffled and irritated - were we fools? She disappeared for a moment, then returned to say that a gentleman inside had offered us a ride up the highway to out truck. We thought about it for a moment then agreed, if only to put her at ease. It would have been a nice cool down, walking a few miles on a mountain road in the rain. The fellow with the car was a very nice guy. A dad with two young daughters who squealed happily as Lucas licked their fingers from the back of the vehicle.

Finally back at our truck about six hours after we left it, we shed our wet clothes and drove down the mountain wearing no pants. Lucas, naked as ever, quickly went to sleep in the back seat.