Mathematics and Mileages to my House

The trail to my house, as all trails in the Southwest, is a wash (or vise versa). You go along down the dirt road where the BLM rangers lost my tracks. When the tire ruts have begun to meander individually, separate from one another, you have come to the right spot. Now they split and go around trees that are 50 years old.

They tracks have become trails.


But these trails are no longer monotonic, (one-to-one) i.e. for a given distance from the trailhead there are different, yet equivalent, positions on the trail. In other words there are many trails masquerading as one another.

Suddenly, you are at my camp.

"Four hikers go into the canyon with shovels. Three come out..."

Aravaipa is one of the most scenic of Arizona's many beautiful scenic canyons. Unfortunately, like many riparian areas in the southwest it's beauty and ecology are threatened by the invasive species Russian Olive, or tamarisk.

"Tamarisk SHOULD NOT BE in Aravaipa canyon.

We're getting it done, beating the monsters back, yanking them from their dirty little nests - taproots and all - and hanging up on the rocks to die. This is the best way to stop them from re-rooting themselves - but it's also the 21st-century equivalent of nailing owl-skins to the barn wall to ward off witches: begone, ye cursed tamarisks!

We worked the area from just below the Narrows almost to Virgus canyon. In the spring we pulled thousands of seedlings out of this stretch of canyon. The ones we missed grew a lot over the summer, especially their root systems, and these had to be dug and picked and pulled with the extra leverage of a weed-wrench. We estimate that we pulled out 100-150 plants. One was even flowering (the hussy!)."

[this quote is excerpted personal communication, Diana Turner, volunteer leader]

Las Cienegas Grassland Monitoring

Las Cienegas BLM National Conservation Area (NCA) is situated just north of Arizona's "Wine Country" in Elgin. The NCA encompasses most of the valley between the Santa Rita and the Whetstone "Sky Island" mountain ranges. Its verdant, rolling grass hills are a welcome surprise after the stark rock and Saguaro spires of the Sonoran Desert. When travelers see it they invariably exclaim, "Oh, I didn't know Arizona could be like this!". [map]

We identified annual and perennial grasses to evaluate ecosystem recovery after several years with no livestock grazing (there are native Pronghorn antelope). The transects revealed a marked increase in overall ground cover and a succession over the years from annuals to perennials. There were a few invasives, of course, such as Lovegrass, but also many beautiful natives like Sideoats Grama.

Grasses can be quite beautiful: while they lack the showy colors and fragrances of flowers because they are wind pollinated (and hence don't need to attract pollinators), their varying solutions to the architectural problem of arranging the seed head are quite wondrous, especially under magnification.

Source: Vplants.org

The Wildlands Project

"We are ambitious. We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuaha have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska, when wolf populations are restored from Mexico to the Yukon to Maine; when vast forests and flowing prairies again thrive and support their full range of native plants and animals; when humans dwell on the land with respect, humility, and affection."

Contrasted with some environmental groups that fight to save "the last great places", the Wildlands Project (TWP) advance a positive vision: Rewilding.

Rewilding means "safeguard biodiversity where it is intact and restore the integrity of wild Nature where it has been compromised." For example, "as a first step toward protecting the extraordinary biological richness of Mexico's northern Sierra Madre Occidental mountains and the adjacent prairies, our Mexican staff identified ecologically significant areas, including critical habitat for jaguars, thick-billed parrots, and black-tailed praire dogs...We intend that Arizona and New Mexico will once again have jaguars in the arroyos and thick-billed parrots feeding on pine cones. But such intentions are only fantasies unless we first protect these animals' habitats in northwestern Mexico."

Note: Even with a positive vision, the best conservation plan needs be defensive in this time of explosive development of mineral resources and degraded agricultural land. Why do they capitalize "Nature"? Restore, rewild, revitalize, renew, rebalance, replenish, regenerate, reconnect.

Sky Island Alliance

"To my mind these live oak-dotted hills fat with side oats grama, these pine-clad mesas spangled with flowers, these lazy trout streams burbling along under great sycamores and cottonwoods, come near to being the cream of creation." Aldo Leopold (1937)


"This landscape that so enthralled Leopold was where the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre kiss, where the plants and animals of the Neotropics mingle with those of the Nearctic, where jaguar and grizzly hunted the same ridges, where elk and javelina browsed and rooted cheek to jowl, where northern goshawks took thick-billed parrots on the wing. Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora are landscapes of wonder, beauty, and wildness--and of mind-boggling biological diversity. Aldo Leopold saw this landscape as a single ecological region, as do we today. Sky Island Alliance (SIA) hopes to protect it and restore it to ecological health."
[paraphrased, Wild Earth Journal, 2000: The Wildlands Project.]

Sky Island Photos


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Earth Verse

Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams
Gary Snyder

Tea-Time on the Mountain-Top

You are CORDIALLY INVITED to a TEA PARTY on the SUMMIT of Mt. Wrightson, (Santa Rita Mountains, Sky Islands) this SATURDAY and SUNDAY from noon till 4 in OBSERVANCE of the planet MERCURY's greatest visibility on the 29th. Refreshments will be served. Dress will be smart-casual and please be on time. An after-party camp will observe Mercury's peregrinations.
Cheers,
CONOR

--

Postscript:
The glare up here is Tremendous, serving tea and talking about imaginary things. I can see smoky haze rolling off the open pit mines. Mines and telescopes, the only things visible of the earth from up here by moonlight. The crickets lie still on the asphalt as autumn starts. I am fatterning up for the Winter;mosquitoes cannot bite me and river rocks are Shiatsu on my back. I'm spending the weekends tracking Jaguars (either melanous or spotted) in the Borderlands. This is where Coronado sought the seven cities of gold. There is only one place in the world with more mammal diversity: the Costa Rican rainforest.

Ranch Life

We keep a loaded rifle at all times. Always know where the animals are. Always know where the nearest exit gate is. Bison are a herd animal, and when they stampede, as is their wont, they are almost impossible to stop; it is a classic example of a self-perpetuating system. The ones in the middle have to keep running to keep ahead of the ones behind, so even though they can't see what's in front of them they'll keep pushing the ones in front, through anything: fences, streams, people. They'll trample the individual who stops to smell the flowers.

The tractor blows smokes rings into the whimsically blue sky, while 50 miles away, across the valley, thunderstorms perch like gargoyles on the mountains. But the only thunder comes from the lumbering bison as they re-enact the stampedes of their racial memory. When the daughter of the rancher talks about how "they mainly wander around in the north slope, but once one starts heading down this way they'll all follow..." I think she is talking about clouds before I realize she is talking about buffalo.

--

Crouched in the tall grass, sweating, I remember where I came from. The cavernous darkness of the barn, a shaft of sunlight from the open door, sparks flying from my slowly sharpened weapon. The sweat takes me back to Tucson, a place far away but with similar summer weather (monsoonal) and similar annual rainfall (about 10 inches). But here, on the West Slope of the Colorado Rockies, the streams gorged with snowmelt and mountain rain are only 13 miles away, not 1300, and their misty breath, siphoned through itenerant sprinklers, grows grass up to my chest. There are a hundred species in this artifical meadow (many grasses and forbs:great burdock, knapweed, red and white clover, alfalfa (purple, blue, and light blue), mullein, morning glory, milkweed, gumweed, western dock, chicory...) but one does not belong. Suddenly I lunge and my shovel strikes the root of the musk thistle. I move on while it lies there dying. I wander long and aimless...

I live for the woods

Bush alder and pentaphylooides floribunda graced the south bank, while grasses and sedges and --what's that? a decaying old mushroom --with a fringed ring -- psychedellic! Definately a Psilocybe. I took a deep whiff and the on-beyond-earthy smell, as usual, constricted my bowels and while my heart raced to keep up. I gasped and staggered back, but soon I overcame these time-tested instincts and so, with a cry of "no time, no time!" plunge-stepped off into the wilderness.

My explorations take me gradually upstream. It seemed as if the days were flowing by, and I spent whole lifetimes at each bend in the babbling brook. Do not the fish also cause erosion? The elk with their thrashing?

In a clearing where the buck elk stood
squared their hips and bellowed their mating cry
thrashed their still-tender antlers against the sticky-hard
and brittle-soft
bark and branches of the aspen,
Quaking.


On this mountain I am climbing to meet you. I stop under a Ponderosa while the rain passes, and eat of the clear pine sap, and browse oregon grapes packed thick about, gently brushing my ankles, and dream:

It is not possible to tread on the Magic Island, the plants grow so thick. Instead one must swing from limb to limb! Or from stalk to stalk. Let nature show herself as she will. Often a juicy stalk of food will appear in the morning. Trash is simply dropped, whereupon is promptly vanishes into the udnergrowth (Sometimes you can smell where a lot of people or animals have recently been). But to what purpose the song of the birds? The angry chatter of a chipmunk? The ecology of sound? A mossy world where nothing has any weight. The long rise and slow intermittant relapse. The sound of bubbles popping underwater. Quicksand in the river deltas; even the larger boulders rock gently as if they were floating. A caterpillar living on a bed of moss.

I speak for the woods
I live in the woods
I speak in the woods
I live for the woods

Lime Night Life Light

Ah, back to the hammock

cold paws, correct breathing

shoulders relaxed
writing in bed, flowers
scattered around
my dark shape
amid
innumerable dark shapes
under an empty sky
full of fluttering
moths
whose white noise fills up the valley
called to my reading
my lime night life light
a babbling brook of half-heard ideas
while
I roam, hourless,
over the mornings and afternoons
of possible lives not lived
and possible patterns
of impossible sciences

South Park, Colorado

Its best to be protected the first day out in the wilderness. Racing clouds and sun meant sunglasses useless. Plunging through underbrush - stop at the edge of a copse of woods. So unfortunately that meant boots. There was evidence of Plenty - the squirrels had more pine cones than they knew what to do with; many lay unchewed in the relative clearing under the canopy of Engelmann spruce boughs.
The edge of the woods, where the aspen grow shorter, scarred by the testosterone-fuled frenzy of male Elk. There were battles here, symbolic and real; the snorting cry of chivalry and desire. Scattered bones stand silent testament to those too old to be fleet of foot.