Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (15 page)

Chapter 16

The Mojave Desert

The Mojave is the most sterile and repulsive
desert I have ever seen.

John C. Fremont

Y
ou can meet the damndest people in the desert. By that same line of reasoning, the Mojave should have the damndest people of all. But you had better know how to get along with them. They can play key roles.

A 47-mile dry stretch on the PCT is broken up by one lone redoubt that hikers pass by. It is at a place called
Desert Bazaar,
and is also the official entry point into the Mojave Desert. I wandered up to Desert Bazaar alone in the middle of the afternoon wondering what I had just stumbled on. What greeted me was a scene out of the Wild, Wild West, including the façade of a saloon, jail, post office, and library.
What is all this?

When I saw the garage was open, I wandered in there to seek refuge from the bullying wind. Here, I met the strangest person on the entire PCT.

“What are you at my house for?” came the question rifled at me.

“Uh, well,” I stammered, “I was hoping to stay here tonight before heading off into the Mojave tomorrow.”

“Where are you going to stay?” he fired back.

“I see the RV’s,” I answered, “but it doesn’t look like I fit in the beds.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve got a long bed in the jail,”

“Oh, yeah. Is there anybody in there?”

“Yeah,” he said, “some drunk has been staying in there, but I’m tired of feeding him. Tell him he can get going.”

“Do I need a key?”

“No, go on in there.”

I wandered straight over into the building marked JAIL. When I looked inside the bars there was a child-sized bed with a doll in it. Score one for the owner over naïve me.

When I got back in the garage, some cooked pasta was waiting. “You want some pasta?” he asked sharply. “Yeah, that would be great.”

“Give me some money,” he held out his hand.

We got that straightened out and he then offered me a bucket and salt water for soaking my feet. As I sat there eating pasta and soaking my feet I thought,
this guy’s not so bad.
But that’s when he moved in for the kill.

“You know the problem with hikers,” he barked at me.

“Where would I even begin,” I countered.

“They don’t share their women,”
he responded with great certitude. “There were two couples that had both of my RV’s rocking all night last night. And you’ll never believe what they did.”

“What?” I wondered.

“They never invited me in there to participate.”

The
gentleman
with whom I was interlocuting was the owner, Richard Tatum. He was in his mid-sixties and a spitting image of the comedian, Don Rickles. But Rickles had always seemed to have a rational side to him. The fellow in front of me appeared stark mad.

“The one thing I can’t stand though,” Richard said, “is when people don’t give me the respect I deserve. Nobody disses
Big Dick.”

“You hear what I’m saying?” he asked. “Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” I said mildly, wondering where this was going.

“I’m Big Dick,” Richard shouted. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Let me show you,” he said, unzipping his pants.

“That’s okay,” I quickly said.

“Take a look at Big Dick.”

“No,” I pleaded.

I jerked my head away just a split-second before Big Dick could directly display his badge of manhood to me. Close call.

Quickly, I decided a better place to seek refuge from the stiff wind was outside of the garage behind a car.
Left Field
soon walked up with that expectant look hikers adopt after being out in the desert for a few days.

“Hey Skywalker,” he said, “what are you doing sitting here?”

“Just getting everything straight in my backpack for tomorrow.”

“Is the owner in there?”

Left Field and I had maintained a running verbal battle for a good while now, which we both enjoyed. He was only 21 years old, but his every move bespoke, “I’m in command of things.”

I decided this was a good time to test his mettle.

“Sure, go check in with him,” I responded, but gave him no heads-up of what to expect.

Ten minutes later he walked out and looked at me with a mixture of amusement and shock.

“Is it just me,” he asked, “or is this guy batshit crazy?”

We laughed in unison as he kept looking at me for a specific response.

“Did he, uh?” I began to ask.

“Yeah,” he nodded with his face flushed.

Left Field had finally met his match in Big Dick.

Fortunately, we were to see that there was a lot more to Big Dick than his initial raffish behavior. Without this lonely, windswept outpost to provide some relief, traversing the Mojave would be quite a bit more complicated for a PCT hiker. Given the overall harshness, it’s not surprising that quite the mercurial character is the Mojave’s gatekeeper.

“The Mojave Desert offers a blend of splendor, stark beauty, and vast expanses not found anywhere else in the country,” wrote the
Defenders of Wildlife.
All I can say is it takes an especially romantic person or organization to have such a love-love relationship with the Mojave Desert.

Nonetheless, millions of Americans have chosen to live here. Las Vegas, with a population of nearly two million, is the largest city in the Mojave; almost a million people in the eastern Los Angeles metropolitan area live within the boundaries of the Mojave as well. Millions more flock annually to see the Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park, the lowest point in the entire United States (-282 feet).

Temperatures in the same place can easily vary 80 degrees in one day. Readings below zero degrees are common in the winter, but in the summer temperatures can easily exceed 130 degrees. Annual rainfall is usually less than five inches. The environment is simply inhospitable to human life, except in those oases created by modern irrigation techniques. Heck, it’s even harsh to animals judging by how few you see out there. And the ones you see are almost all poisonous.

I was very reluctant to go out in the Mojave alone for fear of getting lost. Left Field had fled immediately after yesterday’s incident, and everybody was scattered.

Fortunately, a foursome had hiked into Desert Bazaar at dark the previous evening. I had seen them before at the Saufleys and the Andersons, and they appeared to be that rare thing—a close knit foursome. Unlike most groups, they appeared to have what it took to stick together. For starters, there were two guys and two girls.

The males,
Dirk and Snake Charmer,
were both west-coasters in their late thirties. The two girls,
Laura,
a charming mid-thirtyish lady from London, and
Ingrid
a tall, graceful German girl in her late twenties, were both plenty attractive. No matter what somebody might try to tell you, that helps maintain group unity. I sound like I know what I’m talking about on this topic which, of course, I don’t. But in this case the results speaks for themselves. They’d been together since the Kickoff, despite having very different hiking styles and speeds.

They had been so sequestered, in fact, that I was even reluctant to broach the subject of hiking out with them this morning. Finally, I just started walking along into the Mojave with them. I was soon glad I had.

We arrived at a confusing maze of dirt roads that all looked the same. A group the previous day had missed a turn here and ended up twenty miles off course (Perhaps not so coincidentally, it was the same group that had Big Dick so stoked up about rocking his RV’s the previous night). Fortunately, one of the German girl Ingrid’s many talents was map reading, and she figured out which direction we should head.

The Mojave is basically a desert floor and utterly featureless. For mile after mile we walked in an arrestingly ugly landscape. For the most part, it was the easiest possible place to hike, despite hikers carrying up to 7 liters (15 pounds) of water. Some people had been talking for weeks about night-hiking all the way through it. However, a heavy cloud cover was to hold the entire time we were in the Mojave. Instead of burning up, I struggled to stay warm.

The sole aesthetically appealing feature I could notice was the Joshua trees (named by the early Mormon settlers after the prophet, Joshua). These sturdy green trees with sharp, spindly branches are indigenous to the Mojave and often marks its boundaries.

The only human construction in this entire milieu may have been the ugliest thing of all. I refer to the closed aqueduct piping system that runs for 223 miles through the desert. It contains the water supply for the city of Los Angeles. Quite a story lies behind it.

A long-living urban legend has it that Los Angeles stole its water. That is not true. Technically, it’s not anyway. The city stayed within legal bounds at all times. But make no mistake—through secrecy, guile, subterfuge, and all the rest, the city pulled off something akin to the
world’s second oldest profession
in pursuit of the I.

In the late 19th century, San Francisco was the closest thing the United States had to sophisticated European splendor. Los Angeles was far behind and chafed at its second-class status. Its population had finally begun catching up, though. In fact, L.A.’s population was doubling every five years. However, future growth of the city faced one huge roadblock—lack of water.

The fundamental problem was that most of the water in California lies in the northern part of the state. The massive amounts of precipitation off the Pacific Ocean collide with the western slopes of the Sierras. It’s not uncommon to have 100 inches of snow on one side of the mountains and less than ten inches only fifty miles away. San Francisco, but not Los Angeles, has easy access to most of these swollen rivers flowing to their Pacific outlets.

Unfortunately, on the eastern side of the mountains, the few rivers that flow are usually much less substantial. There is one exception. Let me rephrase that; there I one exception—the Owens River.

Just south of Yosemite, there is a break in the Sierra chain. The monstrous snowfalls that normally collide with the western banks of the Sierras come barreling through this gunshot pass, creating a rushing river flowing south through the Owens Valley. The lake into which the river empties—or, I should say, used to empty—was Owens Lake. It receives enough water from the Owens River to satiate the
daily water needs of 2 million people.