FEATURE STORY

SANCTUM SOUTHWEST

by Ron Harris

Five hours later, we reached our summit. The empty sky had been pale turquoise hiking out in the morning; now the gathering clouds of noon were herded by a cold and constant wind onto the shoulders of lesser peaks around us. Soon, we would be shrouded in a slate grey gauze of mist and rain.

We could go no higher and the still sunlit vista to the east wouldn't last long. The August rain shadow was about to divest its daily deluge onto this mystical mountain, announcing itself with thunder that began with a low kettledrum roll and ended in an ear-splitting crash. In the windy silences between, lightening illuminated the linings of surrounding thunderheads with a shimmering chatoyance at once ethereally beautiful and electrically lethal.

We could go no higher because the bare talus and gravel of the actual summit wasn't just forbidding; it was forbidden. Before us was the barren windswept pantheon of Apache gods, the cloud-shrouded castle keep of the Crown Dancers, the Holy of Holies of all Apacheria.

We stood in the doorway of a great cathedral, denied the transept by a small, yellow metal sign nailed to a decaying four-by-four, supported by a cairn of rock:

United States Department of the Interior
Bureau of Indian Affairs
Boundary
Fort Apache Indian Reservation

The slightly higher summit beyond is a kiva of spirits. Only members of the White Mountain Apache Tribe are permitted. Even as we watched, dim figures faded in through the vapor, moving slowly toward us from the hazy dome of the peak.

The movement distracted us from our breathtaking panorama. The Apaches walked slowly, a few yards apart, bent forward, peering intently at the ground. From time-to-time, they bent down, picked something up, examined it and moved on. They seemed oblivious to the impending storm.

To the east, over the wind-blasted treeline of gnarled and stunted stumps, the sun bathed the whole of the Apache National Forest, the Escudilla Wilderness and New Mexico beyond. The lakes decorating the landscape like glistening, Navajo jewels, were testimony to the volume of water this mountain wrings from the sky onto Arizona's desiccate deserts.

Northward, the Painted Desert was dappled with light and shadow as wooly clouds slid over the great mesas of the Navajo and Hopi. Rays of sunlight poured through towering thunderheads onto the surreal landscape of the Petrified Forest, spotlighting an otherworldly graveyard of giant Sequoia trunks which have lain where they fell, back when the Earth was young.

Southward, darker clouds dimmed the distant Bear Wallow Wilderness, the rimrock border of the San Carlos Reservation and the great Sonoran Desert beyond.

But the approach of the Apaches recalled our attention to the bare shouldered boulders of the summit. As far to the south-west as we could see, an undulating, opaque curtain of rain slanted down onto the forest of pine and fir. Fort Apache Reservation was disappearing as the watery pale slowly climbed the slopes to where we stood.

For all the hiking and bending they had done, the Apaches appeared empty-handed. They carried no bags and were lightly dressed in the dichotomous costume almost uniform on Apache reservations. Grandmother appeared the most traditional, in moccasins, full ankle-length cotton skirt and scarf, but the frayed, silver satin warm-up jacket jarred her ethnic image. The rest of the family -- parents and a pair of beautiful, raven haired children -- wore similar habit, shod in those ubiquitous and anachronistic white "athletic" shoes.

"Hon-Dah!," I said, over the wind. It was my entire Apache vocabulary.

"Hello," the father replied. The adults smiled as they walked by and the youngsters examined us silently over their shoulders as they vanished into the misty trees of their ancestral land.

Closer and closer crawled the pelting rain. From a rock cairn, we turned a full circle for one long, last look. Then, realizing we were doubtless the tallest lighting rods in eastern Arizona, we began our recessional to the shelter of the old growth forest canopy.

We reached the woods just as the curtain closed behind us. Sheets of rain hit the gravel, rattling like hail. It was the kind of storm Edvard Grieg wrote about in his "Hall of the Mountain King" and it was easy to imagine the crashing climax of his musical monument to mountains as we raced for the sanctuary of the ancient forest.
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Susan and I had some distance of our own to cover and we were on the shady side of the mountain. Darkness comes early to Baldy's eastern slope, especially under heavy cloud cover. It would be late when we made the trailhead and later still when we reached our rented cabin in Greer. As the primeval forest thickened and dusk dimmed the trail, we hiked silently, thinking about the mountain we had climbed and others who climbed it before us.

Named for an 18th century Spanish Grandee, the Mogollon Rim, like the Grand Canyon, is one of Arizona's defining land forms. Stretching east and southward from Grand Wash Cliffs into New Mexico, the rim is the southernmost edge of the immense geological province known as the Colorado Plateau. The sheer cliffs and jutting ramparts so picturesquely described by Zane Grey and Aldo Leopold, soften and swell into the 11,590 foot extinct volcano named the Sierra Blanca by the Spanish, and known today as Mount Baldy. Its original designation, the White Mountain, is now applied to the whole range for which the White Mountain Apache Tribe is named.

Only a fraction of the eastern slope of the Baldy massif is the Mount Baldy Wilderness Area of the Apache National Forest. The rest of the great mountain is within the Fort Apache Reservation and the bare plug of the true summit is revered, (by those Apaches who still practice their religion) as the dwelling place of deities.

The mountain and its watershed deserve the respect of the rest of us for other reasons; it is the source of most of the water consumed and wasted by the state's homes, industries, agribusinesses and a ballooning plethora of golf courses, swimming pools, fountains and private lakes.

Angling cognoscenti and those who care about endangered species, are aware that most of Arizona's coldwater fisheries are born of this watershed, including the only waters in the world wherein are found the rare, and until recently, endangered, Apache trout.

Created by U.S. Grant in 1871, Fort Apache is 1,664,874 acres of forest and mountain meadowland. Baldy's copious cape of grass and timber is laced with the cold, clear, waters of 15 streams; all but one flow into the Salt River drainage of central Arizona. Only the Little Colorado will wend its north-westerly way across the Navajo Nation to join the Colorado deep within Grand Canyon.

The White Mountains is one of those "last, best places." Deer slip noiselessly through aspen and ponderosa. Black bear and mountain lion hunt thickets and rimrock. Wild turkeys peck among ferns and flowers, while eagles scream above towering Douglas firs. Osprey strafe the surface of glistening reservoirs and fly dripping, twisting trout back to huge nests that lakeside snags wear like living crowns.

Most indigenous wildlife still find their original habitat habitable. Antelope share swales of grass with cattle and some ranchers insist the Rocky Mountain elk have multiplied to nuisance numbers.

Even El Lobo has come home to the White Mountains, although maybe not to stay. Since the Pleistocene, the Mexican Wolf has howled throughout Mexico, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico, but the last Mexican wolf in Arizona was killed three years before passage of the Endangered Species Act. Now, El Lobo's haunting howl hangs again in the algid mountain air, but for how long, no one knows.

By dark, we reached the meadows along the marge of the stream's West Fork. The creek mumbled to us through the velvet black as we strained to see our navy blue car in the inky trailhead light. At last a twinkle of chrome blinked like a lighthouse beacon and we hurried to the machine and its comforting heater. Rain drops had turned to icy rhinestones, encrusting everything and glittering, even in the dark. We were thankful for the defroster's warming glow.

Driving to Greer, our clearing windows revealed families of elk cows and calves. Then, just outside town, we slowed to a walk for a young bull elk, grateful for the light we furnished as he trotted nonchalantly to his turnoff.

Back in our bedroll, my mind went back up Mount Baldy to the Apaches in the rain and their curious behavior. Slipping into sleep, I hoped I might dream the explanation, but the answer came much later, in a rare interview with Ronnie Lupe, then Chairman of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. He knew what that Apache family was doing on the stormy mountain's bare basilica. As he explained, my mind went again to the mountain, past the weathered boundary sign and on to the highest point, to the Rain God's kiva and a ritual re-enacted since the dawn of deep time.

There I watched ancient priests come up from the deserts around Oraibi, to pray and perform mysteries while hundreds, perhaps thousands camped in the nearby forest, waiting.

For three full days the medicine men conferred in his kiva with the Rain God. Then, on the fourth day, the people came from the woods to the summit to leave their most valued possessions as sacrifice to the Rain God. As they placed offerings near the entrance to his kiva, they prayed he would accept them and allow the sky to bless their corn and squash. The people taught the prayers to the children, guiding their hands as they offered gifts of toys and dolls.

Soon, the gravel at the edge of the volcanic cone, the entrance to the great kiva, was covered with gifts to the Rain God: beautiful head-dresses, necklaces, beaded clothing, buckskins, weapons, tools and toys. Leaving it all, the priest and people withdrew down the mountain to their desert mesas to await the rain. As they leave, there is thunder in the distance and the wind picks up.

So Baldy's bare pate, rounded and polished by eons of erosion, is, among other things, a reliquary. The remnants for which our Apache grandmother searched so assiduously -- tiny beads, bits and pieces of a disappearing culture -- still please the Rain God and still elicit his blessings on the land.

Would that all mountains were held as holy as traditional Apaches consider their beloved White Mountain, for all mountains are sacred, home to a rain god of their own. Mountains are much of the magic of water and all of us, man and beast, live downstream.

Copyright © 1998 by Ronald Harris, Phoenix, Arizona
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