Commentator Scott Thybony headed into the Painted Desert to find the route taken by an eccentric anthropologist in 1881. He discovered a wind-carved world and learned from a friend a more civilized way of traveling in the backcountry.
Sand has buried the wind-carved landscape on each side of the wash I follow. Directly ahead a falling dune partially covers the cliffs of a promontory where a trail angles upward. A horse has punched staggered holes in the sand slope, and I plant my feet in them to reach level ground 300 feet above. I’ve come here to locate the route used by an early Smithsonian anthropologist to cross the Painted Desert.
Frank Cushing set out from Zuni pueblo in 1881 to visit the Havasupai Indians in the Grand Canyon. He had become intrigued by reports of a people who lived in a canyon so deep the sun reached the bottom only at midday. Cushing insisted on going in summer and nearly lost his life when they ran out of water.
With three Indian guides, the anthropologist left the Hopi mesas and followed a beaten path along a branch of the old Moqui Trail. As they descended into the Painted Desert he noted in his journal, “a wild, sublime series of terraces cut into a thousand fanciful forms by wind and rain.” The following year, Cushing published a full description in the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
“Terrace after terrace,” he wrote, “one below another, stretched out before me, melting off into misty mirages. . . Giant sand dunes rose from plains of blazing, dazzling white. Here and there, near and far, rose great solitary rocks, angular as if the sculptor’s chisel had clearly cut them.”
The trail takes me along the edge of a sharp point where the desert spreads out below. This view matches the scene Cushing described, and little has changed since then. The only part he missed was the strangeness of it. Whenever I find myself here an altered sense of reality kicks in.
Returning to the truck I join photographer Dave Edwards. With a storm approaching we begin driving back and soon stop to clear a way through a rocky wash. The two of us tip boulders to the side and walk the route to find the best angle of attack. Back in the pickup Dave continues in low gear. Where the streambed widens, he finds solid bedrock and stops. Lunch time.
He pulls out a cooler from the back and begins removing the contents. First the beer, of course, something made by monks. Next comes the salad with every ingredient fresh, organic, and hand-selected. Then he instructs me in how to prepare the main course – a whole-wheat tortilla slathered with cream cheese, topped with a cucumber sliced Julienne style, and wrapped around a chunk of smoked Alaska salmon the size of a dog’s ear. Having spent years in remote places, Dave has mastered the art of the tailgate lunch.
Winds have smoothed the rock we sit on, exposing a scattering of concretions. Each has a tail of sandstone tapering away on the leeward side, the way sand drifts behind brush. On the open flat nearby an outcrop has taken on the shape of a capsized boat, wind abraded into a smooth-sided yardang.
Back on the main track, we turn south toward a dunefield stretching along the horizon. Soon a band of wild horses takes off at a run, stringing out behind the leader. In a single pulse they flow across the crest of a dune, silhouetted for a moment against the sky before disappearing.
“Every time I come out here,” Dave says, “it confirms just how wild and remote it is.”
Yet we could be back on a paved highway in an hour. Each generation finds its own wilderness, and it doesn’t need to be on the far side of the world.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
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