a third trip to the Arrastra has yet a different character. no snakes at all this time. I spend one very long and exhausting day making a full bushwhack to the middle segment of Peeples Canyon below Sycamore Spring. this entails a negotiating a 130-meter (400-foot) escarpment of steep and rugged Precambrian trachytes (?) and pyroclastics (?) which are dipping strongly downwards in the direction of the canyon floor making a series of highly inclined planes which end in overhung cliffs. this combined with the presence of loose clasts, and the cacti, and it's like descending an escalator on ball-bearings in a needle factory. faugh. south-facing, the ascent in the late afternoon sun was brutal but without incident. I was mostly worried about snakes and needles at eye level on the ascent. the canyon at this point is more open with a dry cataract to the west. there are several springs coming in from the sides and a number of pools, one more than ten feet deep which probably persists year-round -- no fish, but a number of frogs and thousands of polliwogs, some marooned in pools which will end up shortly as dried-up dust pockets with dessicated gobs of formerly living protoplasm.

lunch is taken slowly on the floor of an undercut cliff in rapidly diminishing shade. in the company of ant lions and a few lizards.

I am completely startled at one point, while photographing a recently broken Saguaro, I hear the honking rasp of a wild ass (not an ATV-driver, a burro). a thoroughly pissed-off male about 50 meters away, I can't remember whether they can be aggressive or not, but this one seemed to consider it as an option for a while. I keep moving while scouting for suitable vegetation to keep between us. he may be aggressive, but he can't plow through a cholla, saguaro, or ocotillo.

checking the Google topo when I get back to the house a few days later, I see I didn't memorize the terrain quite properly, missing a draw that I should have gone up and then I would have found a saddle with an easier access to the middle part of the canyon closer to where I descended to on the second visit to Sycamore Spring. some day, a full (overnight) transit of the entire canyon would be marvelous. next time.

take out a number of tamarisk trees in Cottonwood Creek wash, until the blade on the trim saw snaps into three pieces. cheap. wonder what herbicide they were using up in Echo Park for eradicating the non-native pest.

and the differences? different plants blossoming, temperature 10 degrees warmer. dryness increased. but the blossoming itself is not only a simply visual phenomena, but one that is registered by that background buzzing which is constant during dayLight hours. no awareness of any crescendos at solar noon or anything like that, though there are spatial variations where the background presence is drowned out when walking (carefully) among the branches of a paloverde or acacia in bloom. there the bees and other flying beasts are in an intoxicated and very loud frenzy all around the ears. otherwise, when transiting the space, the sound is simply there.

down from the heights through Kirkland, at the Bar & Grill, a bevy of roadies parked in the style of... while the desert insinuates, deprecates, and sums.

Moore knows rivers, wet places, how to feel, how to transliterate feelings, and how to see, but I'm not in consonance with her characterization of the desert. drawing emotion onto that landscapes seems to place the human over that which is not known as though it was known. something like the common personification of animals and the position of pets in the social system. the desert is a transform mapping of the Void. why personify that? seems corrupt to add human stuff(ing) onto it.

Sometimes, in a desert landscape, a landscape without consciousness, emptier of intellect than any other landscape I have ever seen, I think I can feel emotion lying like heat on the surface of the sand and seeping into the cracks between boulders. There is joy in the wind that blows through the spines of the saguaro, and fear in bare rocks. Anger sits waiting under stones. Exhilaration pools in the low places, the dry river beds, the cracked arroyos, and is sucked by low pressure ridges up into storm clouds that blow east toward the Alamo Canyon -- Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking

I join Joanne on a half-day excursion to Verde Springs at the headwaters of the Verde River. she is an old acquaintance from the mid-80's when she and Mike led biology and geology field trips at the local community college -- I was on a memorable week-long one to Death Valley in the winter of 1985. the hike today is part of local Earth Day activities, although she has been leading these monthly for the last year as part of the public awareness campaign that the Center for Biological Diversity is mounting in opposition to the plans for massive groundwater mining by the towns of Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Chino Valley. a representative of the Nature Conservancy was along as well to introduce the land that they recently bought protecting one of the most sensitive areas of the riparian headwaters. there was an eclectic group of folks from a thirteen-year-old to several couples who've retired to Prescott.

we started out at the 100-year-old Sullivan Lake impoundment in the middle of Paulden which is fully sedimented and the dam itself is crumbling. it sits at the head of a 20-meter deep canyon cut into a late Cenozoic basalt flow that forms the immediate subsurface for much of the immediate area. Joanne gave a brief overview of the issues that are threatening the Verde headwaters. the primary one being the construction of a huge pipeline by the Prescott city government that will tap into the Big Chino Aquifer, spur rampant development, and have a major impact on the springs that feed the Upper Verde.

we then proceeded to the parking at the Little Thumb Butte Bed and Breakfast where we hiked down to the river at the confluence of Granite Creek and the Verde (not until I did a before group portrait). upstream of the confluence the Verde is blocked by the influx of sediment from Granite Creek and forms a turbid still water lake that is cut into the canyon sediments -- clearly the Sullivan Lake dam silting up has deprived the river of its normal sedimentation load and caused heavy down-cutting of the pre-existing flood-plain (which now lies about 8 meters above the current water table). this has largely destroyed the riparian environment above the confluence. I would suggest the first thing to do is to begin to cut the dam down, slowly, so that there can be a incremental release of the 100 years of backed up sediment to bring back the former water-table level and reclaim the upstream riparian environment. this solution is likely impossible given that the upstream watershed feeding Sullivan Lake has significant human development of the huge watershed area which covers Paulden, Chino Valley, and much of Prescott as well as the entire Big Chino Basin.



there are many significant Hohokam archeological sites in the area, structures and petroglyphs alike: the ancient ones were here in force. and disappeared as they did elsewhere in the region. suddenly, in the mid-1300s. unfortunately these are minor sites compared to other more spectacular places, so often petroglyphs are chipped and defaced, and certainly the areas have been thoroughly cleaned of movable artifacts. it is illegal to disturb any findings, but the laws are almost never enforced.

we wander upstream to a wide but now down-cut and parched floodplain with large and elaborate (and inscrutable) petroglyphs chipped into the desert varnish that is present on basalt boulders fallen from the cliffs. then we head back below the confluence where the canyon transforms into a rich riparian environment with the river simply appearing in the midst of the gravels first as a stagnant trickle. as we go on further downstream it grows rapidly with the influx of numerous springs coming in from the north side of the canyon through some fractured limestone (and ultimately from the Big Chino Aquifer. I spot a long gopher snake lounging on a branch in the riverbed. the fish increase in size as we move down stream. evidence of beaver activities are everywhere. we lunch at the Nature Conservancy segment, wade in the creek a bit, head downstream another fifteen minutes and then wander back to the cars in the hot afternoon sun.

Joanne has taken many tens of people on this hike and rightly assumes that once people have experienced the richness of the riparian environment they are more likely to be able to imagine the consequence of its potential loss. as everywhere in the West, and increasingly, in the world, water becomes an object of contention -- to some an economic commodity, to others merely another extractable resource, and to the entire ecosystem that depends on every drop, an indispensable ingredient of life.

access to the area is somewhat restricted (much of it privately owned), but the headwaters area that is managed by the Arizona Game and Fish Department as the Upper Verde River Wildlife Area is open to the public. highly recommended!

lock in a 140% gain on gold and platinum bullion between 2003 and 2009. not too bad though the platinum peaked short-term last April at a 400% gain. wasn't around to cash in and wasn't following the commodities market then.

sleep dissolves along with the darkness. full moon is covered with high clouds most of the night. but morning brings full sun breaking over the eastern horizon. in the bed of the truck, it finally finds my eyelids. and brings first a reddening haze, then, with squinted opening, shafts of eyelash-broken brilliance. the five percent humidity has scraped the throat and nose raw. water is the first thing: imbibio. reaching up to unlatch the rear gate which slams open with a thud and lets in the sound and sun of morning desert.

impact on body by place is subtle and brutally immediate at the same time.

already leaving this particular place, only four days. leaving precisely when there is that draw, that pull to go deeper, longer, to simply become there or at least to completely resonate to its frequency. resonate to rattlers, springs, green stone, slickensides, smaller and larger bursts of psychedelic colors every few centimeters, the dead cow, the lone cottonwood, the humming, the air, the water, the Light; thoughts of other places, other people, and other lives bring mostly a deepening melancholy and turbid state to clear thinking.

ants. mosquitoes. snakes, thistles. what did I kill by walking, by being there? there are indeed thousands of tiny flowers scattered on the ground everywhere. the cattle have already destroyed the vast majority of the cryptobiotic soil spanning between the other, larger vegetation. they represent the most damaging influence on the desert environment. specifically they cause the widespread compression of the upper surface which cryptobiotic soil cannot recover from in any short-term way. so, every step taken... life destroys to create. only problem now is the plague species, humans, and how the system will deal with them.

today, after that small amount of moisture in the night, the entire place is vibrating. when standing still, there is a loud and continuous background buzzing that is non-specific in source direction. standing near a particular blossoming plant, there is the sensation of particular bees and other insects doing their thing, but otherwise, there is this background humming that has no point source but rather simply is -- like the hissing of blood in ear.

on the way in to Sycamore Spring both times, I note the existence of a lone Cottonwood tree growing up in the middle of a lightly sloping alluvial fan below a sizable un-named mesa. the only possibility for a Cottonwood to be there is water, and plenty of it. a good objective for a bushwhack. after the numerous encounters with slithering and rattling things yesterday, attention to movement and especially foot placement becomes aligned with breathing. of course any movement has to be calculated when in such an environment. miscalculated movement will be punished with some pointed intersecting and likely penetrating the body wall. I escape these four days with only two of those painful encounters, both arising in the thin slice of time between a visual scan of upcoming terrain and a glance at some specific object within the field of view. then aiiii-shit! as the pain jolts upwards from compromised shin.

this bushwhack takes me to the cottonwood. it looks to be around a hundred years old, there are a few other water-seeking plants, a tamarisk, rooted in a whitish rock ledge. apparently some near-surface water is available. paradise in the shade under the tree. except for the stench of death which I trace to the desiccating corpse of a cow. the shifting wind brings eye-watering wafts on occasion, but otherwise I spend an hour or two soaking up the energy of being under the lush green canopy surrounded by hard-core Sonoran desert. it is a singularity like Sycamore Spring on a smaller scale and with no running surface water.

minuscule F/A18 fighters are frequently dog-fighting in the airspace above. in the day and night. moving in and out of unaided vision, tightly circling each other, dropping flares, and, with afterburners, roaring in such volume that all ambient sound is swallowed. for our nation's security. so it goes.

otherwise, commercial flight contrails gradually fill the sky with high-level cirrus clouds that soften the terrain and its re-radiative impact, but this effect distorts its being what it is, along with distorting the things living here. they did not evolve with spent jet fuel clouds hanging overhead to shade them from the burnishing sun. this is a problem. just another problem that the human species have applied through their amplification system -- this is the waste product, waste energy, which alters the environment.

the rest of the day is a slow and rambling return to base. run across some small mining digs, one trenched into a pegmatite dike that includes some coarsely crystallized black tourmaline with its classic trigonal (rhombohedral hemimorphic) cross-sections. someone has tramped this land, and in the hunt for extractive wealth, has, literally, left no stone unturned. the West is everywhere scarred by these digs from small 2-meter test pits to the massive kilometer-wide open-pit gashes. that mineral bonanza, that natural 'surplus' regime drove and still drives the development of the West. straight north of here about 15 kilometers, is the Phelps-Dodge copper/molybdenum open-pit monstrosity. without which, as the old Colorado School of Mines bumper sticker proclaimed Ban Mining, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark the developed world could not exist.

head out to Sycamore Spring earlier this morning to allow for a longer period to explore. four liters of water rather than two. forgot to take the pruning saw to take out some of the tamarisk trees growing in the wash. will do next time out.

how the cattle wear ways through the bush: I followed many of those ways, but they are, in fact, infinite in number and go nowhere but elsewhere. leaving spaces where anything edible is gone. and the microbial soil is crushed and eroding. only trickly splattered shit left behind in various stages of dessication. just as all other forms of life process energy and leave waste behind. eating on the move, because there isn't enough nutrition in one place to really graze and shit one of those classic UFO-shaped pies, those are the product of pastoral abundance. the desert is not abundant in any way except in lack. it takes at least 100-200 acres of this land per cow per year, possibly double, triple that. why even raise cattle here is the loud question I would ask the ranchers.

how long does a cowpie last? here they are hard and indeed could be made good use of in a cow-pie-throwing contest. at the immediate moment of exit from the humid gut, the pies fester with flies, the hairy and loud kind with the technicolor backs and eyes. in a frenzied dance likely for the water content alone. fast dessication hardens a crust which keeps a core amply moist for some days. this attracts some kinds of burrowing creatures who build tunnel complexes that riddle the whole-ness. the pie eventually loses it's bilious green color and grades into a bleached beige of a rag used to wash a car a few times. they seem to persist in this form -- dried and digested grasses, cellulose -- for a long time, years to be sure, possibly decades? probably a decent fuel source. how many acres used to gain one pound of meat on these beasts?

then there is the presence today of snakes. I see seven. hopefully not prophetic. four were pretty positively rattlers. that based on sound and sight. the other three were not. I got one good audio fragment of one of the rattlers which I shall upload eventually. chilling. the repeated encounters make me wish for a pair of leather snake chaps. it also transforms my attention into a focused exercise of moving awareness. watching everywhere within a couple meters (yards) of the feet. (recalling that a rattler can strike a distance two-thirds of its length) and one of the snakes I saw was easily a six-footer, as fat, as they say, as a man's arm.

after an alternately adrenaline-pumped and relaxing hike, Sycamore Spring greets with greener trees, the peregrine falcons, the other birds, gurgling water, frogs, dragonflies, cattail, the snakes, and evidence of more -- javelina, deer, and such. after a lunch of sardines, avocado, Wasa rye crackers, and nuts, I decide to continue down the canyon as far as seems prudent. the width varies as does the water quantities, as the spring water goes in and out of sandy sections. I have to wend my way around boulders the size of small cars to trucks, worn smooth. at one point a huge Cottonwood has died and fallen across the canyon, immediately below that is a pool cut deep into the rock, it is full of water, and is at least eight feet deep. several frogs are chilling at one side. I scramble my down stream for an hour, but decide after a particularly challenging section to begin to head back. any injury here could easily be fatal although if capable of getting back out of the canyon, the cell phone might function, otherwise, it would be days before help would arrive.

the hike back is tiring when I take a bushwhack short-cut which cuts off about a mile, but the trade-off between rougher terrain (very much so!), and that mile is more than paid for by the amount of ravine scrambles and having to carefully scout the way ahead.

storm, thunder, a spattering of rain, wind makes the truck tremble; full moon, the waking moon, stand, look, ponder, wander, stand, look, watch, meditate, mind gradually emptying of words and being replaced by the absolute anti-symbolic regime of things-as-they-are. not words for things, not pictures of things, but the simple imbricate truth of thing-as-it-is -- immersed, connected, continuous, and very much alive. reductive thoughts purged. and now simply embodying the form of wisdom impressed on the sensory body, not the meaning: where next to place the foot, what not to touch. what looks different, what is the same.

on the way down to Sycamore Spring again, take the Iron Springs detour through Skull Valley wait for a freight train at the grade crossing there, and find the old cottonwood tree that I photographed in 1985 or so with the 4x5 Graflex during an outing to the area. since then, one huge branch, 4 feet in a diameter, has fallen off, a raven circles above, agitated at the incursion into its place. the dry desert wind moves the natal leaves, later in the season the leaves will make a deep rushing sound in the wind.

An army marches on its stomach. -- Napoleon

as if this is enough to justify the concept of energy usage and amplification: it is precisely these fundamentals which directly illustrate the connection between collective energy resource regimes and, in this case, the amplified energy projection potential of militaristic social structures. the balance between the starvation of the general population ond the full bellies of soldiers is a core decision of those controlling a nation-state. think North Korea, think Soviet Union, think any state.